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Old 08-31-2021, 07:54 AM   #1
Uncle Robin
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Excessive liberty is bad!

This is not a political post, but my reaction to a line I just read in The Jungle Book in Hindi. Since the English original was published in 1894 and its sequel in 1895, the following line REALLY jarred

"बिलकुल ब्लैक एंड व्हाइट सिनेमा की तरह लग रहा था"

The large bolded text are English words written in devanagari: "black and white cinema". So the whole line reads basically "looked exactly like black and white cinema"

I've long felt the Jungle Book belonged in Hindi, especially since Hindustani was Kipling's L1 until around 5 yo, and I loved the Hindi dub of the 2016 movie so much I haven't watched the English version. I've been enjoying the translation so far, but this anachronistic paraphrasing was very irksome. The translator did say in his foreword that he was aiming the translation at kids, but even so, this seems a bit much.

Here's the original passage:
Quote:
“Ha! Ha!” said Mowgli, on his back. “Now thou knowest!” and the torrent of black horns, foaming muzzles, and staring eyes whirled down the ravine just as boulders go down in floodtime. "
And the Hindi passage translated into English:
Quote:
Mowgli said, "Ha! Ha! Now you will know." Only jet black horns were visible there, and white froth on the fur of the cattle; it looked exactly like black and white cinema. The herd of buffaloes looked as if black stones were flowing fast in a strong flood.
I think what disappoints me most is that the above quotes show the "cinema" reference was an insertion, without it the passage would have been a close rendering. Hence my rant against excessive liberty.

How do you react to this kind of VERY loose translation?
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Old 08-31-2021, 07:58 AM   #2
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Translation is an art more than a science. If the translator tries to be too literal, the result will be unpleasant to read, so some liberties are necessary, and more if the style is not plain and simple.

However, I have to agree with you. Anachronisms are distracting and can take the reader out of the story.
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Old 08-31-2021, 08:03 AM   #3
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I spoke another language as a boy before relocating to the USA. I recall the pithy "Translations are like wives -- the beautiful ones are sometimes not faithful and the non-beautiful ones are sometimes faithful." Sometimes the translation surpasses both beautiful and faithful and is great art in its own right. Best regards, Pop
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Old 08-31-2021, 08:04 AM   #4
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Translation is an art more than a science. If the translator tries to be too literal, the result will be unpleasant to read, so some liberties are necessary, and more if the style is not plain and simple.

However, I have to agree with you. Anachronisms are distracting and can take the reader out of the story.
Exactly. I have no problem with translators rendering the spirit of the work, in my view it's what they SHOULD aim for. But this particular phrase was superfluous, I think.

Kipling made no comparison of the scene to something else, he didn't say for example "it was like a street artist's pencil sketch". Had he made some sort of comparison like that, then substituting a more relevant modern reference might be justifiable. Simply inserting one seems wrong, when I doubt any kids would have trouble reading the passage without it. It comes across like a narrrator's aside, which I was fine with in The Princess Bride, but feels out of place here
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Old 08-31-2021, 08:06 AM   #5
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I spoke another language as a boy before relocating to the USA. I recall the pithy "Translations are like wives -- the beautiful ones are sometimes not faithful and the non-beautiful ones are sometimes faithful." Sometimes the translation surpasses both beautiful and faithful and is great art in its own right. Best regards, Pop

And imo, this case is neither faithful nor beautiful, and definitely not great art, hence my adverse reaction.
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Old 08-31-2021, 09:05 AM   #6
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It's a double anachronism, since any child reading the book today has probably never seen black-and-white cinema.
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Old 08-31-2021, 02:58 PM   #7
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It's a double anachronism, since any child reading the book today has probably never seen black-and-white cinema.
YES! This thought occurred to me after my earlier posts too. The translation was published in 2004 or thereabouts, so the "aside" would not only be anachronistic but unhelpful to its target audience.

The other thing that made it odd to me is that in earlier chapters the author used a lot of very Sanskritised Hindi words, which has the effect of making the book "feel old". Tis might have been a deliberate choice to replicate Kipling's now 'antique' English, but if so, the cinema reference is out of place for yet another reason.
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Old 09-01-2021, 09:36 AM   #8
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There is a longstanding argument in the Tolstoy community over the Pevear & Volokhonsky translation of War and Peace that was published in 2007. It got a lot of attention at the time due to Oprah Winfrey featuring it. Richard Pevear and his wife Larissa Volokhonsky have done quite a few Russian translations.

