recommend a translation

i'm going w/ the classic, since it's said to be the far more poetic of the two. i've never heard of lydia davis.

SAMUEL JOHNSON IS INDIGNANT:

that Scotland has so few trees.

HAPPIEST MOMENT

If you ask her what is a favorite story she has written, she will hesitate for a long time and then say it may be this story that she read in a book once: an English language teacher in China asked his Chinese student to say what was the happiest moment in his life. The student hesitated for a long time. At last he smiled with embarrassment and said that his wife had once gone to Beijing and eaten duck there, and she often told him about it, and he would have to say the happiest moment of his life was her trip, and the eating of the duck.

(Also, many of the stories are several pages long. But many are a sentence long, or less.)

Beckett's self-translations

both those seem to me reliably quality

for one thing, fewer words on the page. i swear that might have made a big difference.

i can't read french but god it almost seems not worth wondering whether beckett's trilogy is better in the original.

This is a link to the Lydia Davis translation which I'm posting mostly to remind myself next time this thread is revived that I would like it. I didn't realize they were having different people translate each section, though!

Richard Burton's translation frightens me.

You could be right -- I'll probably buy a couple of different ones, used, and see which comes off as more worthwhile. I don't want to dismiss him without reason, if indeed, his translation job is the most interesting of the lot.

Only released in Japan, and if you google in English you will be dissapointed with the $80-120 range of prices.

But if you go to amazon.co.jp and enter in the ISBNs for the 2 volumes (4061860518 & 4061860526) you can find both volumes in mint condition for about $5 each. Add in about $12 for shipping and you're in business.

Swann's Way: There've been a lot of great articles on this, including on by Hitchens in the Atlantic. I think the best one was in the NY Review of Books about three months ago. The general take is that the Moncrief/Kilmartin/Enright version is the best; Proust really was that purple; Moncrief's Gallic and twisted use of syntax captures the Proustian sentence and the way it swells to the conclusion. Ironically, given Davis's quirks, the consensus is that her's is much more literal and denotationally accurate, but less poetic and accurate to Proust's aesthetic. However, she's said to be much easier to read, perhaps because she doesn't have as much connotation.

Casuisty--have you read People of Paper or Notable American Women? I like Lydia Davis a lot, but her newer stuff hasn't seemed as good. Also, everything she writes seems like the same thing, blurs together, etc.

I'm glad you pointed that out, it was fun to read, esp since I'm in the process of reading Proust right now...Does anyone have any conclusions about the Lydia Davis translation? I really enjoyed the 'revised by enright' translation but it's starting to slow down a bit.

Hence lots of Polish goes via French, to barely clarify.

If, for some reason, you want to read both, start with the Elizabethan one and see how you fare with it. It will seem too much of a slog to come to it after reading the Graves version.

French was the key second language in Poland for a long time. After Russian, god bless em. See J Conrad et al.

Hence lots of Polish goes via French, to barely clarify.

― Mystic Handyman (noodle vague), Tuesday, April 4, 2006 Bookmark

Ah right, coincidentally I've been reading the first translation of Ferdyduke and so have been wondering, although I only stepped in this thread by accident - I decided to see what the minds of ILX had to say about translation after reading a bit about Cesar Vallejo's Trilce today (which I'll never read in Spanish (although it seems that knowing Spanish doesn't help), just like I'll never read Proust in French).

Such is life, etc.

I am trying to decide whether I should read the Davis or the revised Moncrieff when I try and go back to reading Proust, soonish.

Also I have just read the Jay Rubin 'NOrwegian Wood'. Did Birnbaum do 'Wind-up Bird'? I wonder, because I do not recall it having any of the odd smirky moments of dialogue I associate with the Murakami translations: as if they were written by an unusually talented fanfic writer.

i read the Davis translation when I read Swann's Way awhile ago--really liked it a lot. I compared certain passages I liked a whole bunch with the Moncrieff and I thought the Davis was superior every time.

Davis didn't translate the whole book, did she? Only 'Swann's Way', right?

korrekt

this means i only have to rebuy one volume, though

hm: the american edition of this is much better looking than the english. how annoying.

my Wind-Up Bird Chronicle (the white, red and black Vintage edition) is a Rubin translation.

