language & communication – Page 20 – don't confuse the narrator

of shoe-cleaning and elephants

I’ve been back in the DCTN archives discussing narrators – first person and third person – and what’s ‘real’ in my poetry, and have just written that the inspiration for a poem is almost certainly something in my life, but it isn’t necessarily something real that actually happened to me.

The trigger may be a personal experience, or it may be something I read or overhear, or something from today that I connect through to something half remembered from the past etc. I then take that kernel of an idea and extrapolate it and link it with other images and ideas to create a poem. The same trigger can inspire different poems in different styles or forms and with different protagonists, and the information that fleshes it out may come from personal experience, research or imagination.
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talking about translation

The question arose recently about whether a translator should translate into their own mother tongue (direct translation) or into their second language (inverse translation). Someone expressed the adamant opinion that you should never trust a person who offered to translate into a language other than their own – they’d be bound to do it badly.

I actually disagree quite strongly.
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news and clichés

Reading the ‘newspaper’ on Tuesday – the 20p Independent i – I got the impression that the concept of news must have changed considerably since I used to read the UK press on a regular basis. There was no text other than ‘headlines’ on the front page, and inside it seemed all to be gossip, sport or opinion. Even what I think was intended as an editorial struck me as no more weighty than a teenager’s blog entry.

Last night, I watched the BBC news on television instead. Sadly it was no better.
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treachery, forgery, or the sincerest form of flattery?

I’ve been over at Cantueso’s blog again, looking at translations of a poem by Hans Magnus Enzensberger and wondering about some of the phrases. In the blog comments, Cantueso says:

[the English] translation is much better and much more faithful than [my Spanish]

Not knowing any German, it’s hard for me to comment on that, but the coupling of the two adjectives ‘better’ and ‘faithful’ catches my attention. It makes me think of the Italian expression traduttore, traditore – ‘translator, traitor’.
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“an even better blog”

Checking my blog comments, I found this in the spam file:

It clearly is spam, but I wondered how many people had received something similar and let it be published.

So I googled the phrase “I couldn’t have asked for an even better blog” and wasn’t really surprised when the search returned over a million hits.
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