My girlfriend is overseas at a conference on Middle East political/cultural issues now. I’ll see if she has any conversations about this topic.

Siva

“The situation took a brutal turn on January 1st when more than 100 ethnic Kikuyu (the tribe Kibaki belongs to) were burned to death by a gang of Kalenjin, Luhya and Luo men (tribes associated with Odinga) in a church outside Eldoret, in the Rift Valley.”

http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/L01651287.htm

(Am sure if you google you will find more facts pointing towards what happened.)

Sadly, 30 people were mercilessly burnt to death by a mob. We are not told the ethnic backgrounds of those who torched the church, just like we are never told the actual ethnic groups of those who burnt the 13 people who took shelter in a house in Nakuru, or of the policemen who shot down over 50 people in Kisumu, Kenya or even of the countless murderers who violently chopped travellers to death and so on and so forth.

Perhaps at this stage, and as part of the healing that Kenyans are desperately trying to achieve, it may be best not to go the ethnic route. Kenyans suffered terribly throughout that period, and to try and contain this suffering in Manichean dyads of ‘good and bad,’ ‘victim and perpetrators’ is to deny voice to the countless people who suffered, yet were not party to any of the atrocities that we saw happen.

Good post. First, I confess I haven’t read enough P&V, nor compared them to others, to be able to assess their work. But I think Pevear’s defense is central to literary translation.

As opposed to other fields of translation (I happen to be in legal translation), which opt for the most conventional way to say something, a literary translator does the opposite. Meaning he measures how different the author’s style is from the common way of speaking and tries to find a voice that’s equivalently unique (to invent an oxymoron) in the target language.

Many non-literary translators, on the other hand, ask the question, “how would the English-speaking lawyer/doctor/businessman say this?,” thereby suppressing the original author’s unique voice and replacing it with the everyman. Some complain Garnett took this approach to the extreme, making Tolstoy and Dostoevsky essentially have the same style.