Which Translators do you Trust?

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 think the Jolas translation is the only one in print; it's nice to have a version by one of Döblin's contemporaries, but I'm glad to hear that it'll have a supplement. I think NYRB is finally coming out with an English collection of Döblin's stories this year, too.

Yes - really looking forward to that, and there is this too, from their Calligrams series

https://theuntranslated.wordpress.com/2016/03/25/interview-with-miguel-part-1-on-literature-in-portuguese-translated-and-untranslated-2/

Don't know where else to put it - but this interview with a very cranky blogger - is terrific and there are a good dozen books that I'd love to see translated.

Great on Portuguese from Portugal and Brazil, and also on Guimaraes Rosa's novel - which is one of those I know about and love to see translated.

Just finished Paradise by Abdulrazak Gurnah, which I picked up on a whim - very interesting read, the descriptions of Tanzania 100 years ago felt vivid enough that I got that feeling of being a child again reading a book where you don't know what's going to happen next because you literally don't know what the possibilities are. Something I also get from Amin Maalouf.

Next up is Two Lives, my first William Trevor.

William Trevor is great, but I found Two Lives one of his least interesting books, despite all the praise. Go with a volumeof his hort stories, they're brilliant.

this thread is gonna make me buy more books that I'll look at and go "hope I get to that one before I die" about. I'm a Margaret Jull Costa fan, she sure does keep busy. on the other side of the coin, I don't speak German so I'm not sure, but Tobias Shnettler, who translated my book into German, asked such great and intelligent and thorough questions during the process that I would be surprised if he isn't an ace translator

Funnily enough I have a Margaret Jull Costa translation ready to go - picked up Juan Jose Saer's The Witness from the library just yesterday.

Looked up Tobias Schnettler, and he seems to have translated you, David Cronenberg and Lena Dunham. An odd mix.

William Trevor is great, but I found Two Lives one of his least interesting books, despite all the praise. Go with a volumeof his hort stories, they're brilliant.

― like Uber, but for underpants (James Morrison), Sunday, March 27, 2016 11:14 AM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Thanks! Quite enjoyed Reading Turgenev regardless, but I'll definitely look out for the short stories.

Looked up Tobias Schnettler, and he seems to have translated you, David Cronenberg and Lena Dunham. An odd mix.

strictly millionaires

(kidding hard, actually, they wanted me to do a reading/q&a tour over there but blanched at providing any budget at all for it)

Tim Parks does not trust William Weaver:

http://www.nybooks.com/daily/2016/03/28/primo-levi-minefield-an-exchange/

All the recent Italo Calvino translations were done by either Weaver or Parks--"Perhaps when I find time and energy I will put together an article on Weaver’s work and reputation. It is long overdue." This should be interesting!

(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?

^^^ 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 🤣