Which Translators do you Trust?

This is not a question as to how well a particular translator carries out his/her craft, but their taste as to what they do translate. I guess this question assumes they are allowed a taste and translate fictions they like in the first place. I don't know how the process works.

I like Michael Hoffmann quite a bit - he has translated several works by Joseph Roth, and looking at the list of authors he has translated there are one or two there I hadn't heard of before and would love to find and read (Ersnt Junger, Irmgard Keun).

Also Sophie Wilkins.

Mike Mitchell's translations of Meyrink, among others, for Dedalus, read like a dream - as they should.

Michael Hoffmann is great--never been disappointed by his taste.

Anthe Bell's another good guide: she translates from French and German, and has done Stefan Zweig and a number of others for Pushkin Press, as well as being co-responsible for bringing the Asterix comics into English.

George Steiner for your Hungarians, Tiina Nunnally for your Scandinavians.

D'you mean Szirtes?

Szirtes translation of Krudy's "Adventures of Sindbad" is an all-time favorite.

Yes, Szirtes, sorry! Had been reading an article by Steiner and got confused.

I've been googling and trying to acquaint myself with Hungarian fiction for the last half hour.

Thanks all!

xyzzzz__, try Iván Mándy's short stories in On The Balcony.

Antal Szerb as well. At least Journey by Moonlight (and I'm assured the translation is good as well). The other stuff I'm not so keen on, although I enjoyed Oliver VII. Other people would definitely rep for his other stuff, mind.

Journey by Moonlight is excellent.

A Hungarian not mentioned: Sandor Marai. Just paid a visit to my local library and saw Szirtes' translation of Esther's Inheritance so I am having a go in between Proust(s).

Lydia Davis might become another guide of mine -- her translation of The Way By Swann's is one of those books for life, and I see she has translated many other French authors (esp interested in looking at the Blanchot translation). Trying to find a web source that lists all of her translation but no luck so far.

Marai's 'The Rebels' is really good, too: a bunch of Hungarian teenagers get up to increasingly odd shenanigans while their fathers are off fighting WW1.

I don't know, but I found some of the ideas in this interview (with one of my old intro. to English Lit. teachers) somewhat interesting:

http://www.wordswithoutborders.org/?post=VenutiTranslationBlog

Thanks for linking to that. A bit depressing, really.

My journey into translated works has centred on early 20th century European fic so its been easier to get hold of several authors from certain countries. I'd say I'm fairly satisfied at the amount of fiction that is translated from these, insofar as it allows me to grasp certain historical-political contexts from those periods - it can give me a picture, or it can get me to a point of interrogation...

There is space here for the role of foreign films. But again there is a whole separate issue as to what films are selected to make it into screens overseas (I'd venture that way more foreign horror films make it whereas almost no horror lit from other countries is ever translated?)

Try these guys for foreign weird/horror fiction:

http://www.blackcoatpress.com/
http://www.dedalusbooks.com/

Margaret Jull Costa's involvement is enough to get me to look a book, at least: I have especially enjoyed reading her Pessoa, Atxaga (oh man I love Bernardo Atxaga), Gaite, Saramago; a number of bits and bobs I've picked up over the years largely due to her involvement and have liked very much: "The Migrant Painter of Birds" by Lydia Jorge, "The Yellow Rain" by Llamzares (sp?)

That I can't be arsed with Javier Marias and Perez-Reverte can't be her fault, can it? And not even her involvement has tempted me in the direction of Paolo Coelho. I wonder if I'm missing something?

Talking fo missing something, any tips on where to start with Eca de Queiros much appreciated.

Couldn't get into de Queiros at all. Tried Mario de Sa-Carneiro? Barking mad Portuguese Decadent, friend of Pessoa.

i like Richard Pavear and Larissa Volokhonsky, they've translated a large number of russian classics and done a really good job with it.

Lídia Jorge! I had no idea she was even translated.

Talking fo missing something, any tips on where to start with Eca de Queiros much appreciated.

The old Penguin Classics translation of The Maias is mostly sound, as far as I know - it's an intimidating book (500 page doorstop, the main love affair plot often being interrupted for long descriptions of portuguese social life), but it's the best thing he's ever written, and I got at least two non-portuguese speaking friends to dig it. Pick it up if you like Il Gattopardo. If you want to start off with something lighter though, there's Cousin Basilio (also hueg, but a lot more plot driven; probably his most overtly Flaubert/Zola influenced work), or The City & The Mountains, which is reasonably short and, if you get past the reactionary "city bad country good" message of the book, has a lot of fun moments and a nice lyrical touch.

Atxaga (oh man I love Bernardo Atxaga),

I'd forgotten about him! I've read two books by him and they were great. Must find more!

