commonality of prose?
So I see alot of y'all being all into foreign writers and stuff, notably hurakami and mishima for weebs (all respect due etc), maybe brecht and thomas mann and some french guys maybe.
I was wondering how many of you think you can really fully appreciate translated prose. I mean unless you've got a pretty strong understanding of the foreign culture and language wouldn't you lose alot of the intricacies of it all?
Think david foster wallace once said in that interview with the german tv station that he thought his own novels wouldn't translate well at all, etc. So I'm wondering how many of you, feel like you really really get it reading foreign writers or if you think that good literature is universal.
>>8200593
Most of why I read is for the writing, the prose, etc.. So if I can't find a translation of something that sounds phenomenal I just try to find something in my own language. It's kind of depressing desu.
>>8200593
>foreign culture
Not really, there's a huge amount of sharing between cultures in the modern world anyway. Subtleties might be lost but who cares if it's meaningful/enjoyable for you?
>foreign language
That's literally what the translation is for. Why on earth would you need a strong understanding if a language to read a -translation- of it?
>>8200619
>>8200613
well I mean especially in eastern languages, in Chinese (probably similar for Japanese and Korean as well)
They have a thing called Cheng Yu
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chengyu
there's an entire other level in the way they use language, not just as a simple idiom or a reference, but also has to do with the interplay of the pictographs and radicals that exist in the chinese characters, while the translator can probably find a similar english idiom, reading without the knowledge of the original language seems like you'd lose so much of that, unless the translator also includes like an entire section of dfw-ish footnotes. I'm wondering if there's examples of this kind of thing in other languages, especially Russian, German and French. Wonder if there's a native speaker that's read the English translation of any of the classics that can share their thoughts about this
