« It's beginning to look a lot like Christmas | Main | Quote of the day » Lost in translation21 Dec 2007 09:00 pm I've been rereading Italo Calvino's If On a Winter's Night a Traveler, and regretting that I don't speak Italian. There's always something vaguely unsatisfying about reading in translation; I always feel the author straining against the flattening effect of someone else's words. But perhaps I'm just projecting. Are there translations which are better than the originals, or just as good? Borges doesn't count. TrackBackTrackBack URL for this entry: Comments (41)
No one can understand Kant in German Well, the Unabomber did it. But perhaps the effort drove him around the bend? I'm sure there are translations that are better than the original, but even though I speak pretty fluent German I still don't feel qualified to judge the relative literary merits of an original and a good translation (in either direction). Though I can certainly identify *bad* translations... 
I'm reading If On a Winter's Night a Traveler at the moment and the translation is like soup. It's a horrible place to be when you can't know if the real author is taking you on a spin or the translator is deplorable. But what is there to do, I suppose? Don't meet these writers or live with the intrusion of a translator. It's pretty grim. French and Spanish are before Italian already on the list of languages I need to learn to read great literature. So I fear I may never appreciate Calvino. I don't remember Eco's translator bothering me in Italian to English. Borges never counts, it's unfair. I'm sure there are novelists out there giving nightly thanks he never wrote a novel. Murakami has two regular translators. One I hate, the other I love. Keep an eye on the tiny translator by-line the next time you're reading his short stories.
I've known native speakers of German (faculty at St. John's College) who advised reading Kant in English translation. Apparently Norman Kemp Smith understood Kant very well and had a much better style -- shorter sentences, for one thing. Nabokov claimed that Dostoievsky's Russian style was trashy and journalistic, so he might come off better in English, though I don't know that Nabokov went that far. To judge by the admiration of the French, Poe (and Jerry Lewis) must sound better in French translation.
Poe is supposed to be pretty good in French. Some of Elizabeth Bishop's poetry, in Brazilian Portuguese, is way better than in English. Also, plenty of good foreign writers worked as translators of minor authors early in their careers and are supposed to have crafted superior versions, such as Eça de Queirós translating King Solomon's Mines into European Portuguese. Mostly, though, they were just hacks.
I have heard the same about Kant. Also, I am told that the Jay Rubin translations of Murakami are superior to the originals. Beckett's original French is stilted and schoolboyish. The English is more natural. Anthony Burgess's _A Clockwork Orange_ is not exactly *better* in translation, but it is sometimes even more interesting, or interesting in different ways. Try the Spanish translation, which AB supervised: _La naranja mecánica_.
I wouldn't necessarily agree, but an argument could probably be made for the King James Bible.
"I don't remember Eco's translator bothering me in Italian to English." FWIW, William Weaver, who translated If On A Winter's Night A Traveler, also translated many of Eco's books, including the Name of the Rose and Foucault's Pendulum.
Shocked! You're absolutely correct, Mr Saturday. I'm a terrible clod to have wronged Mr Weaver so dreadfully. It must really have been Calvino annoying me... Thanks.
William Weaver is one of the greatest translators of our time. You are still reading literature when you read one of his translations, and I believe the casual reader of Calvino is missing nothing. His translation of Eco's Foucault's Pendulum is amazing, and Eco himself admitted that there was an instance when Weaver clearly improved on his original sentence. Translation is an art, and Weaver is an artist.
heh, could be worse... translated Japanese leaves you with the cold feeling that you've missed out on the beauty and ended up with biker boots shuffling across rice paper... I don't think you understand, gaijin. although, having someone read it to you? Is oddly satisfying, as if the words didn't matter, and they were speaking directly to your brain.
Borges? He was just being polite. The translations are not better than the original, but maybe for non-Argentines the Spanish of Borges has some unwelcome strain. When you are Argentine and can get each and every reference, the translation is inferior. In particular, the beginning of the Universal History of Infamy is incredibly tame in English, as so much of the references are watered down, and the translator has to make explicit some of the original understatements. As for the KJV, some of the sheer potency of the Hebrew original cannot be translated into any European language. Also, the majesty of the Psalms is better conveyed with the fewest words, and Hebrew is extremely sparse that way.
