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May Book Club: Literature in translation
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Message 1.聽
Posted by Herb Robert (U14072548) on Saturday, 1st May 2010
Welcome to this month's Book Club, where the topic is Literature in Translation. Any comments you have would be most welcome, so don't be shy, let everyone know what you're thinking!
The rota for the Book Club, which starts on the 1st of each month, can be found at
and the rota for the Book of the Month Club, which discusses one particular book starting on the 21st of each month, at
This is, of course, a huge topic, and is going to mean quite different things to different people. Perhaps when we've discussed it this time we might think of narrowing it down at a later date. My approach to this is as a native English speaker who reads exclusively in English. Many years ago I read French and Italian at university, but the novels I read there I chose, where possible, to read in English and to pillage the originals for suitable quotes. It is also, I think, widely recognised that in the UK at least 鈥渇oreign鈥 literature is hard to sell to people.
I am intrigued by what can get lost in translation. For this reason, I will, wherever possible, read poetry in the original language, because it seems to me that poetry is so dependent on the language in which it is written that almost any translation is bound to lose the essence of the original. Having said that, how much, as a non-native speaker, can one work one's way into the nuances of the original tongue? Yet my very favourite poem is Dante's /Divine/ /Comedy/ and I have yet to come across any translation that consistently works at all well in English. However deficient my Italian, it is in Italian that I choose to read that work.
A very interesting light is shed on this by non-native speakers writing in English. Nabokov, for example, writes at the very beginning of /Lolita/: 鈥淟olita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta. 鈥 I have always wondered whether that pronunciation is true of (British) English speakers. I think it could only have been written by someone whose first language was not English.
We might also like to consider how much one's own language needs translating. With a little bit of help I think most of us can read Chaucer in the original. But what about poems like Sir Gawain and the Green Knight? Simon Armitage's recent translation of this is excellent; unlike Chaucer, though, the language of the Gawain poet has to be learnt almost as a foreign language. The case of Dante and Italian native-speakers may be similar.
What sort of trust should be place in translators? There is a famous anecdote of Victor Hugo translating 鈥淭he Firth of Forth鈥 into French as 鈥淟e premier du quatrieme.鈥 And how does /Finnegans/ /Wake/ work in, say, Italian? Translation or paraphrase?
The question of trust arose for me quite recently when I was reading /The/ /Elegance/ /of/ /the/ /Hedgehog/ by Muriel Barbery. The parenthesis in the following sentence from the second chapter of the book doesn't seem to make any sense to me, and I wondered if it were similar in French: 鈥淚 have 鈥, if I am to credit certain early mornings of self-inflicted disgust, the breath of a mammoth.鈥 The problem of course is that your reading is halted for reasons that may have nothing to do with the author's writing.
/The/ /Elegance/ /of/ /the/ /Hedgehog/ is, however, an extremely readable and enjoyable book (one which flatters the reader's intelligence no end) and contains the following very interesting passage (commenting on Tolstoy in French but translated now into English, which is pretty mind-boggling!)
鈥'I have been much blamed, both for war, and for peace 鈥 But everything comes at its appointed time.' ...I would give anything to be able to read it in Russian. What I have always liked about this passage are the pauses, the balance between war, and peace, the ebb and flow of his thoughts 鈥 Was this merely a whim on the part of the translator, embroidering something that might have been very simple in the original 鈥 or is this the very essence of a superb text which, even today, still moves me, however I resist, to tears of joy?鈥
Well, I'll be interested to see what everyone else makes of all this. Or of something else entirely!Link to this forum: May Book Club: Literature in translation
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Message 2
Posted by Fureys (U7828610) on Saturday, 1st May 2010
Hello Herb Robert, fascinating thread!
I have worked as a freelance translator for nearly 40 years and really hope that this thread takes off, hope that not too many people will be put off by what is sometimes not an easy subject to discuss.
Please correct my Italian, I think they write 'traduttore traditori' (tanslators traitors) which is pretty much how I feel sometimes. Another useful one is a translation from the Swedish original (which is my main source language): translations are like women, the most beautiful are not always the most faithful.
FureysLink to this forum: May Book Club: Literature in translation
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Message 3
Posted by petal jam (U1466691) on Saturday, 1st May 2010
Sat, 01 May 2010 14:40 GMT, in reply to Herb Robert in message 1
Lovely OP, herb. Don't currently have an all-encompassing theory about literature in translation, except that it is usually, though not always, worth the effort of trying to read something of the original, especially if you have any Latin at all and are reading a Romance language. [Would love it if a Nordic linguist could say the same about Scandinavian tongues. My scrap of German and Old English is nowhere near enough to read a Danish menu.]
English has such a vast vocabulary from various linguistic sources that there is usually a way of conveying the intention of the word, but without all those feminine endings we lose so much incidental poetry, even in prose. Our ears and eyes are attuned to the beginnings of words, the first cut; the southern voice swallows the endings. [For some reason I'm hearing a Yorkshire voice saying 'friendly-like' a re-inforcement of that soft 'lich/ lice' Germanic ending.] Which leads to Simon Armitage's Gawain, which I much enjoyed. Fine storytelling.
Interesting you write about Nabokov: a friend of yore, French mother-tongue, teacher of Russian, living in England use to say that there was a special pleasure in Nabokov when your linguistic frame of reference matches so well. Suppose someone has proposed similar ideas about the natural pairing of 19thC Russian novelists who were educated mostly in French, even in France, with a French translator.
