Today's post at BVC was sparked by a recent reread of 26-year-old Fanny Burney's Evelina, which rocketed to best-sellerdom within weeks after it came out late in 1778
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I had never thought about that until Steven Brust was championing a specific translation of Dumas's work a decade or two back. Until then I'd thought that the rather turgid nineteenth century translation I'd read (because my French is alas not up reading Dumas in the original language) was a match for Dumas. What a difference!
Contrariwise: I first read The Count of Monte Cristo when I was ten or so. I adored it then and I adore it still. I reread it regularly over thirty years. And my old copy was falling apart, so I bought a new one - and couldn't read it. It had never occurred to me that there might be more than one translation; I'd had several editions over the years, but always the same text. It was like suddenly encountering a paraphrase of a favourite novel, a retelling by another hand. I couldn't bear it.
Oh, that makes sense. If one translation works perfectly, another is going to jar. I remember people commenting on that when certain liturgies were rephrased.
The translation question is one we've discussed a lot over by our edge of the swamp. There's no right answer, I don't think--it depends on the era and the audience (e.g., scholarly or popular) and your intentions. It gets especially interesting/complicated when you're translating not only across cultures but across time. Dumas's French won't be the same as contemporary French, and Dostoevsky's Russian won't be the same as contemporary Russian. Murasaki Shikibu's Japanese isn't readable by modern Japanese speakers without training, any more than Beowulf is by modern English speakers.
Your side issue is fascinating. Writers whose first language isn't English but who write in English can free us of our perceptions of English, I think--they can startle us with some of the things that English can do.
Plus we can teah you words you've forgotten. *grin*
The frist version of Kings and Rebels loaned a lot of vocabulary from books like Ivanhoe and I used words people told me they had to look up, like: inimical, glaive, destrier, vambrace, gambeson (I decided against 'acqueton' because even I thought that was too exotic). I've toned that down somewhat now, but I still use a faint spicing of old fashioned vocabulary because it fits my overall voice.
Oh, anyone who reads historical novels or history knows all of those words, as well as glebe and various liturgical obscurities (I confess I did a great deal of dictionary delving when I first read Eramus's letters); it's how the words are used that can change mood and meaning more than one might at first surmise.
There are a lot of theories of translation. Dorothy Sayers described some of them in one of the introductions for her translation of the Divine Comedy. The one I remember is that medieval translators felt that so much was lost in translation that it was good to add whatever beauties they could think of.
And there's a long bit about red in an Umberto Eco book which is translated as being about yellow (or possibly the other way around)-- and he was fine with that because for him, it was all about the sound of the words. Color is a very vivid thing for me, so I don't think it's a reasonable substitution.
A piece I read about translation gave a different motive for the medieval translators: the paramount goal was showing that the common language could be as beautiful as classical languages. Also, of course, "authorship" was a somewhat different concept then; attributing your text to a famous name, for instance, was a way to honor the famous person.
Your second paragraph just shows that no choices in translation are perfect--better than if the color had been kept the same and the point about sound lost, I think.
One book on linguistics of humor also says some fascinating things about the problems of translating jokes. For instance, "Rugby players have odd-shaped balls" doesn't work in Russian, since the word for a sports ball is not used for testicles. In Russian, Italian, and Spanish, they are called "eggs," so you could use that, but then you lose the link to rugby.
Sometimes I am in awe of any good translation at all.
add whatever beautiesmarycatelliFebruary 20 2011, 15:48:24 UTC
King Alfred did that. When Boethius asked who were the descendents of Homer, Alfred plopped that down and asked the same thing about the blood of King Arthur.
Chaucer gets -- interesting in Troilus and Cressida. Every so often he comments that this is told in the book he's translating. C. S. Lewis comments that this is just about conclusive evidence that in fact he's diverging from the book.
When I taught at Gotham Writer's Workshop, one student impressed me with her use of parentheses--I usually really dislike them, but hers won me over anyway. She said that in her first language, Russian, parentheses are much more common, including in famous literature. Something had somehow carried over, then.
Oh! I also use parentheses quite often but I did not notice it was more common in Russian - I use them in Russian more often than other people (because I enjoy having small asides sprinkled all over the text).
According to Brust, he could not find the name of the translator, who did the work for Little,Brown in 1888. But if you buy the Tor reissue, Isbn 0-812-53602-9 you will get the translation that Brust (and I) liked.
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Contrariwise: I first read The Count of Monte Cristo when I was ten or so. I adored it then and I adore it still. I reread it regularly over thirty years. And my old copy was falling apart, so I bought a new one - and couldn't read it. It had never occurred to me that there might be more than one translation; I'd had several editions over the years, but always the same text. It was like suddenly encountering a paraphrase of a favourite novel, a retelling by another hand. I couldn't bear it.
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Your side issue is fascinating. Writers whose first language isn't English but who write in English can free us of our perceptions of English, I think--they can startle us with some of the things that English can do.
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The frist version of Kings and Rebels loaned a lot of vocabulary from books like Ivanhoe and I used words people told me they had to look up, like: inimical, glaive, destrier, vambrace, gambeson (I decided against 'acqueton' because even I thought that was too exotic). I've toned that down somewhat now, but I still use a faint spicing of old fashioned vocabulary because it fits my overall voice.
Reply
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And there's a long bit about red in an Umberto Eco book which is translated as being about yellow (or possibly the other way around)-- and he was fine with that because for him, it was all about the sound of the words. Color is a very vivid thing for me, so I don't think it's a reasonable substitution.
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I need to go back and read that Sayers intro--I read it ages ago, before I could appreciate it.
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Your second paragraph just shows that no choices in translation are perfect--better than if the color had been kept the same and the point about sound lost, I think.
One book on linguistics of humor also says some fascinating things about the problems of translating jokes. For instance, "Rugby players have odd-shaped balls" doesn't work in Russian, since the word for a sports ball is not used for testicles. In Russian, Italian, and Spanish, they are called "eggs," so you could use that, but then you lose the link to rugby.
Sometimes I am in awe of any good translation at all.
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Chaucer gets -- interesting in Troilus and Cressida. Every so often he comments that this is told in the book he's translating. C. S. Lewis comments that this is just about conclusive evidence that in fact he's diverging from the book.
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