Rethinking "Mother died today": Translating a work requires a surprising amount of thought to avoid leading readers into contextual pitfalls, and
The Stranger is no exception.
"Within the novel’s first sentence, two subtle and seemingly minor translation decisions have the power to change the way we read everything that follows."
posted by estlin
on May 16, 2012 -
47 comments
"The Threat to Proust" by Roger Shattuck:
When Proust’s novel fell into the public domain in 1987, three Paris publishing houses were ready with new editions that had been in preparation for several years. They all carry the same basic 3,000-page text with few variations. The differences lie in packaging and presentation. Laffont-Bouquins chose to publish three fat volumes prefaced by elaborate historical and biographical materials. Garnier-Flammarion produced ten pocket-sized volumes competently edited by Jean Milly. The new Pléiade edition, published by the original copyright holder, Gallimard, made the boldest, most ambitious, and most expensive bid to claim the market. In a combination of editorial, literary, and commercial decisions, Gallimard proposed to influence the way we read Proust and, to some degree, the way we approach all great literary works. [more inside]
posted by Trurl
on Apr 19, 2012 -
32 comments
Solaris, Stanislaw Lem's 1961 masterpiece, has
finally been translated directly into English. The
current print version, in circulation for over 4 decades, was the result of
a double-translation. Firstly from Polish to French, in 1966, by Jean-Michel Jasiensko. This version was then taken up by Joanna Kilmartin and Steve Cox who hacked together an English version in 1970. Lem,
himself a fluent English speaker, was always
scathing of the double translation. Something he believed added to the universal misunderstanding of his greatest work. After the relsease of
two film versions of the story, and decades of speculation, a new direct English translation
has been released. Translated by American Professor
Bill Johnston '
The Definitive Solaris' is only available as an audiobook for the time being. Copyright issues, hampered by
several, widely available, editions of the poor English translation may mean it is some time yet before a definitive print edition makes it
onto our bookshelves.
posted by 0bvious
on Jun 19, 2011 -
64 comments
There is a before and an after André Markowicz. In the early 1990s the translator, born to a Russian mother and French father, began translating the complete works of Dostoyevsky for Babel / Actes Sud. By the time he finished the mammoth undertaking in 2002 he had proved something: what people had been reading by Dostoyevsky wasn’t Dostoyevsky. - an
interview with André Marcowicz, writer and translator.
[more inside]
posted by Monday, stony Monday
on Jun 28, 2010 -
12 comments
Brindin Press has lots of poetry translations into English online, concentrating on
French,
German,
Italian and
Spanish, though
more than 40 other languages are represented as well. A
boatload of translators is represented, from those toiling in obscurity to big literary names (e.g. there are translations of Catullus poems by
Ben Jonson,
Jonathan Swift,
Louis Zukofsky,
Aubrey Beardsley and
Thomas Hardy). There is also a
section of quirky poems. Finally,
here's a rendition of Goethe's Der Erlkönig that substitutes the elfish king with a dalek.
posted by Kattullus
on Sep 27, 2009 -
4 comments
[Ezra Pound] worked on and for poetry as others might work on a major scientific discovery or a drawn-out military mission. Thus, as Sieburth reminds us in his introduction to The Pisan Cantos, when, on May 3, 1945, Pound was arrested at his home in the hills above Rapallo, he immediately put a small Chinese dictionary and a copy of the Confucian classics in his pocket. Working as he then was on his Confucian translations, he knew that, wherever the military police were taking him, he would need these books.
From
Pound Ascendant by Marjorie Perloff. Ezra Pound's ability as a translator of Chinese poetry has long been disparaged by sinologists, such as George A. Kennedy in
Fenollosa, Pound and the Chinese Character. Other academics have sought to defend him. Two examples are Zhaoming Qian's
Ezra Pound's encounter with Wang Wei: toward the "ideogrammic method" of the Cantos and Stephen Tapscott's
In Praise of Bad Translations: Ezra Pound and the Cultural Work of Translation (pdf). Eric Hayot draws the contours of this long-running debate and explores its significance in
Critical Dreams: Orientalism, Modernism, and the Meaning of Pound's China. Pound's
Cathay in full and a public domain
audiobook version (iTunes link).
posted by Kattullus
on Apr 30, 2009 -
16 comments
The Gawain Project is an ongoing translation of the late 14th century anonymous poem
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (originally written in Middle English) into Modern English, for the amusement of Arthurians and anyone who likes a good story.
[via mefi projects]
posted by Effigy2000
on Feb 13, 2009 -
18 comments
The Tale of the Heike (Heike Monogatari) is a medieval Japanese account of the rise and fall of the Taira clan and has inspired many other works of art. Click on the chapters and scroll down to see
Heike illustrations (or start
here), see
more art or
figures inspired by the Heike. Would you rather read?
[more inside]
posted by ersatz
on Nov 16, 2008 -
10 comments
Sean Bonney's translations of Baudelaire are unconventional. Instead of following the form of the French originals they are semi-concrete typewriter poetry. In a
review of the book,
everyone's cup of tea, onedit magazine says that they are "certainly the best translations of Baudelaire in English ever written." Which might explain why they published 35 of them in their latest issue. You can listen to Bonney read his translations
here [mp3]
posted by Kattullus
on Jul 18, 2007 -
61 comments
The Aesthetics of Resistance. The first part of
Peter Weiss's 3-volume novel
Die Ästhetik des Widerstands (1975-81) has, after many delays, finally been
published in a Joachim Neugroschel’s English translation: a major, though largely-unheralded literary event. The book ‘stands as the most significant German novel published after The Tin Drum.’
[more inside]
posted by misteraitch
on Jun 28, 2005 -
7 comments
