/lit/ - Literature

Holy fuck, sex as a topic is so boring in any form.

i read translated chinese poetry as old timey tweets or blogposts, you lose what makes it poetry but you gain more insight into that world than you do via non-fiction

>>19059681
>but you gain more insight into that world than you do via non-fiction
I thought its the other way around

it's better than reading no poetry at all

>>19059666
What does it matter if poetry is translated or not? Poetry is either good or not, beautiful or ugly. Consider the following example - imagine if tomorrow a groundbreaking discovery revealed that the entire corpus of Shakespeare's poetry was actually translated from original Inuit poetry that was lost to history. Would it change anything about the way you feel about the quality King Lear? If the answer is yes you need to rethink your relationship with literature.

>>19059666
Yes, absolutely. The fact is, most great poets read translated poetry, and translated some themselves.

>>19059813
That's a good example. But the >translation meme is deeply rooted into the /lit/ brain, and many would answer positively to your question.

>>19059848
>>19059813
But you depend on the capability of the translator and language that is translated to. In my language classic works were translated by our famous poets, but then its more like a collaboration, no?

>>19059813
No but i would think that it must then be even better in the original inuit language

>>19059813
Based inuitbros would never write something as autistic as Shakespeare plays.

>>19059813
>Would it change anything about the way you feel about the quality King Lear?
First of all, there's a universal beauty and truth to a true piece of art that can be achieved with any language and without language, like music (sure it's a form of language).
But saying a translation can convey that truth does not alter the fact that with a translation, you are simply not consuming how it was meant to be consumed, the author picked every single word carefully and you just lose it all after the translation.
You get the message but you lose the form, the way that message was meant to be conveyed.
Sure, no problem reading a translation, after all we can't be proficient in ALL the significant languages, but yes, a lot is lost in a translation, and yes, it's a world of difference reading a translation and reading the original.
With translated poetry, you are reading as much as the author's work as you are reading the translator's.

>>19059672
based

>>19059666
Checked. Yes it is. Firstly, a translation might be a fine work in its own right (maybe better than the original). Secondly, when you don't have the time/energy/inclination to learn language X, it's better to read a good translation of a good poem in X than not to read it at all.

Certain people on /lit/ will deride you for this, but they themselves don't read anything at all. (For the most part, they can't even read.) Ignore them.

Comparing translations of poetry can be a lot of fun. It's something you can't really do in a novel that takes hours to read.

>>19060217
Why? Maybe it's even better
>>19060247
A good translator is also picking every word with the greatest care

>>19059666
Checked. Yes it is. Firstly, a translation might be a fine work in its own right (maybe better than the original). Secondly, when you don't have the time/energy/inclination to learn language X, it's better to read a good translation of a good poem in X than not to read it at all.

Certain people on /lit/ will deride you for this, but they themselves don't read anything. (For the most part, they can't even read.) Ignore them.

>>19060262
Yeah, we should have a Le Ton beau de Marot thing on /lit/. (OP posts a foreign poem and everyone does translations.)

>>19059666
yes, if you have no other choice

>>19060276
>A good translator is also picking every word with the greatest care
yes, but still, the final translation is as much of a work of the translator as it is of the actual author. Nothing wrong with it but still very different from the original.

>>19060280
I have other choice to learn 10 most significant languages though?

Do some people here really not enjoy reading? If you read something and you enjoy it, it is worth reading translated or not

>>19060345
Sometimes people just want to argue

>>19060337
if you have time.
but that leaves out all other poetry from all the other languages you aren't absolutely fluent in.

>>19060318
Again, what does it matter? Original, translator, the hell do you care whose hand wrote the lines if they're beautiful? Your assumptions hinge on a priori belief that the author is always superior to the translator which is a form of pointless idolatry.
I would also like to dispute the DUDE JUST LEARN 10 LANGUAGES suggestion. The kind of fluency necessary to appreciate the great works of poetry and even prose requires a good decade of intense study, immersion, and sheer practice, most translations are done by learned academic scholars who dedicated their lifetimes to untangling the subtle linguistic peculiarities between various languages, studied ONE author for decades, to suggest that you can approach the same level of insight snd appreciation by jerking off Duolingo exercises is absurd. By jumping into original texts having achieved basic reading fluency is doing disservice to everyone involved

>>19060449
I’ve always been convinced that the translation meme is for people posturing, or an excuse to not read. The thought of a basement dwelling incel studying 10 languages in his basement is funny. As I get older, time becomes more valuable, and spending a lot of time to learn a language to simply read a book, isn’t in my cards

>>19060449
Based

The most popular book of the late 1700s and early 1800s was translated poetry

Simic wrote in English.

>>19060732
Op here, forgot to mention pic not related

>>19060732
>wrote
Writes. Fucker's alive

>>19060770
I grew out of simic my second year of college. This, “wrote”

>>19060774
Thus*
>*tabletposting

>>19060774
Have you let him know he's dead to you?

