"The translator is author and artist and it's their words we're reading"

November 2, 2024 1:38 AM

Why You Should Read Literature in Translation is a video essay about what is gained in translation. There is a transcript, but you need to click on "show transcript" all the way at the bottom of the episode notes. The essay ends with recommendations of books in translation and they're all interesting, and so are a lot of other books discussed.
posted by Kattullus (7 comments total)

As Bruce Sterling once wrote, "There's a quality in a good translation that can't be captured in the original."
posted by adamrice at 6:12 AM on November 2 [2 favorites]

What, like Finnegans Wake?
posted by Jessica Savitch's Coke Spoon at 8:58 AM on November 2 [2 favorites]

Change this to "why you should watch anime in translation" and watch the sparks fly.
posted by egypturnash at 9:41 AM on November 2

...Not infrequently I read a book in translation and then the original - and I have opinions - and most significantly, I disagree with him on a point he makes at 15-ish min. about his hating when people say, "It's better in the original." And that's because sometimes it is: A couple years ago I picked up L'Anomalie by Hervé Le Tellier and was unexpectedly swept away. It is a masterful novel about story-telling and novels and reality and and and. It has a fantastic ending, or at least a deeply, deeply satisfying one (to me, at the time). And then I was hanging out with a bunch of German speakers, talking about books and it came up and I started shoveling the praise and it was not as admired by those who read the 'German translation. And so I found it at a book store and, yeah, a lot of the nuance was left out (why? dunno.)

Similar but different, I think some writers profit enormously from translation - there's a certain American writer who's short-stories in the late 80's I really, really, enjoyed but whose novels I find way less compelling - and his readership here, among Germans is ginormous. Like, huge. And incomprehensible, but - I have to imagine his translator is fantastic and able to breath life into text that... (And on the third hand there is a really faithful, beautiful really, German translation of Moby Dick that is really praise-worthy for capturing some of the wildness and beauty of Melville's prose)

So, go figure. Milan Kundera had a lot to say about translations and being translated, and worth the insight though I can't put my hand on it right now.
posted by From Bklyn at 11:11 AM on November 2 [2 favorites]

The Penguin The Pillow Book of Sei Shonagan as translated by Ivan Morris is my examplar. (Internet Archive Full Text). Here is an audio book preview of it. It is a book over a thousand years old book wherein you meet a living breathing woman. There is nothing quite like it. It and A Tale of Genji are translated favorites of mine .
posted by y2karl at 2:31 PM on November 2 [5 favorites]

The bit about Clarice Lispector is interesting. Now I wonder if Chinese translators of her works have chosen to preserve the 'weirdness' of her language in their translations.

There's no doubt that a translator can improve upon the original work -- "The Three Body Problem" as translated by Ken Liu is a well-known example by now. But it's also true that the higher the bar an author sets in the original language, the more difficult it would be for translators to clear that bar in the target languages. (Yes I'm specifically bitter about the disappointing Chinese translation of "Pilgrim at Tinker Creek" done by Yu Youshan. Annie Dillard deserves better.)

I don't read much translated literature in English, but about 20% of my Chinese reading is translated literature. The difference is this website/app called Douban, a site that's like goodreads and imdb rolled into one. I have been able to get very good recommendations of foreign language books through Douban forums. Marguerite Yourcenar, Korean writer 金爱烂 Ae-ran Kim, Michio Hoshino, Herta Müller and Dubravka Ugrešić are all happy finds from there.
posted by of strange foe at 8:02 PM on November 3 [3 favorites]

I was reminded of a passage in Samuel R Delaney's nonfiction essays collection The Jewel Hinged Jaw where he talks about this and gives two translations of passage of a classic -- a description of a storm if I recall correctly-- for example. One is music -- Wagner in full storm. The other was a walk/don't walk crossing light.

That was an amazing collection of essays. Another was about the impossibility of critically covering contemporary English poetry at that time. It's all very easy to decide who wrote the classics when people who could read and write were more the exception.than the rule and go Wyatt, Marvell, mostly Shakespeare and so forth, when writers were in the hundreds rather than the hundreds of thousands if not millions. And is hence sans neuralinks and AI computer augmentation impossible for your average everyday postmodern Schrodinger's Cat Box doomscroller comprehend.

And I am glad to be reminded that he's still rocking it. In his old school web desigh ways. He is truly the polymaths' polymath.
posted by y2karl at 11:58 AM on November 27 [2 favorites]