![]() ![]() It’s like a gigantic Rube Goldberg machine, bristling with an inventiveness that veers past “smart” to a point between “zany” and “Pee-Wee’s Playhouse.” Here, for example, is Dan, the book’s hero and authorial stand-in, talking about his Lord Don Quixote: It’s easy to see how it does so, for when it comes to technique, Bottom’s Dream keeps its gears on the surface. MASTER OF MONSTERS TRANSLATION HOW TOForeboding in appearance, it responds to its audience as if it had been waiting for us … and then the more we read, the more the labyrinth opens, until soon we recognize it as less a minotaur’s trap than a kind of illustrated manuscript: a “booke” whose intricately embroidered letters are meant not just to be read, but to teach us how to read better. The whole effect seems meant to repel, which is weird, since one of the first impressions we get upon reading Bottom’s Dream is of entering a puzzle or game, something designed to hold our attention. Inside its cover, the idiosyncratically spelt and punctuated narrative scrolls downward in a trunk with marginal notes protruding like the ribs of a gigantic skeleton. Part of this is simply a matter of size, for at 1,400 folio-sized pages Bottom’s Dream is both long and so physically cumbersome that it’s hard to imagine reading it on anything other than a lectern, or maybe a whale-elephant-turtle pagoda. Woods’s new English translation of Arno Schmidt’s notoriously-untranslatable Zettel’s Traum, is like watching one of these beasts saunter out of the forest and begin munching on a telephone pole: the sheer, jurassic weirdness of the thing scrambles our pathways, making it difficult to do anything except stare. For at the end of the day, isn’t it smarter to avoid those books we can’t imagine transforming? Isn’t it better to leave them where they are, roaming the forests of literature like gigantic beasts that, though terrifying, are doomed to extinction? The sensation is annoying, to say the least, which may be why certain volumes acquire the label “untranslatable” in the first place. Like Borges’s Funes, it is cursed with a flawless memory - a memory that curses us in turn by reminding us over and over again that the book we’re reading is actually a version of another book which we aren’t reading, but which we can feel floating behind our heads like a moon. The unsuccessful translation, on the other hand, can’t forget anything. Translations that we call successful, therefore, tend to encourage us to forget where they came from, hypnotizing us through deft mannerism (who needs Turgenev when you’ve got Constance Garnett?) or blinding us with genius (try seeing Homer around the mushroom cloud of Christopher Logue’s War Music). As readers we want God’s Word failing that, we want a version of this Word that makes us forget that it is a version. In retrospect, his attempt to prevent the familiar translation’s authority from being undermined looks as much political as literary - but it points to an underlying nervousness about translation that has been with literature since its beginnings. In the fourth century AD, for instance, no less a mind than Saint Augustine begged the future patron saint of translators, Jerome, not to undertake his revolutionary retranslation from the original Hebrew. The most famous example of this is probably the Bible, a volume that has been reimagined thousands of times, but whose readers seem to be constantly insisting that their version is the last. ![]() MASTER OF MONSTERS TRANSLATION FULLTHE HISTORY OF LITERATURE is full of untranslatable books, the vast majority of which have been translated very well at least once. ![]()
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