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Posted By: Hydra Translations - 08/31/07 07:39 AM
I know some of you are translators. Please to explain: I just finished reading Straight is the Gate by Andre Gide, translated into English by the despicable Dorothy Bussy. Surely the only logical reason for producing an English translation of a French novel is so that English-speakers who cannot understand French may read it. So why, why does Dorothy Bussy choose to leave untranslated from French the poetry quoted by characters; poetry which bears importantly on the rest of the novel, and in some instances runs over a page, a page-and-a-half in length? Not a single line of the 100 or so quoted is made penetrable for the hapless anglophone reader. How can this possibly be justified? Doesn't the fact of purchasing an English translation of a French novel speak for my French-language abilities? Why make an exception for poetry, which if anything will be harder to understand than prose?
Posted By: Jackie Re: Translations - 08/31/07 01:21 PM
Sorry, can't answer your question, but I can say that she was a member of a family that I was considerably less than impressed with, in my readings by and about Rupert Brooke.
I know that the Bloomsbury people were not the whole world, but: mercy, I don't think it says very much good about society when it not only permits but actively encourages (through laudatory accolades if nothing else) a bunch of people to do nothing but focus on themselves and their innermost thoughts, philosophies, etc.

(Sorry for the redundancy, but I couldn't think of a way to make laudatory a noun, and accolade alone wasn't as strong as I wanted to declare.)
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