Translations

Compositional Design Course 

This year brings a new focus on quick ink-wash copies from the masters - copies of wash drawings and ink drawings after paintings and frescos.  I very much like what Boris Pasternak wrote about the work of "translations" (writing) or copies (art).

Excerpted from the introduction of "Pasternak; Selected Poems," translated by Jon Stallworthy and Peter France.

"Boris Pasternak's views on literary translation were based on his own immense experience as a translator. Circumstances were such that for long periods of his life translation was his only source of income. [He] compared it with the work of an artist copying classical models in an art gallery, and preferred it to all other ways of earning a living.

"The translation must be the work of an author who has felt the influence of the original long before he begins his work. It must be the fruit of the original, its historical consequence.

"More than this; we have said that translation is inconceivable because the principal charm of a work of art lies in its unrepeatability. How then can a translation repeat it? But translation is conceivable, because ideally it too will be a work of art; sharing a common text, it will stand alongside the original, unrepeatable in its own right. And translation is conceivable because for centuries before our time whole literatures have translated one another. Translation is not a method of getting to know isolated works, it is the channel whereby cultures and peoples communicate down the centuries."