Re Italian - I don't really know modern Italian, but I've found it hugely enjoyable to read Calvino in the original, to linger on the phrases and the images. Once sat next to a chap who was attempting to translate the Vita Nuova into verse in the old reading Room at the BM. [Don't think it came up for publication though - or not as a straight rendition.] For a translation of the /Comedia/ I still prefer the side-by-side Sinclair version, which gives you timely subtitles but doesn't attempt to distract you with imperfect poetry. I tend to be annoyed by translations which proclaim that they have 'presented the essential poetry of the original for a new audience' and feel they've just borrowed it unnecessarily - I can imagine the music of the words, thank you, what I want is the bits of narrative I can't quite catch.
All of which is daft when it comes to reading languages you really don't know at all. To me, that's all Greek. In which case I'm thankful for anything which hangs together and suggests that the ancient philosophers were not much different from a lively bunch in a contemporary taverna. Equally missing for me is the loss of a page of Chinese characters. Like everything else I can think my way into it by way of hieroglyphs and poems in the shape of a mouse's tail but it's still something exotic, not my natural way of 'seeing' literature.
[Have a horrible feeling I've said most of this before, in bits. Apols if you've already heard it.]Link to this forum: May Book Club: Literature in translation
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Message 4
Posted by E Yore (U1479700) on Saturday, 1st May 2010
Sat, 01 May 2010 15:12 GMT, in reply to Herb Robert in message 1
Excellent introduction, Herb. Like many people I suspect, literature in translation (ie from whatever original language into my own - English as it happens) posed few problems for me, despite "clunkiness" of style, as long as I spoke & read no other language. Once my French was good enough to read it without problem, and once I started reading French at university, it became impossible for me to read my dog-eared copy of 'The Three Musketeers' my parents had given me one childhood Christmas, or any other French work in its English translation.
Since I now read French as easily as English, I often have the choice of reading a novel initially written in a foreign language in either its French or English translations and which I choose really depends on the language of origin - Germanic/Scandinavian languages I read in English; Romance languages in French. It doesn't always happen (I've read the Arturo Perez Reverte novels in English because my local English library happened to have them) but at least I have the illusion of being somewhat closer to the original, even if I know I am missing something.
My Russian colleagues are still out on whether Russian comes out better in English or French translation but Tolstoy's novels, especially War and Peace, pose a major problem as quite a lot of the dialogue between the aristocrats is written in French anyway, iirc (or do I have it wrong?). Educated upper-class Russians all spoke French at the time and the fact of swinging between one and the other is rather a part of the novel that Tolstoy's readers would have appreciated, I suppose, just as we appreciate Shakespeare shifting between blank verse and prose where one or other of his characters "slums it" (thinking of Henry V and the night before Agincourt as Henry walks through the camp.)
When Umberto Eco's 'Name of the Rose' came out, I had quite an interesting conversation with someone in his French publishing house who hated the French translation, because you couldn't appreciate the constant sliding between Italian, good Latin, mediaeval Latin and mumbo-jumbo that takes place. Eco plays with language deliberately, but does that mean that we all need to learn Italian to appreciate the novel fully?
As to "tradutore, tradditore" - sometimes not! The same couple of translators, Richard and Clara Winston, translated from German to English both Albert Speer's 'Inside the Third Reich' and Joachim Fest's 'Hitler'. The former is beautifully smooth reading, the latter is heavy, clunky and like wading through treacle. I can only suppose that Speer's German is light and smooth and Fest's is not ...
And to end these witterings, have any of you living abroad ever had the strange experience of reading English in translation? French friends cannot understand why I will not read an English novel in French (after having tried, I assure you. Poirot in French isn't half as funny); even when one doesn't know the text already, it is like seeing an actor one knows heavily disguised for film and one tries to tease out the features one knows. Very disconcerting.
, Herb, never read our authors in translation but always in theLink to this forum: May Book Club: Literature in translation
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Message 5
Posted by E Yore (U1479700) on Saturday, 1st May 2010
Sat, 01 May 2010 15:15 GMT, in reply to E Yore - pointless pedant in message 4
Oh dear, bad editing, scrub the last line of my post. I was just making a stupid joking comment on Herb's reading his authors in translation at university.Link to this forum: May Book Club: Literature in translation
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Message 6
Posted by Fureys (U7828610) on Saturday, 1st May 2010
Petal Jam,
I've lived in Scandinavia actually longer than I have lived in England, so am pretty well at home with the language, and the three major languages here (Danish, Norwegian, Swedish) are from the same group and are not t h a t far away from one another. Danes and Norwegians can read each other's newspapers, while Swedish is a bit further off. It's in speech where they differ markedly. Most southern Swedes can have a stab at understanding spoken Danish - while northern Swedes are more comfortable with Norwegian.
You can clearly see the influence of the Vikings in English (though of course Saxon in its turn was not that far away from southern Viking speak.
Words for parts of the body:
Hand, finger, thumb, skull, neck, (eng)
Hand, finger, tumme, skalle, nacke (swe)
Words for weaponry
Sword, spear, knife, shield, axe, helmet (eng)
Sv盲rd, spjut, kniv, skj枚ld, yxa, hj盲lm (swe)
The Finns however, have a langauge all their own, that no-one else can understand (well, maybe Estonians).
Hope I'm not boring you, but it's a fascinating subject! On the matter of translation, I thought I'd come back later with a few favourite books in Swedish that have been translated into English.
FureysLink to this forum: May Book Club: Literature in translation
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Message 7
Posted by petal jam (U1466691) on Saturday, 1st May 2010
Sat, 01 May 2010 16:56 GMT, in reply to Fureys in message 6
Bit of a hobbyists question, Fureys - could a Swede read something like the Battle of Maldon with less/same fuss as a modern English speaker?
