Complete article at following URL:
http://www.boston.com/ae/books/articles/2008/07/13/in_other_words/?p1=Well_MostPop_Emailed7

In other words

A practitioner describes the love, loss, and limits involved in the fine art of translation

By Estelle Gilson

July 13, 2008

The greatest theatrical, literary, and musical works are magnetic - they continually attract reinterpretation and modernization. Mozart's 220-year-old "Don Giovanni" has been updated with bra-and-panty-clad choristers, Shakespeare's 400-year-old "A Midsummer Night's Dream" with rock 'n' roll. Aristophanes's plays have been slangified to hell and back, and Dante's "Commedia" has turned up in every literary style from terza rima to no rima at all.

[ ... ]

Each of us brings our values, backgrounds, and tastes to every experience, including reading. Up in the higher echelons of culture, diverse judgments and reactions can seem amazingly and exasperatingly cockeyed. Tolstoy found Shakespeare's works "insignificant and empty." Rebecca West found Tolstoy's intellect wanting. Vladimir Nabokov denounced Garnett's Victorian versions of Tolstoy as "a complete disaster." Yet he produced so literal a translation of Pushkin's "Eugene Onegin" that Edmund Wilson considered it devoid of poetry.

[ ... ]

As we have through the centuries, we uncover, interpret, and reinterpret to the best of our abilities, and as closely as two languages will permit, the work of brilliant, pedantic, hateful, loving, disturbing, soothing writers, poets, and thinkers, so that readers, no matter how distant in time and space from them, can taste the wealth of their offerings.

Estelle Gilson is a writer and translator. She can be reached at EstelleGilson.com.

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