Though I speak o Hebrew, I believe Simon has it right. The Psalms are a great test of a translation of the Bible. It's also tough, for my ear at least, to do Ecclesiastes well, but I suppose that's true of any of the more lyrical passages. To judge most versions though, it's only fair to measure against something from the New Testament as well (if that's coming from the Greek). The Sermon on the Mount and the first chapter of John give a good sense of a translations flavor, I think. As to the original question of superior translations, my girlfriend thinks Heaney's Beowulf surpasses the original, because he's a more practiced poet than whoever the first scribe was. I am entirely unqualified to read the original, so I'll just pass on her opinion without comment.
The original of the New Testament would have been in Aramaic, not Hebrew. I think Nabokov's own translations of his Russian novels "The Defense", "Mary" and "Invitation to a Beheading" are about as good as the originals, if different. Those are the only ones I've read in both. The English is a bit stilted and overripe, in that Nabokov fashion, but that very overripe stiltedness is part of the Nabokov charm in English, so it works. The Russian is more direct and, to the extent I can judge such things, I don't get the sense when I hit one of the more exotically calibrated sentences that there's anything strange about the choices; they just read like a viciously intelligent and cutting intellectual. In English, part of the mystique is that they read like a viciously intelligent and cutting intellectual who is also extremely strange and perhaps mad, or else simply so odd and out of place anywhere in the world, due to the fact that the society he grew up in has ceased to exist, that his observations, while keen, are slightly nuts.
SwissArmyD: Interesting, SwissArmyD. In my experience, the problem is actually usually the opposite: lively Japanese that's full of major tonal shifts--often quite rough--gets rendered in an airy, "contemplative" petals-drift-down-to-the-placid-lake-surface-as-a-crane-glides-overhead mush. (Airy mush? Eh--it makes the point.) Japanese writing often has quite a bit of snap to it. Murakami does nothing for me, so my opinion on whether the Rubin translations are better than the originals wouldn't mean much. I wouldn't be surprised, though. Rubin's writings about translating are energetic and mischievous, so he's likely not to approach things too reverently.
Ariel Dorfman (Death and the Maiden) wrote one of his books in English and then in Spanish. Or first in Spanish and then in English. So he sort of "translated" his own book. He is an Argentine-Chilean-American.
And why doesn't Borges count? Borges is amazing.
Michael Kandel's translation of Stanislaw Lem's The Cyberiad is a work of genius. I think Umberto Eco has said that the English translation of Foucoult's Pendulum is an improvement on the original.
The English version of Calvino's Invisible Cities is absolutely gorgeous.
Borges (and Nabakov) don't count because they translated their own work.
I wonder why more such books aren't published in bilingual editions? I got the Pinsky version of Dante's Inferno and loved the fact that you could either read the translation OR look at the original verses and peruse the translator's notes. Best of both worlds: uninterrupted pleasurable reading, or delving into the arcania. And I can't imagine Borges being as good in English; it was one of the few joys of high school Spanish lit. My wife says Gabriel Garcia Marquez definitely loses something in translation.
Not so, Megan--There are people who say that Nabokov's later translations of his work (like for Lolita) are inferior to the English, because he was cut off for so many years from "live," Soviet non-emigre Russian. Nabokov's Russian and English are both fearsome, so I can't judge.
Huh? I thought for sure the English translation of Ficciones was done by Bonner or Irby or Kerrigan or somebody I forget. I thought the reason Borges was excepted was his precise, structured, almost mathematical style just reflected Borges's own unique thought process that seemed to resist a certain linguistic compartmentalization. While he was extremely fluent in English (and so many other languages) to the point of being an Old English scholar, my Spanish lit prof said he was hesitant to write translations because given a another chance at the work, he worried he would meander into another story rather than a faithful translation. Borges wrote a great Spanish translation of Faulkner's Wild Palms , definitely my favorite translation. Also Nabokov originally wrote Lolita in English. The Russian version is officially the translation.
