A translation can’t be read... «Through the Window»
Oksident5 марта 2017A translation can’t be read before the period in which it is written: this is both obvious, and a kind of brute annoyance. And it can’t – or at least, shouldn’t – be written in a pastiche of the original work’s period. It must be written for the contemporary reader, yet give that reader the same, or a similar, ease or difficulty as an original reader would have had. And just as there can be delinquent looseness, so there can be misguided over-accuracy. It is very difficult to suggest (except in footnotes and introduction) the general literary context in which a book is written, which is central to the writer. Books are often written against – against romanticism, against authorial ego and intervention, against the notion that some themes are ‘higher’ than others.
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