Won in translation
International Translation Day is celebrated every year on 30 September on the feast of St. Jerome, the Bible translator who is considered as the patron saint of translators.
Ah, translations, the not bablefish type. I wouldn't be familiar with a third of the novels, plays, movies I am without them, not to mention the non-fiction books essential for researching anything of interest. Last year several book awards were handed out at the Corine in Munich, to ten books, eight of which were translated, but did anyone mention the translator(s) in their praise? No. And they're getting paid lousy wages in general, too. So, let's hear it for translators once in a while.
Now, while matter-of-fact scientific translations are important, the absolutely best thing which can happen if we're talking about poetry or fictional prose is that the translator has poetic gifts of his/her own, and sometimes even manages to achieve a work of art of its own. (Classic famous examples: Catullus' version of Sappho's most famous poem. The Schlegel-Tieck-Translation of Shakespeare. Also Rilke translating Elizabeth Barrett Browning, as quoted here.
All of these examples are, however, either translations from English into German or from Greek into Latin, not into English, the language I'm currently using, which is not my own. I am, however, familiar enough with it to appreciate the beauty of a great translation/version, and have previously written about two of my favourites:
Ovid as rendered by Ted Hughes
and
Seneca's Oedipus as rendered by Ted Hughes
Hughes' has a way of recreating the ancients in his own fierce poetry that enchants me every time I read one of his versions, which is why I do so more often than reading more accurate German translations of the same writers. Here are some quotes of the very last one he wrote, his version of Euripides' Alcestis. As Keith Sagar pointed out in an essay, Hughes never translated one of the most famous Ovidian tales, the one of Orpheus, the poet who tries to retrieve his dead wife from the underworld, but fails to. However, the story haunted him for obvious biographical reasons, and in his version of Alcestis - not the most popular of Euripides' plays, an odd choice to work at - or not, if you're dying, and the play is about a wife lost through your own fault but also returned again to life -, he inserts a sudden speech of Admetos about Orpheus which isn't there in the original (A glance. Think of it. Only a backward glance,/ And he had done what he should never have done/ At the crucial moment./ He lost her). Alcestis as rendered by Hughes is one long passionate argument with death (also with Death, who shows up as a character early on), loss, love and selfishness, and in it he comes up with lines like these:
A dead woman, a falling star
With a long train
Of burning and burned-out love.
Falling into non-life.
Into endless time, endlessly falling.
or:
You live now
Only because you let Death take her.
You killed her. Point-blank
She met the death that you dodged.(...)
You are the cannibal. Only you.
Thrive on that feast. Nobody else.
Think of it.
Every day you live she nourishes you
With her dead body.
Or:
We should never have married.
Men who have never married
Keep their nerves inside their own skin.
The nerves of the married man,
His very entrails, all his arteries
Are woven into the body of his wife -
And into the bodies of his children.
And then again:
Necessity could not frighten Alcestis,
We pray to Necessity to spare us,
But we pray to Alcestis
To give us courage to live - as if death
Were no more than the outline of life,
The outline of a shadow on a wall,
Maybe the shadow of a dancer, a reveller.
And in conclusion: read translations. Sometimes, they're absolutely magnificent.
Ah, translations, the not bablefish type. I wouldn't be familiar with a third of the novels, plays, movies I am without them, not to mention the non-fiction books essential for researching anything of interest. Last year several book awards were handed out at the Corine in Munich, to ten books, eight of which were translated, but did anyone mention the translator(s) in their praise? No. And they're getting paid lousy wages in general, too. So, let's hear it for translators once in a while.
Now, while matter-of-fact scientific translations are important, the absolutely best thing which can happen if we're talking about poetry or fictional prose is that the translator has poetic gifts of his/her own, and sometimes even manages to achieve a work of art of its own. (Classic famous examples: Catullus' version of Sappho's most famous poem. The Schlegel-Tieck-Translation of Shakespeare. Also Rilke translating Elizabeth Barrett Browning, as quoted here.
All of these examples are, however, either translations from English into German or from Greek into Latin, not into English, the language I'm currently using, which is not my own. I am, however, familiar enough with it to appreciate the beauty of a great translation/version, and have previously written about two of my favourites:
Ovid as rendered by Ted Hughes
and
Seneca's Oedipus as rendered by Ted Hughes
Hughes' has a way of recreating the ancients in his own fierce poetry that enchants me every time I read one of his versions, which is why I do so more often than reading more accurate German translations of the same writers. Here are some quotes of the very last one he wrote, his version of Euripides' Alcestis. As Keith Sagar pointed out in an essay, Hughes never translated one of the most famous Ovidian tales, the one of Orpheus, the poet who tries to retrieve his dead wife from the underworld, but fails to. However, the story haunted him for obvious biographical reasons, and in his version of Alcestis - not the most popular of Euripides' plays, an odd choice to work at - or not, if you're dying, and the play is about a wife lost through your own fault but also returned again to life -, he inserts a sudden speech of Admetos about Orpheus which isn't there in the original (A glance. Think of it. Only a backward glance,/ And he had done what he should never have done/ At the crucial moment./ He lost her). Alcestis as rendered by Hughes is one long passionate argument with death (also with Death, who shows up as a character early on), loss, love and selfishness, and in it he comes up with lines like these:
A dead woman, a falling star
With a long train
Of burning and burned-out love.
Falling into non-life.
Into endless time, endlessly falling.
or:
You live now
Only because you let Death take her.
You killed her. Point-blank
She met the death that you dodged.(...)
You are the cannibal. Only you.
Thrive on that feast. Nobody else.
Think of it.
Every day you live she nourishes you
With her dead body.
Or:
We should never have married.
Men who have never married
Keep their nerves inside their own skin.
The nerves of the married man,
His very entrails, all his arteries
Are woven into the body of his wife -
And into the bodies of his children.
And then again:
Necessity could not frighten Alcestis,
We pray to Necessity to spare us,
But we pray to Alcestis
To give us courage to live - as if death
Were no more than the outline of life,
The outline of a shadow on a wall,
Maybe the shadow of a dancer, a reveller.
And in conclusion: read translations. Sometimes, they're absolutely magnificent.