Just thinking that even when you are reading what is ostensibly your own language it doesn't necessarily feel like 'yours'. I read Victorian novels as a child, sitting in front of a coal fire, knowing that my aged granny was born a Victorian. Often our electricity flickered or went off. Stories which were studded with comments on the habits of fires, chimneys, guttering candles or gaslights and how to manage your skirts seemed quite straightforward. However a contemporary North American novel [can't think of a specific] was full of language and materials I didn't recognise.
Actually I was about to type the word 'materiality', thought I'd better check it's meaning [it's from Audit principles] and came up with:
<>
Quite liked the notion that translation, even the most high-minded literary translations, are a transaction from one set of linguistic and cultural ideas to another and that, as fastidious readers of literature in translation, we're looking for discrepancies or misleading weight of coinage.
Those of us who have posted so far are in the slightly privileged(?) position of being able to weigh the transaction. My friend of the Nabokov laughed uproariously at PG Woodhouse but thought the precision untranslatable because the comedy comes from the language as much as from the character and the situation. How to convey the one without overbalancing at the expense of the other? I read/hear this time and time from people about particular classics and authors in their own languages. Perhaps novels of ideas and their opposite straightforward narratives do better in translation. We can appreciate the sequence of ideas leading up to the Whole or see the events unfolding and not worry about the rest.
E. Yore that's interesting that you read the Northern Europeans in English. I tend to find, say, Thomas Mann oddly unfinished in English but don't know enough German to see why. Think you'd want to read e.g. your Milan Kundera in French. For the Russians you could go with either, since you have the fundamental understanding of Tea [available at all times.]Link to this forum: May Book Club: Literature in translation
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Message 8
Posted by E Yore (U1479700) on Saturday, 1st May 2010
Sat, 01 May 2010 17:12 GMT, in reply to petal jam in message 7
Petal, the only reason I would read German or Scandinavian lit in English is the perhaps erroneous assumption that a Germanic language will translate better into another Germanic language that shares certain same origins - using modal verbs rather than subjunctives, not having all important information at the beginning of the sentence as in French etc.
This is perhaps off-thread, but I've always had a pet theory about language, literature and geography, based on first literatures. The Romance languages are by and large geographically based around the Med where sunshine is harsh and shadows limited half the time. Germanic languages being far more northern, the shadows are more pervasive. Is this the reason that the first epics in English, Scandinavian, German all deal with heros fighting mythical monsters or that ghosts/supernatural beings are so prevalent, all of them being easier to imagine in long, shadowy autumns and winters? The early literatures of Romance languages, afaik, are more based around reality and the hero fighting against his fellow man. I do realise my theory breaks down when if early Greek literature is thrown into the mix!
Contrary to popular belief, the French are not Romantic whereas I find the English (sic) are more so.Link to this forum: May Book Club: Literature in translation
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Message 9
Posted by Peggy Monahan (U2254875) on Saturday, 1st May 2010
Sat, 01 May 2010 18:33 GMT, in reply to E Yore - pointless pedant in message 8
I too have done my stint as a translator, and still do some from time to time. I was told by the professionals I worked with that a translation should read as easily as something originally written in that language. That is a very difficult goal to reach - because it means totally reconstructing sentences and paragraphs, and frames of reference.
Literary translation in my experience is either very badly paid or they get someone who is already very well-known as a writer in their own right.
When I'm tired I read detective stories. I prefer to read in English so it's easy. But I will read Agathe Christie etc in French because the context is familiar but then I start to translate in reverse in my head so that gets tiring.
I do not however choose to read literature in languages I read but not well (Italian, Spanish, Portuguese) except for poetry. But when I read in translation I'd choose English unless it's easier to get it in French. I don't think that the source language makes a difference if it's a good translation.Link to this forum: May Book Club: Literature in translation
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Message 10
Posted by petal jam (U1466691) on Saturday, 1st May 2010
Sat, 01 May 2010 19:07 GMT, in reply to E Yore - pointless pedant
Hmmm... the languages of sunshine and of shadows .. Well I'll give you that the further north you go the more spectacular the sunset, that particular feature of poetry and descriptive prose and useful orientation for sailors outside the Med. I'm ambivalent on sentence structure. As often said on here, Scots feel kinship with Dutch, so right at the very southern end of the Germanic branch.
Oddly British children don't usually grow up reading their North-facing literary heritage at all, Tolkein notwithstanding. [Don't know about the rest of the world.] What we did grow up with are the Proven莽al influenced later versions of Anglo-French versions of Romano-British myths.** Emotionally we appear to be more in the Celtic Twilight than the Northern Lights.
[** Untangle that, Mr Griffin.]Link to this forum: May Book Club: Literature in translation
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Message 11
Posted by Bearhug (U2258283) on Saturday, 1st May 2010
What we did grow up with are the Proven莽al influenced later versions of Anglo-French versions of Romano-British myths.聽
Erm, am I the only one a bit lost about what stories you mean here?
I'd say the stories I grew up with were mostly Grimm and Greek/Roman legends. I'm not sure how that fits in with what you are talking about.
When it comes to translations - the only thing I've really known well enough to be able to compare translations is Catullus's poems, and I've two different published translations, and one is far better than the other (though both are better than my own efforts were!) It did give me some insight into how differently something could be turned out, but knowing that isn't usually so relevant, as I usually don't know the original language well enough (my German reading level seems to be around young teenage, French similarish, though I've forgotten a lot of vocab, and Spanish lower,) and when I do read in another language, it takes me far longer than in English, as I have to check vocab and sometimes grammar.
Often there is only one English version available. I guess things like Tolstoy might have more than one version available, but I still won't know which is truer, and I've only read the edition I have. Whether I find it a good read or not, I don't know enough to know whether it's really a good read in the original, or a particularly good translation - and vice versa; if I don't enjoy it, is it just not my sort of book, or a bad translation?
