distasteful
Apr. 20th, 2004 10:41 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
truepennyBefore proceeding to my own woes, I would like to point to ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
misia's post on the transparency or otherwise of writing, especially in an online autobiographical (or semi-autobiographical, or quasi-autobiographical, or pseudo-autobiographical, depending on one's intent) forum like this one. What she says is so very true.
Meanwhile, back in Dodge, the miscreants in the jail are plotting revenge on the Sheriff.
Which is to say, I have Latin translations to do for the first time in ... a really long time.
This, I think, is the issue that most completely blindsided me at my defense. I was expecting questions about my argument (although there were surprisingly few), expecting concern and dissatisfaction about my handling of the secondary reading (of which there was a great deal). But I was not expecting my committee to flay me up one side and down the other for having used the Loeb translations of Seneca. I knew they weren't great, but I was frankly providing them merely as a service for readers who didn't feel like resurrecting their rusty Latin. I'd made sure that the Loeb provided the gist of Seneca's meaning and simply moved on. It wasn't an issue I was interested in, and since this was a dissertation in ENGLISH Literature, of which only one chapter dealt with a Latin author, and that much more on the plot and theme and influence level than the language level, I didn't expect my committee to be interested in it, either. That's actually an overstatement; it didn't occur to me that anyone would even notice, much less mention, the matter.
Wrong. Dead wrong. There are more ways to object to a translation than I had ever imagined, and my committee practiced all of them. I've rarely felt so incompetent, naïve and stupid in my entire life.
I felt like a lion thrown to the Christians.
The upshot of it all is that I'm doing my own translations, which may be more work than some of my other options, but is considerably less bother. It doesn't require finding and assessing other translations, just me and a dictionary and squeezing blood out of a stone.
And yes, since you ask, I am bitter about it.
misia's post on the transparency or otherwise of writing, especially in an online autobiographical (or semi-autobiographical, or quasi-autobiographical, or pseudo-autobiographical, depending on one's intent) forum like this one. What she says is so very true.Meanwhile, back in Dodge, the miscreants in the jail are plotting revenge on the Sheriff.
Which is to say, I have Latin translations to do for the first time in ... a really long time.
This, I think, is the issue that most completely blindsided me at my defense. I was expecting questions about my argument (although there were surprisingly few), expecting concern and dissatisfaction about my handling of the secondary reading (of which there was a great deal). But I was not expecting my committee to flay me up one side and down the other for having used the Loeb translations of Seneca. I knew they weren't great, but I was frankly providing them merely as a service for readers who didn't feel like resurrecting their rusty Latin. I'd made sure that the Loeb provided the gist of Seneca's meaning and simply moved on. It wasn't an issue I was interested in, and since this was a dissertation in ENGLISH Literature, of which only one chapter dealt with a Latin author, and that much more on the plot and theme and influence level than the language level, I didn't expect my committee to be interested in it, either. That's actually an overstatement; it didn't occur to me that anyone would even notice, much less mention, the matter.
Wrong. Dead wrong. There are more ways to object to a translation than I had ever imagined, and my committee practiced all of them. I've rarely felt so incompetent, naïve and stupid in my entire life.
I felt like a lion thrown to the Christians.
The upshot of it all is that I'm doing my own translations, which may be more work than some of my other options, but is considerably less bother. It doesn't require finding and assessing other translations, just me and a dictionary and squeezing blood out of a stone.
And yes, since you ask, I am bitter about it.