Robert Chandler is also someone who I think is doing good work:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/feb/18/andrei-platonov-robert-chandler

Michael Hamburger looks like a guide to much German poetry.

Yes, I've been enjoying his Holderlin recently.

Almost certainly get that Goethe. Holderlin looks good too.

Been scanning the Avill Press site, v tasty looking, need to get that Petrarch.

first came to Hamburger through his translations of Celan, he really is amazing. He also did Sebald's long poem After Nature, which is masterful imo.

will rep for this as well: http://www.amazon.com/German-Poetry-1910-75-English-Edition/dp/0856351628. long out of print but deserves a repress.

Believe he also translated Hans Magnus Enzensberger.

I have an Enzensberger 'Modern European Poets' vol. on Penguin (poll idea once I score enough of them) tr. by MH.

That German Poetry anthology does look good. Will look at ILL.

Tim Wilkinson for Hungarians maybe?

Marignalia on Casanova looks really interesting.

http://www.publicseminar.org/2013/12/andrey-platonovs-antisexus-and-the-sex-gender-industrial-complex/#.U8ZtRHfepTI

^putting this story up here for later.

Richard Howard

Ah yes I have his Baudelaire.

Realize I sometime subconsciously mix up Michaels Hamburger and Hofmann.

Standalone thread on the latter, for yr reference: Michael Hofmann: poet, translator, critic

http://www.asymptotejournal.com/article.php?cat=Special_Feature&id=158&curr_index=29&curPage=current

Really enjoyed that, thanks!

Funnily enough I came across an old bilingual anthology of modern Russian poetry later in the day while I was browsing at Notting Hill book exchange - checked the contents and there was no Shamalov.

Didn't get it but I'm counting the days to get hold of this one. I assume this will have poets from the Perestroika-era and also some Lermontov.

Thanks for that link.

This is a talk on the book.

http://www.londonreviewbookshop.co.uk/events/2015/3/russian-twentieth-century-poetry

Booked that - quite excited. I rarely go to literary talks or poetry readings.

This is a good piece on Platonov, and it has a further translation of Chevengur. I hope to read the full thing one day.

On Sir Thomas Orquart: http://www.asymptotejournal.com/blog/2015/03/12/the-cromartian/#more-5691

Ur-

Richard Zenith Interview: http://www.asymptotejournal.com/interview/an-interview-with-richard-zenith/

No idea how accurate they are, but really enjoyed David Magarshack's trans The Idiot, Ann Goldstein's version of the Neapolitan Novels, Natasha Wimmer's take on 2666, and Norman Thomas Di Giovanni's work with Borges. Borges does seem as close to translator-proof as possible, but NTDG mixes rule.

His widow-executrix does not agree, on either count.

Yet another link from Asymptote (its like translator porn) but I love this review. The book is interesting and its written by one of Krasznahorkai's translators, writing about a key-looking piece of the modernist puzzle.

http://www.wsj.com/articles/6-esteemed-literary-translators-in-their-own-words-1458748414

So cool to see Hofmann is working on Berlin Alexanderplatz.

Castle Gripsholm and Death Sentence are such fantastic books in their own ways. Real gifts to the world.

Was Alexanderplatz even translated into English before?

only know of the the early jolas trans.

...which is the one i have, complete with photo section from the fassbinder film. dunno if the penguin i see around is a different translation or not.

...or tv series if you prefer (scored a copy for 15 pounds recently!)

I vaguely remember seeing that translation but thinking it was cheesy for some reason.

no lime re: TV adap, you are in for a treat!

Was Alexanderplatz even translated into English before?

― Woke Up Scully (James Redd and the Blecchs), Friday, 25 March 2016 Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Oh yes its been in circulation for a long time. Read it about ten years ago. Not Penguin, can't remember it had a red cover.

I would say its the only Ulysses type novel I am interested in revisiting (including Ulysses in the not bothered).

(I am pleased to report that I have had some e-mail contact with Margaret Jull Costa as part of my Book of Disquiet project (as mentioned on the Pessoa thread) and she gives every indication of being delightful.)

I missed this post but am so starstruck, she is amazing

The Robin Buss translation of Count of Monte Cristo, which I read this summer, was so delightful that I planned to write him a fan letter as soon as I finished it. Was then peeved to find out he died in 2006.

Nonetheless - think I'll pick up some of his other translations.

Good interview with Lucy North, whose translations I've not read although managing to definitely given me an IN to the female Japanese writers she talks about.

