Saturday, March 10, 2012

A master translator speaks

From Worldcrunch, a brief but interesting article on Josée Kamoun, the French translator of Philip Roth, John Irving and Jonathan Coe: Why Philip Roth Sounds So Good In French: The Method Of A Master Translator

“The translator dances the tango with the text. When the text leads with the left foot, the translator steps back with the right. It is an extremely tight embrace, and, if possible, graceful...”

4 comments:

  1. well said text leads with the left foot,more information about translator is get this link translation business opportunities

    ReplyDelete
  2. That's brilliant. I can't imagine what a challenge Roth would be for a translator.

    ReplyDelete
  3. There's a whole novel about a translator which says much the same thing, very high quality writing: The Mistress by E S Purnell. I got it on Amazon. All about the magic and mystery of language, and a page-turner to boot.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Interesting. This might be one of those where "the original is unfaithful to the translation."

    ReplyDelete

Thank you for your comment!

Unfortunately, comment spam has grown to the point that all comments need to be moderated. All legitimate comments will be published as soon as possible.