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Less Than Paper-Thin: Pseudotranslations, Absent Fathers, and Harry Mathews's Armenian Papers

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.)

Type: Book chapter
Title: Less Than Paper-Thin: Pseudotranslations, Absent Fathers, and Harry Mathews's Armenian Papers
ISBN: 178188725X
ISBN-13: 9781781887257
Publisher version: http://www.mhra.org.uk/publications/Prismatic-Tran...
Language: English
Additional information: This version is the version of record. For information on re-use, please refer to the publisher's terms and conditions.
UCL classification: UCL
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH > Faculty of Arts and Humanities
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH > Faculty of Arts and Humanities > Dept of English Lang and Literature
URI: https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10138395
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