(DOWNLOAD) "Lost in the Details: Translating Master Peter's Puppet Show." by Cervantes: Bulletin of the Cervantes Society of America ~ eBook PDF Kindle ePub Free
eBook details
- Title: Lost in the Details: Translating Master Peter's Puppet Show.
- Author : Cervantes: Bulletin of the Cervantes Society of America
- Release Date : January 22, 2007
- Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines,Books,Professional & Technical,Education,
- Pages : * pages
- Size : 219 KB
Description
TRANSLATION IS A SISYPHEAN task, one that promises frustration and despair for the translator and dissatisfaction, at best, for the reader of the translation. The great Spanish critic Ortega y Gasset says, "the idea that there ate philosophers and, more generally speaking writers who can, in fact, be translated is an illusion" (93). After examining the enormity of the translator's task and exploring how translation theory has framed the perspectives of three translators of Don Quijote--John Ormsby, Burton Raffel, and Edith Grossman--this essay will examine how those positions affect their respective translations of Maese Pedro's puppet show (II, 26). In his essay; "No Two Snowflakes are Alike: Translation as Metaphor" Rabassa cites sound, curses, and articles as problems in literary translation, but then focuses on three larger issues that make translation a quixotic enterprise. "The author who knows his language inside out" (8) is the first. Rabassa uses a line from the Brazilian writer Joao Guimaraes Rosa's novel, Grande sertao: Vere'das: "O diabo na rua no meio do redemoinho," which translates literally as "The devil in the street in the middle of the whirlwind." In the Portuguese, the devil is not only in the whirlwind but literally in the word for whirlwind: "redemoinho." The translator of this difficult text has to deal with how to accomplish a similar feat in English. Second, Rabassa cites the author who has a strong knowledge of local idiom as yet another problem that makes a text untranslatable. Juan Rulfo provides the perfect example here with the title of his short story, "Es que somos muy pobres." The title literally says, "It's just that we're very poor." The "Es que," when translated, sounds strange to the English speaker, giving it affectation; yet in Spanish it not only sounds natural, but also lends humility. Finally, Rabassa talks of those works steeped in their cultural milieu. The example he gives is Luis Rafael Sanchez' La guaracha del Macho Camacho, but Don Quijote, could be substituted just as easily.
 "Lost in the Details: Translating Master Peter's Puppet Show." by Cervantes: Bulletin of the Cervantes Society of America ~ eBook PDF Kindle ePub Free){kind=link}