translator, translator

TOTranslation is a necessary evil, necessary, but still evil. What I wouldn’t give to read Soseki in Japanese or Shakespeare in English! In the latter case, here you have an excellent translation fixed in our language by Ramón G. Izquierdo of the two sonnets of Don Guillermo that rightly deserved the award for the best translation in 2012 at our awards of the year.

I remember, and maybe you do, the zarracin that was organized a few years ago with the aim of translating Valle into Galician. Be Don Ramón of chibo beard, climb to the top! “What stupidity, what barbarism! —I would say—, precisely the work that should make me Galician or Spanish, not that the most popular characters speak in wolf romance or divine words! How do you translate them?” Valle’s mastery of language is one of the two greatest achievements of his unmistakable style. Why deprive us of appreciating it?

Now, our cases, under translation, may contain compelling reasons. Lembro, still with a bit of magic, a discussion that, based on our university collection Classics of Universal Thought, has a colleague from a high university. “But why do you need to translate Newton, Plato or MacLuhan into such a minority language, if they have not been translated into Spanish? Isn’t this a waste of time and money?”. In short, convincing certain carpetovetónicos that Spain is a plural country and not that there are very different sensibilities can be an exhausting ordeal.

Now, a Catalan woman, with a surname that goes beyond Cubata (Bacardit), says that she does not want one of her novels, written in Plaino’s name, to be translated into Spanish. There’s merengao us!, Dona Rosa would say, and let’s go to the café. Looking at the polo, the writer tries, with such a picturesque design, to eradicate the wound of bilingualism in those latitudes. In short, I don’t think any Spanish publisher will Seppuku because he did not destroy the purity of the Catalan text and publish it in the infamous Quevedo language. What fatigue. These two independents go from bad to worse; every time it resembles Andersen’s story more and more: there is no Christian who can convince you that the king will lose. Madia levan