"Although he neither speaks nor reads Persian, he is a popular interpreter of Rumi, rewriting the poems based on other English translations" white liberals lmao
"Although he neither speaks nor reads Persian, he is a popular interpreter of Rumi, rewriting the poems based on other English translations" white liberals lmao
check out these categories:
American translators
Iranologists
Poets from Tennessee
Sufi poets
University of California, Berkeley alumni
this mf is a bit on Trillbilly's podcast lol
This is surprisingly common, especially in poetry. They'll get a grad student to give them a literal, word-by-word translation, and they'll make it pretty and publish it as their own. The grad student is lost to history. WB Yeats's Sophocles renderings are another example.
How is that even real? A literal translation of poetry wouldn't convey half the nuance, that's how poetry works.
Right, they get someone else to provide the meaning, and they take care of the nuance. I think Pevear & Volokhonsky have a similar approach to prose. Gregory Rabassa, who most famously translated Gabriel Garcia Marquez, said that his approach to translation was "How would the author write this if they were writing it in English?", and you can see that governing philosophy in poetry all the time. Translations of Homer going from the Greek's dactylic hexameter to English's iambic pentameter, and that kind of thing. Or Ovid's The Art of Love, rendered in limericks.
mayos like this really be translating all the text from every single non-european culture and gatekeeping every single english-language Wikipedia article and then you wonder why there are unsourced quotes about Genghis Khan being white lmao
so this mf just reads a rumi poem in english and goes "ah so true" and just changes the words around a bit to make it his own? academia is a grift.
Well to be halfway fair, translating poetry is a fucking art in itself. You have to understand how to convey pace which works differently in different languages.
Like Spanish has long sentences, German has long words, etc. If you directly translate English to Spanish then it’s going to sound really punchy and abrupt and if you directly translate German into English it’s going to become very verbose.
But the issue here is the guy cant read the originals. So how the fuck can he know what the original pace and feeling is supposed to be? He’s writing fan fiction.
But to the broader concept of translating prose, actually that’s an amazing field in itself. The best translators of poetry are multilingual poets because they have to rewrite the poems to get the same feeling as the original, and sometimes the best translations are actually quite distant from a direct transcription of the original.
No he isn't. Fan fiction writers tend to be consumers of the original work
Plato's Cave was actually about white people refusing to ever read anything in it's original language.
I still think it didn't have a meaning; it was just Plato telling his buddy about his idea for a dystopian novel about people living in a cave looking at shadows (not everyone was cut out to tell stories)
I don't think garden gnomes should hold professorships
🧵 on the secularization of Rumi including examples https://nitter.net/PersianPoetics/status/1261745279860080641#m
Reminds me of how Westerners try to turn the Daodejing into this weird proto-anarchist work when it's actually fairly autocratic at places. The Ursula translation was pretty bad, especially the part where she took out a passage because it was too "Confucian."
Maybe she was worried there would be too much....Confucian
Really thought this was going to be about Daniel Ladinsky, who wrote multiple books that pose as translations of the poetry of Hafiz, but actually if you read the forward it is merely poetry "inspired" by Hafiz, he claims Hafiz appeared to him in a dream with these poems. https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2020/6/14/fake-hafez-how-a-supreme-persian-poet-of-love-was-erased
Which was really deflating for me because those Hafiz "poems" helped get me through some angsty times in my young adulthood.
This is like inverse me
the sad part is this guy eventually got an honorary doctorate in persian literature from university of tehran. the humanities in iran are neglected and in a sad state of affairs this just goes to show how fucked up it is
Went to a posh school