Re: Zapffe’s On the Tragic: An Attempted Translation
This is a commendable project. What follows is not meant as discouragement, but as advice.
To start off, I suggest removing mentions of selling physical copies from the web page. It might also be good to remove the joking suggestion that a previous translator met an untimely end. We are not dealing with the Necronomicon here
The unedited machine translation is useful for getting an overview of the structure and content of "On the Tragic". As such it is a contribution, but it should not be used as a representation of what Zapffe actually wrote. I will exemplify.
A link to my translation of chapters 1 and 2 can be found
here (I will remove it upon request).
This is not a professional translation, but can be used as a rough guide to the accuracy of the raw machine-translated text. The footnotes and bracketed comments are especially important from a translation perspective.
Some of the machine translated sentences are eerily good, but many are wrong in ways that are not apparent from the translated English. One example from chapter 1:
Lat os si att dette sidste er opgaven. Word for word, this corresponds to "Let us say that this last is the-task". It is machine translated as "Let's say this is the last task." (p. 11 of the MT PDF). The English looks all right on the sentence level, but the actual meaning is "Let us say that this last [thing I mentioned in the previous paragraph] is the task."
I translated this as:
Or might I not even have any preconceived notion, viewing it as my task to approach the concept in a spirit of independence, giving it its rightful place through gradual approximation, eliminating sources of error?
[new paragraph]
Let us say that this is indeed our task.
In order to check the MT text against the original and turn it into a real translation, you need to be able to read the original without relying on machine translation – which requires advanced second language proficiency – or work with someone who can.
There is no getting around the necessity of reading and interpreting the original text, reaching your own understanding of what Zapffe wrote, and making appropriate choices along the way. Even if you have a background in philosophy, you will need to deal with lexical and syntactic difficulties, references to the Scandinavian literature and culture of the early 1900s, and so on. There are passages in the text that will be challenging even for native-level readers of Norwegian/Danish.
Here is a comparison between a reasonably elaborate passage in machine translation and as translated by a human:
p. 107-108 in the translated PDF file:
Only at one point the erkjendende be safety in the strict everyday sense. Whatever his destiny should endure, it must end death. And even though death comes late, the plagues of the age will catch up with him his time and make his mark on his life regardless of the desires and plans he has still had to maintain. This knowledge of death , our surplus knowledge-perhaps their bitterest gift, is already given to us in childhood; on the move down the river of life, the waterfall of death stands high above the valley. Many people try to overdo it with its own rubbing, but the silence afterwards only doubles Frygtelig. However, not all are marked as strongly and not in the same way. There is a great distance from the pure knowledge of the duration of its life to its purity enlightening anticipation of the dissolution process with all the glowing questions arising therefrom and with the strange light falling over all human activity. It hears from battlefields and cemeteries the living thunder of what was. Great works crashed over great ruins, and behind the scenes of events, he sees the quiet millions who are busy utensils and plows as the storms of history pulled over their heads. Nu everything is quiet, what succeeded and what did not succeed, the difference is deleted. The world ruler and the nameless victim, here they mix land and here they swap land, while new badgers froth over the plain, charged with unused power. The earth breathes like a big lung, life out and even through all pores. The story of everything is gripped by the sighted as fiery fellow living of the unfathomability of renewal and the nightmare of repetition in the greatest at least.
Some bits are fine, some bits are subtly (and for the second-language reader, dangerously) wrong. Then you have the bits that are obviously, humorously wrong, like the frothing badgers. But the devil is in the details.
The same passage as translated by me:
On only one point can the experiencer be certain – in the every-day understanding of the term. No matter how his fate might unfold, it will end in death. And even if death comes late, the torments of old age will catch up with him in time and dictate the terms of his life without any regard to the desires and plans he might still have left. This knowledge of death, perhaps the most bitter gift of our surplus of consciousness, is given to us as early as in childhood; during our journey down the river of life, the distant roar of the waterfall of death reaches across the valley. Many attempt to drown it out by making noises of their own, but the stillness that follows only becomes twice as fearful. However, all are not affected as strongly, nor in the same way. There is a vast distance between a dry awareness of the duration of the life span and the utterly devastating [imaginary] pre-experiencing of the process of dissolution, with all the burning questions that thereby arise and the strange light that is cast upon all human affairs. From battlefields and graveyards the living man hears the thunder of that which once was. Great works lie toppled upon the ruins of great works, and behind the pageantry he espies the silent millions who labored and tilled the soil while the tumult of history raged past above their heads. Now all is still, both that which came to fruition and that which came to naught; the difference has been leveled out. The ruler of the earth and the nameless victim – here they mix dust and here they exchange dust, while new peoples surge across the plains, charged with fresh vigor. The earth breathes like a great lung; the living emerge and the dead are sucked in through every pore. (1) The history of all creation is encompassed by the painfully vivid co-experience [medoplevelse] of renewal on an incomprehensibly vast scale, and the nightmare of recurrence in great things and in small.
(1) Literally
liv ut og lik ind, literally ”life/living beings [go] out and corpses [go] in”.
A translation that tries to capture the flavor of the original might go along the lines of "Out go the living, in go the dead, through every pore".
