This article (thanks, Enigmatic Mermaid) gets to the heart of my problems with the publishing industry's failure to translate foreign literature. The central idea:
The loss of the most distinguished, characteristic and classic books from other languages will finally make itself felt, however richly English is able to compensate itself from its multitudinous sources. There is really nothing like the strange bi-authorship of translation; the hapless, resourceful or wooden sense of words not deployed by a single hand according to instructions from a single mind; the demands on vocabulary and, less predictably, on syntax, that made the reading, for example, of Gregory Rabassa’s translation of One Hundred Years of Solitude such an enlarging experience.I think it's probably this question of difference, of mapping the space between cultures really, that led me to do comparative literature in college, and that has me studying Aymara now. An exploration of other cultures is so important to how we understand our own, and for me at least reading foreign literature focuses that exploration on the world of ideas.Translation is the other, it upsets expectation, it extends the field of comparison, it forces even the sluggardly to re-evaluate and to re-contextualise. A period of good writing has to be a period of good and abundant translating also. The fact that we’re not presently living in one should qualify the large claims currently being made for British poetry and fiction. Surely a healthy – never mind an exceptional or wonderful – condition wouldn’t be this sequestered or this drip-fed on parochial fashions and moods and reputations. It’s undeniable that it’s written in a world language, but how much of it is world literature? It’s the present low level of interest in translation that prompts the question.
Maybe this would be a good time to take up literary translation?
Stendahl gets the update in a new translation of the Red and the Black that's supposed to be pretty good, according to Salon.
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