Lucky for having me as his reader, forced by the circumstances that I do not know French and do not have any other translation available, I who recognized the great plot (revolution, China's nascent communist movement), Andre Malraux's brilliant conceptions (terrorists, revolutionaries, their sacrifices and inescapable humanity), his stirring prose (faintly detected by myself, mostly imagined, but with moral certainty that it exists in the original French) all buried under the muck and mess this accursed translator managed to inundate these all with. But here, I commit no such sin.Ĭhevalier who did a horrible job here, his only saving grace being that he was lucky. And so now I repent and ask forgiveness for my many sins of ingratitude, those countless occasions where I toasted the writers and their works while ignoring, forgetting and treating as completely insignificant their translators without whom I would have not been able to read what they've written at all. I am sure I've read about several great writers, though at the moment I remember only Nabokov, who developed their literary muscles translating classics before they wrote their own. So in reading a work which is not in its original language it matters a lot which translation you read, and that you cannot really be sure, going gaga over a 'masterpiece' you've just stumbled upon, if the same was excellence conceived or excellence in translation. A bad translation can mangle a work beyond recognition a good translation-as GR's Cynthia Nine attests vis-a-vis Coelho's regurgitations-is capable of turning out something even better than the original, like a much improved version of a crude prototype the author originally wrote. That the act of translating a literary work is not a neutral and mechanical act but a truly creative one.
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