My eyebrows were raised, when reading a piece by John Berger in last Saturday's Guardian Review section ("Language can't be reduced to a stock of words...", 13/12/14, p.17). In it, he makes several quite debatable points about the nature of translation and of linguistics, but what really stood out was this assertion:
Consider the term "mother tongue". In Russian it is rodnoy-yazik, which means "nearest" or "dearest tongue". At a pinch one could call it "darling tongue".Now, I revere John Berger, whose TV series Ways of Seeing on BBC2 in 1972 blew my young mind. But this is utter bollocks. The Russian expression rodnoĭ yazyk (in a more conventional transliteration) does not mean "nearest" or "dearest tongue", as he suggests. The various Russian words with the common stem rod have as their primary meanings "family", "birth, origin", or "sort, type". The verb rodit', for example, means "to give birth"; rodina is one's native land; rodinka is a birth-mark. So, rodnoĭ yazyk is one's native language, the language one is born into, or your "mother tongue" in our gendered idiom. In fact, in grammatical terms, rod is Russian for "gender".
So, where on earth did he get this from? Maybe there's a Russian idiom for "family" that is conventionally translated as "nearest and dearest"? Looking it up in the dictionary, I see there is an idiomatic usage of rodnoĭ which is given in English translation as "my dear". But the dear-ness here is illusory; it's surely kinship that's being invoked, and the expression (which is probably as dated, if not as camp, as "my dear!") is perhaps more like addressing someone as "Bro!", or even "Blood!" ... But I'm out of my depth here.
Ironically, this is exactly the point that Berger wants to make, that language "cannot be reduced to a dictionary or stock of words and phrases". Quite so. And high-end translation is never a two-way process: once a poem has been reworked into a set of functioning approximations and equivalents in another language, it can't simply be reverse-engineered back into the original. Though you can have a lot of harmless fun in Google Translate doing exactly that.
I did email the Guardian, pointing out the error, but it seems they have no time for such pedantry. But, please, let's stamp out this bizarre factoid before it escapes into the wild.
[The illustrations are from a bound book of fortune-telling cards in the British Museum, which can be seen here]
7 comments:
It always amazes me that poetry translates at all. I was led the other day (from a crossword puzzle, in fact) to look at an English translation of the ancient Chinese poem Li Sao at http://www.lingshidao.cn/hanshi/quyuan.htm and the fact that it rhymed really made me wonder how much latitude had been exercised in translation. In fact, I think the text is obscure even to modern Chinese scholars (of which I am not at all one, I should add), as there even seems to be doubt as to the meaning of the title.
Zouk,
Well, strictly speaking, it doesn't. As Robert Frost famously put it, "poetry is what is lost in translation". But, like making a musical out of a novel, it's possible to create something new which respects something essential about the orginal.
Somewhere, I've got a reference to a really interesting piece on the issues in "translating" Japanese haiku -- I'll look it up.
"Rendering" is often a better word.
Mike
Zouk,
I think this is the one:
http://www.bopsecrets.org/gateway/passages/basho-frog.htm
Mike
Excellent link, Mike - thanks. Great commentary, which shows how difficult it is to really convey the significance of a poem in translation. It is odd that Berger should get something so wrong (apparently). I imagine the Guardian must now have a long list of readers who are familiar with Russian, based on letters like yours. As it happens, the crossword I referred to (above), featuring Li Sao as a light, appeared in the same edition of the Guardian. In a further coincidence(?), the crossword's theme was words which combine with "monger", while Berger uses "wordmonger", a novelty (to me at least).
The point that words don't necessarily have exact equivalents in different languages is trite to anyone really familiar with more than one ....
... which reminds me of the time our mutual friend BC, who used to ask for my help with his French homework, wrote about "une allumette de football"! He was clearly a follower of the Warehouse school of translation at the time!
Ah, yes, the notorious ¡fósforo del día! ...
Mike
Haven't heard the Spanish phrase before. Does its fame derive from
http://www.webletras.com.br/genesis/march-of-the-days/traducao-espanhol/imprimir
which, if I remember correctly, is about where I came in a couple of years ago...
PS
Do you know my android French keyboard doesn't know about allumettes? I guess they are rather quaint, old-fashioned things.
Zouk,
No, it's the sort of lame joke any Spanish beginner makes -- I remember writing it on a postcard from Spain to my workmates in Bristol back in 1978! I think I mentioned Los Arqueros, too, which several of them were fixated on [translation for overseas visitors: "The Archers" is a long-running radio soap opera set in rural England].
Mike
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