Waxing Lyrical Again, it Must be Spring!

Suddenly I empathise with translators of literature, flowery descriptions are terrible to translate. Personified seaweed, for instance, beating against the water's edge. Try shortening that to a few chosen words, making it sound plausible and get the same meaning across. The key, I've discovered, is to translate meaning, not words. Disregard commas, and silly slips of the pen and write out the images the text produces, just switch languages. Then go back over and make it legible, making sure it reads pretty much like the original. You don't just exchange words, you 'gjendikter'. It's a Norwegian word, that lacks a proper English counterpart. It roughly means something like re-writing, yet not quite. It means that, when you translate fiction or poetry, you write the story again, and become a poet yourself. You not only translate, but in a sense write a new poem, with the same meaning and the same aim as the one you base it on, your source text.

And I understand why Nabokov translated his Russian works himself; not only losing the Russian nuances in the process, but to have someone re-interpret everything, must have been unbearable.

Translation is so much fun! I get to write things like 'On the middle of the island we encounter a little red stave church, standing as a monument to times and generations past'. Times and generations past! Almost as much fun as the medieval text we translated, that had different types of armour, lances, crossbows and fortresses (I had a fierce debated with myself: fortress, stronghold, encampment, fortified camp, castle?).

Waxing Lyrical Again, it Must be Spring!

Suddenly I empathise with translators of literature, flowery descriptions are terrible to translate. Personified seaweed, for instance, beating against the water's edge. Try shortening that to a few chosen words, making it sound plausible and get the same meaning across. The key, I've discovered, is to translate meaning, not words. Disregard commas, and silly slips of the pen and write out the images the text produces, just switch languages. Then go back over and make it legible, making sure it reads pretty much like the original. You don't just exchange words, you 'gjendikter'. It's a Norwegian word, that lacks a proper English counterpart. It roughly means something like re-writing, yet not quite. It means that, when you translate fiction or poetry, you write the story again, and become a poet yourself. You not only translate, but in a sense write a new poem, with the same meaning and the same aim as the one you base it on, your source text.

And I understand why Nabokov translated his Russian works himself; not only losing the Russian nuances in the process, but to have someone re-interpret everything, must have been unbearable.

Translation is so much fun! I get to write things like 'On the middle of the island we encounter a little red stave church, standing as a monument to times and generations past'. Times and generations past! Almost as much fun as the medieval text we translated, that had different types of armour, lances, crossbows and fortresses (I had a fierce debated with myself: fortress, stronghold, encampment, fortified camp, castle?).