Re: new relay

On Wed, 30 May 2001, Aidan Grey wrote:

>    I can only speak for myself - I don't like using
> Biblical passages because 1) I'm not Christian, 2)
> Christianity is the dominant religion in the US, 3) I
> don't like the ideas it espouses, 4) it is
> controversial (in interpretation and so on).
>    If it's going to be a religious text, I'd MUCH
> rather a fictional religion's texts were used, even if
> they were monotheistic.
For me it's exactly the other way around: I don't like using Biblical
passages because I *am* Christian, and if I translate from the Bible
I probably can't help introducing Biblical language and imagery into
Valdyas and the Valdyan language. The danger is that I'll have a very
hard time distinguishing what's native to it and what's been
"grafted", and I don't want Valdyas to represent *my* morals and
values, but its own. They may be similar in some respects, but
they're not the same.

The same goes with twentieth-century political texts, or indeed any
Western European political text: I've been steeped in that culture.
It's too close to home. I think it may be the same phenomenon that
keeps me from translating my own fiction: I know it so well that
translating it doesn't bring it closer, but pushes it further away.
Hard to explain; does anyone understand it well enough to paraphrase?

It's much easier to do a text from whatever other culture, whether
fictional or from parts of this world I didn't grow up in; it may be
full of cultural artifacts, but they're not *my* cultural artifacts,
so I can handle them from outside.

   Irina

--
           Varsinen an laynynay, saraz no arlet rastynay.
irina@valdyas.org (myself)     http://www.valdyas.org/irina/valdyas