Book review: Der Zauberberg / The Magic Mountain

[finella_c]

Reading Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain. Subjects: entropy, degeneration (physical, social, moral), and the phenomenology of time. Set in a Swiss sanatorium with a cosmopolitan clientele, before the First World War; Mann's heavy-handed metaphor for a 'sick Europe'. Narration proceeds at an absolutely glacial pace, appropriate to a door-stopper of

Comments

[dalmeny]

I can think of a film with similar translation problems, 2046, where the dialogue is in a couple of Chinese dialects and Japanese, which are all subtitled without comment into English.

Comics sometimes denote when dialogue is being translated through the use of <> as as marker, so it's possible to indicate that someone is speaking clumsily in a second language. Of course this can also be conveyed in prose using, "he said in French", so I wonder if that's how other translations of Mann approach this.

I expect this is obvious to anyone who has seriously considered translation, such as yourself...

[finella_c]

Wong Kar-Wei! Such beautiful films. Always up for re-viewings of Ashes of Time Redux.

So, in 2046, did you find that _knowing_ the dialogue was in different languages (and / or knowing that the language differences were not flagged in the subtitles) changed the meaning of what you saw, or how you responded to it?

I didn't know about that convention in comics - thanks. I still think it's different being told that someone is speaking clumsily versus experiencing their clumsiness directly. But I guess comics rely on the visual dimension to add layers of meaning. Good adaptations use the chosen target medium to do that - i.e. supplement what is lost in translation.

Maybe we should see all translation as a form of adaptation? Hmmm...

[dalmeny]

I would have to rewatch 2046 to be sure, but I think so. Some of it involves a romance between a young Chinese woman and a Japanese man in Hong Kong, perhaps a decade or so after WWII. The dialects convey information about the Chinese characters' origins and pasts.

There's probably an article or two in how comics convey different languages, accents and voices through choices in script and typeface. Alan Moore is one of the few writers I can think of who will have pages of untranslated text written in Arabic or Chinese (or Martian), then shift to using when the point-of-view shifts to someone who understands the language.