When the translation beats the original.

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When the translation beats the original. Anonymous Fri Oct 11 11:45:49 2019 No.13973924 [Reply] [Original]

> In his “Sobre el Vathek de William Beckford [On William Beckford’s Vathek]” (1943), Jorge Luis Borges (1899–1986) paradoxically claims ‘[e]l original es infiel a la traducción [the original is unfaithful to the translation]’.1 With these seven words, Borges disrupts the very core of traditional Anglo-American translation studies: in a context where translations are generally regarded as secondary to their source texts (ST)—temporally, textually, and in statu —Borges affirms that a translation can assume an independent existence. A further implication of Borges’s (seemingly illogical) declaration is that, in some ways, the translation may be truer to the fundamental “spirit” of the original than the original itself.

(Campbell, Bryony. p. 1. "The Original is Unfaithful to the Translation: Towards Recognising Originality in Translation". The New Zealand Journal of Translation Studies. Vol 1. No 1. 2018.)
Link to the paper: https://ojs.victoria.ac.nz/neke/article/view/5158

> A good translation is always a re-creation in another language. That’s why I have such great admiration for Gregory Rabassa. [...] I think that my work has been completely re-created in English. There are parts of the book which are very difficult to follow literally. The impression one gets is that the translator read the book and then rewrote it from his recollections. That’s why I have such admiration for translators. They are intuitive rather than intellectual. Not only is what publishers pay them completely miserable, but they don’t see their work as literary creation. (Gabriel García Márquez with The Paris Review)

> García Márquez himself read One Hundred Years of Solitude in the Harper & Row edition and pronounced it better than his Spanish original,” Elie writes. “He called Rabassa ‘the best Latin American writer in the English language.’” (The Paris Review)

Link to article: https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2016/06/14/gregory-rabassa-1922-2016/

In this thread we talk about everything related to translating (in any language) literature:
Is "the original is unfaithful to the translation" ? What is your favorite translation?
What is the best translation?
Which translations surpass the original?
Which ones drastically change the original?

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/lit/ - Literature