LAS LENGUAS INGLESA Y ESPAÑOLA de Delfín Carbonell

I have often explained my intellectual shortcomings in my language abilities. I must read most world literature in translation. And although I gratefully acknowledge translators' efforts in rendering originals into English and Spanish, I am still weary. I remember my reading of Dowstoweski ´s The Idiot where the main character, Prince Mishkin, was el príncipe Mishkine. Why so? I finally discovered that the translation into Spanish was from French, not Russian. I had been reading a translation of a translation. In order to keep the sound of Mishkin, the French translator added an "e" to the name and the Spanish translator followed suit, unnecessarily.  In a recent post, I complained lightly about Murakami ´s Norwegian Wood translation into English. As I speak no Japanese (and no Danish, Tagalog, Chinese, Korean, etc.), I decided to check  Lourdes Portal ´s rendering of that novel into Spanish. Both translations are suspiciously similar. I must venture that Lourdes Porta...

  Haruki Murakami has just been awarded the Spanish Princesa de Asturias premio a las Letras (€50,000). On one of her recent visits from San Francisco, my daughter Laura left behind for me to read, Murakami´s Norwegian Wood . I read and liked it but it left in me a funny feeling, a sensation that something was amiss, that something was faux. Jay Rubin , Takashima Professor of Japanese Humanities Emeritus at Harvard University, is Murakami´s main translator into English. Most of my readings in world literature are in translation because, except for three, I ignore all the other 6,500 languages spoken on Earth. I cannot compare Professor Rubin´s rendering from the Japanese and must accept his translation as good. His English is spotless, of course, and I could understand the novel well. No problems. Yet, there was something missing, something faux in his translation. The characters did not seem Japanese to me, they did not sound Japanese. I was given the impression that the young p...