Duncan, D; (2020) Less Than Paper-Thin: Pseudotranslations, Absent Fathers, and Harry Mathews's Armenian Papers. In: Prismatic Translation. (pp. 339-351). Legenda: Oxford, UK.

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Abstract

This is a chapter about bad translations. What does it mean to read a translation and feel — not necessarily all the way through, perhaps only at certain moments — that it is inadequate? I daresay anyone who has worked much with translations has had this feeling, a bristling of the senses, at some time or another. Sometimes the tingling might be aesthetic at root, a series of moments that jar on the ear, pinpricks that build up to a sense of the translator’s tone-deafness: inelegant phrasing or odd lexical choices that we find it hard to imagine in a work celebrated in its original language. Maybe we suspect the translator of timidity, of not daring to turn away from their source. Or perhaps our suspicion is an intellectual one, of concepts being misrepresented: ambiguities resolved, the complex being rendered simple, or vice versa? In these instances, a gap has opened up between the text we have in front of us and the one we expected to read, and we have adjudged the translator resp- onsible. (This verdict, conveniently, saves us the awkwardness of reassessing a work illustrious enough to have been considered worthy of translation in the first place.)

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