NPR gets a little crazy this week and spotlights literary translation in a "Talk of the Nation" segment featuring those superstars of the art, Edith Grossman and Lydia Davis. I'm particularly interested in their views about rendering into English a book that already has multiple available translations:
After finishing her first draft, Davis takes a look at the work of other translators, and develops a kind of partnership with them as well. "I would begin to feel that we were a group sitting in the room together wrestling with the same problems," she says.
Davis says reading many variations on a single phrase gives her an even better understanding of how complex the process of translation is.
"I sense how hard we've all worked," she says. "It's not easy. Even a not-so-good translation is not easy to produce. Somehow, I think we maybe should have been all together ... doing it together, and somehow achieved the final definitive translation."
On this point, Davis and Grossman part company. Grossman never looks at other translations. The translation is hers alone, she says, but it is impossible to separate her work from the author's.
"Clearly the translation is mine," Grossman says. "Clearly the book I translated was not mine. I really don't believe in sublimating much — and certainly not my sense of what works in English and what doesn't work in English. So I think there is the partnership — in the translation, there's a shared authorship."
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