On Aug 24, 2008, at 6:34 PM, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
Or perhaps, "I don't know what it's supposed to mean." I.e., I
recognize that it has been intentionally devised, but I do not know
how to
access whatever was intended.
What the creator had in mind is one thing (a notional thing), but
it's folly
to figure his intention becomes a property somehow inhering in the
object --
ITS "meaning".
Well, then, how does one get to whatever was in the creator's mind, he
or she not standing next to you, coaching you? There must be a
structure that does inhere in the medium, those old words, that
conveys some approximation of the author's "meaning" to the person who
reads it and recreates some approximation of it internally.
Or it's all a crap shoot.
BTW, how does one know whether a translation is "accurate," "good,"
"reliable," etc.? How can one compare the quality of two translations
of the same passage?
All those JUDGMENTS are notional, and often a function of stipulative
criteria, and thus it's wrong to believe they are qualities that
"are" or "are
not"
inherent properties of the translation. Moncrief's Proust, Garnet's
Dostoievsky
et al, Lowe-Porter's Mann eventually were dismissed as being
inaccurate to
some degree or other. This allowed other translators to turn a
dollar. The
overwhelming current consensus of people of sensibility is that the
original
three
have always been the "best".
You missed my point. You regularly claim that the "meaning" is re-
created or evoked in the listener's mind. IF that is so, does not the
presence of different translations of the same work imply that the act
of recreating or evoking the author's "meaning" in the mind of the
other person is imperfect (and hence, there cannot be "the" meaning of
anything)?
Many years ago, reading a book on linguistics, I read a passage that
said that the pronunciation of a given vocal sound was never a fixed
thing, that the same person did not repeat the same sound identically
on two occasions. My initial, neophyte reaction was to think, "Well,
wait a minute. I can see a Brit pronouncing a word differently from a
Yank. But surely I must pronounce the same word the same way every
time." But then, I began to think further and pay attention to my
spoken language, and I realized that, indeed, I didn't pronounce the a
given word or sound identically every time I said it. Linguistics and
phonology have lengthy descriptions of how various phonemic sounds are
influenced by adjacent sounds, and how the speaker and listener apply
various rules of usage and syntactic filters and other paradigms to
stabilize the perceived sound and narrow its quality to some region
within the phoneme, so that communication isn't badly or irreparably
impaired. (The effect of how singing can badly compromise the clarity
of lyrics is an example of the problem--and its humorous results of
misunderstanding the lyrics even has a name, "Mondegreens," from a
person who misunderstood the line "and laid him on the green" as "and
Lady Mondegreen").
The relevance of this digression to your reply is: Whatever was
embodied in the non-English book was conveyed more or less intact in a
translation, but some translations capture or embody more of the
original, or all of the original in more salient ways, than others.
*Or at least other think that is the case.*
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Michael Brady
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
