Quote:
Originally Posted by HarryT
I'm not taking about reading for pleasure here, but using translations when judging the merit of a book as a work of literature. Can you make an informed jugement of, say, Tolstoi, if you only read his books in translation?
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All I can do is read the critiques of the various translations, make a choice based on them, and then hope I am reading a fair approximation of the author's words and intent. But even those reading a work in the original language very often have different impressions and understandings of that work.
As in conversation, we are touched by those ideas we are open to receiving, and we then interpret them via our own filters. So the reality is that there is nothing perceived that is not filtered. Yes, a bad translation adds yet another filter, or set of filters (the translator's), but many of the ideas will make themselves apparent anyway -- especially in a long work like
War and Peace, which is then followed by his "pounding" in his central points over and over and over again, in various ways, to make sure the reader really got the point (by which time I was yelling at him, "Enough already! I get it!!").