Hi,
Do you think you are missing a lot by reading an established work of fiction in translation? Can you imagine a valued ‘classic’ work of literature in your language having the same effect on someone else reading it in translation as it did on you when you first read it?
Alan
Some translations are better than the original. One case is the perpetually popular Czech translation of a “humorous” American book from 1937, called “The Education of Hyman Kaplan”. It’s about an adult ESL student in New York. The English original is pretty much not funny, but the translation has had Czechs rolling on the floor laughing for decades.
However, some strange things happen in translated novels, and it appears to me that competence isn’t a criterion for getting one’s translation published or even for it to become the standard translation of a given work. In the only available English translation of Remarque’s “All Quiet on the Western Front”, there’s a mistake right on the first page. The English says the army cook has a “carroty head”, which means that he has orange hair. In the German original (“Im Westen nichts neues”), the cook has a “Tomatenkopf”, in other words his head is big, round and red, like a tomato.
Another example: In “Don Quixote”, the original Spanish says that Don Quixote has a horse that’s so skinny that it looks like a greyhound. However, in every English translation on the library shelves, he has a skinny horse AND a greyhound.
I once read a Heinrich Böll story that had a rather extended reference to Theodor Körner in it, who is virtually unknown to English readers. I then read the English translation, and instead of finding some other way to convey the same image, the translator simply took the whole reference out of the story, which meant it lost half its imagery.
One interesting thing is that after you have had some experience as a translator, you can read an English translation and notice that the translator has made a mistake or misunderstood something, even without seeing the text in the original language. You just get a feel for spotting those mistakes.
Oh, that is so true!
.
Hi,
I read Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment (Russian: Преступление и наказание) when I was at University (Wordsworth Classics edition) and thought it quite boring and at times hard to read.
Then I read that Swetlana Geier received an award for a completely new translation into German of the book, and reading it was a lot of fun. She breathed new life into those 19 century characters and came up with a very modern translation. She even changed the title from ‘Schuld und Sühne’ (Guilt and Atonement) to ‘Verbrechen und Strafe’ (Crime and Punishment). A brave move on the part of the publisher.
The works of nearly all the Russian classics have been undergoing retranslation into English by a team named Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky. Either they never sleep or they are really 25 people and not just two, because they have been churning out new additions of these fat novels at an astounding rate. Just for fun, I stand in a bookstore and compare the opening paragraphs of their books with those of the standby Penguin editions of the same novels. The difference is amazing. You can really see how the older translations laboriously adhere to the Russian syntax, while the translations by Pevear and Volokhonsky are in completely natural English. Their text is so well-wrought that they can even leave certain specialized words in Russian (such was words for distinctive Russian-style carriages) without losing any clarity. Previous translators put these words into English and their text was still muddled.
It’s also fun to compare translation of Beowulf. There’s one I really like that’s done in the US and is written in the same type of meter that the original was. Considering that some American country songs also accidentally have Old English meter, it’s not too far fetched to think this can still be done by someone on purpose.
You lose more from some authors (e.g. Flaubert, Calvino, Borges) than others (Mann); then again, some translators (e.g. Malory, Pope, Burton) add more than others (Lattimore, E.V. Rieu, Graves).
Beckett is an interesting case of self-translation.
MrP