/lit/ - Literature

>>11302507
>You’d be a fool if you think that with a translation, if you’re monolingual like I and many others, there is little hope for receiving that same deliberateness.
Stop thinking of the translator as an uncreative technician. A translator is an artist, as much an artist as the author. If you can't tell me WHAT had been removed from a translation of Don Quixote, why do you assert that something has been lost? I know I enjoyed Richard Starkie's translation; I thought his language choices represented the humor of Cervantes. By all means, complain about bad translations. Positing some essence of literature that is lost in translation is admitting to poor evaluative ability. Yes, some idioms and other culturally-dependent concepts in a translation of Don Quixote must be Anglicized; this of course happens automatically. But is this bad? A translation is an interpretation, but anything in the original text that is opaque to a translator will be opaque to virtually any reader in the original language.
Modern performances and recordings of Don Giovanni are sonically different from period performances. Equal temperament has mutated since it's genesis. Even the consonance of a major third in a violin recording from the 1920s will sound "degraded" to a modern ear. New tonality is arguably more precise and is pretty much fixed. Contemporary performances of classical music are like translations. What can I say is missing when a contemporary performance of Don Giovanni is sublime enough? I don't know if it's possible to acclimate my ear to other ratios of temperament, but I don't have a problem with Don Giovanni as I hear it. The opening glissando of Rhapsody in Blue was an improvisation by Ross Gorman. Much of the piece was improvised and later changed by Gershwin. All recordings are different; none are correct. You will never find a pure experience in art because there is no pure genius behind an artist's work. Either the text is good or it isn't.