Scholarly discussion of the music of John Cage.

[Rod Stasick <>]

Sometimes a translator may go for the closest meaning
that's perceived by him or herself (thereby producing a type of 
frustration in trying to get it "right") or the same translator may 
want to try to consider offering a way to let the reader inside 
a particular culture - in this case Turkish - derive a personal meaning.


®ø∂


---
http://stasick.org



On Jul 18, 2012, at 4:15 PM, john saylor wrote:

> greeting
> 
> On 7/18/12, Semih Firincioglu 
> <>
>  wrote:
>> Talking about meaning: I kind of got stuck with the translation of "I have
>> nothing to say and I am saying it," believe it or not. In English it may
>> mean "I don't have anything to say and that is what I am saying" or "all I
>> have is "nothing" and that "nothing" is what I am delivering." You can go
>> only in one direction in Turkish and I took the first route but it still
>> bugs me. Appropriately obsessive and possibly silly, I guess.
> 
> not silly at all to my way of thinking. this is one of his most famous
> quotations, and also ripe with multiple meanings, as you mention. it
> is really true that you can go only one direction in turkish? perhaps
> you meant only one way to go with a turkish translation of these
> particular words.
> 
> while i don't know many of them by name, i know there have been many
> turkish poets over the long history during which [imaginative and
> literary] people have been living in that region. multiple meanings
> are one of the poet's main tricks, so it seems odd to me that you
> can't do anything like this in turkish.
> 
> perhaps i am only misunderstanding what you have said.
> 
> -- 
> \js [http://or8.net/~johns/] : "complete obscure contrariness";