[lit-ideas] Re: Stenka Rasin
- From: Andy <mimi.erva@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: lit-ideas <lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Mon, 21 Apr 2008 19:54:10 -0700 (PDT)
My point exactly. Obviously translation is possible.
It's done all the time. I posted the translation, but
the translation is nothing like the song. It doesn't
feel like it, it doesn't sound like it. It's choppy,
it's stilted. When the singer sings it, he swells and
recedes with the action and almost with the river. I
can't see how this translation could be sung in
English in the same way. Maybe I'm just being hard on
it. I think maybe what might be complicating things
is that the translator was making the lines rhyme
instead of feeling the lyrics. A good translation is
worth a work of art unto itself.
I went and dug up my album. It doesn't have lyrics
printed on it. I don't know why I thought it did.
The other singer isn't a bass and the words were
easier to make out, plus there is no chorus to echo
the last two lines of a lot of the stanzas. But this
version is richer, dramatic, more moving. I would be
interested in anyone's comments on what they think of
it. I can't think of an comparable American song.
Old Man River maybe but it doesn't have the
theatricality of this.
--- Eric Yost <mr.eric.yost@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> WO: Very, very rarely do I find that the
> translation of a sentence from one of these
> languages to another is either
> impossible or is severely distortive of the sense
> of the original text.
>
>
>
> That's because you have a philosophical style of
> mind. If instead you were a poet or a comedian,
> you would discover a world of wordplay, allusion,
> and metareference that does not survive translation.
>
> To pick one famous example, why is Nabokov's
> _Onegin_ so lumbering?
>
>
> Yours,
> Stanky Yadium
>
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