1) Italo Calvino is not that great a writer. Regretting what is lost in translating his work seems silly. I will always remember him for casually fornicating with a current prominent Republican PR hack. At the time they were both divorced and not expecting much from the opposite sex. Wallace Fowlie, a late and great translator of French literature (see his translation of Rimbaud), told me about this very brief encounter. 2) Italian is a relatively easy language to learn, especially if one studied Latin. T.S. Eliot thought it an easily acquired language. He learned it to read Dante and Petrarch. It is certainly easier than learning German. 3) Why don't you note that translating poetry is much more difficult than translating prose? 4) Charles Singleton, a late American scholar who understood THE DIVINE COMEDY better than anyone (even the Italians admit this), produced a magnificent prose translation (better than Robert Pinsky's) of TDC with the accompanying Italian original text on facing pages. Singleton also produced an extended 3 vol. commentary on TDC. Order from the Princeton University Press' Bollingen series. Reading this TDC edition may even inspire Megan Scrooge to care about Christmas again. 5) None of the commentators above mentioned how Maurice Coindreau's French translations of William Faulkner in the 1930s and early 1940s helped Faulkner to win the Nobel Prize in 1949 at a time when most of Faulkner's novels were out of print. The Nobel Committee discovered Faulkner through his French translations at a time when most American critics, most of whom were tiresome NYC leftists and liberals(oh, excuse me, Megan is from NYC), were condemning him as a crazed Southern Gothic reactionary. Most of those American critics, like Clifton Fadiman, Philip Rahv and Alfred Kazin let their politics, not inherent literary quality, determine their literary judgments. Are you listening Sam Tanenhaus and Leon Wieseltier? 6) I wager poor Megan McArdle cannot even rate the best American fiction writers according to their inherent literary quality. Nitwit feminist Penn profs like Nina Auerbach permanently messed up poor Megan's literary mind. She probably cannot even name Willa Cather's two best novels or who Harold Frederic is. She does not even know the Herman Melville novel set entirely in NYC.
Kant cannot be understood in English either and it has very little to do with language? The most vivid discussion surrounding lost-in-translation themes that I have read is due to Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita. There are now so many translations that... Here is one of many. The comments speak for themselves. The reason being that the book has much more to offer than ambiguous word games and yet those can be found too in the original. Nabokov’s writings are less mysterious and also based less on word-games. But Bulgakov is still easier to translate than some ancient Greek classics? The word "character" is a Greek one. And yet it has meant something utterly different in Athens than it means today. Foremost it stood for the smallest common denominator - that which unites all life. Only then can we look at the obvious differences. Today we use the term "character" to describe it idiosyncrasies of an individual. The Greeks had names for that too but different ones. Merely being able to read Old-Greek would not help the reader much? As the Greeks themselves have argued before Aristotle (after whom everything was going down the drain and modern Westernism started emerging) - the reader has to think and feel Greek... I wonder what translations of the bible and the new testament have lost or added? The New Testament was written in simple Greek? - not the ancient Greek of Socrates and Plato. It not all clear that Jesus, who was fluent in Aramaic, was very proficient in Greek. Either way - it turns me almost religious when I think about the fact that Christianity is based on the Greek language. This irony cannot be topped and feels almost devine... Marry Christmess
The French translations of Poe _are_ better -- but that's because the translations were done by Baudelaire. Basically when you read a translation it's sort of like there's two writers. I don't read Russian but am told that my English translations of Lermontov and of Pushkin's "Eugene Onegin" are vetter than theoriginals -- they were done by Nabokov.
Eliot Weinberger and Octavio Paz wrote a short book titled Nineteen Ways of Looking at Wang Wei. It has a poem by the classic Chinese poet and eighteen translations. They conclude that the best translation was the one by Ezra Pound. Pound knew no Chinese; he rewrote someone else's, much inferior, translation. So the answer is to have the translation rewritten by a better writer. Unfortunately, the better writer is likely to be writing his own stuff. This is in line with the previous comments re: Kant et. al. Someone who understands the material but is a better writer, or at least a more readable, could improve on the original.
