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Holger
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« on: August 16, 2018, 06:45:47 pm » |
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First of all, I do understand the problem very well, though of course, if I read the liner notes I won't care about the English version.
However, I can of course comment a little on the German originals. Eckhardt van den Hoogen is, to say the least, a very special case. I know a good deal of persons – musicologists who opinions I respect a lot included – who pretty much like his style. I must admit that I don't, and I seldom read one of his essays in total. It is all very much over the top in my view, quite the opposite of being prosaic. You already described the content of his notes pretty well, and about the same could be said about the German he uses. He often seems to burst with enthusiasm and then has a soft spot for all sorts of ornaments, images, metaphors, quotes, complicated constructions and related stuff. It is certainly written on a high level of language but at the same time very much at the border of sounding mannered.
I see the problem about Susan Marie Praeder's translations, and of course the sentences you quoted should have never been translated like that. On the other hand, when you talk about rather translating the "sense" of the original, it is also true that the original is overloaded with images and all sorts of extras, and a good deal of van den Hoogen's writing is actually very much about finding just these images (kaleidoscopes etc.). It already sounds a little strange or, say, special in German, and translating it is probably a very hard task.
Personally I do prefer a more sober and fact-oriented approach, and this would certainly be a lot easier to translate.
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