{"id":6245,"date":"2018-01-17T20:41:08","date_gmt":"2018-01-17T19:41:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/idiolect.org.uk\/notes\/?p=6245"},"modified":"2018-10-15T11:01:56","modified_gmt":"2018-10-15T10:01:56","slug":"come-let-us-compare-translations","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/idiolect.org.uk\/notes\/2018\/01\/17\/come-let-us-compare-translations\/","title":{"rendered":"Come, let us compare translations"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Svetlana_Alexievich\">Svetlana Alexievich<\/a> won the 2015 Nobel Prize for literature. Her book on Chernobyl (subtitled in the first translation &#8216;The oral history of a nuclear disaster&#8217;) has a 2005 translation and a 2016 translation. Here are two excerpts:<\/p>\n<p><em>Voices from Chernobyl<\/em> (2005, translation by Kieth Gessen):<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>\n&#8220;I was saved by my mother. She&#8217;d lived a long time and had lost everything more than once. The first time was in the 1930s, they took her cow, her horse, her house. The second time, there&#8217;d been a fire, the only thing she&#8217;d saved was me. Now she said, &#8220;We have to get through it. After all, we&#8217;re alive&#8221;\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p><em>Chernobyl Prayer <\/em>(2016 translation by Anna Gunin and Arch Tait):<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>\n&#8220;My mother was the saving of me. In the course of a long life, she had been deprived of her home and everything she had earned. The first time was when she was purged in the 1930s. They confiscated everything: her cow, her horse, her house. The second time it was a fire, and all she was able to save was me, her little daughter, plucked from the flames. &#8216;You just have to get through it,&#8217; she comforted me. &#8216;The main thing is, we&#8217;re still alive.&#8217;\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>The 2016 translation is based on the revised (2013) version of the text, and is longer &#8211; containing whole sections of text not in the 2005 translations (as well, as this example suggests, being more verbose in a line-by-line comparison with the 2005 translation).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Svetlana Alexievich won the 2015 Nobel Prize for literature. Her book on Chernobyl (subtitled in the first translation &#8216;The oral history of a nuclear disaster&#8217;) has a 2005 translation and a 2016 translation. Here are two excerpts: Voices from Chernobyl (2005, translation by Kieth Gessen): &#8220;I was saved by my mother. She&#8217;d lived a long [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6245","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5KQtW-1CJ","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/idiolect.org.uk\/notes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6245"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/idiolect.org.uk\/notes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/idiolect.org.uk\/notes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/idiolect.org.uk\/notes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/idiolect.org.uk\/notes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6245"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/idiolect.org.uk\/notes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6245\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6268,"href":"https:\/\/idiolect.org.uk\/notes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6245\/revisions\/6268"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/idiolect.org.uk\/notes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6245"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/idiolect.org.uk\/notes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6245"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/idiolect.org.uk\/notes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6245"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}