ReturnThis page began as a two fold project. One, it was to express my interest in and love of Jean-Jacques Goldman; his music certainly, but especially his lyrics. The second was to begin work on translating the difficult world of poetry.
As a graduate student in religious studies, one of the primary issues I'm concerned with is understanding the art of translation, and how that art (or in many cases, lack there of) eventually effects the presentation of ideas. I've looked at, specifically, the academic community's handling of religious texts arising out of the study of Lakota culture and religion. It's amazing the number of ways one word for a religious belief or divinity can be translated. It's even more amazing understanding the power that resides within that choice of translation. Is word "x" to be translated as "God"? and if one does make that translation, does it create ideas in the minds of the reader that are unintentional, or even incorrect? Yes, it's convenient to translate "Wakan Tanka" as God, but does that translation make Wakan Tanka "God"? And over time, with the use of Wakan Tanka as God, does it become God?? Interesting questions, hum?
Anyhow, working with translations as ideas required that I have some concept of how translation as an art, works. Which means, getting my hands dirty and translation stuff. Now, while my Lakota is good enough to make decent translations of some things, the work is very hard and tedious... and quite frankly, fraught with too many primary issues about grammar and syntax to really understand anything about 'translation'. So, I chose a language I'm more familiar with, and which is far closer in structure to English. French. I began by translating stuff that was useful for my dissertation: texts on dialogics, texts on linguistics, texts on religious studies, texts on texts.... Fun, hum?
It's one thing to translate academic texts, where the writing is complex in structure and in intellectual hoop-jumping, but is relatively straight foreword in meaning and grammar, especially when you are already playing the academic game. On the other hand, literature-novels and such- is so contextualized, wrapped by ideas that must move in a logical pattern and direction, that it too is relative easy to handle. If a word or phrase doesn't make sense alone, the meaning can usually be construed by looking at the rest of the sentence or paragraph.
Poetry, however, is its own monster. Besides being a forum for alliteration and metaphor, poetry is also marked by the lack of grammatical coherency; the author's desire to play with the language; the author's hope to create double entendra, purposeful miscommunications and intentional misdirection's. And, one line of a poem doesn't necessarily have anything to do with a second line...not directly anyhow. Monstrous, hummm?
So, this is my first attempt (first draft, you might say) of dealing with less than straight foreword texts. Please feel free to comment, in any fashion, about these translations.
-Tanya-