What are the differences between the Rubin Norwegian Wood and the Birnbaum one?

I got the Lydia Davis 2nd hand. Does anyone have an opinion on different translators being used for every volume of 'Remembrance...'? They all have very nice covers and the Penguins feel good, which is a rubbish reason I know, but I'll never find all 16 vols of the Scott.

j there is a vintage (i think) edition of the twice revised montcrieff-enright-kilmartin

i like the idea of the different translators: sort of puts them apart from having to try and be 'definitive'

-

in re murakami, birnbaum translated norwegian wood for japanese english learners. (he also did translations of the first two novels, i think for the same reason: these have never (i think) been available outside japan.) (i really want them.) his version apparently makes no cuts, which the rubin one does; also, i've read that it handles certain things better in terms of avoiding banality ... okay, that's not quite right, because murakami does a lot with quotidian banality. i've read that it does better at avoiding sentimental banality which rubin falls into at a couple points. i have no idea if this is true or not, obviously. (i think i'm projecting what i myself want in it to something i read some time ago.)

Need advice: saw the Mathers/Maldrus translation - 4 vols for 15 quid.

Should I get it?

Of the The Book of Thousand Nights and One Night, that is...

Also I have just read the Jay Rubin 'NOrwegian Wood'. Did Birnbaum do 'Wind-up Bird'? I wonder, because I do not recall it having any of the odd smirky moments of dialogue I associate with the Murakami translations: as if they were written by an unusually talented fanfic writer.

― thomp, Friday, April 24, 2009 2:49 PM (9 months ago)

Birnbaum translated the short story "The Wind-Up Bird and Tuesday's Women" which later went on to become the first chapter of Wind-Up Bird (Six Fingers And Four Breasts). Birnbaum's translation is available independently in the The Elephant Vanishes so you can do a A-B if you care...

Apparently others do care:

First Jay Rubin's:

"When the phone rang I was in the kitchen, boiling a potful of spaghetti and whistling along with an FM broadcast of the overture to Rossini's The Thieving Magpie, which has to be the perfect music for cooking pasta.

"I wanted to ignore the phone, not only because the spaghetti was nearly done, but because Claudio Abbado was bringing the London Symphony to its musical climax."

And now Alfred Birnbaum's:

"I'm in the kitchen cooking spaghetti when the woman calls. Another moment until the spaghetti is done; there I am, whistling the prelude to Rossini's La Gazza Ladra along with the FM radio. Perfect spaghetti-cooking music.

"I hear the telephone ring but tell myself, Ignore it. Let the spaghetti finish cooking. It's almost done, and besides, Claudio Abbado and the London Symphony Orchestra are coming to a crescendo."

! interesting

WARNING LONG:

The reason i bring this up is because there was a lot of backlash against Alfred Birnbaum from Knopf (HM's publisher in the USA) because he did not come out of academia, he was basically just a dude who was born in the US but was educated (primary-HS-uni*) in Japan and, like thomp hints at above, was probably totally blown away by HM and wanted to get translate it into English. His first translations came fairly hot on the heels of HM's japanese publications. He was a huge fan obviously.

*in fact, he attended the same prestigious uni as HM: Waseda in Tokyo.

IMO, Birnbaum with perhaps his distance from academia and the fact that he was young and had actively lived in a Japan as an outsider (Murakami lives in between Japan and the USA... and also considers himself an outsider), really nailed Murakami's voice. Maybe not the capital "I" Importance of HM legacy as artiste, but the style, the flow, the mood of the language seems very close and near to the energy.

http://www.jpf.go.jp/j/intel/study/symposium/murakami/img/guests/Birnbaum.jpg
Alfred Birnbaum

BUT THEN....

HM (who is bilingual and spent about 10 years in the 80s-90s teaching literature in Boston, Princeton, LA and even a year in the midwest iirc) was contacted by Knopf who recommended to meet up with Jay Rubin who also lived in Boston, where he was the chair of Japanese Literature at Harvard, with a specialty in Noh and Japanese Classical Literature of the Edo-Meiji-Taisho periods.

