Featured Post

BFRC

I am posting this as a benchmark, not because I think I'm playing very well yet.  The idea would be post a video every month for a ye...

Monday, April 28, 2014

Translating Mallarmé, or, Someone is Wrong on the Internet.

See the prosody bully at work here.

7 comments:

Anonymous said...

God. People in English are so ignorant and so arrogant. (They should be illegal, I feel, upon reading this.) Useful to remember since I usually long to be in that department, larger, easier to hide in, less dictatorially run than Spanish, usually. Mais elle est dingue, cette conversation...

Jonathan said...

To be fair, I think half the people in that conversation are not even English professors, but autodidact independent scholars like John Emerson or Rich Puchalsky. Adam Roberts is a science fiction novelist.

Anonymous said...

Well, OK. But they are officious nitwits. Bad faculty are like this. It is why I always thought I was not smart enough to be a professor -- many professors talked, or most importantly wrote like these people, and I could not see why it was smart, so, I must not be in the know ... ;-)

Jonathan said...

Agreed.

Andrew Shields said...

I was disappointed when you apologized. You were doing exactly what you said: pointing out a basic mistake in the approach to the translation and raising the question of how to rethink the problem. If people feel offended by precision, that's their problem, not yours.

Jonathan said...

Yes, I shouldn't have apologized. I guess I felt like my comments were unwelcome, and hence I had overestimated the level of discourse that people wanted to use. That was my fault. I misjudged the rules of the game in that case.

Andrew Shields said...

Well, the people who were offended could also be accused of "misjudging the rules of the game". Perhaps they weren't even aware of their assumptions about what the unwritten rules until someone broke the rules.