{"id":3094,"date":"2010-02-11T16:40:24","date_gmt":"2010-02-11T21:40:24","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/?p=3094"},"modified":"2010-02-11T16:40:24","modified_gmt":"2010-02-11T21:40:24","slug":"translation-problems","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/translation-problems\/","title":{"rendered":"Translation Problems"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"Not long ago I chastised Paul Muldoon for his bad translation of one Aim\u00e9 C\u00e9saire poem in the New Yorker<\/em>. In connection to that post, old friend Paul Buck in England send me a e-piece (that only reached me today in its printed version) that takes a more serious mistranslation to task \u2014 & does so in great depth while giving a needed historical introduction to the book and its earlier translation. I could only wish that translations would more often get this kind of detailed treatment \u2014 the bad ones (of which there are more than enough, unhappily) but the good ones as well. So I suggest that readers interested in matters of translation & even those simply interested in foreign literatures (as this article will tell them how publishers easily foist obviously incompetent translations on unwary readers) have a look at Tori Moi’s “The Adultreress Wife,”<\/a> in the current issue of the London Review of Books.<\/strong> It is a scathing commentary on the new translation of Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex<\/em> by Constance Borde and Sheila Malovany-Chevallier \u2014 here,\u00a0 a few paragraphs to whet your appetite:<\/p>\n

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The book is marred by unidiomatic or unintelligible phrases and clueless syntax; by expressions such as \u2018the forger being\u2019, \u2018man\u2019s work equal\u2019, \u2018the adulteress wife\u2019, and \u2018leisure in ch\u00e2teau life\u2019; and formulations such as \u2018because since woman is certainly to a large extent man\u2019s invention\u2019, \u2018a condition unique to France is that of the unmarried woman\u2019, \u2018alone she does not succeed in separating herself in reality\u2019, \u2018this uncoupling can occur in a maternal form.\u2019 The translation is blighted by the constant use of \u2018false friends\u2019, words that sound the same but don\u2019t mean the same in the two languages.<\/p>\n

And then there are the howlers. A character in Balzac\u2019s Letters of Two Brides<\/em> is made to kill her husband \u2018in a fit of passion\u2019, when what she really does is kill him \u2018par l\u2019exc\u00e8s de sa passion\u2019 (\u2018by her excessive passion\u2019). In the chapter on \u2018The Married Woman\u2019, Beauvoir quotes the famous line from Balzac\u2019s Physiologie du mariage<\/em>: \u2018Ne commencez jamais le mariage par un viol\u2019 (\u2018Never begin marriage by a rape\u2019). Borde and Malovany-Chevallier write: \u2018Do not begin marriage by a violation of law.\u2019<\/p>\n

At one point, Beauvoir discusses Hegel\u2019s analysis of sex. In the new translation, a brief quotation from The Philosophy of Nature<\/em> ends with the puzzling claim: \u2018This is mates coupling.\u2019 Mates coupling<\/em>? What does Hegel mean? It turns out that in Beauvoir\u2019s French version, Hegel says, \u2018C\u2019est l\u2019accouplement\u2019; A.V. Miller\u2019s translation of The Philosophy of Nature<\/em> uses the obvious term, \u2018copulation\u2019.<\/p>\n

In a discussion of male sexuality, Beauvoir points out that men can get pleasure from just about any woman. As evidence she mentions \u2018la prosp\u00e9rit\u00e9 de certaines \u201cmaisons d\u2019abattage\u201d\u2019, which Borde and Malovany-Chevallier translate as \u2018the success of certain \u201cslaughter-houses\u201d\u2019. But for a prostitute, faire de l\u2019abattage<\/em> is to get through customers quickly; as the context makes abundantly clear, a maison d\u2019abattage<\/em> is not an abattoir, but a brothel specialising in a quick turnover.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

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Not long ago I chastised Paul Muldoon for his bad translation of one Aim\u00e9 C\u00e9saire poem in the New Yorker. In connection to that post, old friend Paul Buck in England send me a...<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[64,103],"tags":[491,667,708,726,1743],"class_list":["post-3094","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-literature","category-translation","tag-lrb","tag-simone-de-beauvoir","tag-the-second-sex","tag-toril-moi","tag-translation"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3094","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3094"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3094\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3094"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3094"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3094"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}