Alex

My firmly rooted school stress and examination angst is finally starting to let go of its grip, I'm starting to relax and act lika a real human being again. I went to the library today to catch up on some reading I've been intending to do. It feels like I haven't read a book in months and months. It was probably ten moths or something as bizarre as that since I last read a good book, I just haven't had the time to get started with good books. I've read some not-eqally-good books during that time though. I can't let go of a good book until I've finished it, so when I don't have time to spend two, three whole days (and nights) in a row just reading, I don't even start. Reading mediocre literature on the other hand is no problem, I can put it aside when I have something else that needs to be done. I had a discussion about this with a friend in Beijing. There was one evening when I had nothing to do, and he asked me why I didn't read my book. He gave me a quizzical look when I said that I didn't want to start reading it, because I thought that I would really like it (and I had to much to do in Beijing to spend a couple of days just reading). I've always considered that to be perfectly normal, but when I put it down like this it do sound a little bit... weird. Maybe I'm just crazy (Could it be? Nah!).

I was a little dissapointed when I left the library though. Almost none of the books I wanted was in, I did order one from their magazine, I'll pick it up tomorow. I borrowed the very surprising Jonathan Livingston Seagull by Richard Bach. I didn't know what to expect, but I surely did not expect a book in which the main character is a seagull. A new experience for me. It was cute and wise and had a message that might not be totally unfamiliar yet worth some consideration, but it wasn't fantastic. Worth the trouble though. It was some fifty pages and I read it through in an hour. Finding myself on square one again, with nothing to read, I went and bought Sylvia Plath's The bell jar. I've only read two chapters, but I'm loving it already. READ IT!
It's amazing that I've been able to put it aside to write this text, maybe it's only because my need to express myself in words is bigger than anything else (it could have something to do with my enlarged ego). Unlike eating, for example. I've noticed that you don't really need to eat when you have a good book, if eating means that you'll have to cook and you can't read while doing it.

They did have The bell jar in Swedish at the library, but I can't really see the logic in reading a book in translation if you can read it in it's original language. That's because I've been studying nothing but language the last two years, it has made me realize how disturbingly insufficient translations are, there is just too much that gets lost in the process. Translations are a kind of necessary evil, of course the work needs to be translated, otherwise one would be completely limited by one's own skills in foreign languages, too much good work would get lost. But even in the best cases, a translation is only a more or less bleak version of the original.

Every language is idiomatic, this means that every language have expressions that can not be directly translated, because the word-for-word meaning isn't the actual meaning. Like the Chinese "nihao", which literary means you-good, but actually means "hello", or the Swedish "hej då", which literary means hello-then, but actually means "good bye". Then we can start to analyze the literary meaning of "good bye" and if we continue from there then we'll be at it all night long. On top of that there is the difficulty in the fact that the equivalent word in one language for a word in an other language very often don't have the exact same nuance, it makes it very hard to make people of different languages to get the same impression of a sentence. Even when you can translate a word directly to another language, there is a big risk that the translated word isn't as loaded, more loaded, or differently loaded than the word in the original language, which gives the translated sentence another tone than originally intended. 

What I've come to realize is that it is actually impossible to translate anything from one language to another. You can get a translation close to the original, but you can never get it exact. And the biggest pleassure in reading the works of a good author is, in my point of view, the pleassure in reading hers or his personal use of language and formulations. If the language sucks but the story is really good I don't think a translation is too disturbing, because you won't miss any pleassurable language-use anyway.

I personally hope to translate some work of fiction from Chinese into Swedish some day. I don't want to work full-time as a translator, but I still hope I'll do it at least once. It is a scary thought, but one can only do the best one can do. I'd rather put forth an insufficient translation than let the fact that the large majority of the Swedish population can't read Chinese stop the good work of one or another autor to get spread in Sweden. As I said: translations are a necessary evil. Hence the fact that I think one should avoid it when possible.



/Alex