Very interesting. Im happy to know that there exists such a man. First, the book is a tremendous pain in the ass to read, let alone translating it. Ive always disgusted translation. I hate it. When I translate I commit crimes. Thats because its an art in its own way, which I dont master anyway. For example, Im reading Dost. recently and Ive been comparing three editions, each by a different translator, and found them all not so much convincing. Theres something mechanical about translation that keeps the reader hanging on the surface of meaning, and not having access to the unconscious of the book. However, there are some translators that succeed in doing this. These are men and women of exception. Most of the times, they dont translate the words as much as transmitting the meanings in ways so artistic they cannot feel mechanical or superficial, but rather purely artistic. In this case, the original author and the translator become co-authors. Example: Rubaiyat of Omar Al Khayyam as translated by Edward FitzGerald. Especially in England and the USA, the name of Al Khayyam has become synonymous with FitzGerald to the the extent that some people has coined the full name Fitzgerald Al Khayyam. This coinage calls to mind Borges metaphysical interpretation to this mysterious translation: Some critics believe that FitzGeralds Omar is, in fact, an English poem with Persian allusions; Fitz Gerald interpolated, refined, and invented, but his Rubaiyat seems to demand that we read it as Persian and ancient.The case invites speculations of a metaphysical nature. Omar professed (we know) the Platonic and Pythagorean doctrine of the souls passage through many bodies; centuries later, his own soul perhaps was reincarnated in England to fulfill, in a remote Germanic language streaked with Latin, the literary destiny that had been suppressed by mathematics in Nishapur. Isaac Luria the Lion taught that the soul of a dead man can enter an unfortunate soul to nourish or instruct it; perhaps, around 1857, Omars soul took up residence in FitzGeralds.* According to this, to translate to an author is to let them haunt you to the extent that you become haunted by them, so that there is only one poet at the end. *Jorge Luis Borges. Selected Non Fiction. Ed. Eliot Weinberger. The Enigma of Edward FitzGerald. P. 366-69.
Posted on: Mon, 16 Jun 2014 22:10:33 +0000
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