HARUKI MURAKAMI: TRANSLATION INTO ENGLISH AND SPANISH
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...