cozy slavic village

i love translations i love the act of translation i love it so so much

translation is so fun because people feel so strongly about it and for good reason because ultimately it's all about sacrifice. do you sacrifice form for content? content for mood? mood for form? there are no solutions just compromises. as anthony burgess said, "translation is not a matter of words only; it is a matter of making intelligible a whole culture". nabokov referred to a bad translation as giving "the impression that I am witnessing a murder and can do nothing to prevent it". the husband and wife translators of russian novels, pevear and volokhonsky work in tandem, translating and reading and polishing in a process pevear referred to as "raising questions". douglas hofstadter asked multiple people he knew to translate a short 16th century french poem and came back with wildly varying results. to use eliot weinberger's words, "every reading of every poem, regardless of language, is an act of translation" and the actual literal act of translating from one language to another exposes so much about the languages and the author and the translator and the reader of the translation! it's a deeply intricate analysis that expands continuously outward!

petition to shorten "classic literature" to "clit"

i cant believe that to be a translator i just have to come to terms with the fact that translation does not exist. there will never be complete identity between two different languages there can only ever be equivalence. there is no such thing as translation without loss & in fact loss is inherent to translation you cannot escape it. and as a translator you will always have to make choices that will lead to those losses and it will feel like a betrayal and you will be haunted by what you have killed in translation & grieve and there is nothing you can do about it. the only way to curb that loss is if everyone everywhere spoke every language which is not feasible & there is just a void of meaning, a cemetery of significance in every translation and a world of footnotes and translator’s notes will not be enough to fill in the gaps. but still. yknow yknow

i cant believe that to be a translator i just have to come to terms with the fact that translation does not exist. there will never be complete identity between two different languages there can only ever be equivalence. there is no such thing as translation without loss & in fact loss is inherent to translation you cannot escape it. and as a translator you will always have to make choices that will lead to those losses and it will feel like a betrayal and you will be haunted by what you have killed in translation & grieve and there is nothing you can do about it. the only way to curb that loss is if everyone everywhere spoke every language which is not feasible & there is just a void of meaning, a cemetery of significance in every translation and a world of footnotes and translator’s notes will not be enough to fill in the gaps. but still. yknow yknow

"war and peace is boring" bro in the first 50 pages pierre gets banished from petersburg because he tied a cop to a bear and threw them both in the river

Tiktok marvel fans really will be out here like "movie fan SHOCKED because i'd rather watch superhero movie #54 in blue and not a sensual 1987 french horror film about a man discovering his wife may not exist set in what is gradually revealed to be a space station" as if you're supposed to agree that superhero movie #54 is the clear winner in this comparison

Love the idea of a story about a complex issue that's told from the perspective of something that cannot comprehend or care about the issue. The way the story would be sliced up and moments that a human would consider pointless would be focused on because the pigeon happened to be there would be hype as fuck

This is compelling. Consider me fucking compelled.