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Old 04-03-2021, 09:12 AM   #27 (permalink)
adidasss
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Originally Posted by ando here View Post
Minor quibble: Despite the valiant effort I think we're missing something in the translation. MM, you say (in your spoiler), quite rightly, that the novel is evocative and I agree but English tends to flatten the ornamental nature of Italian. I wish I had a dual language edition of Cities. Sometimes I feel the Weaver translation drops the ball in situations where I just know Calvino means to make a graceful play.
I found an Italian text online so you can do a comparison. I think it's virtually impossible to make a 100% correct translation but from what I gathered from my copy, the translation is quite good. The serbo-croatian one took some liberties that maybe captured the meaning better but who knows what the meaning is! I certainly didn't.
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