I do wonder if we miss out in English on a lot of literature, because there's so much already published in English that we don't get a lot of good stuff translated. I remember 3 or 4 years ago, I asked about English editions of Dutch authors; it seemed there's not a lot out there that's been translated.Link to this forum: May Book Club: Literature in translation
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Message 12
Posted by Bette (U2222559) on Saturday, 1st May 2010
Excellent idea for a thread, and good introduction Herb!
The only language that I read fluently is French. I /did/ read several novels in Dutch, but that was more for language acquisition rather than reading to enjoy.
Well, I have to say that based on the few books where I can actually judge translation, I'd like to say 'hat's off' to the translations - and /three/ /cheers/ for the really /good/ translators amongst that group (I think, that to translate a classic novel, or - even more, poetry - takes some dedication to the art!).
I read (over the course of 14 years) some 140 works in French - of which some 20% were in translation. Some of those were originally written in English, and some of the translations of those seemed to me to be OK - well, at least I /enjoyed/ reading them in French! ('Of Mice and Men, 'The Old Man and the Sea', come to mind immediately). However, I once presented 'Emma' to our lit group, /Big/ mistake. Even though I had reasonablish translation, others in our group had a worse one. The humour was /totally/ lost!
The opposite happened with 'La Promesse de l'Aube' by Raymond Gary, which had me laughing out loud in the original, but I bought it in English for OH, and was shattered to find how flat it read.
Many books, I have read in French, but the original language was neither French nor English. Many of those books I have enjoyed, but don't know what I am missing by not being able to read the work in the original. One book, at least, has 'worked' for me in the two languages I know: 'Silk' - which was written in Italian. However, the style of that is so simple and pure, that I can see how it works in so many translations. Another book, which I am introducing in the Book of the Month in June, is 'The Old Man Who Read Love Stories', by Luis Sepulveda. Written in Spanish, I loved reading this in French, and will be interested to see how I feel reading it in English.Link to this forum: May Book Club: Literature in translation
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Message 13
Posted by petal jam (U1466691) on Sunday, 2nd May 2010
Sun, 02 May 2010 00:41 GMT, in reply to Bearhug
Sorry I meant King Arthur. Was listening to the radio at the same time as typing, which doesn't help.Link to this forum: May Book Club: Literature in translation
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Message 14
Posted by Kate McLaren etc (U2202067) on Sunday, 2nd May 2010
Sun, 02 May 2010 08:38 GMT, in reply to petal jam in message 13
I find I can't read literature in translation if it is translated from a language I know. For some reason I have found French literature translated into English particularly bad. I constantly hear the French in my head; it is as if the translator has never asked themselves what language they are now writing in.
I absolutely agree that a translation has to read as if it had been written originally in that language. On the rare occasions that I get a literary translation, after translating it and checking it (yet again) against the original, I then put it aside to settle for a while and then read it only in English. If anything jars I change it. And then, sigh, go through it yet again with the original checking that I haven't changed the meaning.
I love Russian literature in translation (into English) but that is probably because even at my best I had only O level Russian and now have pretty well none.
Re Dante, no native Italian would have any trouble with him at all. I have no trouble with him at all and my Italian, though once fluent, is now rusty. He is much closer to modern Italian than Chaucer is to modern English.Link to this forum: May Book Club: Literature in translation
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Message 15
Posted by Miladou bloody but unbowed (U3518248) on Sunday, 2nd May 2010
Bookmarking!
Link to this forum: May Book Club: Literature in translation
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Message 16
Posted by Fureys (U7828610) on Sunday, 2nd May 2010
Answer to message 7 Petal jam
Hi again. I very much doubt that a Swede possessing today's education would be able to read a poem dating from 900 odd. Although the Scandinavian languages have not changed as much as English in the last 1,000 years, they have nevertheless been subject to enormous influences, principally German and French before the Second World War, and almost entirely English since then. The one language which (probably because of its island isolation) has hardly changed at all since the Vikings is Icelandic. In fact when Danish or Swedish film producers want to produce something 'authentic' from Viking times, they invariably film it on Iceland with local actors and actresses. Then when the film is shown on (for example) Swedish TV, they use Swedish subtitles.
FureysLink to this forum: May Book Club: Literature in translation
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Message 17
Posted by musicalGill (U2477991) on Sunday, 2nd May 2010
I read in Dutch or English and have started only to read untranslated work unless it is a classsic tha I can't read in its 贸riginal language.
I find when reading translated work the sentence construction alwyas seems clumsy, and I am wondering what the original text was.
I find you can tell the age of the translator by the words that they use, some really old words creep in.
I also wonder about the ethics of translating books with multiple translators the Lost Symbol from Dan Brown was translated by 4 writers.Link to this forum: May Book Club: Literature in translation
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Message 18
Posted by I love Emmett (U14347802) on Sunday, 2nd May 2010
I was interested to read a comment upthread about preferring not to read books originally written in English (my, and presumably the other poster's MT) in translation. I tend to take a contrary view - but not in terms of enjoying the books; I like to have a few 'old friends' in a new language as they help me to access the new language. When finding myself confronted by a new language I look for books I read as a child (Pooh, Wind in the Willows, even the Famous Five) and plough through them, knowing exactly what the structure of the story is and how the characters express themselves. This generally gives me a way in to narrative links in the target language. For example, 'he said', 'he replied', 'he thought' and other basic linguistic structures. I don't necessarily need to learn the whole mantra, I said, you said, we said etc., but being able to put together a coherent story so that I can talk to people is necessary for me.
