Bill Caswell
Blog 4
Giovanna Tsiolas, Interpretations of Dante…
I agree with your general point, that Rodgers is easier to read than Norton, despite Norton’s translation being considerably more recent. (Your examples seem to contradict your argument, however, at least the way I read them.) In general, writing from the early to mid 20th century seems to be the most consistently difficult to read. I think this has something to do with the expansion of access to education (as in, people who perhaps are not exceptionally intelligent or articulate were suddenly entitled to a college education), and the decline of education in the classics. A political science professor I had a few years ago spoke Latin, and made a convincing case that the writing of the founding fathers was based heavily on the style and structure of Latin prose, and that it was often possible to literally translate their writings into Latin with no loss. By not teaching Latin, then, we deprive ourselves of this structure and the resulting coherency and succinctness. I do not speak Latin, so I cannot verify this argument, but it has captivated me ever since hearing it. I will say that speaking Italian has improved my writing. Because Italian syntax is much stricter than English, I have begun putting more consideration into the order of my sentences. For example, “I’d do it if I were you” becomes in Italian, “Se fossi in te, lo farei.” If I am not mistaken, “Lo farei se fossi in te” is incorrect and non-grammatical because the main clause of the sentence is “If I were you” not “I would do.” While “I’d do it if I were you” is grammatical in English, I think there is something indescribably, unquantifiably cleaner about “If I were you, I’d do it.” (I know there are better examples, but alas nothing else is coming to mind right now.) For me, it is tiny things like this which set apart good writing from bad writing.
Roberto Esposito, Jakobson & Eco
I agree entirely with your general impressions of the two essays. The first was coherent and had a clear argument with good (if nitpicked) examples. The second was complete gobbledygook.
It has been a few weeks since I read it, but I am not sure if Jakobson concludes that translation is completely impossible. My impression of his argument was that, while meaning is possible to translate, other, subjective qualities like sound or symbolism may be lost. A translation is possible, then, just not one which is entirely accurate. Perhaps I am just nitpicking—certainly, Jakobson’s argument is that a proper, completely faithful translation is impossible or close to it.
Anita Hotchkiss, Traduzione/Tradimento
The two examples of bad translations you give at the end are very interesting, and I had never heard them before. It seems strange to me that horned would be interpreted literally, given how the Bible is often interpreted figuratively. Similarly, I do not understand how it took 400 years for an American art historian to rediscover something as simple as the name of the tool used by Italian sculptors.
If an interpretation is a translation (as some texts we have read have argued), then other examples of this phenomenon come to mind. The Nazis’ appropriation of Friedrich Nietzsche’s philosophy, for example, shows how a “translation” or interpretation can massively distort the source text.
I am mildly interested in historiography (the history of historians and their views, essentially), and recently (in the past few decades) there has been a complete reversal in the interpretations of the First Party System (Federalists vs. Republicans). When America was an isolationist, small-government country, historians tended to look favorably upon the Republicans and poorly upon the Federalists. If you read Henry Adams for example, who wrote his magnum opus “History of the United States 1801-1817” throughout the late 19th century, he is relatively sympathetic toward the Republicans, though he still launches attacks against Jefferson and especially Madison. As the federal government has expanded, and as America has become the world’s premier super power, historians have begun to look far more kindly upon the Federalists. Gordon Wood is the most respected living historian of this era, and it is hard for a modern reader not to walk away from his writings with the impression that the Federalists were the “good guys.” Ron Chernow’s gushing biography of Alexander Hamilton, the leader of the radical Federalists, spawned a Broadway musical which essentially equates Hamilton—who in reality wanted to create an autocratic, expansionist American Empire with himself on top—with President Obama, supposedly perfect and enlightened in every way, while the Jeffersonian Republicans are equated with modern Republicans, supposedly bigoted and obstructionist.
This shows how historians, as the “translators” and narrators of the past, can interpret it in a way which has real-world ramifications, and how changes in modern politics can alter our interpretations of the past.