I don’t write thinking directly about what I’m feeling, usually. I just let myself write whatever comes out without it necessarily being directly a translation of what I’m aware that I’m feeling, you know?
And I always read the English translation and always have conversations with my translator, for example about the names. I always have to approve it.
I began writing poems when I was about eight, with a heavy assist from my mother. She read me Arthur Waley’s translations and Whitman and Robinson Jeffers, who have been lifelong influences on me. My father read Keats to me, and then he read more Keats while I was lying on the sofa struggling with asthma.
Even though I believe a superlative translation can achieve timelessness, that doesn’t mean I think other translators shouldn’t attempt other versions. The more the better, in the end.
In poetry, I have, since very young, loved poetry in translation. The Chinese, the French, the Russians, Italians, Indians and early Celts: the formality of the translator’s voice, their measured breath and anxiety moves me as it lingers over the original.
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.
If a translation doesn’t have obvious writing problems, it may seem quite all right at first glance. We readers, after all, quickly adapt to the style of a translator, stop noticing it, and get caught up in the story.
True art selects and paraphrases, but seldom gives a verbatim translation.
‘Lost in Translation’ was a year of my life, if not more, and then ‘Marie Antoinette’ was about three years of my life.
So writing stories is not easier in comparison to the playwriting or translation; the stories are easier in league with them.
When I hit a block, regardless of what I am writing, what the subject matter is, or what’s going on in the plot, I go back and I read Pablo Neruda’s poetry. I don’t actually speak Spanish, so I read it translation. But I always go back to Neruda. I don’t know why, but it calms me, calms my brain.
A firm, for instance, that does business in many countries of the world is driven to spend an enormous amount of time, labour, and money in providing for translation services.
Poetry is what gets lost in translation.
I wrote ‘Yellow Submarine’ for the Beatles. I wrote the screenplay for ‘The Games,’ about the Olympic Games. I wrote ‘Love Story,’ both the novel and the screenplay. I wrote ‘RPM’ for Stanley Kramer. Plus, I wrote two scholarly books and a 400-page translation from the Latin, and I dated June Wilkinson!
The truth is, I have an excellent team, a staff that handles Blue Elephant, my translation company, perfectly. It is like a well-oiled machine.
I was always interested in French poetry sort of as a sideline to my own work, I was translating contemporary French poets. That kind of spilled out into translation as a way to earn money, pay for food and put bread on the table.
I think the national team is more like a traveling circus. It’s hard to get that translation into the NWSL teams.
Each language has its own take on the world. That’s why a translation can never be absolutely exact, and therefore, when you enter another language and speak with its speakers, you become a slightly different person; you learn a different sort of world.
I read pretty well in French and Spanish. I don’t want to read a book written in French or Spanish in translation.
Any adaptation is a translation, and there is such a thing as an unreadably faithful translation; and I believe a degree of reinterpretation for the new language may be not only inevitable but desirable.
In English, there is one word for sister. In Chinese, there are two separate words, for elder and younger sister. This is actually a translation problem because if you see the word sister, you don’t know how to translate it to Chinese because you don’t know if it’s an elder sister or younger.
The original is unfaithful to the translation.
‘The Tin Drum’ is one of my favourite books of all time – I’ve probably got 12 or 15 copies with different covers, different translations – but it’s also just about my favourite film.
Wherever modern translations of marked excellence were already in existence efforts were made to secure them for the Library, but in a number of instances copyright could not be obtained.
Translation is an interestingly different way to be involved both with poetry and with the language that I’ve found myself living in much of the time. I think the two feed each other.
For what is liberty but the unhampered translation of will into act?
My mother introduced to me as a child the world of language: the way in which translation can be a system by which you can understand others.
Pound’s translation of Chinese poetry was maybe the most important thing I read. Eliot a little bit later.
I assume that we are all limited by our own brains and experiences and can only understand other people and other creatures through a kind of translation that brings them closer to us.
Translation is like a woman. If it is beautiful, it is not faithful. If it is faithful, it is most certainly not beautiful.
I want to see someone like Bobby ‘The Brain’ jumping around in his weasel suit with the rhinestones. Guys who are animated like that make the best translation to TV and to videogames.
I was nearly 40 when I published my first book. I was a slow starter – or rather, I was slow to gather my work together, though I had published translations, mainly of the Italian poet Montale, by then.
I’m not a best-seller, but through translations, I’ve accumulated some money.
The goal of Bible translation is be transparent to the original text – to see as clearly as possible what the biblical authors actually wrote.
For the version of this CD released in Japan, a translation of the English lyrics is included, but there are lots of places where meanings are lost in the process of translation.
The fact that I stick up for women doesn’t mean that I think all men are rapists. But that’s lost somewhere in translation. Obviously I don’t think that. I married one! I gave birth to two of them.
The Hindus say, ‘Nada brahma,’ one translation of which is, ‘The world is sound.’ And in a way, that’s true, because everything is vibrating.
Scarlett Johansson was wonderful in ‘Lost in Translation,’ and then, seemingly within a couple of weeks, she became completely Hollywoodised. I was shocked. I didn’t recognise her. I hope to God it’s just a phase.
One of the reasons why there are so many versions of Chekhov is that translations date in a way that the original doesn’t; translations seem to be of their time.
The US and the European Union needs to help in the translation of the demand for democracy into a political will.
I write my novels in English first; then they are translated into Turkish by professional translators. Then I take their translation and rewrite. So basically, I write the same novel twice.
Film has lost something in the translation to high tech. It’s become so super-real. It’s with digital this and stereo that, and everything’s like a CD.
And after I started working for the Bureau, most of my translation duties included translations of documents and investigations that actually started way before 9/11.
It’s not that prison makes you shed your abstract notions. On the contrary, it pares them down to their most succinct articulations. Prison is, indeed, a translation of your metaphysics, ethics, sense of history and whatnot into the compact terms of your daily deportment.
Want to train a machine translation system? Train it on a gazillion pairs of sentences of parallel corpora, and that creates a lot of breakthrough results. Increasingly, I’m seeing results on small data where you want to try to take in results even if you have 1,000 images.
Translation and UnitedMasters, which is all one company, is my vision and my dream, and I think it’s today’s reality of the convergence between storytelling, technology, and culture.
Like ‘Lost in Translation,’ I worked on an advertisement where a Hollywood star was doing a commercial just for Japan. The star was Hugh Jackman. Since I’m Australian, they just assumed I knew him, and I didn’t correct them.
No translation can possibly be perfect. Every production and every performance is a different path up the mountain, and nobody ever makes it all the way to the summit.
The existence of another, competing translation is a good thing, in general, and only immediately discouraging to one person – the translator who, after one, two, or three years of more or less careful work, sees another, and perhaps superior, version appear as if overnight.
Woe to the makers of literal translations, who by rendering every word weaken the meaning! It is indeed by so doing that we can say the letter kills and the spirit gives life.
A translation needs to read convincingly. There’s no limit to what can go into it in terms of background research, feeling, or your own interests in form and history. But what should come out is something that reads as convincing English-language text.
Yes, translation is by definition an inadequate substitute for being able to read a masterpiece in the original.
To be able to come back to Nigeria and get so much love for my work is my biggest life blessing. I’ve always hoped to never get lost in translation with me being British-born.