Ooh, nice one

I just read a Kawakami translated by someone else, and liked it a lot (10p dream sequence aside)

Isabel Fargo Cole is just incredible:

http://www.3ammagazine.com/3am/translating-the-landscape-of-wolfgang-hilbig-an-interview-with-isabel-fargo-cole/

I love Sleep of the Righteous and At the Burning Abyss sounds amazing. Might have to actually shell out hard cash and buy myself a xmas present this week.

i just translated a book http://www.oupress.com/ECommerce/Book/Detail/2295/record%20of%20regret

Amazing!

Dylannn - I'm translating a family memoir (just so my non-French-speaking family can read it - it's not for publication). Do you have any recs for translation tools? I've been using Scrivener, with a split screen for English/French.

i'm sorry, just plain old word processing software.

good on you dylan

all of my literary translations have been borgesian in that theyre all very 'unreliable' ('too interpretive'), which is super frowned upon in the translation field

is yr translated book being distributed to libraries as well?

Congrats on that Dylan, that looks great.

I'm translating an essay from English to a Dutch dialect right now and just have two Word windows on split screen.

Dutch dialect to English I mean

thanks
xp
incredibly reliable translations by academics have ruined most books translated from chinese. translations of contemporary poetry are one place where there is still a lot of playfulness, and maybe youtube fansubs. especially with languages further from english, there's the chance to push the boundaries but it's fairly rare.

yeah should be, the other books in the series are in libraries
.

cool man

Dylann, you are excellent

Kudos to Dylan!

http://www.latimes.com/books/jacketcopy/la-ca-jc-korean-translation-20170922-story,amp.html

an interesting thing about translators you don't trust

Should I trust Emily Wilson - there was a nice interview with her re: her trans of The Odyssey (the first by a female translator).

I love Anne Carson's Sappho and she has also done a job on Euripides.

http://quarterlyconversation.com/the-bakkhai-by-euripides-and-anne-carson

still get nightmares from translating latin

i dont think it was posted here but there is one fella (i think he was pope john paul ii's translator) who pwns all latin translators

i can dig through my files if people rly want his name

i dont remember if he translated any classical lit tho

Robert Chandler seems to sell copies of his translations on Amazon marketplace - I'm just buying The Foundation Pit off him.

Tempted by A Sparrow's Journey..

Susan Bernofsky

^^^ i have a crush

Alan S. Trueblood

How do ppl here feel about Pevear and Volokhonsky? I want to read Anna Karenina this year, but the only version I currently own is the P and V translation and I know that it's 'controversial':

https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2016/09/29/on-translation-tolstoy/

I am probably not picking P&V up and it's not do much to do with that piece. I don't know if it was the translation or the book but Demons did flag quite a bit for me.

I think I have a copy of Garnett.

Is Garnett regarded as a direct translation. I remember giving up on reading one of her versions of Dostoevsky in my mid teens cos I thought it had gentrified or bowdlerised something darker.
Have more recently heard that Dostoevsky was borrowing style heavily from British and other European authors which has left me wondering if that was actually closer to the style he wrote in than I imagined from hearing other people's reactions to his work.
I don't read Russian so can't tell.

I am suspicious of them

I just started the Maude translation (revised by Mandelkern) of War and Peace and it seems really good to me. I've found this version very easy to get into. The dialogue feels lively and natural. The Maudes did an Anna Karenina as well so I may seek that out. I remember trying the P&V Anna Karenina and hitting some clunky sentences early on.

It seems like there was a bit of a translation war between the Maudes and Garnett at one time.

Maude wanted to publish a complete collected works of Tolstoy and enlisted his friends and acquaintances to help campaign for funding and support. There were many competing editions of the more popular works, some of them "very incompetent," according to Bernard Shaw, since Tolstoy had waived his rights over translation. Shaw wrote to The Times asking readers to support the project by "spontaneously giving it the privileges of a copyright edition" and "subscribing for complete sets" to make up for the "miscarriage of Tolstoy's public-spirited intentions." Shaw's signature was followed by many more, including literary figures like Arnold Bennett, Arthur Conan Doyle, Gilbert Murray and H. G. Wells. Thomas Hardy added his own independent letter, offering support though he did not feel equipped to comment on all the points in the main letter.[24]

After a protesting letter from an admirer of Constance Garnett's translations, the correspondence continued, with Maude asserting that "Tolstoy authorized my wife's translation" of Resurrection and Shaw insisting on the need for a complete collected works, going beyond the "great novels" which were "sure to get themselves translated everywhere," since other translators had "picked the plums out of the pudding." He went on to compare Maude's "devoted relation" to Tolstoy with that of Henrik Ibsen's translator William Archer, or Richard Wagner's Ashton Ellis.

