Aftermath... in Spanish premiered on Youtube (1 Viewer)

That was interesting watching that, even though I am very weak in Spanish, I could get the feeling of the story.

Was it translated well?

Thanks for showing us.
 
Translators and writers fall into the same category: all translations suck, all books suck... save theirs. Being a translator myself, I guess you get the picture. To be honest, though, I do not have a copy of this book and I can't really judge the translation. The title sounds a tad too literal to my ears, but what I do I know. Bukowski is not easy to translate. The simpler he gets, the harder it is to translate him properly. I can't recall the last time I read a Bukowski book in Spanish, probably 15 or so years ago. When you're a translator, you don't want to read translations, believe me. Even if you read the text in your own language, you can hear and see and feel the English words all along. It's painful. The worst torture ever.

But I'll buy a copy for sure ;)
 
Bukowski is not easy to translate. The simpler he gets, the harder it is to translate him properly.

Even if you read the text in your own language, you can hear and see and feel the English words all along.

Buk's novels, Notes of a dirty old man, Tales of ordinary madness and Septuagenerian stew have been translated in Dutch.
(Post Office, Factotum and Women are still in print.)

The translations of his novels in Dutch are "okay"...
The short stories are readable...but not great.
The poems? Really awful.

A Dutch guy called Gerard Bellaart, translated a selection of Buk's poems in Dutch, I've never read them.

Cold Turkey Press' first publication was "Drunk Miracles & Other Immolations" (1970), a selection of poems by Charles Bukowski.

drunkmiracles.jpg

Bellaart: I first came across the writings of Charles Bukowski in 1965, Hydra, Greece, when someone handed me a copy of 'The Outsider'.
In 1969 I made a selection of his poems, translated them into Dutch and published them under the title 'Drunk Miracles & Other Immolations' in 1970 with a specially written introduction by Bukowski. It was the first appearance of his work in Holland."
 
whoa, that picture of buk on the cover of the book ponder posted. never seen it. very nice.....thank you!

the hunchback of l.a. indeed!
 
Nice. Thx cirerita.

B. mentions the Dutch publication of "Drunk Miracles & Other Immolations" somewhere in the letters. I remember reading it.
 
The translations of his novels in Dutch are "okay"...
The poems? Really awful.
Poetry shouldn't be translated into languages it wasn't written in. Does that sentence make sense? Engrish is my first language, but I never lerned the rules...

But seriously. No poetry translation. It's just wrong. Carl Weissner and Bukowski's German "fame and fortune" be damned.

Translating poetry is like doing a cover version of a song. "Gee, that's nice. It reminds me of how great the original is, and how much it sucks to hear it sung it in your voice."

Poetry is a subtle art. It isn't Stephen King boogie man stories or romance novels. Translate those all you want. Translate some textbooks. There's something for all the translators to do. Sounds like important work.

All you fuckers should speak and read English anyway. Everyone knows that. Well, everyone here knows that. And here is all that matters.




Okay, I'm half kidding. But only half.
 
I agree. Poetry is tough. Maybe the toughest, really. You would also think that monsters like Ulysses from Joyce are not made to be translated, but there's a really good one in German from Hans Wollschläger, a talented author himself.

And Carl Weissner is a very special subject matter. I probably said it before: It's a pity we can't really discuss him and his translations of B. because of the language-barriers. He did his job and it worked out. Hard to tell if one could have done it better or worse.
 
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Poetry shouldn't be translated into languages it wasn't written in. [...]

i'm glad i was able to read Bukowski poems and Whitman poems and Shakespeare sonnetts WAY before i would ever have been able to understand them in the original.


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but back to this thread:

the illustrations seen, are from the first german publication of this story, two years ago.

it was (of course) limited and isn't available any more.
except here maybe. (hehe)

oh, boy! i'm going to become a business-man! dammit!
 
Thanks, cirerita! If only I understood Spanish, but it was interesting to watch all the same.

As for translations, I would rather read a flawed translation of a Buk novel or a poem, than not get to read it at all...
 
Well, you guys are right, of course. Better to read a translation than not read it at all.

But I was thinking of something I read in two different translations, and the feel - even the meaning really - was different between the two. This was just text, not poetry. Since the translations were so different, I was left wondering whether either of the translators really had an idea of what the author was trying to say. Ever since then I am wary of translations. Too much rests on the shoulders of the translator.

And poetry - I think comparing it to music is pretty accurate. Anyone can play the chords to someone else's song and sing the right words and notes, but the feeling you get from the song is going to be different. I think of all the people who have covered Woody Guthrie songs over the years. They're fine little songs, and of course a lot of people would never hear them without the cover versions. But man, you listen to those crusty old Guthrie recordings and it's just a different world completely. Same thing applies to Robert Johnson, Bob Marley, the list is probably endless.

So I think something is inevitably lost when translating poetry. It would be interesting to get the take of a fluently bi-lingual poet who has translated their own work, if such a person exists.
 
