/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.2195134]

how legitimate are translations? are they even worth reading because authorial intent is totally raped....

and without that what is art? nothing at all...its like me saying heres my translation of Crime and Punishment

"shit happens and don't kill anyone, the end"....

[Anonymous No.2195144]

1. Authorial intent should be raped

2. This is a really fucking complicated subject and I can't be arsed to articulate my beliefs on it at this juncture

[Anonymous No.2195149]

>>2195144
>1. Authorial intent should be raped

without intent there is no art, you could say anything is art, a dog farting, a rock falling on your head...

and without intent OPs translation of Crime and Punishment would be art...yet it isn't because it isn't what the author intended

[Anonymous No.2195153]

>>2195134

god damn Olivia Munn is hot in that pic

[Anonymous No.2195156]

>>2195144
The reader should have an opportunity to accept or disregard the author's intent, however. I think translations should try to be true to the source material because that's what readers believe they're buying.

[Anonymous No.2195157]

translations can't be true to the source material

an author painstakingly choose every word with care...then its raped by some guy in a different language lol

[Anonymous No.2195162]

There's some cases where the author themselves are bilingual and knows and trusts the translators working on their stuff (ie, Murakami translated shit from English to Japanese commercially and speaks positively about the translators bringing his works to English, they're probably above whatever burden you're setting as "legitimate"). There's also stuff that's been translated and critqued for decades, finding whichever is considered the "authoritative" version at that point is usually fairly safe. Shit that came out last year and Random House hired some random freelance translator to do whatever he wanted with the localization is hairier, and for the most part you should probably consider yourself reading the translated version rather than actually thinking of it as having read the original.

[Anonymous No.2195169]

Well, the writer tells a story to the reader. If it's in another language, an interpreter is needed. You can get a good one, who will transport meaning and find adequate words that even transport wordplay etc., or you can get a bad one where a lot is lost.
Or, don't disregard this one, you can have a brilliant one who improves the original work. Not talking world literature here, but some mediocre novel can win in another language. It doesn't happen too often, but it happens.

[Anonymous No.2195171]

>>2195157
As a guy who speaks three languages, I can attest to the fact that most translations are shoddy hackwork.

But, some translators expend even more time and effort on each word than is reasonable, and they're both the cat's meow AND the cat's pyjamas.

[Anonymous No.2195173]

>>2195149

When the revolution comes your silly distinction between art and life will be collapsed, forcibly.

[Anonymous No.2195179]

>>2195157
>an author painstakingly choose every word with care

Or churned out some shit because deadline was approaching. You really must distinguish between masterpieces on which the author worked for a decade and the other 99.9 % of printed fast food.

[Anonymous No.2195189]

>>2195179
>You really must distinguish between pretentious bullshit on which the author wasted his life and the other 99.9 % of readable literature

[sandwiches No.2195193]

> hasn't read Benjamin
> hasn't read Borges
> hasn't read Derrida

That feel when /lit/ posters still believe that words, in and of themselves, undermine our meaning. That feel when everything you say is already dead in your heart so there is always a kind of contempt in the act of speaking.

[Anonymous No.2195196]

i think we all understand that translation is inherently impossible but reading translated works is still awesome

whatever

[sandwiches No.2195197]

> hasn't read Benjamin
> hasn't read Borges
> hasn't read Derrida

That feel when /lit/ posters still believe that words, in and of themselves, do not naturally undermine our meaning. That feel when everything you say is already dead in your heart so there is always a kind of contempt in the act of speaking.

[Anonymous No.2195216]

>>2195134
Translations can be reviewed by people how know both languages and can judge for accuracy; they are then praised or condemned or both; publishers will pay attention to condemnation of old translations when a new translation is offered. As for being able to carry language-specific meanings over... Well, if the author's delicate puns on such-and-such a word sounding like a scatological term are lost, well, we'll just have to console ourselves.

[Anonymous No.2195225]

>>2195197

>he believes the bullshit philosophers feed him

[Anonymous No.2195239]

>>2195197
You need a hug you candy-ass

[sandwiches No.2195262]

>>2195239
>>2195225
you guise!

[Anonymous No.2195381]

A couple people named dropped Derrida, or indicated that authorial intent isn't the be all, end all. I'll try to back them up a bit, since they didn't make it too clear.

First, quick refresher on semiotics. A sign is the conjunction of a signifier with a signified. So if we take the sound/word "Tree", that is not its meaning but the way it sounds in speech or looks when written, we can imagine that there is something behind it, its meaning, the idea of trees, and everything that entails about plants etc. The sound/word "tree" is the signifier, the concept tree is the signified. Signifier+Signified=Sign.

Presumably what the author intends to tell us is the signifier, that activity in his brain, which must be turned into signifiers. At this point, writing/speech is already one step removed from thinking/experience. We shouldn't have too much issue with translation (as one translation as already occured through writing/speaking).

The issue gets more complex, and this is where Derrida comes in. Derrida says we can imagine a signifier with out a signified. A nonsense word- Bleerph or something- which within language has no meaning (yet). Derrida says that we are to agree with the Sausserian Semiotics (the above paragraphs), we must be able to imagine a signified without a signifier, or else the distinction between signifier and signified becomes uncertain, that maybe the signified is a mere illusion of our language be it written, spoken, or else.

[Anonymous No.2195382]

>>2195381

Continued

Derrida's critique of semiotics is that, as an imagined science when it was created by Saussure, Saussure was quite specific that it would need to become more than a study of language, but a study of how the brain conceives and represents. Derrida's claim is that semiotics has failed to do so, and that it has become primarily the study of spoken and written language, that attempts to move it into other sign systems have not led to much. Barthes Mythologies is an interesting attempt to do so, so is Thomas Sebeok's theory of a "Semiosphere" as a concept of reality instead of a Biosphere sor something else.

Anyone else well read on this? Am I paraphrasing correctly? I've only read Derrida's Positions, which is probably a good introduction to him, and some other secondary sources.

[Anonymous No.2195390]

>>2195381
>>2195382

oh cool thanks

>didn't read

[Anonymous No.2195393]

>>2195382
continuing onto the idea of Authorial Intent.

This issue diverges a little, not sure it relates to Derrida at all. There is a concept commonly referred to as the Intentional Fallacy. The Intentional Fallacy is the mistake of thinking that an artworks meaning is that of the artists intention. It isn't, works can have many meanings. An example.

Take Nazi sculpture (pic related). It is a neo-classical movement funded by the Third Reich durring its reign. It expoused manliness, power, history and the authority of the Reich. To Adolf Hitler, and other card carying Nazis, the work has an extremely different meaning, than we might have for it today. It is hard to think about Nazi sculpture within the historical paradigm, to think about Nazi sculpture is to think about its values. We (assuming you aren't a Nazi) have very different feelings about those values than Hitler did. We can think about the Holocaust, the average german citizen did not fully know of the Holocaust. Who's meaning is more important? The Nazi parties' meaning, or a contemporary viewer?

Both meanings are useful, and the contemporary meaning is dependent on our historical knowledge of the intended meaning. You can imagine other works where the primary intention isn't known (Take the Easter Island heads), even if we knew the intention, the meaning they had for whatever culture created them, our meaning can never escape the history of their enigma and mysterious existence.

[Anonymous No.2195403]

>>2195390
I'm not that guy and I know almost nothing about Derrida. But it is unfair to complain that Derrida was full of shit and then ignore people who try to explain his thought to you.

[Anonymous No.2195404]

>>2195393
forgot my pic.