I got the original printing (beautiful deckled edge binding) the day it came out. I threw my back out 2 days later and spent almost an entire week with it in my recliner nonstop.

I much prefer it to the Briggs (2005) translation, but you can find quite a few folks fighting over it online.
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Old 09-01-2021, 10:02 AM   #9
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It's a double anachronism, since any child reading the book today has probably never seen black-and-white cinema.
In the first World:
Supermarkets sell old B&W content on DVD and it's on streaming and Internet. Also a 55" 4K TV is cheaper than the cinema for a family.

My grandchildren prefer the 1930s & 1950s editions of classic books, not "modernised". The publishers reverted some changes they made on "the Famous Five". They have no difficulty with E. Nesbit either which is a lot more archaic than Famous Five.

I have a lot of early published Kipling, before Puck of Pook Hill. In better condition than some 50 years younger books.

Last edited by Quoth; 09-01-2021 at 10:09 AM.
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Old 09-01-2021, 10:03 AM   #10
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There is a longstanding argument in the Tolstoy community over the Pevear & Volokhonsky translation of War and Peace that was published in 2007.
I did some comparing, just reading the same passages in several translations, and I'm no fan of Pevear & Volokhonsky. For me the prose doesn't flow well in their translations, but of course that's a very subjective thing.
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Old 09-01-2021, 10:06 AM   #11
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I did some comparing, just reading the same passages in several translations, and I'm no fan of Pevear & Volokhonsky. For me the prose doesn't flow well in their translations, but of course that's a very subjective thing.
Yeah, and that seems to be where most folks are. If you like the one, you don't like the other at all and vice versa.
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Old 09-01-2021, 10:18 AM   #12
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I did some comparing, just reading the same passages in several translations, and I'm no fan of Pevear & Volokhonsky. For me the prose doesn't flow well in their translations, but of course that's a very subjective thing.
A while back I asked the very helpful and Stephen Dodson, aka languagehat for his recommendation of a W&P translation (his site is HEAVILY focused on Russian literature). After a disclaimer that he hadn't read anything translated from Russian for many years, the rest of his reply I found balanced and helpful:

Quote:
(when I read it in English, I used Dunnigan's, which is fine), but I'll give you the same advice I give everyone who asks about translations: read a few pages of each one you're considering and choose the one you most enjoy reading. It's like wine -- you're not going to find a really lousy one these days, so what's important is that it's to your taste. Each is going to have minor errors and odd stylistic choices, but so what? You want to have the best reading experience possible, so choose the one that will give you that.

I should add that Pevear and Volokhonsky, as a deliberate practice, use literal translations of Russian idioms, which some people like and others (like me) don't, feeling that it adds a false exoticism. For example, the Russian phrase плевать на, literally 'spit on,' is a very common idiom meaning 'dislike, have contempt for,' and a normal translator would render 'I spit on him' as, e.g., "I despise him" or "I can't stand him" or the like; P&V would say "I spit on him" and justify it by fidelity to the Russian (and blast the other translators for betraying the original). You'll have to decide what works for you.

(I also have a personal dislike for them because of their incessant self-promotion and trashing of rivals, but that of course is irrelevant to which translation you should choose.)
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Old 09-01-2021, 10:23 AM   #13
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A while back I asked the very helpful and Stephen Dodson, aka languagehat for his recommendation of a W&P translation (his site is HEAVILY focused on Russian literature). After a disclaimer that he hadn't read anything translated from Russian for many years, the rest of his reply I found balanced and helpful:
I will say this for them though - the footnotes are beyond compare. I learned so much on my first reading of their translation (I'd read two different translations prior to that), and it added quite a bit to my enjoyment.
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Old 09-01-2021, 10:27 AM   #14
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I will say this for them though - the footnotes are beyond compare. I learned so much on my first reading of their translation (I'd read two different translations prior to that), and it added quite a bit to my enjoyment.
Which is why I liked the tenor of his advice - if you like it, and it resonates with you, go with it.
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Old 09-01-2021, 10:50 AM   #15
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I will say this for them though - the footnotes are beyond compare. I learned so much on my first reading of their translation (I'd read two different translations prior to that), and it added quite a bit to my enjoyment.
I decided I preferred the Dunnigan translation and when I reread it last year I combined Dunnigan with the P&V footnotes. The best of both worlds!
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