Jay Rubin first encountered HM's work in 1989, not because he was a fan, but on recommendation of Knopf in New York. By this time, AB had already translated dozens of short stories as well as HM's first 4 novels into English and was responsible for the groundswell of popularity of HM at this time that was hungry for his next novels.

http://www.jpf.go.jp/j/intel/study/symposium/murakami/img/guests/Rubin.jpg
Jay Rubin

Jay claims that Alfred was tired of translating HM by the time WUBC was coming out in Japan, but Alfred has mentioned that it was not offered to him. Since then, Jay Rubin has been the major translator of HM (with a couple exceptions) and is best known for butchering the third act of WUBC. When Knopf was presented with the japanese text of WUBC, they saw a length problem and instructed Rubin to remove ~25k words with the assistance of HM. Yet instead of editing out certain superfluous sections, Rubin decides to remove 2 entire chapters (one of which reveals the entire story of "The Wind-Up Bird" which the novel is named for!) and rearranging the chronology of two other chapters... all against HM's collaborative assistance! Worse yet, Rubin takes a lot of pride in his hack-job claiming it to be "tighter, more concise than the original"... thanks for your opinion Jay.

There's a great article that's not on the web anymore (you have to pay for the archive), but it's written by Wendy Lesser about how Rubin's translations took an instensely colorful and modern text and turned it into the heavy-handed muted gray tones of classical Japanese literature.

Date September 27, 2002
Media The Chronicle Review
Link http://chronicle.com/free/v49/i05/05b00701.htm

I am an avid reader, but a shockingly monolingual one. The English language is the golden prison I inhabit: richly and divertingly adorned, but with all the exits closed off, preventing me from making my escape to French or Russian or Italian or Chinese. Only the Spanish door is slightly ajar, but its opening is just barely wide enough for me to peek through longingly. That is, I can read a novel in Spanish if I'm desperate, but I will get far more out of it if I read the same thing rendered in someone else's English.

Because of this handicap, I am heavily dependent on the work of translators; they are the social workers, you might say, who bring essential luxuries to my cell. I could dispense with these do-gooders, I suppose, if I chose to read only works written originally in English, and I did so choose, during a brief period of callow youthfulness. But even the great outpouring of 19th-century English fiction can seem insufficient and tedious after a while, and if you start venturing into the 20th century, particularly the late 20th century, you will soon find yourself in need of foreign companionship.

So rather than resent my helpers, my crutches, I have come to feel a deep affection for these selfless workers, these brilliant shadows, these people whose highest aim is to remain at the very margin of visibility. No translator wants his achievement stolen or denied; yet just as certainly, no translator wants her voice to overpower that of her source author. It's a very careful balance: However well the disappearing act is done, something of the translator's own sensibility invariably enters into the work we're given in English.

My most intense experience with translation, thus far, has involved a Japanese author. Like Javier MarÌas and W.G. Sebald, Haruki Murakami is a writer who is intimately acquainted with Anglo-American culture even as he remains outside it. (I think writers of this kind may well make the most interesting test cases for translation; at any rate, I find myself repeatedly drawn to them.) Murakami, who has translated Raymond Carver, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Paul Theroux into Japanese, is quite attached to the Beatles, jazz, Scotch whiskey, Marx Brothers movies, and many other products of Western culture. He repeatedly injects something akin to an American sensibility -- a rebellious, non-salaryman's sensibility -- into his hapless fictional protagonists. Yet the novels are written in Japanese and set, for the most part, in Japan, so when we read them in English, we get (as with Marías and Sebald) a strange sensation of foreignness mixed with familiarity, of worlds collapsing in on each other.

The first three novels I read by Murakami -- A Wild Sheep Chase, Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, and Dance, Dance, Dance -- were all translated by Alfred Birnbaum. When I finished the books, I was mildly curious to know more about Murakami; I was desperate to know more about Birnbaum. Who was this guy who could come up with two completely different kinds of English, an old-fashioned fairy-tale diction and a sharp-edged modern idiom, to render the two intertwined plot strands of Hard-Boiled Wonderland? How did he manage to do that weird, youthful, but never annoyingly with-it voice in which Murakami's narrator-protagonists spoke to themselves? How, in short, could he make a Japanese writer sound so remarkably American without losing any of his alien allure? All I could find out, from the jacket notes, was that Birnbaum was born in Washington, D.C., in 1957, grew up in Japan, and lived at various times in Los Angeles, Tokyo, London, and Barcelona.

