Of Crustacean Invincibility

I probably have mentioned it in an earlier post, but I daydream. A lot. Always have done. Whenever I find myself in a relaxed situation, where nothing requires my direct input, I find myself thinking about the immortality of the crab (yes, I like new phrases every now and then). And I'm a vivid daydreamer - I wear that thousand mile stare that obscures the most detailed of ideas.

These daydreams, as daydreams often do, take the form of the perfect scenario - hero gets the girl, hero performs a major feat of heroism and is by general consensus a hero, or hero succeeds in a heroic task of some kind. Most often none of these are even vaguely realistic - so much, indeed, that as a child I firmly believed, among other things (including a creationist theory regarding the bellies of giants), that whatever I thought of would never strike true (Needless to say, my juvenile mind had thus no problem thinking about horrible accidents and deaths hitting people I knew and loved - obviously, that would never happen).

One of the later ones was obviously just the vague ambition of me writing a great epos of epic proportions, and making everyone want to read it because of some Disney-esque storyline, it being published by a major company and distributed all over the world. And then came the day when it was to be translated into another language, and being the bilingual that I am, I obviously took upon the task with great success.

This latter bit isn't actually as stupid as the rest of it. 

There's always been a minor debate within the Swedish literary sphere about translations and translators - whether or not a translated work can truly be considered to still be the work of the original author. It's not a huge debate, and I'm not sure how widespread it is outside of Sweden - unlike many of our European neighbours, we only translate to our native language what is absolutely necessary, and often consider the language of origin to by far be the best representation of the original work. Mostly children-based films are translated, and even they are usually shown in a parallel, English version (Thank god for that, couldn't have watched Madagascar in any other case). The nay-sayers - i.e., those who believe that translations is literary heresy - argue that since the wording is completely replaced by that of the translator, the entire literary style of the author is lost in the process. However, most counter-argue that it's a very shallow thing to say; books are not merely the words that their pages contain. And then again, the entire profession of the translator is to transcribe a work as accurately as possible, using as close translations as possible.

Personally, I'm unsure. I believe that if I were to write something that called for translation between the two languages I speak, I would most probably do it by myself. However, what harries my mind at this point is very much the fact that when I write, the words that appear before me are really to me only suited in the language that I write them in. I think that were I to translate a piece of my own, I could impossibly work out of the original text - I would have to rewrite the same story in another language. Inaccuracies would definitely occur by that approach.

Then again, whenever I read something and I can actually speak the language of the original author, I will always prefer the original language. Why? I don't know. It's some vague belief that it is actually better, but I know of few cases where it's affirmedly so. Terry Pratchett is an excellent example of translations gone wrong - while certainly still an enjoyable book, the Swedish version is nowhere near as funny as Pratchett's originals. Then again, Swedish is a stale language in many ways, and you do have to spend a lot of time and be very creative in order to bend it right. English just falls so... right, somehow. Maybe it's a Swedish thing, or a non-English thing. Or maybe you true native speakers feel so as well? How about French, for instance? I only know a teeny bit of French. Je voudrais croissant, and so on. Voila mon passporte. Does it... Does it grant the same kind of literary satisfaction when writing or speaking it? Do the words come out like a pretty little stream by the side of a pretty little garden? They sure do not in Swedish, most of the time.

Anyway. Perhaps a translator would do a better job of rendering the actual piece in another language. The text, the words that I use would probably be better substituted by a professional, rather than by me. However, again, the written is not merely words. Could a translator - especially in metaphorical texts - truly translate the idea, the discourse itself? Would an author do that better?

At some point, when the daydream of me being exorbitantly rich and wealthy comes true (curse my mind for making that up. Now it'll never happen), I'll hire a translator to vainly translate my own text simultaneously as I do. In the same sense, I'm dreadfully interested to see if anyone's ever done anything like that. In a world as global as today's, isn't the entire issue - or non-issue, perhaps - of translation even more interesting?