About Mori Ōgai on translation
The American Lauren Elkin writes a literary blog in Paris and she posted on Mori Ōgai on translation and fallacy. A snippet: “Ōgai talks about the virtues of being ‘wrong’ in translation—adding or detracting from the original text; of most interest, I think, is the final section in which he contemplates how far a translation should go into the source culture.” She is LaurenElkin on Twitter.
Comments
Well, I think that William Weaver, premier translator of Italian literature, explored this issue in a seminar I attended a few decades ago. He asked, “How should we translate ‘pizza’ into English? His answer was: “peanut butter sandwich”, a cultural equivalent rather than a literal rendering.
Posted by Christal Whelan on 01/28 at 08:32 AM
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