I guess I'm not really on topic here as I'm writing of how I use literature in translation for my own language learning purposes, rather than how good the literature or the translation is.
Perhaps slightly more on topic, I have recently read Henning Mankell's entire series of Wallander novels in translation, but in German. I found the German very effective. I later saw the UK TV adaptations in English and found them less than convincing, then I saw the original Swedish TV adaptations, with English subtitles and found them much closer to the German versions I had read. This could be more of a comment on the TV adaptations than on the translations, but it made me curious about what the script writing team had read in English. I notice there is a Swedish speaker upthread so I wonder if you have seen the English translations of Wallander and how well they work.
Aunt LulaLink to this forum: May Book Club: Literature in translation
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Message 19
Posted by petal jam (U1466691) on Sunday, 2nd May 2010
Sun, 02 May 2010 12:32 GMT, in reply to I love Emmett in message 18
This is fascinating, Aunt Lula. Essentially you are looking for what the individual reader /gains/ by reading in translation, not what the text might lose. Your point about Wallander is fab.Link to this forum: May Book Club: Literature in translation
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Message 20
Posted by Fureys (U7828610) on Sunday, 2nd May 2010
Hi Aunt Lula,
Yes I have seen the English Wallander versions (not all of them) and I found them rather wooden and unnatural. At least the producers could have spent a few bob on hiring in a pronunciation coach for the place names etc. The English speakers including Branagh managed to get the pronunciations 100 per cent wrong. There is another difficulty here as well. All of the Wallander series are set in southern Sweden (with the odd outing somewhere). The dialect of extreme southern Sweden (the province of Scania) is very special and borders on the unintelligible to people from further north. How, as a translator, can you get this across? No use trying to use some quaint 'mummersetshire' dialect of English as that just would not work.
I have read translations by two different translators - one was very good and one was, well, fair. (no names)
Peggy Monaghan upthread had a good point about translation (no matter the source language). When the translation is finished - lean back and say: "that looks good, now - is it English?"
FureysLink to this forum: May Book Club: Literature in translation
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Message 21
Posted by musicalGill (U2477991) on Sunday, 2nd May 2010
I htinbk I have been misunderstood.
I do not read translated works unless a classic in a langage I do not read, then I will choose the english version first and sometimes go on to read teh Dutch one.Link to this forum: May Book Club: Literature in translation
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Message 22
Posted by I love Emmett (U14347802) on Sunday, 2nd May 2010
Sorry if I was the one who did the misunderstanding Gill; it was not my intention to misrepresent anyone. (Seems like a good point to make on a translation thread)
Petal Jam, I think the point about deciding whether something is really English is quite important. I don't do much translation but I do quite a bit of 'polishing' of text once the author has done their own rough translation. I sometimes find myself dithering about points which are not connected with language but with content. It seems to be a bit of balancing act and may depend rather on both how well written the original is and also (in the case of research papers), how well-constructed the research project was/is.
On another topic, I used to use some translated poetry with my students who were learning English. The original was in their MT and I gave them the English and asked them to translate it into their MT without telling them it had originally came from that language. In discussion one day a student said something along the lines of 'This poem's rubbish, who would write this stuff.... blah, blah, blah' - then one of the other students recognised the poem as she translated it and realised it was one of their nobel prize winning writers. Poor boy who had made the comment was left with egg on his face and piped down in future lessons - a nice unintended outcome!
Interesting point about representing dialects in translation. I went to see Alice in Wonderland in German recently and now want to see it in English as I read that Johnny Depp played around with accents so as to represent the Mad Hatter's schizophrenia - but this didn't really come out in the German version. I had no idea about the accents in the Swedish originals of Wallander - it didn't seem evident in either the English TV versions or the German translations of the books. Still, the books have left me with a desire to visit Sweden.
Aunt LulaLink to this forum: May Book Club: Literature in translation
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Message 23
Posted by E Yore (U1479700) on Sunday, 2nd May 2010
Sun, 02 May 2010 17:42 GMT, in reply to I love Emmett in message 22
On another topic, I used to use some translated poetry with my students who were learning English.聽
I did something similar once with a group doing literature. I gave them a text in English without any explanation and waited for the penny to drop - it was Mark Twain's literal translation back into English of the French translation of his 'Jumping Frog of Calaveras County'. Once they realised what was happening, they could then compare both texts. Hmmm, I haven't used that for a while ...
Dialects in translation is a real problem - as I said earlier I never read English texts in French but I do wonder how the translator of Kipling's 'Plain Tales from the Hills', where several stories are written in the Irish "accent" of the ordinary soldier (Kipling is brilliant in his ear for dialect and ability to indicate through English syntax broken up, that speakers are speaking something other than standard English), deals with that "dialect" (and all the history of Irish/English relations underlying that). When I learnt French at school and university, it was classical "proper" French and I was puzzled by my French teachers liking for the Proven莽al accent which sounded so ugly to me, compared to standard French well-spoken. One cold, miserable rainy day when I'd been a student in France for nearly a year, I heard a Proven莽al accent and it suddenly brought a little sun and joy into my life; that was the point when I realised that French was no longer a foreign language for me.
