translations

But what gets lost—as always with the arts when the philistines arrive—is the art. There is nothing inherently good about a book because it is a translation. There are good books, there are mediocre books, and there are a great deal of awful books: translations fit all three categories.

David Baddiel is suspicious about translations. While you can immediately tell that a work has been translated, he says, you have no idea how good the translation really is. And how do you know that, after slogging through 430 pages, the translator didn’t feel the inclination to improve on the original? Given Baddiel’s examples, such suspicions are not unfounded.

“Milton, Stephen Hawking and Haruki Murakami are to be translated into Arabic as part of a ground-breaking programme to spread foreign learning and literature across the Middle East.” The number of books translated into Arabic in the last 1000 years equals the number translated into Spanish in a single year, and thus the great works of literature are only available to a very few.

This fall there’ll be two new translations of Tolstoy’s War and Peace to choose from. Should you read Ecco’s release, billed as the original, or Knopf’s version, billed as the real thing? Knopf says Ecco’s is just a first draft. Ecco say’s Knopf’s is not reader-friendly. I guess it's war.

Sorry Folks there is no Kama Sutra translation here.
These sutras are really beautiful words.