From “the Guardian review”:http://books.guardian.co.uk/reviews/politicsphilosophyandsociety/0,6121,1216899,00.html of a new book by Regis Debray:
bq. Jeffrey Mehlman has managed to translate from French into an entirely new language, one born dead. It is constructed using English words but the effect is of something almost entirely unlike English. This raises profound questions. What is one to make of a chapter heading like “The Milieu/Medium Deflagration”? How is one to translate the last sentence of that chapter: “That nomadic psycho-object, the unknown masterpiece of a nation’s furniture, would mark the improbable encounter, to the benefit of a God more snobbish than His predecessors, of the custom-made and the ready-to-bear”? The last word is clearly wrong. But should it be “wear” or “bore”?
{ 15 comments }
Andrew Brown 05.15.04 at 12:09 pm
yowsa! fame at last!
pepi 05.15.04 at 12:32 pm
Wow. That’s one bad translation. I’d never heard pret-a-porter translated as ready to _bear_ either.
Keith 05.15.04 at 2:27 pm
When I read the part that you quoted, I thought that perhaps he was translating Jarry and this wiggly little bit of nonsense was in fact, ‘Pataphysical. Turns out it’s just a horrible translation and all too serious. Though the idea behind the book would make for some great ‘Pataphysics. Wheels within Wheels: The Dialectical Circumfrence of God.
Phersu 05.15.04 at 4:06 pm
Who would have thought Debray’s pompous “mediologie” could be made even more hermetic.
Heidegger’s translations into French are famous for their obscurity but on the other hand, I think I understand Michel Foucault better in English than in my native language, when a lot of the rhetoric is eliminated.
Adam Kotsko 05.15.04 at 6:11 pm
Keith, That would make a great title for a dissertation — no matter what the topic, really.
BJC 05.15.04 at 8:23 pm
Régis D. is famous here (in France) for writing preface to books he did not read (he was caught once — a laudatory preface to René Nouailhat’s Enseigner le fait religieux : un défi pour la laïcité).
He may also have signed books he did not write…
Ophelia Benson 05.16.04 at 1:47 am
“‘Pataphysics. Wheels within Wheels: The Dialectical Circumfrence of God.”
“Keith, That would make a great title for a dissertation — no matter what the topic, really.”
Of course – this is so obvious I shouldn’t even bother saying it, but I will – of course, it would make an even greater title if it were “Pataphysics. Wheels within Butterflies within Wheels: The Dialectical Circumference of God”
or perhaps
“Pataphysics. Wheels within Butterflies within Wheels: The Dialectical Circumference of G_d”
Ralph Luker 05.16.04 at 3:37 am
Ophelia Benson has both a keen sense of humor and a fine way with titles, even of things she is absolutely, unequivocably, irrevocably, undelutedly, without doubtedly do not exist. I long for such certitude.
Ralph Luker 05.16.04 at 4:29 am
Thats: “… she is absolutely, unequivocably, irrevocably, undelutedly, without doubtedly certain do not exist. ….” Oh, and if you folks at twisty sticks continue to use language like this, if you do not adopt B & W’s speech code, she is likely to howl and flee. She’s always welcome at Cliopatria if she can learn to tolerate freedom of speech and thought.
Jeremy Osner 05.16.04 at 4:32 am
Oy.
Ophelia Benson 05.16.04 at 8:05 pm
Oy veh.
roger 05.17.04 at 4:23 am
Alas, the level of translation just goes down and down in the Anglosphere. Even Houellebecq, on whose novels (much as I dislike them), money was certainly made, were translated sloppily.
On the other hand, who celebrates the really good translators? The level of translation of Chinese books is pretty high — look at Mabel Lee’s Gao Xingjian’s translations, or the slight but sure miracle of Julia Lovell’s translation of A Dictionary of Maqiao.
Odd currents in translatordom, I guess.
Andrew Brown 05.17.04 at 8:10 am
It is entirely possible that the original was written in a jargon as barbarous as the translation, I doubt it, though: there was clearly a pun in the original pret-a-porter, inspired by the fact that the Tabernacle (which he was describing) was carried around. So you might make the case that the translators of Asterix could have done a better job. Another argument for this plan is that they would have taken so many years over all those words that the book would not have come out in our lifetimes. But I think that a translator has a duty to produce something that is recognisably English, even if this violates the nonsense of the original.
Andrew Brown 05.17.04 at 8:10 am
It is entirely possible that the original was written in a jargon as barbarous as the translation, I doubt it, though: there was clearly a pun in the original pret-a-porter, inspired by the fact that the Tabernacle (which he was describing) was carried around. So you might make the case that the translators of Asterix could have done a better job. Another argument for this plan is that they would have taken so many years over all those words that the book would not have come out in our lifetimes. But I think that a translator has a duty to produce something that is recognisably English, even if this violates the nonsense of the original.
Jeffrey Mehlman 05.21.04 at 2:01 pm
Andrew Brown has had his fun at the expense of my translation, but is he right? “Prêt-à -porter” is obviously ready-to-wear (or ready-made), but it refers in this case, as Brown tells us above, but not in his article in The Guardian, to the crucially portable Ark of the Tabernacle, an object borne rather than worn. Debray played on the two meanings of “porter,” I on a similarity of sound (bear/wear) sufficient to reveal to the reviewer, who appears not to know the French text, that “prêt-à -porter” must have been the original phrase. At this point (above) Brown suggests gratuitously that to do full justice to a French text written in such double-entendres would take an infinite amount of time. In view of which, he concludes (with a true philistine touch) that even if the original were non-sensical–but puns convey a surplus and not an absence of sense–better violate the original than give us anything not immediately “recognizable” as English.
–Jeffrey Mehlman
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