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Nabokov on bad translation: No prisoners ...
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Nabokov on bad translation: No prisoners
1 June 2010
Vladimir Nabokov
At the New Republic’s great website dedicated to literary matters — called, simply, The Book — they’ve started excavating from the magazine’s vast archives (the magazine has, after all, been publishing since 1914) and they’ve come up with some real gems. Our favorite of late: Vladimir Nabokov on the fine art of translation in an essay from 1941:
Two grades of evil can be discerned in the queer world of verbal transmigration. The first, and lesser one, comprises obvious errors due to ignorance or misguided knowledge. This is mere human frailty and thus excusable. The next step to Hell is taken by the translator who intentionally skips words or passages that he does not bother to understand or that might seem obscure or obscene to vaguely imagined readers; he accepts the blank look that his dictionary gives him without any qualms; or subjects scholarship to primness: he is as ready to know less than the author as he is to think he knows better. The third, and worst, degree of turpitude is reached when a masterpiece is planished and patted into such a shape, vilely beautified in such a fashion as to conform to the notions and prejudices of a given public. This is a crime, to be punished by the stocks as plagiarists were in the shoebuckle days
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