Nice to see, at least, that he was using my local library, Swiss Cottage.

I cannot imagine the horrors of translating such a piece. En français, bien sûr, all agreements must be accurate so as to remove any possible ambiguity of subject. To avoid such ambiguity all while maintaining ambiguity of gender by replacing « J'étais seul(e) » and re-working it to « Ma solitude au milieu d'une foule de gens ne faisait qu'aviver le problème » is an impressive demonstration of traductological savoir-faire, un cas exemplaire, if you will, of the untranslatable becoming translatable (though this was sans doute ulcer-inducing).

My only hope is that the Brophy will be remunerated for his translation per word count in French!

Transductor, treasoner. --Douglas Hofstadter

John, the phrase is a lot older than Hofstadter.

Yes, but I think he was quoting it for Hofstadter's peculiar way of transducing.

Incidentally, someday I'll have to actually read Le Ton Beau de Marot and post about it. People keep bringing it up in discussions of translation, but much as I enjoyed GEB, when Le Ton Beau came out and I leafed through it in bookstores I found myself intensely irritated by what seemed to me his excessively clever superficiality. But I may have been unfair.

No, that's fair. But it does have its moments.

I agree with Conrad.

French is bad enough, imagine translating into a language like Arabic - which has, if I recall correctly, gender distinction in the first and second person pronouns. It seems that once you got to that point it would be completely impossible to remain agnostic about the narrator's gender. What would the correct response be in that case, other than "hope that the market for Arabic-language books dries up"?

I'll ask my sister how old "traduttore, traditore" is... certainly several 100 years.

"French is bad enough, imagine translating into a language like Arabic - which has, if I recall correctly, gender distinction in the first and second person pronouns. "

or tanslating into a language that requires marking of social hierarchy, or is more specific about differnet varieties of plural, or that doesn't allow much use of tense to sequence events....... All that is what translators get paid for. Sometimes they just punt and you get the King James Bible.

Well, I think there's a difference between providing information that's required by the grammar but not specified in the text, like hierarchy, and hiding information that's deliberately hidden by the text but is made hard to hide by the grammar of the target language. The latter is considerably harder.

I see the difference. I think it depends on your personality type. In the second case what the translator is doing is a kind of passive-aggresssive behavior. That comes pretty easily for some people.

My or rather Hofstadter's point was that to translate "Traduttore traditore" as "Translator, traitor" or "Translators are traitors" is far too clever a translation, thus undermining the point of the saying; therefore (as LH has rightly inferred) Hofstadter devised a truly crappy translation which would by its form illustrate the saying's truth.

As for Le Ton Beau de Marot, I could write a book of about half the length expatiating on its errors and inconsistencies, and actually considered doing so, first as a letter to the author, then as an open letter to the author, until I concluded that as much fun as it would be I couldn't justify the time that would have to be spent -- but I loved the book (unlike, say, the books of Bill Bryson, which have about one error per page and fill me with weariness and disgust (for I am hobbitlike enough to like to read books explaining things I already know)), and I carried it about with me for weeks, causing total strangers to start up conversations with me in French, which I neither speak nor read, so that I would have to explain over and over that only the title is French; at that, I'm grateful I didn't have to read the francophone Egbert B. Gebstadter version, The Graced Tone of Clément: A la louange de la mélodie des mots.

Yup, I'm with John on this one. Hofstadter isn't (and doesn't claim to be, I think) the greatest authority on translation issues, or French, or anything at all outside his fairly narrow field of computer science. But to pass by him (& especially this book) entirely is probably to miss a lot of smart thoughts about language.