English, for all its flexibility, has a problem with having lost the 2nd person familiar to all intents and purposes; so the English translation of a contemporary French or German text, where the protagonists go from saying 'vous/sie' to 'tu/du' would lose that fine but important nuance. I'd be interested in how translators deal with this. Fureys?Link to this forum: May Book Club: Literature in translation
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Message 24
Posted by Herb Robert (U14072548) on Monday, 3rd May 2010
I am completely bowled over by the range of language skills you all demonstrate 鈥 what occurred to me while reading all of your posts was the case of Samuel Becket, who as far as I know wrote both in French and in English: which would be the 鈥渁uthentic鈥 version?
even when you are reading what is ostensibly your own language it doesn't necessarily feel like 'yours'.聽
This is a very interesting observation, Petal Jam. I often wonder how much of the nuance of American literature I have understood. We recently read To Kill a Mockingbird in the Book of the Month Club, and much of the time you really do need a dictionary to hand to get to grips with the vocabulary (鈥渃ollard patch鈥, 鈥渃hiffarobe鈥, 鈥渟cuppernong鈥). This, for me, incidentally, is one of the problems of reading prose in a foreign language: provided there are no more than one or two unknown words on a page it is fine, but if you find yourself reaching for the dictionary every few paragraphs, then the whole experience becomes a bit of a chore.
That is far less of a problem with poetry, because the point of poetry is the setting of words in such a context that they become luminous with meaning 鈥 whether that meaning is private to the reader or not seems to me irrelevant. I have found with Latin (which obviously is no longer a native language to anyone) that the original often contains a richness that no translation into English can ever replicate. Two examples from Virgil: Book IX of the Aeneid describes a spear passing through a skull 鈥渁tro tepefacta cruore鈥 - 鈥渨armed up by the dark blood鈥. Such a cruel image, yet so concise and mellifluous. And in Book I there is the beautiful 鈥渓acrimae rerum鈥, literally 鈥渢ears of things鈥 but meaning something like 鈥渢he tears which mortal life inevitably brings.鈥
I also have a bit of a personal block with Russian literature 鈥 I don't know what it is but it always seems to read like a translation. Perhaps because no translation can ever really get over the style of Russian nomenclature, with its idiosyncratic use of patronymics.Link to this forum: May Book Club: Literature in translation
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Message 25
Posted by Fureys (U7828610) on Monday, 3rd May 2010
Unfortunately I'm at the wordface all day today, so will only be able to post later on or possibly tomorrow, but a couple of things:
E-Yore, I learnt my French in the foothills of the Pyrenees, so the 'mountain twang' comes natural!
Also, I love that story about Mark Twain, on his journey to Europe, remarking when he boarded the ship in NY harbour and heard some German chap speaking, remarking that it was only when he got to Bremen that he heard the verb (spare a thought for the German interpreters!)
Back later
FureysLink to this forum: May Book Club: Literature in translation
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Message 26
Posted by Miladou bloody but unbowed (U3518248) on Monday, 3rd May 2010
Mon, 03 May 2010 12:05 GMT, in reply to Herb Robert in message 1
Thank you for raising such a very interesting topic, Herb Robert. It鈥檚 particularly interesting for me because the book club I belong to has occasionally suggested that we rule out books in translation altogether 鈥 much to my horror!
I鈥檓 a native English speaker who reads French fluently, German slowly and Spanish haltingly. I make it a rule never to read French books in translation, read 50% of the (few as yet) German books I read in English and, although I used to read Spanish novels, I now only attempt Spanish poetry in the original.
As far as your first question goes, 鈥淲hy are the English so reluctant to read 鈥渇oreign鈥 literature?, I have absolutely no idea and will be interested to see what other people think might be the reasons.
鈥淲hat gets lost in translation?鈥 is, to my mind, the music of the original language. However, I would argue that of all writers of English who are non-native speakers, Nabokov is the one to whom this doesn鈥檛, in fact, apply. It has always been a reservation I鈥檝e had about Joseph Conrad, though I know other people disagree with me. I will never forget being totally humiliated by my English teacher when I criticized Conrad鈥檚 style as being sometimes stilted. It was only afterwards that I discovered that he wasn鈥檛 a native speaker and she thought his prose was perfect in every respect. Ouch!
(As an aside, I don鈥檛 have a problem with the 鈥淟o-lee-ta鈥 riff, because I read it as Humboldt playing with the exoticism of the Spanish pronunciation.)
How much of one鈥檚 own language needs translating? Mmm, more painful reminders of the above teacher reading Chaucer to us in the 鈥渙riginal鈥 pronunciation. I think it鈥檚 probably the reason why I鈥檝e never tackled anything earlier, though I adore Simon Armitage鈥檚 translation of Sir Gawain.
I think the last point you raise 鈥淲hat sort of trust should be placed in translators?鈥 is probably connected with the reluctance of UK readers to try literature in translation. Constance Garnett put me off Russian authors for years and Scott Moncrieff was the reason I swore only to read French in the original. I鈥檓 told, though not in a position to judge this for myself, that Ralph Manheim鈥檚 translations are less well-thought of than they used to be. He had a habit of missing out things he didn鈥檛 understand, so the English versions are always noticeably shorter than the originals.
I think I would add another question, which would be 鈥淲hy are translators so little valued?鈥 Sometimes, they are not even credited. It would be interesting to know how they are chosen, too. It seems to me that it鈥檚 so important to select the right person, particularly because one a book鈥檚 been translated, it comes under copyright, so even if it鈥檚 terrible, no-one can bring another version out for fifty years.
I think this post is quite long enough for now, but I just wanted to mention something that rather annoyed me when I read 鈥淓mbers鈥 by Sandor Marai. It鈥檚 a wonderful book, but instead of being translated from the Hungarian, the English version is itself a translation of the German translation. Thoughts, anyone?Link to this forum: May Book Club: Literature in translation
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Message 27
Posted by E Yore (U1479700) on Monday, 3rd May 2010
Mon, 03 May 2010 12:32 GMT, in reply to miladou in message 26
As far as your first question goes, 鈥淲hy are the English so reluctant to read 鈥渇oreign鈥 literature?, I have absolutely no idea and will be interested to see what other people think might be the reasons.聽
Possibly the wealth of literature available in English, for a start? I think that we English-speakers take for granted the wide variety of books at all levels and ages and rarely consider delving elsewhere for our reading needs, outside the classics. This is changing, if slowly - an Orhan Pamuk is now known world-wide, as is a Perez Reverte.
