Oh, interesting post! So what is the best Neruda translation? He's on my to-read list. I think Spanish is a beautiful language, and I do appreciate having it alongside so I can enjoy and halfway understand it along with the translation, even if I couldn't have understood it on its own.
I ran into translation issues myself recently when I read Halldór Laxness' Independent People (prose, not poetry, but still). The English translation left me cold, but I absolutely loved the language in the Swedish one. I think part of the trouble is that Swedish has specific words for landscape features especially in the Nordic countries. Like "fjäll" for mountain and "älv" for river, whereas if you use the words "berg" and "flod" instead, I get a very generic image of anywhere in the world. So the Swedish translation was so much richer in meaning for me (plus it was just better overall). OTOH, I did not like the Swedish title, which was "Fria män" = "Free Men". I think it should've been translated "Självständigt folk" which is much closer to the Icelandic "Sjálfstætt fólk" (and for that matter, to "Independent People"). Literally "Self-standing Folk" in English, I suppose? But apparently the translator felt obliged to preserve the title of the first Swedish translation, so people wouldn't get confused.
Er, sorry, tl;dr about this book that you probably don't care about...
Also, I am tempted to post a Swedish-to-English translation of a folk song that I did.
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timeasmymeasure
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Date: 2014-11-25 11:04 pm (UTC)I ran into translation issues myself recently when I read Halldór Laxness' Independent People (prose, not poetry, but still). The English translation left me cold, but I absolutely loved the language in the Swedish one. I think part of the trouble is that Swedish has specific words for landscape features especially in the Nordic countries. Like "fjäll" for mountain and "älv" for river, whereas if you use the words "berg" and "flod" instead, I get a very generic image of anywhere in the world. So the Swedish translation was so much richer in meaning for me (plus it was just better overall). OTOH, I did not like the Swedish title, which was "Fria män" = "Free Men". I think it should've been translated "Självständigt folk" which is much closer to the Icelandic "Sjálfstætt fólk" (and for that matter, to "Independent People"). Literally "Self-standing Folk" in English, I suppose? But apparently the translator felt obliged to preserve the title of the first Swedish translation, so people wouldn't get confused.
Er, sorry, tl;dr about this book that you probably don't care about...
Also, I am tempted to post a Swedish-to-English translation of a folk song that I did.