Things Chinese

Lack of time (i.e., work) compels me to quit posting in this blog and to limit my occasional blogging to Things Chinese:

http://thingschinese.wordpress.com/

Paul

das wahre Antlitz des Menschen

«Wer von klein auf Wohlstand genossen hat, dann aber in Not gerät, der wird, so glaube ich, im Verlauf dieser Erfahrung in die Lage versetzt, das wahre Antlitz des Menschen zu erkennen.»
Lu Xun

"Mit dem Erzähler und Essayisten Lu Xun auf der Suche nach einem modernen chinesischen Selbstverständnis..."

Neue Zürcher Zeitung, 24. November 2007

http://www.nzz.ch/nachrichten/startseite/der_konfuzianismus_als_kannibalismus_1.588808.html

Garnett's translations

From Orlando Figes review of Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky's recently published translation of War and Peace:

No one did more to introduce the English-speaking world to Russian literature than Constance Garnett (1862– 1946), who translated into graceful late-Victorian prose seventy major Russian works, including seventeen volumes of Turgenev, thirteen volumes of Dostoevsky, six of Gogol, four of Tolstoy, six of Herzen, seventeen of Chekhov, and books by Goncharov and Ostrovsky. A friend of Garnett's, D.H. Lawrence, recalled her

sitting out in the garden turning out reams of her marvelous translations from the Russian. She would finish a page, and throw it off on a pile on the floor without looking up, and start a new page. The pile would be this high...really almost up to her knees, and all magical.

She worked so fast that when she came across an awkward passage she would leave it out. She made mistakes. But her stylish prose, which made the Russian writers so accessible, and seemingly so close to the English sensibility, ensured that her translations would remain for many years the authoritative standard of how these writers ought to sound and feel. For the English-reading public, Russian literature was what Garnett made of it. As Joseph Conrad wrote in 1917, "Turgeniev for me is Constance Garnett and Constance Garnett is Turgeniev."

The Russians were not so impressed. Nabokov called her Gogol translations "dry and flat, and always unbearably demure."[4] Kornei Chukovsky accused her of smoothing out the idiosyncrasies of writers' styles so that "Dostoevsky comes in some strange way to resemble Turgenev":

In reading the original [of Notes from Underground], who does not feel the convulsions, the nervous trembling of Dostoevsky's style? It is expressed in convulsions of syntax, in a frenzied and somehow piercing diction where malicious irony is mixed with sorrow and despair. But with Constance Garnett it becomes a safe blandscript: not a volcano, but a smooth lawn mowed in the English manner—which is to say a complete distortion of the original.

Joseph Brodsky sniped that the "reason English-speaking readers can barely tell the difference between Tolstoy and Dostoevsky is that they aren't reading the prose of either one. They're reading Constance Garnett."

For the rest of this review, see

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/20810

I fought the Borg and the Borg won

I wasn't planning to read the Harry Potter books for another ten years or so. But the other day Laura, who's seven and three quarters, started reading the first one to me and I'm hooked. We're on chapter three...

Empires of the World

I've just finished reading Nicholas Ostler's monumental Empires of the Word: A Language History of the World (Harper Collins, 2005). It's a magisterial introduction to the history of languages and to the history of the world through the prism of language. Unlike previous historical linguists, Ostler does not compare the structure of different languages with a view to reconstructing their past; instead, the compares the career of different languages: their social and political impact and staying power, as well as the reasons for their decline. "It is an approach, previously little explored, to understanding human societies." Much of what Ostler writes about Aramaic was completely new to me. I learned something from every page of this book, including the section on Chinese. In a review of the book, Robert Dessaix writes about the spread of Aramaic:

"Aramaic-speakers, for instance, who were nomads from northern Syria, simply swamped the Assyrian empire, which has been happily speaking Akkadian for 2,000 years, bringing with them a superior technology (always a plus): their alphabet, written on papyrus or leather, much handier than cuneiform on clay tablets.

In the 6th century BC the Persians found it practical to adopt Aramaic as their official language, so that by the time Alexander the Great invaded Egypt, he found the administration there communicating not in Egyptian but Aramaic, and even Ashoka in far-off India had inscriptions in Aramaic on his monuments.

No conquering armies from northern Syria, no settlement of foreign lands, just a bit of 'merger and acquisition' leading to bilingualism in the streets and offices and armies of the Middle East until hey presto! one day anyone who was anyone across half the known world, including eventually Jesus, and millions of nobodies at home as well (that's the important thing) was speaking and writing in an obscure nomadic dialect.

Arabic wiped Aramaic out eventually, of course, though invasion and the imposition of a unitary religion but, interestingly, it wiped out only related languages (as Aramaic, and even Egyptian were). It seems that invasion leaves unrelated languages intact and thriving (Persian, Malay, Turkish and so on in the case of Arabic) unless it's accompanied by massive migration and, ideally, a plague or two."
http://www.abc.net.au/rn/arts/ling/stories/s1461705.htm

Here's an interview with Ostler:

http://calitreview.com/2007/04/03/an-interview-with-linguist-nicholas-ostler/

Paul

Stepmother tongues

Bint Battuta writes:

"I was taught – and I agree – that you should only translate into your mother tongue (assuming you are raised monolingual). I have occasionally translated into Arabic, but I always get the translation checked by a native speaker, and I always feel that what I have done lacks style; it might be grammatically correct, but there are no subtleties or nuances. Translation, particularly literary translation, is more than knowing the target language well, it is about cultural familiarity, about knowing the resonances and connotations words might have, being aware of what the readership will understand as well as what the writer intended. That deeper knowledge cannot be learnt from books.
………………

I can think of many great authors who have chosen to write in a language they have not learnt from birth. Samuel Beckett chose to write in French (after years of living in Paris), and Milan Kundera now does too (again after a long period of living in France). Then of course there was the extraordinary Joseph Conrad, for whom English was a fourth language (after Russian, Polish and French), mastered in his twenties. Bahrain has its own example in Ebrahim Al Arrayedh, who wrote extensively in Arabic, although he only learnt it as a teenager when he moved to Bahrain from India. The Saudi novelist Ahmed Abodehman writes in French. (Eleiva recently told me about Kapka Kassabova, a Bulgarian author who initially wrote a novel and some poetry in English just to practise the language – but won awards for them!)

Beckett turned to French because he felt in French he could write 'without style' – it made his writing very spare (and he translated most of his own works into English himself).

Is there a difference between living for a long time in country other to that of one's birth and choosing to write in the language of that culture (for whatever reason), and writing in another language while still surrounded by your mother tongue?"

For more, visit:

http://battutabahrain.blogspot.com/2007/10/stepmother-tongues.html