Sub-par-way

I have finally finished the Pamuk. It was actually rather good once I made an effort with it. The problem was reading it on the subway rides to school, which is where I do most of my non-school reading. Some books and authors are simply not designed to be reading in small chunks, and I think Pamuk is definitely one of those. He is too dense, too intricate, and a twenty minute bash simply does not do him justice. Interestingly, where I was successful in engrossing myself in his book was on the long ride down to South Ferry - about 50 minutes or so - which really allowed me to relax into his style.

I thought you would appreciate this piece about how difficult it is to translate Turkish into English, as described by his translator, Maureen Freely, talking about the devrik cümle:

This is a sentence--usually a very long sentence--in which words appear in an order different from that ordained by custom and practice, and cascading clauses create a series of expectations that are subverted by the verb at the very end. The poet Murat Nemet-Nejat has described Turkish as a language that can evoke a thought unfolding. How to do the same in English without the thought vanishing into thin air?

The accepted view, especially among bilingual Turks, is that the translator should pay close attention to the sentence's "inner logic." This might also be desdcribed as its architecture--the elegant way in which the various parts reflect one another and, together, reflect the mystery that must never be coarsened by words; the games with voice and tense and the imaginative melding of different epochs and places in setneces that may be admired at length like pictures in a museum. For those who feel at home inside the traditions of Turking thought, the virtues of this approach are manifest. A translation that is utterly faithful to that inner logic will, in their view, open up like a flower to reveal its inner truth . . .

This passage reinforced to me the problems of reading in translation, and that languages really are structured differently, not just grammatically, but in terms of thought processes. A communication gap really does exist between those who are fluent, and those who are not. Nonetheless, understanding how the language works, and why it is translated in a certain way, does help with the reading. All very interesting, to me, at least.