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LANGUAGE_BARRIERS

                                          October 30, 2005

I stood in Stacey's bookstore,
pondering the fact that they carried
not one but three different translations
of Stendhal's "the Black and the Red".

How to choose?

Once you're familar with a                                 
body of an author's work,         I find that I can             
it's not necessary to know        identify problems in     
the original language to          inferior translations of     
spot a false note.                Nietzsche just by reading 
                                  it in translation:        
   But Stendhal                                               
   was new to me...                      "What?  He wouldn't      
                                         have said something 
                                         like that!"        
Comparing the first few                          
sentences showed no     
significant differences.
                  
But down there in the second     
paragraph, there is a description   
of an 18th Century stamping mill,                 
where two of the versions called it                 
"fearful" or "frightful-looking",                 
but in the Penguin edition, it                    
has a "terrible aspect".                      And I gather that's a more       
                                              literal translation:        
    Score!                                                                
                                                "A peine entre-t-on dans    
    Penguin comes                               la ville que l'on est       
    through again.                              étourdi par le fracas  
                                                d'une machine bruyante       
        (Why must *everything* be               et terrible en apparence."     
        dumbed down, including                                               
        "Oxford Classics" editions?)
    


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