Interestingly, I am finding more and more detective fiction translated from foreign languages into English. I had two favourite French authors whose books I loved but not translated into English, so I couldn't share them with the Aged P. They are now translated into English and are good historical mysteries. I don't know, though, what the translations are like.
Claude Izner (pseudo of two women) writes 'tec novels set in Paris of the very late 19th century/early 20th.
Jean-Fran莽ois Parot writes mysteries set in Paris at the end of the 18th century, in the run-up to the Revolution and they are excellent.
鈥淲hy are translators so little valued?鈥澛
I don't know, but a good literary translator is a genius in their own right, able to transmit clearly the thoughts, style, inner fire of an author without ever pushing themselves forward.Link to this forum: May Book Club: Literature in translation
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Message 28
Posted by Rwth of the Cornovii (U2570790) on Monday, 3rd May 2010
Mon, 03 May 2010 15:41 GMT, in reply to E Yore - pointless pedant in message 4
Thank you Herb for starting this. I seem to have unsubscribed from the master thread by mistake. Anyway, I well remember taking "The three musketeers" to France to read because I couldn't 'get into' it, then reading "La Tulipe Noir" in French and being blown away by it. I loved reading my A level texts in French, (Candide, La Peste, La Porte Etroite and Therese Desqueroux) and found the meaning just becomes clearer in the original language so I probably lost marks in my exams for being too literal. No doubt I should have found "The elegance of the Hedgehog" more entertaining in French, but I doubt if the library had enough copies in French for our group, and it would have been a bit swanky to be the only one. And I didn't realise it was written in French because the author could just have been English. The name wasn't obviously French.
When I was at school, I got bored with the translation of the Aeneid which didn't seem to progress the story much and started copying it out in Latin at the back of the class. 15 year olds do strange things sometimes, and found that I was 'getting the gist of it' without translation. The translation in class was plodding on. I wasn't that good at Latin and didn't see the benefit of 'parsing'.
I also accidentally took out a Russian language copy of "The Brothers Karamazov" from the library. A guy in the office was very nosey and had already been caught reading a personal letter over my shoulder, so I started reading TBK in the lunch hour. I didn't get far with it, but the look on the chap's face was a picture. The gossip mill didn't do me any good as it was in 1966 and the Cold War may still have been on. I was only keen on Russian literature, but it cast too many questions. Anyway, I always wished I could read Russian, because of the literature. I recently read Bulgakov's "Notes by a young doctor" which I found a lot more approachable than "The Master and Margarita". Maybe it was the subject matter which was a lot more straightforward, but I think the translation was probably better.Link to this forum: May Book Club: Literature in translation
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Message 29
Posted by Bette (U2222559) on Monday, 3rd May 2010
OH very much likes the translators of Russian literature Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky. He recently read their translation of 'The Master and Marguerita' and compared it to his original edition in another translation. He was so impressed, he then bought 'Anna Karenina' by the same translators (they have also translated Gogol's short stories, too).
Link to this forum: May Book Club: Literature in translation
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Message 30
Posted by Herb Robert (U14072548) on Monday, 3rd May 2010
Mon, 03 May 2010 18:18 GMT, in reply to Bette in message 29
That's given me new heart, Bette. I recently got a copy of their translation of Anna Karenina hoping that its mysteries would at last be opened up for me - looks like I could be in luck.Link to this forum: May Book Club: Literature in translation
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Message 31
Posted by Peggy Monahan (U2254875) on Monday, 3rd May 2010
Mon, 03 May 2010 19:43 GMT, in reply to Herb Robert in message 30
I was quie surprised to discover that in schools in France in Fench they study translated literature - offhand I can remember Edgar Allen Poe and Shakespeare's Rome and Juliet as works that pupils of mine have studied in translation with the French teacher (and that I have then or not taken up in English).
This is because - as far as I understand - in literature the emphasis is on studying forms rather than periods or writers which is what I remember doing in the dark ages of Eng Lit O-level and A-level. So they study "portraits" or "the fantastic".
We only studied translated literature in comparative literature at university.Link to this forum: May Book Club: Literature in translation
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Message 32
Posted by Ex Tram Driver (U5244457) on Monday, 3rd May 2010
Mon, 03 May 2010 20:55 GMT, in reply to Peggy Monahan in message 31
A fascinating set of posts this month to consider. On this subject, it was interesting listening to the Book Club on Radio 4 last Sunday afternoon - Orhan Pamuk specifically discussed translating My Name is Red into English and the method he adopted in achieving this without losing the essence of the book.
Personally, I haven't gone out of my way to read non-English fiction - and I don't really know why, either! (The exceptions are The Name of The Rose and The Shadow of the Wind, btw).
The translation issue is important, I do summarising for a society of Swiss transport related items in Switzerland which can involve translating from German or French into English, and it is not easy to translate into proper English, particularly when technical terms outside a standard dictionary are used.
XTDLink to this forum: May Book Club: Literature in translation
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Message 33
Posted by Peggy Monahan (U2254875) on Monday, 3rd May 2010
Mon, 03 May 2010 21:12 GMT, in reply to Ex Tram Driver in message 32
The translation issue is important, I do summarising for a society of Swiss transport related items in Switzerland which can involve translating from German or French into English, and it is not easy to translate into proper English, particularly when technical terms outside a standard dictionary are used.聽
Technical translation is a whole other kettle of fish. I once did it for a Fench oil institute and the first step was to buy their inhouse dictionary at vast cost, but you couldn't do it without.
