Josh Billings in der Los Angeles Review of Books vom 26. Dezember 2016 zu der im November erschienen vollständigen Übersetzung von John E. Woods.

https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/mons...asha-sokolov/#!

Zitat von "Monsters of Translation"

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THE HISTORY OF LITERATURE is full of untranslatable books, the vast majority of which have been translated very well at least once.

Reading Bottom’s Dream, John E. Woods’s new English translation of Arno Schmidt’s notoriously-untranslatable Zettel’s Traum, is like watching one of these beasts saunter out of the forest and begin munching on a telephone pole: the sheer, jurassic weirdness of the thing scrambles our pathways, making it difficult to do anything except stare. Part of this is simply a matter of size, for at 1,400 folio-sized pages Bottom’s Dream is both long and so physically cumbersome that it’s hard to imagine reading it on anything other than a lectern, or maybe a whale-elephant-turtle pagoda. Inside its cover, the idiosyncratically spelt and punctuated narrative scrolls downward in a trunk with marginal notes protruding like the ribs of a gigantic skeleton. The whole effect seems meant to repel, which is weird, since one of the first impressions we get upon reading Bottom’s Dream is of entering a puzzle or game, something designed to hold our attention. Foreboding in appearance, it responds to its audience as if it had been waiting for us … and then the more we read, the more the labyrinth opens, until soon we recognize it as less a minotaur’s trap than a kind of illustrated manuscript: a “booke” whose intricately embroidered letters are meant not just to be read, but to teach us how to read better.

It’s easy to see how it does so, for when it comes to technique, Bottom’s Dream keeps its gears on the surface. It’s like a gigantic Rube Goldberg machine, bristling with an inventiveness that veers past “smart” to a point between “zany” and “Pee-Wee’s Playhouse.”

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Wobei ich zugeben muß, daß mir die Fingerübungen der LARB, wo man zu oft an den Altären des Poststrukturalismus opfert, zumeist vorkommen, als hätten Deleuze & Guattari sich ins Genre des Besinnungsaufsatzes verirrt.

Zitat

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Its difficulty tempts us, at points, to say that there is no answer, but to do this is to misunderstand the model of reading being offered to us — a model that, though it may at times be frustrating, still believes in what it’s doing. It believes, ultimately, that the world is there to be read, and can be read.

This optimistic pragmatism also undergirds the act of translation itself. Just as the translator knows that he will never perfectly recreate the book he’s translating, this gigantic book understands that the world outside language will always be bigger than language is, while still believing that we can approach it. The untranslatable can be translated, as Bottom’s Dream itself demonstrates — demonstrates even better, maybe, than Zettel’s Traum does. This is a weird thing to think about. We are so used to talking about aspects of a work being “lost in translation” that the idea of anything being added sounds strange, even sacrilegious. And yet, this is at least partly what has happened here. The transformation of Schmidt’s Word has added another level to It, illustrating the book’s own suggestion that it is precisely the “untranslatable” thing that is crying out most acutely to be translated, interpreted, read. Doing so isn’t necessarily easy — but then why should it be? Transformation isn’t easy; on the contrary, it thrives on wreckage. It demands that we be pragmatic, admitting up front that many of our “successes” will be compromises, so that some of them will be miracles. It requires that we translate, in other words, which is not something I would normally recommend to any sane person. But then maybe reading doesn’t have as much to do with sanity as we’re used to thinking.

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Ja. Und nachts ist es kälter als draußen. Bitte nicht versuchen, dieser Passage einen Sinn unterlegen zu wollen. Beweist übrigens sehr schön, daß man sich auf Postfaktisch seitenlang über einen Text verspreiten kann, ohne auch nur eine Zeile davon zur Kenntnis genommen zu haben.