Authors in Translation

[Argobot]

While reading this month's book cast selection (Cosmicomics by Italio Calvino), I've been thinking about reading translated books. It's a subject that has always troubled me; in college, I studied Russian, but it took me several years before I reached an advanced enough language level to read any of the famous Russian novels in their original language. When I was only reading works in translation, I just assumed that I was getting an inferior product. But when I gained the (limited) ability to read in Russian, the difference in the original and the translated were not as stark as I assumed it would be.

 

There definitely is a difference (and a significant enough one so that I didn't feel I had just wasted four years of my life studying an impossibly complicated language), but I was pleased to find that you can still glean the core meaning of something like Master and Margarita if you read it in English.

 

I know that other people hear speak different languages--or at least don't speak English as a first language--so I'm curious to hear other's thoughts on translated works. 

[lobotomy42]

In general, I think reading translated works is fine and I agree with you. The "loss" in meaning when reading something in translation is usually minimal, at least for most conventional prose fiction and non-fiction.  In poetry or any kind of writing where the emphasis is more on the language itself rather than the content, this probably fails to hold, but that is really a very small portion of what most people, even avid readers, read. 

 

Also, most of my favorite literature is fiction in translation - Camus, Sartre, the Russians, Bolano and a few others.  I don't feel like I'm reading something that is unfaithful to their intent or work.

 

I realize that there is a whole school of literature scholarship for which this is view is heresy - "a translated work is A NEW WORK" etc - but I just disagree.

 

On the other hand, I seem to be coming from a very similar background as you - native English speaker whose primary "foreign" language is a few years of university Russian.  So take my opinion with whatever salt you want!

[I Saw Dasein]

I am a native English speaker with near-fluency in French. I think it's kind of a wash. When I read a translation, I may lose some of the beauty of the language and perhaps some meaning. But when I read in French, I also am likely to miss a reference or cue that I would not miss were I reading in English. 

[Argobot]

But sometimes those cultural references are added by the translator--not the original writer. I can only really speak for Russian translations, but I know that some of the earlier, British translators were really prone to including references that would be understandable to their English audiences, but that did not make any sense in a Russian cultural context.

[Squid Division]

I loathe translations that try to stick too closely to the original. Like I think Bulgakov had pun-acronyms, and if a translator tried to do the same in English and keep the meaning, it'd fail miserably. See also dactylic hexameter translations of Homer. It's pointless and hamstrings a translator for no reason and still doesn't offer any sense of what the Greek is.

I'd say comedy and poetry are the most at risk in translation. Comedy is lost without tons of explanatory notes and poetry becomes all free verse.

[tegan]

I hate to bring up the dorkiest possible example, but if you want to see a very clear dividing line between good dialogue localization and a bad one, check out the manga Yotsuba&. It was originally published by ADV in English, who lost the license after the fifth volume. It later got picked up by a different company with a different translation team who took fewer creative liberties with translating dialogue and made everyone sound incredibly stiff and awkward, which completely destroys the exuberant tone of the whole thing.

 

 

The only translated prose I've read was the original version of Battle Royale with the red cover. It too was very awkward and stilted, but I hear that the more recent version is much better.

[Nappi]

I read the Hitchhiker's Guide series in Finnish at high school, and only much later in English. Some details are bound to be lost in translation, but the translated work was still very much that of Douglas Adams'. Also, due to a complicated Christmas present mixup, I actually switched from English to Finnish in the middle of Vonnegut's God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater. It was a strange experience for sure, but after a short acclimation period the text started to feel Vonnegut's again.

 

I've heard that at least some of the translations of Finnish classic The Unknown Soldier are quite horrific, because the different dialects, which were an important part in the book, were handled so poorly. A Finnish translation of The Catcher in the Rye was also criticized for the heavy use of Helsinki slang.

[Gormongous]

Like I've said too many times on this forum, I've done Latin translations of poetry and prose on commission. Though I take the money (and don't give it back), I still despair of ever capturing in English the economy and profundity of the best from antiquity. How do I capture the rush of immediacy from a string of historical infinitives in a way that is distinguishable from the historical present or even from the plain ole perfect? I love Latin as a language because it's totally recognizable in form to any Western speaker and yet totally alien in many of the processes that drive it. But maybe the temporal gap is makes it so, rather than the linguistic gap.

 

I don't know, I'm super-paranoid about the inadequacy of language in general. The inadequacy of translation is just icing on the cake.

[gregbrown]

David Remnick—editor of the New Yorker and candidate for the hardest-working man alive today—wrote a great piece on different schools of thought around translation. Highly recommended.
 
Douglas Hofstadter wrote Le Ton beau de Marot, a pretty highly-regarded book on the same subject. I haven't read it, though, so I can't personally vouch.

[Argobot]

That Remnick article is so great--I love the idea of Nabokov crankily complaining about inferior Russian-to-English translations in front of his students.

 

I've read both the Garnett and the Pevear/Volokhonsky translations of Brothers Karamazov, and the difference between the two is painfully noticeable.