Footnotes
A discussion at the end of the semester:
Me: What's wrong with footnotes in translation anyway?
J.: It diminishes the integrity of the poem!
Me: Which integrity?
And then I went on about Nabokov's remarks about footnotes and Keith Waldrop's use of them in his translation of Roubaud's La forme de la ville change, hélas, plus vite que le coeur des hommes.
Discuss.
EDIT 5:10PM: Also, another classmate discussing alliterations and assonances in Chinese poetry, and his attempts to preserve them. Do Chinese poets really care about those aspects of poetry? Are they even discussed in scholarly literature on Chinese poetry? You know, Chinese being tonal and not really functioning on the same syllabic/accented systems we find in Indo-European languages.
Me: What's wrong with footnotes in translation anyway?
J.: It diminishes the integrity of the poem!
Me: Which integrity?
And then I went on about Nabokov's remarks about footnotes and Keith Waldrop's use of them in his translation of Roubaud's La forme de la ville change, hélas, plus vite que le coeur des hommes.
Discuss.
EDIT 5:10PM: Also, another classmate discussing alliterations and assonances in Chinese poetry, and his attempts to preserve them. Do Chinese poets really care about those aspects of poetry? Are they even discussed in scholarly literature on Chinese poetry? You know, Chinese being tonal and not really functioning on the same syllabic/accented systems we find in Indo-European languages.
Comments
if, as you say, the reader of a poem engages a subjective unearthing and interpretation of an archeological object, the job of the translator is not to explain what the object means to the reader, but to represent it in its fullest enigmatic transparency. It is the reader who must make the object opaque with subjective interpretation - integration into the individual's assemblage of manifolds that comprise their consciousness.
i guess, though, that's a kind of disintegration, because we decode the symbolic to close in on the semiotic meaning, which is always in a different place according to the subject. . . the danger of footnotes, i suppose, is arriving at an overdetermined symbolic representation by interrupting the subject-object relationship with semiotic distortion. At that point, the spacial-social relationship of the reader to the poem and its original author involves directly the translator, and the poem's movement may lose momentum and/or poetic transparency, though it may gain resonance if the footnoted object is elucidated clearly and in context.