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Comment by throw4847285 | Hacker News Reader

I read and loved the P&V Anna Karenina, so as a gift my Mom got me War and Peace. She very consciously bought me the Maude translation, which is how I first learned how contentious translations can be.

Then I recommended Anna Karenina to a friend and I started going over the pros and cons of the various translations when he stopped me and reminded me that Russian is his first language. That's when it clicked for me. It's like people who obsesses over which cut of a movie is the best, except in this case the "true" author's vision is available and many people can access it, just not them. I understand why people fixate on finding the "best" translation.

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Borges had some interesting thoughts on translation, including this great line:

"The original was unfaithful to the translation."

BORGES AFFIRMED, in earnest, that an original can be unfaithful to a translation. He vehemently objected to claims that certain translations he admired are “true to the original” and derided the presuppositions of purists for whom all translations are necessarily deceitful in one way or another. Borges would often pro- test, with various degrees of irony, against the assumption – ingrained in the Italian adage traduttore traditore – that a translator is a traitor to an original. He referred to it alternatively as a superstition or pun. For Borges the Italian expression, unfairly prejudiced in favor of the original, is an erroneous generalization that conflates differ- ence with treachery. The idea that literary translations are inherently inferior to their originals is, for Borges, based on the false assumption that some works of literature must be assumed definitive. But for Borges, no such thing as a definitive work exists, and therefore, a translator’s inevitable transformation of the original is not necessarily to the detriment of the work. Difference, for Borges, is not a sufficient criterion for the superiority of the original.

https://open.unive.it/hitrade/books/KristalBorges.pdf

That guy had a lot of interesting thoughts. It's ironic that of all the writers who I've tried to read in the original, Borges is the only one which comes to mind.

Yeah I agree, somehow Borges's Spanish seems more accessible to English speakers, maybe because he was fluent in English as well. But my Spanish isn't good enough to tell if his writing is significantly different from other Spanish language writers.

As a Spanish native speaker, I would say he’s quite accessible. Most of the references he does are universal classics and he uses a pretty modern language most of the time. And he doesn’t do much playing with metalanguage. I’d say.. the hardest to translate and read would probably be the most experimental just because there’s a lot of meta-references.. kind of like Joyce in Finnegans Wake.

Of course I understand the impulse, but translating Finnegans Wake strikes me as nearly impossible and worth only questionable effort. Even beyond the fact that it's often expressing non-analytic semantics that are extremely difficult to pin down, it's not even entirely English and there's a lot of cross-language wordplay.

https://www.nrk.no/kultur/xl/han-oversetter-verdens-vanskeli...

( The Swedes used 66 years, but according to the Norwegian translator, it is no harder than Shakespeare's sonettes. Begun 2016, ETA 2030. )

Even Ulysses has this problem, there's so much wordplay based off of how things sound when spoken

I would add that a lot of Borges' work is written in an academic style that is highly translatable, but he also wrote a lot about the criminal underworld in Buenos Aires and those works are, unsurprisingly, full of slang and local references that are much more opaque to outsiders.

Another great line about translations is that they are like lovers, they can be faithful and they can be beautiful, but you are very lucky if they are both.

> Another great line about translations is that they are like lovers

It's a great line _if_ one hasn't had much experience with lovers or thought deeply enough about such experiences or thinks of lovers casually. :(

Basically, we love someone because we're attracted to them, because beauty is in the eye of the beholder. We also often love someone for their character which is why we are charmed by them.

It's really difficult to love someone who is unfaithful because our obsession with them merely affirms our own lack of character, and our lack of good judgement, and our inability to discern good character over and over.

Ah, I rant, sorry for that :), but my point is, it's a bad analogy because it doesn't tell us anything true about translations nor of lovers.

War and Peace was my first introduction to the translation debate as well. I read and loved the Anthony Briggs translation, but I also read a few samples from the Maude translation and didn't think it was much different.

In general, I think there's too much emphasis on language barriers for the layperson. It's the classic problem where passionate people introduce considerations that aren't relevant to the casual user ("Don't use that brand/thing! This brand/thing is 0.1% better!").

I'm fluent in English, but still am capable of missing subtle uses of the language. Yet, we treat foreign (to us) languages as if all of the subtly is obvious to anyone who is fluent in it. I honestly don't think that the average Russian reader is going to see much more in the language than an English person with a good translation. An expert will see it, but not me.

In my opinion the return on investment is much higher for increasing your understanding of both the culture and historical moment, not the language.

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