We fall hard for the first translations of a poet's work that we encounter; and most of the other/later translations we come across strike us as pale or somehow inferior.
this is why the photo album is filled with the first translation and all the subsequent translations are lucky to get a snapshot asleep and drooling in the back seat
The same thing, I often find, with the first recording I really get to know of some classical masterpiece like a Beethoven symphony - it becomes normative and other renderings then strike me as too fast, too slow, muffling a great effect here, missing the point there, and so on. Yet, though sentiment for one's first introduction is a natural emotion one can in fact with practice see it for the illusion it is. Perhaps it's the same with translation - a more objective view of the source text recognizes a breadth of potential in it that goes beyond the limitations of "that which first amazed me". Another thing about these renderings is how (as I grow older) I find I naturally gravitate to the translations of my formative years, Euripides in the manner of 1975 not 2007; clearly the English of that time had a literally electrifying effect on coding my adolescent receptivity. Again objectively I may see the modern rendering as more scholarly or accurate, but I don't love it - I find it often crude, thin, pedantic... Again a natural effect of getting older, but an illusion, not objective - something to be got over, not yielded to.
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this is why the photo album is filled with the first translation and all the subsequent translations are lucky to get a snapshot asleep and drooling in the back seat
The same thing, I often find, with the first recording I really get to know of some classical masterpiece like a Beethoven symphony - it becomes normative and other renderings then strike me as too fast, too slow, muffling a great effect here, missing the point there, and so on. Yet, though sentiment for one's first introduction is a natural emotion one can in fact with practice see it for the illusion it is. Perhaps it's the same with translation - a more objective view of the source text recognizes a breadth of potential in it that goes beyond the limitations of "that which first amazed me".
Another thing about these renderings is how (as I grow older) I find I naturally gravitate to the translations of my formative years, Euripides in the manner of 1975 not 2007; clearly the English of that time had a literally electrifying effect on coding my adolescent receptivity. Again objectively I may see the modern rendering as more scholarly or accurate, but I don't love it - I find it often crude, thin, pedantic... Again a natural effect of getting older, but an illusion, not objective - something to be got over, not yielded to.
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