language & translations & fever
I've all sorts of vague thoughts on the power of language and the dilemmas of translation floating around - how deeply language and culture are connected, and how translation is always essentially a re-creation more than a simple transmission of the original message.
Related to fandom, how if we connect to a source in one language it's sometimes odd to be fannish about it in another language - I can't read fic about any of my favourite childhood books without a feeling of disconnect. There's always something off, words and details not quite right. If I hadn't read the Harry Potter books in English I'd probably never gotten into fandom.
This disconnect sometimes happens in my fic writing as well. When it feels like I'm translating a phrase or an idea I'm almost never satisfied with the result. It's impossible to get all the nuances right. Like in Bird of Passage, there's a pretty central bird metaphor that I had to translate from my original idea, and that makes it feel somehow... clumsy and out of joint from the rest of the text, to me. I have no idea if these things would get across to a reader.
And that's all I have the energy to type out right now - I'm feverish and have been doping up on painkillers to go to class, 4h lecture on statistics yesterday (standard deviation & regression analysis and my brain's not made for this!), and seminar presentation today. EXHAUSTED.
Related to fandom, how if we connect to a source in one language it's sometimes odd to be fannish about it in another language - I can't read fic about any of my favourite childhood books without a feeling of disconnect. There's always something off, words and details not quite right. If I hadn't read the Harry Potter books in English I'd probably never gotten into fandom.
This disconnect sometimes happens in my fic writing as well. When it feels like I'm translating a phrase or an idea I'm almost never satisfied with the result. It's impossible to get all the nuances right. Like in Bird of Passage, there's a pretty central bird metaphor that I had to translate from my original idea, and that makes it feel somehow... clumsy and out of joint from the rest of the text, to me. I have no idea if these things would get across to a reader.
And that's all I have the energy to type out right now - I'm feverish and have been doping up on painkillers to go to class, 4h lecture on statistics yesterday (standard deviation & regression analysis and my brain's not made for this!), and seminar presentation today. EXHAUSTED.