Strangely enough, the song "Jesse's Girl" by Rick Springfield was stuck in my head last night and for whatever reason I caught myself trying to sing it in Spanish... "La chica de Jesseeee"..... yeah, it doesn't work. This got me thinking about our discussion yesterday on translation of literary works. El estudiante de Salamanca has so much rhythm and flows so beautifully (and horrifically!) that we could barely do it justice with our English translations. I think the same goes for songs. There is so much more than trying to create a rhyming pattern like in the original song. Like we talked about, English and Spanish sound differently to a reader and when translating one to another, you really lose a lot. One of my favorite Spanish songs is "Dejame Vivir" por Jarabe de Palo (check it out, it's good). Whenever I listen and translate the words back to English in my head, it just sounds choppy and weird. Like Profesora emphatically expressed, we SHOULD keep works in their own languages. However, I can't help but think about all the great stories we would be missing if we could only read in our own language(s). I guess that would be an incentive of learning all the languages in the world!
One a side note, I read Popol Vuh for Spanish 555. It was translated to English from the Quiche language and I thought it was very well done.
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