On the menu in the only cafe in the little village of Gurgy
we saw ( Oh jubilation) Eggs stink to a
smoked salmon house, a starter to be sampled at all costs and then followed
up with Net of trout in the green cabbage
wipes French blue-veined cheese.
What a transport of delight! It
made me think of Jonathan Safran Foer’s irresistibly funny book Everything Is Illuminated, which
transforms the mechanics of translation into something approaching an art
form. At the moment I'm reading The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, which
looks at the clash of cultures between Dutch traders and the isolated citizens
of Nagasaki in 18th century Japan (much better than I'm making it sound). David
Mitchell dissects the delicate tissue of the different layers of meaning in
different languages with a surgeon's precision.
With the lightest touch he shows how language politicises meaning and
manipulates intent.
All of this makes me wonder whether there may be mileage in
having a go at duff, well-intentioned but misplaced translation as a writing
exercise. I think it might make you explore the relationship between meaning
and context - how a word can mean slightly different things in different
situations, even in different sentences - and through that alert you to the
sliding scale of nuance, which is one of the things that gets lost in
translation….
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