READIN

🦋 Units of rhythm, units of syntax

I was complaining to a friend recently about how the New Yorker had printed its translation of "The Prefiguration of Lalo Cura" split up into paragraphs where the original was a single paragraph, and he did not really get where I was coming from -- if it was more readable in paragraphs, isn't that the way to go? As I'm reading the first sentence of Queen Isabel was singing rancheras, I'm wondering why it seems so important to me that this block be preserved as a single sentence, thinking I ought to justify that somehow. If it's more readable broken up, why not break it up?

In the flow of a book or story I do not slavishly follow the syntactic boundaries in the source text -- well perhaps I err a bit on the side of slavishly following them; still. There are certainly points where a period in English seems like the correct translation of a comma or a y in Spanish. But these long paragraphs and long sentences in Spanish seem to me to fill more than a syntactic role; they are communicating a rhythm and pacing which splitting them up has a tendency to spoil. And not only in Spanish -- being a single paragraph seems to me like a fundamental quality of (for instance) "Ein Landarzt"; it pulls the reader insistently into the driving rhythm of the story, will not let go.

posted evening of Sunday, May 12th, 2013
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