Tuesday, June 23, 2009

Improved in Translation?

You rarely see this claim, and it is a very narrow one, but in Choi Yearn-hong's review of Poetess Moon Chung-hee’s 'Woman on Terrace,' he claims that one line in the English translation is "better" (if funnier means better) than in the original

‘The distortion of a text,’ Freud (not writing about translation) says in Moses and Monotheism, ‘is not unlike a murder. The difficulty lies not in the execution of the deed but in doing away with the traces.’ In this case, it seems that the traces are advantageous.

Also, I suppose, this is support of the contention that translation is an art, or at least a craft, and not a mathematical process of creating equivalency.

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1 Comments:

At 2:51 PM , Anonymous Blean said...

Not every single word has the exact translation in every language. Thanks for sharing. Hey, these Hawaii Statehood Apparel might interest some of your Korean friends.

 

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