Time seems to fly and crawl simultaneously sometimes. I don't quite get it, but there you go. I'll be slogging away at something utterly boringly unending and suddenly the week's gone. Again. It's like being stuck in a vacuum while time rushes past around me.
The new semester starts on the Feb 26. I'm quite ready to go back to school again, although what with it being the last six (five, really) months of my thesis and tutoring thrown in as well, it should be nice and stressful, but in a good I'm-doing-what-I-want-to-be-doing kind of way. At least that's the idea.
I've been reading buckets on translation and the upshot seems to be that, at present, everyone's got a different take on it and everyone thinks that their take works for them well enough but that obviously others have their own way of doing it, although they couldn't possibly do it that way themselves. Isn't that nice?
What many do agree on is that the choice of what to translate is usually personal, particularly when it comes to poetry. Even when translators work with 'informants' who know the language of the original text, they seem to want to connect with the ideas expressed and explored before they feel able to actually render the same poem in the target language (English in almost all the cases I've read so far). At the same time, most acknowledge that a perfectly literal translation is impossible simply because no two languages are alike enough for a text to travel intact between them. But that's why they do it. Because even though the exact sense cannot be conveyed, something of the essence of the poem can, and that, they feel, is the point. Better to have an imperfect rendering of , say, Homer than none at all.
What any of this means for my thesis remains to be seen, unfortunately. The only thing I have been able to conclude so far is that there has been extremely little contact between Urdu and French. What contact there has been says to me that the two languages should cross-pollinate--the lyrical quality of each seems to me to travel well despite the distance between the languages and I think something in each manages to capture something very basic in the other in a way that English translations of Urdu and French poetry do not. But then for me there already exists a basic connection between Urdu and Frenchbecause I've heard them used in tandem my whole life. There's no such relationship between them and English for me though, even though I've used that my whole life as well--more so than the other two. That's odd.
The new semester starts on the Feb 26. I'm quite ready to go back to school again, although what with it being the last six (five, really) months of my thesis and tutoring thrown in as well, it should be nice and stressful, but in a good I'm-doing-what-I-want-to-be-doing kind of way. At least that's the idea.
I've been reading buckets on translation and the upshot seems to be that, at present, everyone's got a different take on it and everyone thinks that their take works for them well enough but that obviously others have their own way of doing it, although they couldn't possibly do it that way themselves. Isn't that nice?
What many do agree on is that the choice of what to translate is usually personal, particularly when it comes to poetry. Even when translators work with 'informants' who know the language of the original text, they seem to want to connect with the ideas expressed and explored before they feel able to actually render the same poem in the target language (English in almost all the cases I've read so far). At the same time, most acknowledge that a perfectly literal translation is impossible simply because no two languages are alike enough for a text to travel intact between them. But that's why they do it. Because even though the exact sense cannot be conveyed, something of the essence of the poem can, and that, they feel, is the point. Better to have an imperfect rendering of , say, Homer than none at all.
What any of this means for my thesis remains to be seen, unfortunately. The only thing I have been able to conclude so far is that there has been extremely little contact between Urdu and French. What contact there has been says to me that the two languages should cross-pollinate--the lyrical quality of each seems to me to travel well despite the distance between the languages and I think something in each manages to capture something very basic in the other in a way that English translations of Urdu and French poetry do not. But then for me there already exists a basic connection between Urdu and Frenchbecause I've heard them used in tandem my whole life. There's no such relationship between them and English for me though, even though I've used that my whole life as well--more so than the other two. That's odd.