Hearing Voices - Dawson

     Wow, Seidensticker keeps coming up again and again since we first saw him.  He must have been quite the big deal in the world of translation during his time.  I really like this piece though.  I think it ties in fantastically to the other works we've read.  You can really boil down the theme of many of them to that exact Seidensticker quote she uses, which also appeared in the Seidensticker speech we read, about translation being a series of dilemmas.  I feel like I've come to appreciate that more as we've gotten further into this course, although, of course, we've still only scratched the surface.  Her hairpin dilemma was certainly significantly harder than any dilemma we've encountered so far in class.  I also really like her translation of the Uno passage!  It does a great job of capturing the older feel of Uno's prose in the paragraph.  She does an incredible job in the next Uno paragraph as well, of capturing the accent and voice.  It seems like one of her biggest talents is her ability to capture the voice of a text.  Her translations stand out most in how precisely she captures tone and voice.  In addition, her anecdote about the ‘flowers in salt’ misunderstanding also really showed how context and interpretation shape translation.

    However, if I am to be quite candid, it is essentially a reiteration of the same point as many of the previous readings.  Once again, the main takeaway I get is that the most important thing to focus on is not the words themselves but the voice and the feeling behind those words.  Honestly, I'm not sure what else to say about that message that I have not already said up to this point.  It seems like the central message of translation.  Along with other common themes, like seeking advice from those more knowledgeable, and how translation is a series of impossible choices, and how cultural nuances have to be handled very delicately and carefully to translate them well, etc.  This article ends up boiling down to a few of these points, just like most of the others.  I enjoyed it though!  It's just getting very hard to avoid repeating myself every blog post!

Dawson Maska