March 05, 2003
Four of the Books
I’ve read four of the books I bought in Cardiff eleven days ago. First was Mervyn Peake’s Letters from a Lost Uncle, a delightful tale of an errant uncle's Arctic quest for the elusive White Lion, related in a series of erratically typewritten epistles to the English nephew he has never met. The narrative overlays page after page of lushly imaginative pencil drawings. Some have gone so far as to describe this as Peake’s best work, and a forgotten masterpiece. While I wouldn’t go that far, it is an endearing and faintly haunting book.
In the course of my one-hour spree at Waterstone’s that Sunday, it occurred to me that I’d love to find some history or general reference work about emblem-books, whilst at the same time doubting they’d have such a thing in stock. Then, as luck would have it, I chanced upon a copy of The Emblem by John Manning. So, now I know a bit more about the content and historical development of Alciato’s Emblemata and its successors, about the rôles of the Horapollo and of the Hypnerotomachia as precursors to the emblem-book tradition, about imprese, about Ripa’s Iconologia and Picinelli’s Mundus Symbolicus, and more besides.
Third, I read Omon Ra, by Victor Pelevin, a very sharp satire about the Soviet space program, following the misfortunes of a young volunteer cosmonaut. The only other book of Pelevin’s I’d read was The Clay Machine-Gun (aka Buddha's Little Finger), a more ambitious but correspondingly less coherent novel. Both were the sort of books wherein one wishes the translator had supplied some explanatory footnotes, being suspicious that a fair proportion of the jokes, satirical points, puns on personal and place-names, and topical or historical allusions were just not getting across. Having said that, though, I suppose that a joke explained is, anyway, a joke lost. One that I did manage to get, albeit not straightaway, was the point of a discussion between two of the cosmonauts of the relative merits of various early Pink Floyd LPs — until it dawned on me: they were on their way to the Dark Side of the Moon...
And most recently, yet more Haruki Murakami, in the shape of The Elephant Vanishes.
Posted by misteraitch at March 5, 2003 03:44 PM | TrackBackThere´s always something fun here. No, the word was interesting. - Too little coffee in my system. - Well, actually fun and interesting mean the same thing to me. Some philosophy.
Posted by: Rara Luna on March 6, 2003 10:37 AMI have dabbled in translating Pelevin myself (an exercise in killing time, as it were) and can tell you that all your suspicions are true. His play with street slang is especially hard to replicate; just finding the English four-letter equivalents doesn't cut it because the "snappiness" of the dialogues gets lost. Then again, it can't possibly be worse than translating Joyce's Ulysses into Russian, which has been done very well, to my incredulous admiration. I pity anyone who tries to take on Finnegan's Wake.
Posted by: Alex Baylin on March 6, 2003 11:34 PMPoor Mervyn Peake: I found that his strangely haunting prose was too disturbing for me. I suspected a bleak secret about real life was lurking just beneath the text of the Gormenghast Trilogy. It was no surprise to learn later that he had been associated with the liberation of a concentration camp in 1945. That memory would have been difficult, verging on impossible to exorcise.
Regarding Finnegan's Wake: this is the only Joyce work I have not read. Even in English, this book is too much of a challenge. Maybe reading a Russian translation would be easier, though I would have to learn Russian first.
On the subject of translation: I agree that subtleties of the original language, like puns and word-play are lost. In fact every word is lost, or transformed by some degree of meaning. Alliteration, assonance, the precise metrical pace of words; all this is transformed. We are merely presented with an impression (i.e., somebody else's) of the book. We are never going to attain the fullest reading experience that was available in the original language. We only get a reading of a reading. For these reasons, I don't read translations. However, I have heard and read good things about the latest Proust translation (not least on these Spamula pages), so I may change the habit of a lifetime.
But Finnegan's Wake? I doubt it.
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Posted by: misteraitch on January 20, 2004 11:22 PM