A letter to the editor from the New York Times book review: May 20, 2007 To the Editor: I was initially very pleased to see that you devoted an issue of the Book Review (April 15) to literature in translation. Many of the books sound wonderful. Most of the reviewers’ ability to discuss work in translation, however, seemed fairly limited. Consider James Wood’s review of “The Savage Detectives,” by Roberto Bolaño, in which he also discusses Bolaño’s novella “By Night in Chile.” Wood describes the style of a long sentence whose “musical control is impeccable.” A comment like this must be attached to the translator, perhaps even more than the original writer, for the music in English is the work of Chris Andrews, who undoubtedly spent hours interpreting, phrasing and revising that sentence. If the entire novella manages, as Wood suggests, to be a “poem,” then a great deal of credit belongs to Andrews, who had to rewrite, to re-envision the original and make the music of Spanish into another sort of music — English music. Essentially, Andrews had to work as both interpreter and artist, creating what Bolaño would have written were English his first language. A reviewer who doesn’t look at the original language and the translation really shouldn’t comment on style at all. Most of your reviews, if they did comment on the translation, did so in a perfunctory way. I’d suggest that you find reviewers who are able to assess work in translation as it should be considered: as the work of two artists, not one. Liz Harris Behling Grand Forks, N.D. The writer is an assistant professor of creative writing at the University of North Dakota, Grand Forks.
When I was an economics grad student, I was appalled by the obscurity and terrible prose of many (most?) of the works I had to read. I decided that all research departments should be required to employ a translator (who would, of course, be called an editor). The translator would "work with" the author and suggest revisions to make the article clear and readable. No manuscript could leave the department until it had been okayed by the translator. No university took me up on the idea, so I had to ask myself why this "market failure." 1. Researchers are prima donnas who don't want anyone changing their product. 2. Anyone who could understand all those manuscripts enough to make them clear had a much more prestigious career path open as a professor. 3. Too many of the translations, by making the author's point clear, would also make it clear how unimportant the paper was. I decided that 2. was most important, followed by 3. and 1.
re: Kant: someone who understands the material and is a better writer by necessity interprets the ambiguities in Kant's language and thus something (to my mind significant) is lost. If you want a rough and ready Kant for undergraduates or something, you're right that a translation could be "better," but there's nothing like the original if you really want to understand the text. Also, every translation I've ever seen (mis)translates "Vernunft" as "reason" and "Sitte" as "morality" whereas is should be "reasonableness" and "morays." The implications for the theory are pretty large (especially because "Rationalitaet" and "Moral" also have specific, and different, roles in the theory). And that's just the beginning.
As for the KJV, some of the sheer potency of the Hebrew original cannot be translated into any European language. The oldest extant Old Testaments are in Greek. The original of the New Testament would have been in Aramaic, not Hebrew. IIRC, scholars tend to think the oldest manuscripts of the New Testament would have been in Greek.
Hi - I've studied German philosophers both in the US (Duquesne University in Pittsburgh) and in Germany (Albert Lüdwigs Universität zu Freiburg im Breisgau), and spent my first year in Germany basically ensconced at the university library (UB) with the Critique of Pure Reason at the one hand and the multi-volume Grimms Dictionary at the other. My specialty at that time was phenomenological hermeneutics, and I studied with von Herrmann, the guy who quite properly takes about 2 years to do the first part of Being and Time. Kant is eminently readable in German, but the English language translations are fairly good. Kaufmann's Nietzsche translations are quite good as well. Getting back to the original question, I think that David Carr's translation of The Crisis of European Science and Transcendental Phenomenology is perhaps one of the finest to be found, and can be used to clear up ambiguities in German for the English language student whose German is only fair-to-middling. I spent a lot of time - as phenomenological hermeneutics people tend to do - of trying to find the language that is as precise as possible to avoid ambiguities, and in the academic area it is, of course, critical to be able to read the original, but largely as a control to make sure that one's point is not the mistake of translation. This is particularly a problem in Nietzsche, as in some cases what we read in English was never written by Nietzsche in German (The Will To Power is a good example of this, having been put together by Nietzsche's political slut of a sister, who twisted his works to fit her view of the Nazi ideology), and in this case it is critical to be able to verify what has been translated. Me, I vastly preferred reading Sartre in the original to any translation, and of course if you haven't read Descartes' Meditationes in the original Latin, you can't properly call yourself a philosopher, as that text is the one that everyone otherwise gets wrong (he never said "I think, therefore I am").