Then The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle came out. This may still be Murakami's best-known novel in America; it was his first crossover book, the one that signaled his emergence from the ghetto of Kodansha to the classy precincts of Knopf. I started the first chapter as soon as the book was available, but right away I sensed that something was wrong. Turning to the front of the book, I noticed the name of a new translator: Jay Rubin. What had happened to my beloved Birnbaum? I called Kodansha, Knopf, the Society of Translators -- no answer. Nobody knew anything about the missing Birnbaum. He had apparently completed the transformation required of the Ideal Translator and become a figment, a ghost, an invisible man.

continue reading at
http://chronicle.com/free/v49/i05/05b00701.htm

Some dissent from the NYT review from 11-02-97:

''The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle,'' in Jay Rubin's polished translation, marks a significant advance in Murakami's art. He has stripped away much of the fussy pop ornamentation that in his earlier novels veered perilously near to product placement. The difference is immediately apparent if you compare the first chapter with an earlier version, published as a short story called ''The Wind-Up Bird and Tuesday's Women'' (later included in the collection ''The Elephant Vanishes''). In the short story, Toru reads a Len Deighton novel, listens to Robert Plant on the radio and has a McDonald's cheeseburger for lunch. (How many readers of serious fiction today can identify Robert Plant, the lead singer for Led Zeppelin?) All these references are eliminated in the novel, along with ones to Cartier, Adidas, Allen Ginsberg and Penthouse magazine.

From: Jay Rubin
Sent: Tuesday, January 9, 2001 8:22 PM
To: Gary Fisketjon; Philip Gabriel
Subject: Re: An email roundtable: Translating Murakami

Some additional thoughts on translating from Japanese to English -- in general, the Japanese have a far more sensitive and sophisticated awareness regarding food than most Americans. The number of food-preparation shows on TV--PRIME TIME--is amazing. So when a Murakami character makes himself an egg salad sandwich, Japanese readers are going to feel something a little different from what American readers are going to feel about it. There is no way to convey the cultural context regarding that sandwich in a translation, except perhaps through scholarly footnotes, which would only succeed in destroying anyone's enjoyment of the text. So you just have to have the character make his sandwich in English and figure it's not going to be THAT different. The fact that the word "sandwich" is written in a phonetic script reserved for recording foreign terms, that the Japanese reader's eye travels vertically down the page to take in that word and the other words of the sentence, that the Japanese word for "cut" has a tiny picture of a sword in it: all these facts about the Japanese writing system are fascinating but are of interest only to foreign students of the language and are no more exciting to a Japanese reader than the snake-like shape of the "s" in the word "sentence." As I pointed out in my book Making Sense of Japanese (Kodansha International), the Japanese language is not processed in either hemisphere of the brain but in the left elbow, which makes for a certain calcification of style in literary works, but no translator has yet figured out how to convey this in a foreign language.

So yeah, there are elements of the translators trying to preserve the authenticity of the Japanese-ness of HM's writing by stripping out the western elements (esp. the richness of the ~serious fiction~ academians take on the pop-culture references: "zmg how gauche...", go fuck yourself Jamie James!)

On the amazing 00s film poll that's going on right now, a poster said something about one of my favorite films: "I generally don't like Taiwanese films" and I was like... what the hell does Taiwan have to do with this movie? Strip away the language and the setting, these people are not living in traditional huts in the mountains speaking Hokkien, they are a family living in an apartment highrise who go to school and work (dad works at a video game company for fuck's sake) and are dealing with dying relatives and past-romances (hey, she lives in America!) and dealing with loser friends and the modern condition... when did these themes become exclusively Taiwanese?

Back to HM, I met him 2x. Once at a lecture and once at a book signing. When asked about his works being translated to English, he felt it was unimportant... that as long as the "root/essence" [本] is preserved in the work, the spirit will continue no matter what language it is translated in. I pretty much winced at this statement, but I can sympathize with him, as it's out of his control and he's probably better off not worrying about it. And then I had a thought driving home: in time, all major works get re-translated. So maybe he's not thinking about the "now" but eternally.

