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Underground > Books, Criticism & Writing >

Translations

11:42 / 25.04.05

I'm currently reading Turgenev's Fathers And Sons, and I'm having some issues with the translation. It's a new one, from around 1992 (I've got the Oxford Classics edition) and the attempts to show the generation gaps seem a bit overstated; the younger characters use phrases like big deal and what the hell, which is I assume meant to indicate their difference between them and their fathers, who speak how I would imagine Russian landowners c.1859 would speak. However, it's rather disconcerting, because I'm not sure those were phrases the younger characters would use. It's jarring enough that whilst Bazarov hasn't actually said, "Dude, I consider the social and religious structures prevailing in Russia today to be mad wack" I don't think I'd be particularly suprised if he did.

All this made me think about the process of translation and what might be a good way to go about translating something like this -should the idioms of the time be used, with notes explaining anything that might be unclear? Or would this not present the generation difference clearly enough? Is it possible to translate anything without making it sound, to some extent, like it came from the translator's own era? I usually read translations from more or less the same time as the writing of the book so wondered if this was generally a problem or just a quirk of the version I'm reading now.

After all the questions about the process -are there any translations you think are particularly good? from the point of view of their being readable or keeping the tone of the original. Really, I'm just interested in what people have to say about translating and / or reading in translation...

14:45 / 25.04.05

Going too far to the other end, though, and being absolutely as literal as you can, has two bad results show pretty quickly: (a) lines that make sense perhaps in some other culture but we cannot decipher, such as 'masturbate in hell' or puns that can't cross over like 'pan da/panda' and (b) the annoying habit of leaving some words (the ones which, of course, everyone really knows - but don't) untranslated. If a concept cannot be properly or usefully rendered in english, than, by all means, leave it alone and give an explanatory endnote or something, but house, priest, or banana can easily be put into english.
The tone issue, I think, is the individual translator's... not fault, but, yeah, it's their fault when things don't flow as they did in the original. See Arthur Wailey (that's not how you spell it, is it?) translations of Chinese stuff, and the silly royal uppercrust stuff he inserts where it clearly doesn't belong.
For stuff that's positively ancient (I mean, clay tablet, just after the wheel, days) I don't mind modernized language, because, frankly, everything in their language probably doesn't connote the same anymore. If it's twenty years old, or even a hundred, I'd say, render it either as close to the original or as close to the same era in your area/language. 1850 is 1850, not really, but it'll play well, because it's what you're brought up to expect from a specific era.
This is why I hate nonfic (ostensibly) movies who add cellphones back into the seventies, because modernizing supposedly helps sell the film.

15:02 / 25.04.05

Translation is an interesting area...

When I was living in Canada I sneaked into a UofT lecture given by Umberto Eco on translation, a subject he was in a pretty good position to talk about having worked as both a translator and an artist who has seen his works translated (both in terms of language and medium). He highlighted some of the perils of translation of which up-dating the idiom is just one fragment of... above all else translation is a problem of fidelity, of faithfulness to the original - In the lecture Eco pointed out that the danger in translations of poetry is that to ignore meter or verse the translated texts cease to be poems.

However, the form that 'fidelity' should take varies from text to text. Gilber Adair has won awards for A Void his translation of George Perec's acclaimed novel La Disparition, and I would venture to suggest that the reason he was so acclaimed was theat he was able to retain the lipogramatic nature of the French original in translation... (for those unaware of what a lipogram is, it is a work that omits a specific letter, in the case of both La Disparition and A Void it is the letter E). To translate La Disparition solely for its meaning while ignoring it's underlying motif would be to massively miss the point...

But yes, Vincennes - the problems you specifically outline are possibly a key feature of mid-19th century Russian lit. Attempting to convey with fidelity the subtle, yet discrete shades of meaning for concepts that have merged in english, if not also in modern Russian is a bit of a struggle... Nabakov rated Bernard Guilbert Guerney's translation of Dead Souls, a novel that would be roughly contemporary, so perhaps his translation of Fathers and Sons might well be worth seeking out...

04:11 / 11.11.06

I thought it was easy until they assigned something in one of my English classes. We had to translate Chaucer and Shakespeare/Marlowe in to Modern English.

It was really tough. And thats within the same language.

I was actually wondering which English translation of Proust is seen as the most accurate?

17:33 / 12.11.06

I'm not sure there are any that can be pinned down as the most accurate - the Moncrieff / Kilmartin translation (which I read) is probably better than the Moncrieff alone, because idioms are not translated literally and, apparently, Moncrieff's tendency towards purple prose has been toned down. All the above is just 'word on the street', though, as it's actually the only version I've read. I also think it's the 'standard' translation. However, I've heard quite a bit of enthusiasm for the new translations (I think each volume is by someone different) so I think they'd be an interesting read in terms of how consistent the tone is throughout.

Why do you ask - looking to read it for the first time, or want to look at a different translation?

20:20 / 12.11.06

I was just thinking about this issue, actually, as I'm reading Tobias Smollett's translation of Don Quixote right now. I've read the first half of Don Quixote before in a fairly modern translation, and I couldn't bring myself to continue because I was getting so bored. But Smollett's 18th Century translation is funny and surprisingly seems more modern than the one I read before. It's wildly inaccurate in terms of literal translation, but it captures what I always imagined the flavor of the original to be. And Salman Rushdie endorses it as the only translation of Don Quixote that actually reads like a great novel.

01:03 / 14.11.06

I've found the same with Arabian Nights and Marco Polo. The older translations with their "thy", "thou", and "the prophet sayeth" read so much nicer and create a better atmosphere than the more modern translations...

05:27 / 14.11.06

First time reader for Proust. I was curious which translations are considered the most accurate and the most readable. Since the two don't always cross over.

I tried Burton's translation of Arabian Nights and it was just too much. I made it through Jack Zipes's translation when I was maybe 16. Pretty good stuff. But Burton has the advantage of being public domain.