Of Limits

[@GameLimbs]

Ugh! So much reading anxiety. I have a pile of (non fiction) books probably a foot high that I need to at least get to grips with, if not actually read all the way through, so that I can use them to pitch a PhD proposal to my department, while at the same time taking a course at that department with weekly reading of anywhere from 200 to 500 pages of both fiction and fairly dense theory. On the other hand, realising these limits helped me finish my master's on time. I was worried I hadn't read enough background or theory to actually write it to satisfaction, and thus didn't write anything. Then one day it finally clicked that I'm never actually expected to have read, and thus present, all the knowledge to my reader, only to present the knowledge I have acquired, and give an account of this that shows that I am aware of these limitations. Whatever is then missing is what I might move to in the next project. Regarding translation of poetry, I did my bachelor's on translation of 18th century Swedish troubadour Carl Michael Bellman's songs into English, and came across the wonderfully useful term "horror vacui", which I hadn't heard of before. Literally meaning the fear of emptiness, here used by the writer to warn the translator of the risks of saying more upfront in the target language than was overtly said in the source language, usually, I take it, caused by a fear of losing some of the meanings inherent in the source material that might not be evident in a straight up translation. Also, noted by the writer was that this is probably inevitable. Translation of literature, he called, "an essentially ... surplus-generating activity".

[@ElectricDidact]

Oh wow thank you for sharing your experience! I'm REALLY DIGGING "horror vacui"! Is that a fear imputed to the translator, then? Actually I was just reading a Hebrew scholar's commentary and he was criticizing biblical translations into English for committing the "heresy of explanation," which sounds quite similar, a generation of "surplus" meaning and hence, additional, over-interpreted(?) meaning... On the other hand, however, it seems that theorists like Ricoeur might say that over-interpretative translation actually serves to REDUCE the meaning surplus of the source by trying to pin things down out of anxiety?

[@GameLimbs]

Thanks! It was a very interesting episode, that just happened to touch on something I've actually studied for a bit. I don't have the original text any more, only my own notes on it, but that is my understanding of it too, that it is the translator's own fear of not filling the entire space of meaning created by the original work. Jarniewizc (the critic in question) does want to warn against succumbing entirely to this fear, but he seems to also say that it springs out of a very real problem that any translator has to confront one way or the other. There's no way simply around the horror vacui. I think "heresy of explanation" is a brilliant way of putting it; I'll have to run that by the theologians in my family some day. It highlights even more the kind of violence that can be done to the inherent mystery of a text by over-interpreting it in translation (and perhaps paraphrase as well?) and thus killing its unique effect on the reader. "On the other hand, however, it seems that theorists like Ricoeur might say that over-interpretative translation actually serves to REDUCE the meaning surplus of the source by trying to pin things down out of anxiety?" This fascinated me. How would that work in practice, so to speak. Is it to mean that the translation can serve to solidify and make clearer specific (intended?) meanings, so that the reader is not led astray by (deemed) irrelevant associations that might otherwise crop up? But then, how to decide what gets pinned down? Wow, that's a really long comment. Speaking of surplus... :D