Confessions of a Pop Fan

Thursday, March 09, 2006

ALL THE THINGS YOU SAID

Crap!

To everyone who posted comments to my blog since mid-January, I have not been ignoring you. I just discovered that when I turned on the "Moderate Comments" function in blogger, it switched me over to having to approve every post anyone made--and I had never received any notice that they existed and were waiting for me.

So, to Willie, Chynna, Girl Jamie, Jim from Scotland, Jimmy D., 1031, Jamie M., Denny, Travis, Jewellie, B. Schatz, Greg, Chris T., Mason, Jason Arnett, Ian, Staple!, Mumps, Craigery, and the anonymous Ernest Hemingway quoter--my apologies! It really was a pleasant surprise to discover all these people were reading, and particularly shocking to find all the comments about my Christina Aguilera post were nice. I expected to get shit for that.

Some responses:

Travis: No, I don't hate We Are Scientists, but I haven't listened to it since I happened to have it as my soundtrack. I was trying it out, and thought it was okay...but it's never called me back, despite the Salinger title.

Jewellie: Duh, of course I remember you. E-mail sometime.

Greg: The Gold Experience really was a step up for the Purple One, wasn't it? But if I recall, Come was a record company thing and not a real album. I never actually bought it. And the "symbol" album would have been better without Kirstie Allie!

Anonymous: Shakira put out two albums last year, one in Spanish and one in English. Both are actually very good.

Jason asks: "Word-for-word, literal translations are impossible aren't they? So when something like this that's so vivid is translated, how much of it is really the original writer and how much is the translators slightly changing things around? What are your thoughts on this?" That's a tough one. When I do it, I am merely trying to capture what the original writer intended, finding the appropriate American idiom to fit. As a rewriter only, though, and not the translator, there is a barrier where I have to rely on someone else to deliver the nuance. For big prose projects like the ones referenced in the original post, it is much trickier and I am not sure where some credit lies. If you can find it, The New Yorker ran an article on November 7, 2005, called "The Translation Wars," about the debates over translating, with Dostoevsky as the main focus, and it's fascinating how for years his work was colored a certain way by the nature of the main translator. (I looked for it online and could not find it.)

Anyway, I've tested the reply function and it's all in working order. I wish I still could figure out how to make the comment section more obvious, but I think we've seen what happens when I start touching things.

Current Soundtrack: Elevody; Morrissey, "At Last I Am Born;" Saint Etienne, "Mr. Donut"

Current Mood: embarassed