By Nicole Demby | December 6, 2009 at 10:14 am
In reading A Distant Pleasure, Keith Taylor’s discussion of Daniel Mendelsohn’s new translations of the poems of C.P. Cavafy, one is reminded that every translated poem is always largely a novel construction. A good translator must be almost impossibly nuanced in her attempt to faithfully translate a poem, delicately balancing her consideration for rhythm, meaning, connotation, and many other elements. For the famous modern Greek poet who put so much of his own desire into his poetry that he prompted fellow poet Goerge Seferis to remark that “outside his poems Cavafy does not exist,” the question of translation seems particularly pertinant.
Taylor traces his own beloved relationship with Cavafy’s poems. He expresses admiration for Mendelsohn’s new translation of both Cavafy’s completed works and recently-found unfinished ones, appreciating how Mendelsohn conveys the rhythmic cadences absent in previous translations. Taylor both compliments and criticizes Mendelsohn’s attempt to reflect Cavafy’s interplay of vernacular Greek diction with “high” official language imposed on the populace after the collapse of Ottoman rule, reinforcing how translation is endlessly political because languages are so invariably wedded to history. Most of all though, what A Distant Pleasure conveys is how a new translation of a poet’s work can can help the reader approach the poet’s original intentions, imbuing old and beloved poems with new meaning that at once strengthens old affections and offers novel perspectives. As James Longenbach suggests in his own laudatory review in the Times Sunday Book Review, Mendelsohn seems to possess a profound understanding of the essence of Cavafy’s work and to have distilled this essence in his translations.
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By Nicole Demby | November 15, 2009 at 3:20 pm
In Edit This Page, Evgeny Morozov recounts the history and evolution of Wikipedia as discussed by Andrew Lih in his book, “The Wikipedia Revolution: How a Bunch of Nobodies Created the World’s Greatest Encyclopedia”. With compliments to Lih’s book, Morozov offers an insightful explanation of Wikipedia’s transition from the unfettered democracy of its early days to its current to a much more bureaucratic form, an inevitable transition, Morozov suggests, as the site grew and attracted a larger more diverse set of editors (not to mention many “vandals”). Yet he goes on to criticize Lih for failing to give a comprehensive philosophical explanation of why Wikipedia works. He then criticizes the site itself for an administrative structure that forces “subject experts . . . to engage in pointless intellectual debates with Wikipedia’s bureaucratic guardians, many of whom are persuaded only by hyperlinks, not cogent arguments.”
Morozov’s admonishment of Lih’s philosophical failings may be only a foil for his own failure to grasp the unique nature of Wikipedia. In his article The Charms of Wikipedia published in the New York Review of Books, Nicholson Baker captures the idiosyncrasies of Wikipedia and describes how it is precisely these idiosyncrasies that make the site such a dynamic and vital resource. Proving that one man’s flaws are another man’s charms, Baker explains that on Wikipedia “any inelegance, or typo, or relic of vandalism reminds you that this gigantic encyclopedia isn’t a commercial product.” This is not to say that Wikipedia’s founders did not aim to create an accurate source, they did. And while the information on Wikipedia is far from perfect, it is not so far from perfect to justify critics’ complaints (in her article on Wikipedia in the New Yorker, Stacy Schiff cites a Nature survey that found that Wikipedia had four errors for every three of Encyclopedia Britannica’s). Yet to focus too heavily on the question of Wikipedia’s accuracy distracts from the real beauty of Wikipedia, its cultural import. While Morozov may bemoan the insufficiency of the entry on nouvelle vague-director Claude Chabrol compared to that ofTransformers-director Michael Bay, he can’t deny the fact that most people in this country would probably rather watch a film starring Megan fox than Jean-Paul Belmondo. Yet with 13 million articles, Wikipedia is also a repository for people’s diverse and obscure interests. The cite could never be as extensive or as relevant as it is if it were bound to the same restrictive methodologies as more traditional encyclopedias. By preferencing online sources rather than library tomes, Wikipedia both reflects and perpetuates the fact the internet has spawned a generative, fundamentally populist form of knowledge-creation, one that is presently our greatest epistemological tool. To lament this fact as Morozov does is to be sorely out of touch with the contemporary society that Wikipedia reflects with both its methodology and its flaws.
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