As to your second 'source,' I don't think that the process you are describing is neccessarily an inherently negative one. For instance, Camus' novels are influenced by the sort of stylistic innovations of American detective fiction. The production of style draws from sources with more promoscuity than acknowledged here. As an extreme opposite example of your point, Hitler's prose is invariably helped by translation. There are some hidden assumptions about translation contained in here. Translation is inevitably something else, but that 'something else' is not inevitably a lesser version of the 'orginal.'
robert wood
> Personally, I think a lot of the bad writing of the
> pomos in English comes from two sources, one innocuous
> and one not.
>
> 1) Pomo is of French origin, and many of its principle
> figures were/are French. The books in English are a
> translation. Moreover, like Aristotle and Heidegger,
> the pomos do a lot of wordplay. In French. So, you get
> the same goofiness in the translated works of Derrida
> and Foucault as you do in those of Aristotle and
> Heidegger, because the translators are attempting to
> render the internal logic of another language.
>
> 2) Anglophone pomos imitate the bad translations from
> French. It would be as if a bunch of Chinese fans of
> Joyce were trying to write like Chinese translations
> of Ulysses.
>
>
>
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