Friday, November 11, 2011

Mangled translation

[I couldn't resist reproducing some paragraphs from a translation of an earlier posting of mine on Claude Levi-Strauss, apparently into Russian and back again. It is from a site called russianbrides, where you can read the whole thing. -- Ah, the days when we were enchanted together!]


In college in the fifties I [WD] hew down in with a grouping of graduate students who were sociologists and anthropologists who half convinced me that, enchanted together, these disciplines sufficed to apprehend the over the moon marvellous. Sociology (then at the replenish of its prestige) explained advanced industrial societies, while anthropology took complaint in deep trouble of the tea. I was continually uneasy that both seemed to pass up the highest achievements of magnanimous sensation of values to assail together on the homespun. Of plainly the methodological problems posed in the locality anthropology and sociology had not surfaced, in spite of a not divers were hyperopic, even-tempered in those Pollyannaish days. For divers, I postulate, this lay plaice was an advantage; to me it was not. Epigrammatically, W.

Auden attach it first-rate, with his eleventh commandment, "Thou shalt not allocate a sexually transmitted approach." Nonetheless in 1955 I dutifully acquired chestnut of the required bibles, a behemoth tome entitled Anthropology Today: An Encyclopedic Inventory, edited in the locality the distinguished Americanist Alfred L. H. Kroeber. I was struck, in spite of, in the locality an identical in the soft-cover in the locality Claude Lйvi-Strauss, a maverick who attracted me in the locality his autonomy. As I cancel (the soft-cover has recently disappeared during a needed triage of my library), this tome had essays in the locality hither fifty specialists, mostly representing the consensus of American Anthropology at the outdated, dominated in the locality the unwritten law established in the locality Franz Boas. in cross This was in details my primordial introduction to structuralism, a taxpayer to which I settle upon replacing in a tick.

[snip]

Lйvi-Strauss, in studying the mythologies of untaught tribes, transformed the scheme the 20th century came to apprehend mores itself. "A important pundit, Mr. Tribal mythologies, he argued, Вlan remarkably smarmy systems of dialectics, showing normal bananas qualities as chichi as those of Western societies. Lйvi-Strauss rejected the end that differences between societies were of no consequence, but he focused on the down aspects of humanity's attempts to apprehend the over the moon marvellous. . . . He became the primordial agent of 'structuralism,' a ready of compassion in which cosmic 'structures' were believed to underlie all magnanimous be disadvantaged by, giving decree to possibly disparate cultures and creations.""His manage was a complete power even-tempered on his critics, of whom there were divers. And his article - a ragout of the chop-logic and the rapturous, fullest extent of unafraid juxtapositions, knotty Donnybrook and cultivate metaphors - resembles trivial that had awaken formerly in anthropology."Lйvi-Strauss is such a justly known sketch that the cornerstone facts of his lumpen may be lickety-split summarized.

There has been no comparable successor to him in France. Born into a acclaimed French-Jewish artistic corm, he started in tenets. In the 1930s he had the distribute possessions of being invited to appropriate with a look on a professor at the University of Sгo Paulo in Brazil. Finding this taxpayer too arid, he switched to anthropology. From this about he launched his review trips to the reach of the Amazonian Indians, his merely the sack manage. After the decline of France he made his scheme to Marseille where he was proficient to put into place a speedboat to the French Caribbean. disparaging. Having returned to France, he was fleetingly mobilized at the start of World War II.

[snip]

As he remarked, in spite of, the manage can clear-headed as plainly be characterized as the dealing of men. I made my primordial apprehensive agreement with the French scholar's manage in 1955, in spite of I had trivial kink of the scheme he on into what capability be termed the "map of information." In the plainly of the following decade a dissimilar of translations of exposed books made his ideas more rambler in the English-speaking over the moon marvellous. As I acclaimed. Two handle absent from, and appease ballast as distribute introductions. in cross More unqualifiedly connected to structuralism was The Savage Mind, translated into English in 1966. The primordial is his amply illuminating pilgrimages recollections Tristes Tropiques (1955).

When I was teaching at Columbia University in the untaught seventies I got the end of bothersome to reshape structuralism into ancient history. I formed a trivial grouping of graduate students to hit this conversion. Lйvi-Strauss had unmistakable the scheme with his studies of the masks of the Northwest Coast Indians. As with other such attempts in this the sack, our efforts did not greatest ballast to much. I conclude with a not divers words hither structuralism itself.

[And so forth.]

Labels:

0 Comments:

Post a Comment

<< Home