Lydia Davis med essay om oversettelse i nyeste nummer av Paris Review!
Paris Review er nå (september 2011) ute med sin hundreognittiåttende utgave, som blant annet inkluderer et nyskrevet essay av Flaubert- og Proust-oversetter og forfatter Lydia Davis. Essayet omhandler nyoversettelser og bærer tittelen «Some Notes on Translation and on Madame Bovary»
Du kan lese et utdrag på nettsidene til Paris Review. Her er åpningsavsnittet:
«Not long ago, I was chatting with an older friend who is a retired engineer and also something of a writer, but not of fiction. When he heard that I had just finished a translation of Madame Bovary, he said something like, “But Madame Bovary has already been translated. Why does there need to be another translation?” or “But Madame Bovary has been available in English for a long time, hasn’t it? Why would you want to translate it again?” Often, the idea that there can be a wide range of translations of one text doesn’t occur to people—or that a translation could be bad, very bad, and unfaithful to the original. Instead, a translation is a translation—you write the book again in English, on the basis of the French, a fairly standard procedure, and there it is, it’s been done and doesn’t have to be done again.»
