Traduttore, traditore

Working on Boris Vian for a musical-literary evening.

“In 1946, he published a faux-French translation of a novel by a non-existent African American author, Vernon Sullivan. Emphasizing through parody and self-referentiality the "impossibility" of translation from American English into French, Vian simultaneously attacks both the notions of a constructed, fetishized "original" text and of racial authenticity.”

Of course translation is impossible.

I will be singing Corcovado on Saturday night, and as a courtesy to my French audience I have translated the English version into French, and will sing both. I have no idea whether the English is faithful to the Portuguese original, so any relationship between my French version and it will be tenuous. I intend to check with a friend who is a Portuguese to French translator, but I dare not till after the gig.

Rosemary Arrojo, Oficina de tradução (The Translation Workshop):

“Instead of considering the text, or the sign, as a receptacle in which ‘content’ can be deposited and kept under control, I suggest that its prototypical image becomes that of a palimpsest, from the Greek palimpsestos (‘rubbed smooth again’).

[…]Metaphorically, the ‘palimpsest’ becomes the text erased in each cultural community and each epoch, so as to give way to another writing (or interpretation, reading or translation) of the ‘same’ text.”