![]() In my introduction to Werther I pointed out that “Goethe created a language that overthrows the tradition of decorum, restraint, and neoclassical balance that was prized by eighteenth-century writers and readers, replacing it with an impulsive language of subjective feeling. In my process of translating, I deal with this problem by starting not with the words but with the author’s rhythms and voice, and try to fit the words in English to them, to the extent possible in a way that encompasses both story and shadings. Another problem for translators is that English is a ruthlessly empirical language that does not have much room for subtle shadings when compared with other languages. This greater attention to the author’s use of language has resulted in better translations, especially of demanding literary works. ![]() In recent years, literary translators have paid more attention to the shadings of the original work, whereas earlier translators were more focused on simply translating the story told rather than taking into account the many shadings in the original language in which the story was told. I retranslated Goethe’s novel The Sorrows of Young Werther for Modern Library because I felt that most of the existing translations into English did not adequately reflect the waterfall of Goethe’s style in the German. These comments were made by translator Burton Pike at a panel titled “Retranslating the Great Works of Literature: How and Why?”, presented by the PEN America Translation Committee at BookExpo America 2015. ![]() ![]()
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