Dennis Wuerthner: Academic Translation

Dennis Wuerthner: Academic Translation

Dina Famin

 

One thing that struck me about Professor Wuerthner’s presentation was how much fun he had during the translation process, which he described as a “love relationship with the work and author.” I’ve always loved academic translations, including footnotes, but I learned this year that I only like them when I’m reading. When I’m the one doing them, I get so, so, so bored. It’s so hard! Maybe my translationship with my author just isn’t quite where it needs to be yet. But it was wonderful to see the research aspect being one of the key parts of enjoyment for Professor Wuerthner, who got to follow literally every rabbit he came across.

Professor Wuerthner mentioned the concessions made during such a translation, which is not for the faint of heart, to read or to write, with footnotes three times as long as the text itself. Due to our removal from the text both in time and space, we cannot relate to it as the intended audience did. Furthermore, as it’s a blended text, Professor Wuerthner had to decide how to translate the poetry, the rhythm and rhyme of which was “often simply impossible” to translate. Some puns and expression were lost in this method of over-explaining, but Professor Wuerthner’s reading of some parts (I liked the breadth of tone and topic!) was lively and amusing. The stories were entertaining, doubly so in the voice of such a speaker, and the poems were both beautiful and tongue-in-cheek at different moments. So although something was undeniably lost, I cannot say that the result was dry, despite its academic nature.

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