Quote:
Originally Posted by anacreon
For those reading German, the Handke - Unseld Briefwechsel is another look into being a writer / a publisher, which I also found fascinating.
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I only wish I could read Handke in German! Kathy Acker and I used to talk about
Der kurze Brief zum langen Abschied in particular -- since she was obsessed with her sadistic moth (my pet word for
mother) -- but both of us went through a phase of reading everything we could by Handke. Though Weaver, Manheim and others seemed to do basic justice to the style, we presumed they also distorted what Mr. H. had to say (and halved the felicitous centaurs of his language). V. Woolf mentions somewhere that the experience of reading Russian fiction in translation is like peering through someone else's prescription lenses.
(BTW: There's a rather creepy discussion about translating Handke
here.)
Dani Cavallaro has written insightfully about a poem of mine (cf. pp. 73-4) which contains the phrase
our symphonies are insect seas -- her comments are in English and conceal no secret poetry behind the Kabbalistic shells of translation --
as did Prof. Tatiana Rapatzikou (pp. 155-170), whose original essay is in Greek. I can barely parse that language and have no idea how my formulation works in her version, but in someone else's
Turkish translation of that same poem,
insect seas becomes
rovartengerek. In German,
insect seas is translated as one word as well.
I used to live with a translator from Bavaria by way of Los Angeles and was intoxicated by the balletic German formulations she seemed to extract from the most pedestrian American prose. She was also in the process of translating Unica Zürn (whom people used to say she resembled) into English.
Zürn's diaristic correspondence (by which I mean her novels) is intricately inspiring as well, isn't it, anacreon? And I so wish that Paul Celan and Ingeborg Bachmann's correspondence were available as an ebook in English translation --
this translation, as it happens.
An American writer friend who now lives in Berlin once asked a German writer whether
fischfrau would be the correct translation of
mermaid. The German writer chortled immoderately, explaining that a fischfrau would be the result of a human male fornicating with a fish. Apparently, an obscene picture was somehow attached to the epithet.
I envy that gentleman his familiarity with the nuances of the portmanteau.