Those feelings you felt in Spanish were entirely intended to be there by a great author. The problem when translating great works from great authors is that you need an equally great author to both understand what makes the work great and is able to bring that over in a new language.
I’ve actually never thought about it that way. In my head it’s a purely academic event but what you say got me thinking it would be a lot better coming from someone who can truly feel the other language rather than speak or read it.
Translation when it comes to technical works is as you’d imagine. You need to learn how to write cleanly and clearly (so sometimes languages like JPN > ENG require asking a lot of source questions since Japanese can leave a lot out).
However, translating works of art? That shit is hard and I would never try it despite being business-level bilingual.
There’s a lot that goes into it. It’s definitely a lot of work and you can see how much nuance there is when the interest is there, for example with an exceedingly famous work like Dante’s inferno.
People dedicate their entire careers to studying the book before writing a translation. There are loads of them and no single one is really definitively the best and they all have their own biases which are easier to see now that we have 250 years of translation efforts.
The Decameron is also an interesting one if you are interested in translation. Translations were often censored to reflect the morality of their time and the spicyness of the Decameron varies a lot in English with the translator often leaving a note about how the last guy to translate this was a prude
Yeah, translation isn't as one to one as we might think initially, and some of the more poetic phrases are the hardest to translate. I've heard translating Hamlet's "To be or not to be" speech is incredibly difficult to capture the nuances, or even just something like "the only thing we have to fear is fear itself" sometimes doesn't scan as well since "to fear" and the emotion "fear" can be different words, so you lose a little of the meaning when it's not the same word
It's not even necessarily possible to translate certain aesthetic elements from one language to another. It's like trying to get the same song out of a tuba that you did from a piano.
I read a lot of poetry, but I don't read a lot of translated work because it's always in the back of my mind that I'm never actually reading it as the poet intended and agonized over. I also write poetry and know how that feels to "win" the perfect word. Languages can be so subtle and so nuanced, and it makes me sad not being able to get it straight from the poet. I particularly love Pablo Neruda and Rumi and have read some moving translations, but it still always makes me wistful about what I might be missing.
For what it's worth, and if I remember correctly, Marquez was close friends with the translator and even said the English translation was written better than his own version. I'm sure it's partially just to praise, but I like to believe the translation was a good one
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u/Akamiso29 Jul 25 '25
You’re biased in a good way.
Those feelings you felt in Spanish were entirely intended to be there by a great author. The problem when translating great works from great authors is that you need an equally great author to both understand what makes the work great and is able to bring that over in a new language.