Translations

I'm reading Thomas Mann's Death In Venice at the moment - in English, which is a bit weird as German is my mother tongue. Whilst reading, I couldn't help but admire the people who translate prose and poetry (especially poetry, which takes the whole thing one step further I assume). I always get incredibly frustrated when I attempt to translate something from German to English or the other way round.
It's not getting the meaning right, that's easy; what always baffles me is how to get the beauty across. Each language has its own charm (though I still fail to find it in French), and to transport the respective cleverness, elegance or subtlety into another language is often hard, sometimes impossible. And I'm only talking about German and English here, which at least have similarities. But there are some expressions and qualities that are simply unique to one language, and the task of finding a similarly elegant, beautiful, striking (or even deliberately ugly)  equivalent in another language always fills me with desperation. It's not just getting across what's being said - it's how it is being said, the tone, rhythm, sometimes metre. German with its consonant clusters and sibilance often sounds quite aggressive, while English is generally much more polite, even when it is at its most pompous.

That's only one difficulty to overcome when recreating certain moods and atmospheres, not to mention subtleties like irony or innuendo. And of course there is the aspect of beauty. Imagine translating a Shakespeare poem into German: The meaning is there, but now you have to find a way to make it sound beautiful too, the German way, but it still has to match the metre etc. People have done it, but I still prefer the original - and that is not just because I prefer English to my native language. I'd choose English over German any day, but when it comes to reading Goethe's or Schiller's poems, I'd stick to German. I simply think it purer, if you know what I mean. Translations can come close, but they'll never exactly match the tone or mood of the original. I believe it's impossible. But maybe that's just my view because I'm fluent in both languages. People who only speak English might still think that Death In Venice is brilliant (& I'm sure a lot do), but I'd rather go for the original - I should count myself lucky to have that choice between two languages.

Sometimes, translations can shed a different light on meanings. In Fry's Planet Word, Stephen Fry talked to a French actor who has acted in many Shakespeare plays - the French traslated versions. He said that when translated into French, the famous 'To be or not to be, that is the question' can also be interpreted this way: 'To be or not - to be, that is the question', which gives an entirely new meaning to that immortal phrase. Still, even he said that he'd prefer the English original, because it's richer and just matches the whole style better. And I have to say, when he said the line in French (NO idea what it was, but it sounded awful!), I just could not imagine it having the same effect as the original. It was longer, had more monosyllabic words, which takes away a lot of the dramatic impact.
In the same episode, Mr. Fry also talked to some Chinese - and they said that there is no verb 'to be' at all in the Chinese language (I assume they were talking about the Mandarin dialect, but it sounded like no other dialect had that verb either), so they have to find the nearest equivalent, which would be 'To live or to die', I believe - now, compare that to the original. Nothing like it, much of the intensity and intimacy is gone. Just goes to show: If possible, read it in the original.