Rubáiyát, Omar Khayyám; poetry translation&illustrations

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I am reading Rubáiyát this morning.

An author mentioned in his book that an Arab man told him the original texts of Rubáiyát is not as good as Edward FitzGerald's translation.

But I feel hardly to believe him. It must be very different from English, at least.

Sometimes I feel pathetic about languages. How many people can use more than one language in their own lives? Or more than two?

I think I would never agree with that many languages can be translated in English while not lose their spirits.

But the most pathetic thing is that we cannot do anything for it.

Have you seen its famous illustration by Edmund Dulac?

Would you like to discuss it also?

Among all these illustrations, I particularly like the one for Quatrain XLIV and one for Quatrain CX.

Last edited by metaphysics on 18 Jul 2011, 8:52 pm, edited 1 time in total.

What is the standard of good translations?

And what is the standard of good illustrations?

I know people who are fluent in ten languages. The human brain is is a first rate aural language processor. We are born to speak and sing. Reading/Writing is a skill only acquired recently (within the last 15,000) years and we are not equipped genetically to do it all that well. That is why there are dyslexics.

A child acquires his first language in 1.5 years and he is perfectly fluent in it by 4 or 5 years of age. The rest of the child's life is spent filling in the gaps.

ruveyn



ruveyn

I agree. I know people like so as well.

But for most of us, are we deprived the ability to enjoy beautiful literatures?

And even for people who speak more than 10 languages... how much of the beauty of literature that they can actually acquire?

I have doubt.

Huh?
The translation is BETTER than the original work of art????????????

That cant be right.

Ofcourse youd have to be fluent in the original Persian to apreciate the beauty of the original. I would have to pick between English translations which doubtless vary in quality.So Fitzgerald's might well be the one for an american like me.

The saying goes that "a translation is like a wife - if its beautiful its not faithful, and vice versa". Maybe thats too pessimistic. I suspect its often true but not always.

Beauty and reliability of translation.

I have seen another standard which called-

The way that can make reader feel what the translator thinks the original author wants readers to feel and what the translator feels.....While there is another important thing that there is how much difference between the original author and the translator.

Yes that it also a good standard.
The best perhaps - if you're seeking to experience the work as a work of art. ( it depends on your purposes ofcourse- If you're reading the work as a historic document then you might want a plodding litereal translation.)

Sometimes there is a distinction between "translating" and "interpreting".
The former is just changing the vocabulary and grammer in a litereal way from language to language. The latter about convaying meaning. That can involve changing the actual words. The UN has interpreters who translate what the diplomats are saying over the PA as the diplomats speak. They often translate idioms as well as words like the Chinese phrase "law of the fish" into the English "law of the jungle" which means basically the same thing.


I saw a history channel show about the Kama Sutra in their series "the History of Sex".

A Western Sankrit scholar expert quoted the following line from the book: "her breasts were like the sinus lobes on the forehead of an elephant".

After a pause he said "it DOES loose something in translation."

My guess is that in Sankrit they had one short word for "the sinus..." which is probably a common site in India.

A UN interpreter might say "her breast were like melons"- or something like that- comparing them to something an American would see in a grocery store everyday that could be named in a single word- instead of to something an american would have to go to the zoo to see and takes a whole sentence to name.

Wo ho ho!

Your quote of course is worthy of pandabear and deserves to be politely ignored. The frequently cited - at least I use it a lot - traduttore traditore [you see how "the translator is a traitor] destroys the punch, proving the point?] - is closer to the truth.

Because [hey, this is my family business] of the differences necessarily separating even two dialects of a single language, it is inevitable that ANY translation will lose some information, add some disinformation, and distort a proportion of what remains.

The general goal [though the precise goal varies with text and audience and purpose] is to add to the translation so little as possible, remove so little as possible, and change as little as possible.

That said - a translation of a work of literature MAY be better than the original.

The translatrion of a work of art must BE a work of art. And if the ytranslator is a great artist and the original a mediovcre work - it happens. A good LITERARY translation is a new work.

What is the Chinese ' Law of the fish?' I know lots of Chinese idioms, but I really confused on that one... I am so curious!

Umm..Some of my narrow oriental thoughts..the 'melon' simili is perhaps too common and therefore, can lose part of the beauty of the word...for making the text more beautiful, we probablys should use more 'poetic'(acquired by others as 'poetic' subjects?) (like in the Song Of Solomon ( I love KJM)
"Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth: for thy love is better than wine.
...
A bundle of myrrh is my well-beloved unto me; he shall lie all night betwixt my breasts... "

Would you agree?


And for lose something..More we don't know about it, it loses more...

As in the Rubáiyát, here is an example(probably not quite similar as yours)
X
Well, let it take them! What have we to do
With Kaikobád the Great, or Kaikhosrú?
Let Zál and Rustum bluster as they will, ( I cannot understand why, in my book it is Let Rustum cry"To Battle!"as he likes )
Or Hátim call to Supper—heed not you.

How can readers understand if they don't know the background? Rostam and Sohrab, perhaps, if I am not wrong- I nearly fogotten about the epic, but the Rustum made me think about it may about the epic

Who do you think is a good translator? I am so curious!!

Anybody knows Rustam and Sohrab??

I am so curious!

P.S. Where are you.....

as I would tell you in the first week of my course on the theory and practice of translation, a translation is good or bad first and foremost in relation to its purpose, in which the biggest factor is the intended audience. Take Bible translations - one of my colleagues wants a translation that sounds as much as possible like one of his friends talking in the living room. kxmode prefers the almost unreadable verion put out by the Jehovah's Witnesses, because he believes it to be the most accurate [certainly it is the one that best fits their theology].

There have been a LOT of translators, some, like James Legge who was responsible for much translation from the Chinese, well known as individuals, some almost anonymous. I am not up on a lot of individual; translators. To judge them, you really need at least some access to the original language as well as the translation.

In the case of literary translation, unless you can find a language scholar who is also a wordsmith [as in Tolkien's translations from Old and Middle English] you often need two people. - one who knows the source language well enough to understand the fine points of the text and one who knows the target language well enough to produce a masterpiece. For example, Coleman Barks' English versions of Rumi. Barks has little or no Farsi. But he could take a straightforward Englishing of the poems and turn them into serrious English poetry.

the thing about the FitzGerald Rubaiyat is that his translation is one of the great poems in Victorian literature (practically the only long one we still read today), while Omar Khayyam is only considered a minor poet in his own tradition.

Robert Graves collaborated on a newer, more faithful translation, & nobody reads it (it's actually become quite a rare book, as i see by looking on amazon):

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rubaiyat_o ... r_Ali-Shah

for awhile now it has not been customary for American poets to be interested in learning any other language but their own, while the academic industry of translating has thrived, seeking out ever-more arcane texts that have not yet been translated, or texts translated before into old-fashioned English; so the result is that there are many uninspired translations of everything, while the great Promethean translations that open up new possibilities for the translator's contemporaries, such as the Elizabethans knew, are largely absent.

i have sometimes enjoy comparing different translations of works i like, passage by passage:

http://graywyvern.livejournal.com/71249.html

most people who actually attempt a literary translation come to understand it, like politics, as the art of compromise.
i think of it, also, as a series of musicians each covering a traditional song in their own style.

An excellent analogy.