However academic jargon is the worst. I do it in a field in which I am genuinely interested and committed but it is genuinely meaningless in both languages.Link to this forum: May Book Club: Literature in translation
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Message 34
Posted by Dame_Celia_ Molestrangler (U14257909) on Tuesday, 4th May 2010
I'll read anything in English, German, French, Spanish and Danish (that's the order of confidence of my languages - although I can sometimes read French texts faster than I can read German simply because the word order is more similar to English).
The problem with foreign literature is not so much the language as the mentality.
I'm back in GErmany for the fifth time. I have been back this time for (gulp) ten years! In the first six years, despite previous experience of living here, despite German family, I found more and more cultural differences between the two countries. Now.. Germany and the UK should be fairly similar: similar climate, potato eaters, Christian religion, Germanic language. But, boy!, there are huge differences.
So... this also spills over into literature. There is no German equivalent of Jane Austen. Classic German literature (let's say, 19th century?) is damned serious. Not a barrel of laughs. Even the comedies have serious moral undertones.
French literature? I have found it to be very full of navel-gazing. Nothing going anywhere (very often). Like the country's films. I watch the films and think "At last! A film I understand" only to be completely confused by the ending. (OK.. I understood the recent film on Moliere.)
Maybe I'm just used to American TV shows that tell a complete story with a neat ending in one hour. I really cannot stand an unclear ending.
Oh, and I can't stand books that try to say "look at my big brain - aren't I the clever one?" Such as If on a Winter's Night a Traveller by Calvino. Worked my way through it last year. I could have done without it.
Thank heavens for detective fiction. That's usually good in any language. It is said that detective fiction is the easiest to understand as everyone knows the conventions.Link to this forum: May Book Club: Literature in translation
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Message 35
Posted by E Yore (U1479700) on Tuesday, 4th May 2010
Tue, 04 May 2010 06:45 GMT, in reply to That Old Janx Spirit in message 34
The problem with foreign literature is not so much the language as the mentality.[...]There is no German equivalent of Jane Austen. Classic German literature (let's say, 19th century?) is damned serious. Not a barrel of laughs. Even the comedies have serious moral undertones. 聽
I agree, which is why I'd never read English lit translated into the target language if I want to learn that target language - one loses out on the cultural implications of the language. Humour and poetry are in my eyes the two things which are most difficult to get across to another language simply because they are so anchored in the psyche of the civilisation.
French literature? I have found it to be very full of navel-gazing. Nothing going anywhere (very often). Like the country's films. I watch the films and think "At last! A film I understand" only to be completely confused by the ending. (OK.. I understood the recent film on Moliere.)聽
Quite a lot of the very contemporary stuff is like that, but there is a whole slew of authors who aren't as high profile who do write stories - I've mentioned two detective novelists up-thread, but there are also others you might enjoy: the novels of Fran莽oise Chandernagore, especially L'All茅e du Roi and her trilogy on 'La Sans Pareille'. Quite a lot of good historical fiction as well; authors such as Jeanne Bourin or Robert Merle.
Actually, one of the most memorable 'tec novels I read which did far more to explain Japanese society to me than any history/sociology book was this:
Alfred Birnbaum, the translator, did a memorable job, as he had to explain in detail things that would have been obvious to the Japanese. The style may end up pedantic at moments as he has to explicit what is implicit, but the reading of the novel isn't hampered by the translation. An excellent mystery novel and an object lesson on the difficulties of translation.Link to this forum: May Book Club: Literature in translation
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Message 36
Posted by diasporatehousewife (U9694450) on Wednesday, 5th May 2010
Wed, 05 May 2010 07:23 GMT, in reply to E Yore - pointless pedant in message 35
Interesting thread. I loved 'If on a winter's night a traveler' (sic). But read it 20 years ago or so in English.
I've recently started reading Scandinavian literature in Danish - Jan Guillou is Swedish but my mastery of Scandinavian is not so great that I can read it in Swedish. I started off with the first of a trilogy about Vikings and the Knights Templar. 'The Road to Jerusalem', which I read in Danish and found very challenging as it is full of old words about clans, chieftains, chain mail etc etc.
But I liked the story, so I read the second of the trilogy in English and was shocked at the thudding clunkiness of the translation. So I read the third book in Danish again. I am not really in a position to judge whether the Danish translation - being so closely related to Swedish - was clunky as well, in which case one could surmise that it is just the writing itself as it is a 'plot-rich' book - but I think it was the translation that was weak, as I keep reading 'Danisms' in the English - idiomatic phrases that don't translate literally and so on. I think I've written about this elsethread... so apols if I am repeating myself.Link to this forum: May Book Club: Literature in translation
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Message 37
Posted by Bearhug (U2258283) on Wednesday, 5th May 2010
I think it was the translation that was weak, as I keep reading 'Danisms' in the English - idiomatic phrases that don't translate literally and so on.聽
I read a children's book in German (which was translated from English originally.) It had a cat which was going on about why cat burglars are so called, because of their ability to climb and be silent, like a cat. Unfortunately, the German is something like Fassendenkletterer, or literally facade climber, and it doesn't make as much sense when it's going on about being called a facade climber, because they are as sure and silent as a cat.
I did wonder what those not coming from an English background thought of that bit.Link to this forum: May Book Club: Literature in translation
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Message 38
Posted by Bearhug (U2258283) on Wednesday, 5th May 2010
That would be Fassadenkletterer which is cat burglar. I should proofread my German as well as my English, especially when it's not sounding right anyway...
Link to this forum: May Book Club: Literature in translation
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