So hopefully someday we'll get a Wind-Up Bird Chronicle that isn't stripped of the Western pop-culture references, the jazzy hipster dialect, the whimsical chapters deemed unnecessary by some stuffy Harvard prof...

have never been a big fan of HM, but will fully admit that it may be because of stuffy translations. (can't recall who did NW or HBWATEOTW). all his narrators sound the same. I did read what I talk about when I talk about running and he seemed like a really cool dude. I would have had a drink at his jazz bar.

I can definitely get behind a crusade against a stuffy harvard lit professor. yeah!

really looking forward to Mathias Enard's Zone

hmm...reading about it and wondering why I'm not more enthusiastic than I can manage at the mo.

did you read the excerpt at conversational reading? it sounds awesome

I was reading a review of Zone at Quarterly reading. Can't find any excerpts of his writing except this short story

Or Quarterly conversation...

here's a bit

http://www.rochester.edu/College/translation/threepercent/index.php?id=2789

Just read that. Seems that resistance is futile :-)

lydia davis is blogging abt her new translation of madame bovary over at the paris review - http://www.theparisreview.org/blog/author/ldavis/

sorta disappointed that she doesn't seem too interested in gossipy shit-talking about the existing translations

Thanks for the link - really enjoyed that, especially when she talks of her experience of translating Proust.

what's the best translation of turgenev's 'fathers and sons'? i was waiting for what seemed like the inevitable pevear/volokhonsky version, and then i just stumbled across an interview in which they said they'll never do it!

i can't say which i read—it was old and used, likely a popular one in the 60s or 70s—but it didn't really strike me as so literary as to matter a lot what the translation was. it was just exciting to read people arguing about important stuff.

The one I read was the current Penguin Classics one. I loved that book! Got me hooked on Tugenev in a big way.

http://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/feb/28/ahmet-hamdi-tanpinar-the-time-regulation-institute-turkey-western-time

Great piece.

Out of curiosity, has anyone read all the new Penguin Proust translations?

I read the Lydia Davis Swann's Way, the first time I'd read any Proust, and loved it, and was quite convinced by her arguments in defence of her style of translation so I had presumed I would continue with the other new translations rather than switching to the older ones but I never really see people talking much about the other translations or translators, so now I'm not so sure.

Great piece.
Nice. Thanks. That piece turns out to be more or less the preface of the Penguin edition of the book.

k, that explains why something published in The Guardian is any good. I got a 2nd hand copy of A mind at Peace three years ago (or so) and it was such a bad year for reading I sold it.

I did see a copy of The Time Regulation Institute 2nd hand about a couple of months ago and didn't bother :-(

robin - I have read all the other Penguin translations. At the time I felt they weren't talking as much about it because Swann's Way is all most people will read. It didn't bother me, nor did I feel I wanted to get to Scott Moncrieff, for some reason I can't get on with him.

Cool, thanks, I already have the second one in the new translations so I'll stick with them for now anyway.

For once, something to look forward to from this publisher.

https://fitzcarraldoeditions.com/books/the-possessed

four nobel laureates not good enough for ya?

Sounds intriguing!

four nobel laureates not good enough for ya?

― crutch of england (ledge), Monday, 21 August 2023 bookmarkflaglink

When this publisher is written about every couple of months or so they mention the laureates but Alexievich is their best one and Dalkey had already published her book on Chernobyl. Other publishers had already bought out some of her other books so Fitzcarraldo don't 'own' her.

Ernaux was also not solely discovered by them either. Plenty of translations pre-2014.

I haven't tried Olga Tokarczuk.

Who is the fourth?

When you've read the book you can come back and give us your thoughts on the translation.

The fourth is elfriede jelinek. Yokarczuk is the only one I've read (and rate highly). I'm not into their famous blue covers.

Tokarczuk, yok yok.

Moncrief's translation is beautiful, but it's almost as much Moncrief as it is Proust (from what I understand--I can sorta read French). I have yet to try the Davis translation.

"elfriede jelinek"

Ah ok, she's been published by a range of publishers.

I think Europa supporting Ferrante or Archipelago doing the same for Knausgaard is more significant even if they didn't win the Nobel.