I think it's a good analogy, comparing original songs to cover versions. That's the way it feels reading Buk in translation. Often the translator is not even an professional translator but just someone who's "good" at English, and sometimes they fuck up. I'll give you an example. In the poem, "Something for the touts...", these lines appear: "...the days of the bosses, yellow men with bad breath and big feet...". Well, yellow can mean the color yellow but also a coward or cowardice. Here in Denmark the translator chose to translate the word into the color yellow! So when you read those lines you think of Chinese/Asian bosses with bad breath and big feet, and I don't think Buk was talking about Asian bosses...:D
 
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Hehe. that's funny. Yellow men. It reminds me that I've never read a German translation of "Something for the touts ..." Strange, because it's one of my all-time favorites.

roni, do you know by any chance in which German collection this poem landed? Thx.

And if I remember correctly, Weissner was not a "professional translator" too, at least not when he and B. started corresponding/working together. Then he was just an English-student, wasn't he?

It would be interesting to get the take of a fluently bi-lingual poet who has translated their own work, if such a person exists.

Although not really known as a poet, Samuel Beckett would be an example for that. He wrote Waiting for Godot in French first, because he was living in Paris and later translated it into English.
 
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Samuel Beckett wrote in French and translated into English later, as mentioned by Johannes. he wanted to take some of the emotional, narcissistic qualities that out of his writing that would have been present if he wrote first in his native tongue. or somesuch. I'm paraphrasing from memory.

and I'm translating my Sanskrit thoughts into English on the fly.
 
Yeah, I was thinking more specifically about poetry. Translating a novel or a story or a play - there's so much more room for adaptation while still maintaining the feel of the work.

In a great poem every line - every word - has to hit just right. Seems like quite a task to translate a good poem.
 
I went down to my bookcases and dug out my Beckett Centenary Edition (lookit me! I'm pomo!), and read the intro to the poetry volume and it turns out that Beckett did not translate the poems he wrote in French.

so that supports your point.

show off.

;)
 
I was thinking more specifically about poetry. [...] In a great poem every line - every word - has to hit just right.
Seems like quite a task to translate a [...] poem .

you're exactly right on that.
i can tell from two points:

1.) from several poets, i have different translations on my shelf. these show it ALL! - (e.g.: Whitman - i have 3 translations into german plus the original Deathbed-edition. - it's so EASY to find the single mis-takes in a translations, even though you wouldn't be able to do the Whole thing yourself .)

[ or classical music: take different conductors, like Furtwaengler vs Toscanini - there's a Universe between them. and i'm not talking about politics here! - in a way, conductors are translators of a composer's work.]

2.) trying to translate my own poems into english is an adventure.
not only because i ain't no native speaker. (this could be corrected in collaboration with natives.) the reason is:
you DO feel the urge to use different line-structure, different grammar/sentence-structure, even different pictures!

transforming your (own) poems into another language CHANGES them. i don't believe, there is Any poet (especially if he/she's fluently bi-lingual !) who would transform their poems from the original language word-by-word.
you can Try to stick to the original as much as poss. and you should.
but you are not allowed to simply copy-paste the words. it ruins the whole thing. other languages demand a different handling. definitely.
 
There's this crazy poet in Spain (he's been in a mental ward for over 20 years now) who used to translate poetry a long time ago. He literally rewrote the originals and called the resulting poems "perversions" instead of "translations". He's a most interesting guy, Leopoldo María Panero. There are two good movies/docs about his family.

Sadly, I know too many poets -especially Americans!- who can babble a few words in Spanish and feel confident enough to translate Lorca, Vallejo and all the other big poets into English. They have this "I'm a POET, I know three words in Spanish only, but I'm a POET and I can translate other poets into English because I'm a POET" attitude. I'm not naming any names ;)
 
I went down to my bookcases and dug out my Beckett Centenary Edition (lookit me! I'm pomo!), and read the intro to the poetry volume and it turns out that Beckett did not translate the poems he wrote in French.

Ah, so that's really interesting. Maybe he couldn't really, wouldn't or didn't want to. That would be an argument in this direction for sure.


roni said:
sorry.
i don't know a German translation of this either.

hm, hm ... but there must be one. Now I really want to have it. Maybe in one of the later jumbo-collections?

4177EXR1HZL._SL500_AA240_.jpg


???
 
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not in THAT one:
the poems in it are from 'Love is a Dog from Hell', 'Play the piano drunk' and 'War all the Time'.

'Something for the touts' is from 'crucifix' (and 'Burning').
Therefore, the only german book that's supposed to have it, is 'Western Avenue', but it hasn't.
 
I tried to locate it somewhere, but it seems to be true. This is very strange. We should translate it now, roni, what do you think? :)

Maybe Weissner had good reasons. "Something for the touts ..." has, despite everything else, a wonderful rhythm, imho. Outstanding even in B.'s oeuvre. I even thought so while reading it the first time, you really get the feeling of musical patterns coming through the words, don't you? And that, of course, is untranslatable.
 
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Regarding translations of poetry, I think the works of Nazim Hikmet (translated by Randy Blasing and Mutlu Konuk) are quite good, but I can only imagine what they are like in their native Turkish. I wonder if, given the idiosyncrasies of the English language, it is at least sometimes "easier" to translate a poem into English than it is to translate an English poem into another language. Particularly one written in colloquial English, such as much of Buk's work.
 

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