I'd just like to know if it was thought that Garnett kept her translations true to the original feeling she was translating from.
What I gave up reading just seemed too gentile and polite when i was expecting something rough and dark. BUt could be taht the original had a feeling I wasn't expecting it to have and just conveyed information and topics taht weren't otherwise being handled at the time.

P&V’s literalness generally makes then clunky and unreadable.

P’s solo translation of Three Musketeers is atrocious.

Idk I’m reading P+V’s Brothers Karamazov right now (my first exposure) and the literalness makes it defamiliarized and engaging to me!

Still got to finish Anniversaries but Damion Searls isn't waiting for me.

“The Other Name” — the first two volumes of Jon Fosse’s 1250-pg “Septology” — will be published in April by @transitbks. Fosse is a genius. Hoping to write something on this. pic.twitter.com/7RancGdC5s

— Dustin Illingworth (@ddillingworth) February 18, 2020

i'm a p&v skeptic, but the maude has been great as i work through w&p. i love some garnett translations though.

throwing these into the mix: charlotte mandell and adrian nathan west have built up some good will for me. nathanaël's work on hilda hilst makes me really curious about her other stuff. philip boehm did two of my favorite translations of last year (malina and the fox & dr. shimamura, both nd).

do yall have a favorite proust? i tried both moncrieff and davis this year and went through davis, but should i switch back to moncrieff for later volumes?

I read this, as a total noob---most sustained enjoyment found in Lydia Davis's Swann's Way (the perfecy gateway, of course) and she explained her approach (with kudos and some marvel re prev translations)--:

In Search of Lost Time (General Editor: Christopher Prendergast), translated by Lydia Davis, Mark Treharne, James Grieve, John Sturrock, Carol Clark, Peter Collier, & Ian Patterson. London: Allen Lane, 2002 (6 vols). Based on the French "La Pléiade" edition (1987–89), except The Fugitive, which is based on the 1954 definitive French edition. The first four volumes have been published in New York by Viking, 2003–04. And I think I've got the whole thing in Penguin Deluxe now? Anyway, got and read all those versions.

No idea how accurate they are, but really enjoyed David Magarshack's trans The Idiot, Ann Goldstein's version of the Neapolitan Novels, Natasha Wimmer's take on 2666, and Norman Thomas Di Giovanni's work with Borges. Borges does seem as close to translator-proof as possible, but NTDG mixes rule.

― dow, Thursday, October 15, 2015 1:03 PM (four years ago) bookmarkflaglink

His widow-executrix does not agree, on either count.

― dow, Thursday, October 15, 2015

i tried both moncrieff and davis this year and went through davis, but should i switch back to moncrieff for later volumes?

― vivian dark, Tuesday, 7 April 2020 bookmarkflaglink

That's what you see ppl say now and then, it seems there is a consensus on this but I love the multi-translator project although I think that's more to do with Davis. Her translation was just a fuel for me to read volume after volume till the last sentence.

"throwing these into the mix: charlotte mandell and adrian nathan west have built up some good will for me."

Both are very good on twitter. Mandell's twitter is: 1) transcription of Robert Kelly's just composed poems, 2) love the way she goes through picking sentences from a book (she did so many from Broch's Death of Virgil last year) she is slow-reading through 3) pictures and videos of nature.

Really looking forward to her translation of Genet's essays. And she is doing a version of Monsieur Teste!

West got me to read Juan Benet who I think is one of the great discoveries of the last couple of years.

Isn't Borges' widow's problem with the NTDG translations the fact that she got fuck-all money from them, whereas the newer, inferior translations get her royalties?

Seems plausible---anyway, good thread: Borges translation?

Even self-translators à la Sam Beckett are not to be trusted. Traduttore, traditore, etc.

RIP Edith Grossman

I loved her Mutis translations.

I have big plans to read through Scott Moncrieff's Proust once I'm finished my current French reading (almost done, phew). I'd like to complete all of the major English versions eventually, if I live long enough.

RIP, there’s a funny bit in her why translation matters book where she’s complaining about how little most reviewers care about translators & points out the tell that (if they mention it at all) they’ll just write “ably translated by”

Yup, most journalistic reviews lazily sign-off the quality of translation without knowing both source and target language, instead of trying to evaluate the music of the prose (whether translated or not).

Surely they know the target language?

something quasi ironic about retreading the prose of A La Recherche du Temps Perdu. Looking at all the angles covered in the retelling etc?

I just love the book, and I think it rewards the attention. If you take a couple years to read it, then enough time will have passed since the first volume that you can pretty much start again right away. The translations give you more to explore.

Surely they know the target language?

― Tsar Bombadil (James Morrison), Sunday, 10 September 2023 bookmarkflaglink

Maybe 🤣