The oldest extant Old Testaments are in Greek. The Dead Sea Scrolls are the oldest known copies at present, and those are primarily written in Hebrew dialects.
Meta-Meta: Don Quixote compares reading a translation to looking at the back of a tapestry.
I rarely put aside a book without finishing it, but that Calvino book was a rare exception (in English translation, so I can't help you with the main question here). At first I found it charming and clever, but before I got very far - I think it was in the train station, where the author refused to commit himself to an era - I began to feel a rage at the impudence at playing with me, the reader, so casually. I returned it to the friend who lent it to me (not one of the possibilities enumerated at the beginning anyway, maybe that is why I never made the connection!).
I have to agree with Erika Szostak on Invisible Cities, probably my favorite Calvino book. But the problem with translators is similar to the problem with historians. You have to know where the translator is coming from if you want to understand why they chose this word versus another. Nietzsche was pretty poorly understood when his sister was doing the translations and Kaufmann's translations didn't come for another fifty years.
I concur with Avram in re: Michael Kandel's translation of Stanislaw Lem's The Cyberiad. That book, which is a series of sallies by a pair of robots who themselves construct robots required an incredible amount of english-language genuis in order to make wordplays of equivalent complexity to the original Polish work. One of the more popular sallies is about the two characters creating a robotic Bard, and, well, the author and the translator are both up to the task of making the Bard come off as a genuine genius, even though they had to create a considerable body of the Bard's work in the story. In fact, any of Kandel's translations of Lem's work are excellent, which is remarkable considering the widely variable tone and breadth of Lem's books, which include a lot of scientific documentary about fictional events, light novels about a space adventurer, and even more literary works like book reviews of books that don't exist. It's sad that Lem's most famous (in the West) work, Solaris has not yet been translated directly from English. The English-language novel version is translated from a French translation, while the Tarkovsky movie was in Russian and its remake was a remake of the movie, not the book. Avram, if you like Kandel's translations, you should try Kandel's own writing. His Captain Jack Zodiac was a wonderful pre-apocalyptic novel that remained relatively light considering at the time it spent in a doomed Earth. Plus the pre-apocalypse is not well-covered territory in SF. It's way out of print, though, but the internet should make it possible to locate a copy.
Speaking of Nietzsche, Thomas Common's translation of Thus Spake Zarathustra is definitely a completely different book than any of the 'plain' English translations. It has such a scriptural flavor. A perfect book to read aloud.
The "Master and Margarita" issue is complicated by the fact that the first translation to appear in the West was based on the version that had been published in the USSR at the time, which had censored one of Bulgakov's twin closing chapters. The thing is, after reading that version first, and then a version with the censored second half of the double-ending included, I found I actually liked the censored version better. But I was a lot younger then and might like the real version better if I were to read it today.
I've only read a bit of Kandel, but what I read I liked. I seem to recall a theory that translation is hardest in works where it's culturally specific and the language is significantly distant from the translated language. For example Chinese humorous or political stories rarely translate well to English because they're specific to China and their language is unrelated to English. The same might be true of Burmese, maybe moreso as they're more isolated from the West. Despite that I'm not sure how true that axiom is in reality. If it were completely true there should be a good deal of quality translations from Dutch or Frisian into English, but I don't think that's the case.
Can a translation be better than, or as good as, the original? Perhaps, but it takes an enormous amount of luck AND skill AND effort. Most of the time, translations are doomed to be failures by that standard. I have translated about 200 poems, and of all those, I think maybe once I equalled the original (Rilke's "Love Song", www.polyamory.org/~howard/Poetry/rilke_love_song.html). Mostly, you make compromises; you try to get as close as you can, until you can't get any closer; and then you stop. On the other hand, I don't think writing one's own work is very much different. Art is never finished, only abandoned.
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A friend of mine once saw a german graduate student friend reading an english edition of the Critique of Pure Reason. When asked why he was reading a translation, he replied "Are you kidding? No one can understand Kant in German."
Posted by Blackadder | December 21, 2007 9:39 PM