>>19060780
No. Although I should write to him to let him know and see what he says. Maybe his response will change my opinion of him back to when I was obsessed with his poetry

>>19060449
what do you mean, what does it matter? It matters because I want to read what that guy wrote, not some other dude.
Do you really have that much of a hard time admitting that poetry in its original language is superior to reading a translation? Let me guess, you are a anglo, therefore you can only read english and could never actually experience reading and comparing works in different, distant languages, so you hold that opinion that it doesn't matter. I've read the divine comedy in italian, another latin language, and in english, and there is a world of difference between these versions.
While the romanic language was able to hold some of the rhymes and rhythm, english just lost it altogether. There is no way of maintaining all of the form like it was intended by the author.
You either keep the meaning while losing rhythm, rhymes and other nuances, or you keep the latter as much as you can (probably not much) but you have to adjust and adapt the actual meanings of the words.
>I would also like to dispute the DUDE JUST LEARN 10 LANGUAGES suggestion.
Like I did in my post? Stop being disonest, I said it myself it's impossible to become proficient in every language, one needs to read translations in order to be able to read many important classics, and there's nothing wrong with it, OBVIOUSLY it's better to read the translated iliad rather than not reading it at all, but you are telling me there's no difference in reading it in english and reading/listening to it in the original greek? go suck a dick, disonest cocksucking fatty.
Can't learn 10 languages, but I can learn two or three, and since I'm not a lazy piece of lard like you burgers I'm doing my best so I can read Brecht and Mann and Rimbaud and Baudeleire and Proust in the original, just like I did with Dante, Leopardi, Ariosto and Tasso, and you can cope all you want

>>19060789
>Mr Simic revealed he received letters of this nature on a daily basis, but wrote them off as an occupational hazard of being a famous poet. 'I never would have believed, ' he added, 'that this Anon person would have gone so far as he did'. Police are still trying to contact family members of Anon in the aftermath of the tragedy.

>>19059666
It deppends, do you care about the poetry itself or the work as a poets work? When you read a translation of aristotle, you dont read aristotle, you read Robin Smith.
People who dont understand this have never faced totally different translations on the same subject

>>19060449
>Your assumptions hinge on a priori belief that the author is always superior to the translator which is a form of pointless idolatry.

lmao you literally just cured my neurosis of not being able to read translated poetry.

(I'm dead serious, thanks mf)

>>19059813
people read king lear because of king lear's reputation; they read translations because of the original's reputation

yes, if you read a poem in translation and like it, then the fact that it's a translation shouldn't stop you from liking it
but if you read a poem in translation because of the original's reputation then you have been (frankly) bamboozled, and may not find what you seek

there are certainly great translations out there, but they require as much genius as great original works, and genius translators are few and far between

>>19061058
Good point, however reputations more often than not extend to the translations. Like I said people who did them are masterful artists themselves, or at least meticulous academics like P&V. Whether you read Iliad from Fagles or Lattimore you are guaranteed a brilliant work of art. When you read Metamorphoses from Golding you possibly get something that exceeds the original work (don't quote me on that my latin is rudimentary still, but Pound swore by it).
Some people, however, truly do value the 'authenticity' of experiencing the original vision, and those people can't be helped regardless of what I write there. If you read King Lear in spanish, did you experience Shakespeare? Well, yes and no. You didn't touch thoughts and passions of Shakespeare directly, but you nevertheless felt them through the membrabe of a spanish mind. Which, one could argue, is only the second membrane, first being our own, rendering all process of reading a glorified translation

>>19061434
With writers like Ovid it's silly to get too pedantic. It's not like, even if you read Latin, you are reading the pure unvarnished words of the man himself. You are reading Ovid as copied/edited by twelve centuries of monks.
For all we know, originally Ovid was a bit sloppy and he was tidied up and 'corrected' over the years

>>19060802
>I've read the divine comedy in italian, another latin language, and in english, and there is a world of difference between these versions.
Being a Spanish native speaker and then learning Italian hardly counts as learning a different language.

yes, it's just harder, and you just have to be more careful about getting good translations. would strongly recommend trying various translations of foreign language poems if you don't like them at first

>>19061768
While it definitely makes things much much easier, the similarity also brings some difficulties and confusion.
Also, there are several meanings to "learning a language".
Understanding a movie without subtitles, a lecture in italian? Quite easy. Speaking and writing properly? Significantly harder. Being able to read Dante, Tasso, Leopardi and the reading being pleasurable, i.e. not missing many words, not having to stop often to look things up, etc., is quite hard, and is something I've put a LOT of effort on, including starting with short stories, then novellas, then some essays and philosophy, non-fiction like italian books on italian history and culture, contemporary novels, some more complex novels like Eco, then easier poems, all the way up to being confortable reading Dante.

Will I ever be more proficient at another language than someone who does it for a living? Probably not
Do I still want to read it? Yes
Thats the answer for me

>>19059666
As long as it's translated into any other language besides English. English is NOT suited for poetry, much less for transation of foreign poems.

>>19059666
>Read a book of translated poetry
>don't read the introduction explaining in detail the cultural and historical context of the work
>don't read the translator's note explaining in detail the translator's process and why they made the decisions they did
>don't read the footnotes explaining in detail why certain elements of the poems were untranslatable, or explaining cultural references that would be lost on non-native readers
>just read the poems themselves and lose myself in the beauty

>>19059666
>pic
where do you people find all these cringe content and why do you spend so much time looking for it?