{"id":3693,"date":"2010-06-17T06:24:57","date_gmt":"2010-06-17T11:24:57","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/?p=3693"},"modified":"2010-06-17T06:24:57","modified_gmt":"2010-06-17T11:24:57","slug":"translation-matters","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/translation-matters\/","title":{"rendered":"Translation Matters"},"content":{"rendered":"
Started a post last month as the translation of a note on translation from Pierre Assouline’s blog La R\u00e9publique des Lettres<\/strong><\/em>. Got side-tracked, but here it is, with another couple notes on recent matters of translation that have come to my attention:<\/p>\n
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Auteur et traducteur fifty\/fifty<\/a><\/h3>\n

<\/em>Philippe Claudel’s novel Le Rapport de Brodeck <\/em>was given the annual Independent Foreign Fiction Prize<\/a> awarded by the British daily paper to a foreign novel translated into English. What is most interesting is not that this is the first French novel given the prize since Fr\u00e9d\u00e9ric Beigbeder’s five years ago, but that the jury had the good idea to split the\u00a0 \u00a3 10 000 award fifty\/fifty between the author and the translator, John Cullen. A way of showing the readers that the translator is something like a co-author of the book they hold in their hands. Is this already the case in France?<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/div>\n

* * *<\/p>\n

Meanwhile,\u00a0 Katy Derbyshire, on her lively love german books<\/strong><\/em> blog, comments on an annual summer meeting of German translators. Below, the opening paras of her post; you can read the full article here<\/a>.<\/p>\n

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Wanted: Lively Young Men. On A Translators’ Get-Together<\/a><\/h3>\n

It’s that time of year again. Every summer the German literary translators meet up in the small medieval town of Wolfenb\u00fcttel for workshops and socialising. This year there were about 170 of us, plus a smattering of editors and interested parties.<\/p>\n

The fun starts on the Friday with a lecture, this time an impromptu talk on the influence of translation on the European image of the Orient in the 18th and 19th centuries. In fact, the “translators” of 1001 Nights and other texts did more than a little compiling and inventing, which has a knock-on effect to this day – Aladdin and Sinbad, for example, aren’t actually mentioned anywhere in the existing Arabic manuscripts. The Arabic translator Hartmut F\u00e4hndrich did a great job of filling in for a speaker gone AWOL, entertaining and informing us in his own inimitable way.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

* * *<\/p>\n

In a little essay on “The Poetics of Islam” that first appeared in issue 20 of XCP, and now reprinted on their blog, here<\/a>, Kazim Ali<\/strong> also has a head-scratching moment concerning the translation of the Qur’an:<\/p>\n

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One significant verse of the Qura\u2019an appears near its beginning \u201cThis is the book. In it there is no doubt.\u201d Growing up under the shadow of such an authoritarian dictum I continually wondered at my own doubts, engagements with faith, forays away, through, and within dogmatic teachings. Only last year, in a new and wonderfully acclaimed translation I read a new rendering of the same verse: \u201cThere is no doubt this book is a guide for the faithful.\u201d<\/p>\n

I have a feeling I had better learn Arabic because those two renderings do not read the same.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Started a post last month as the translation of a note on translation from Pierre Assouline’s blog La R\u00e9publique des Lettres. Got side-tracked, but here it is, with another couple notes on recent matters...<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11,21,64,103,1],"tags":[451,453,598,1743],"class_list":["post-3693","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-arab-culture","category-blogs","category-literature","category-translation","category-uncategorized","tag-katy-debyshire","tag-kazim-ali","tag-pierre-assouline","tag-translation"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3693","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=3693"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3693\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3693"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3693"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3693"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}