by Kelly Pickerill
A customer was in today looking for the second Stieg Larsson mystery, The Girl Who Played With Fire; it will be released at the end of the month, I told her, and lots of us can’t wait. If you happen to understand Swedish, however, you can go ahead and read the entire trilogy. She said her grandfather has done just that. So of course we got to talking about the aspects of translated novels (and especially poetry) that must be altered to retain a semblance of their meaning or are even completely lost during translation.
Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s novels have been praised for, among other things, their beautiful language. But can we really say it’s his language that’s so lovely? Isn’t it more accurate to say that his novel’s translator painstakingly pored over each sentence until it most closely resembled Marquez’s aim and cadence in Spanish?
And were another translator to do her thing, mightn’t she transform Marquez’s work into something more lovely yet less accurate or, vice versa, more pointed but less musical? One Hundred Years of Solitude is one of my favorite novels, but I can’t help wondering if I’m missing something because I can’t read it in Spanish.
I’m a big fan of the Russian novelists, especially Nabokov, who actually did most of his own translating and eventually wrote solely in English. But let’s talk about the big ones, Tolstoy and Dostoevsky– there are more translators for their novels than books to translate. How important is it to read the translations of one of the “chosen,” like Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky? Is it okay if you read another version, or are you missing out?
I’m sure it’s not all hype; I’ve read their translation of Anna Karenina and it is very good, and I’m looking forward to reading their translation of War and Peace (I just wish I hadn’t bought that other edition for fifty dollars before they got around to translating it).
Where the hype fell flat for me, though, is when I jumped on the bandwagon and picked up Robert Fagles’s acclaimed translation of The Aeneid. When I came to one of my favorite parts, the “break-up” scene in book four, at the end of which Dido throws herself on a sword, Fagles’s translation seemed so sterile and overwrought compared to the lines in my dog-eared, beloved copy translated by Allen Mandelbaum:
The supple flame devours her marrow;
Within her breast the silent wound lives on.
Unhappy Dido burns.
(IV 88-90)
This is Fagles’s translation of the same lines:
The flame keeps gnawing into her tender marrow hour by hour
And deep in her heart the silent wound lives on.
Dido burns with love — the tragic queen.
It’s better than some others, like the prose-ified translation by David West (there should be a law against rendering epic poems into prose form), but it’s so modernized that it makes Dido’s feelings seem almost adolescent. The terse line “Unhappy Dido Burns” grabs onto you; I feel it frees the passage, allowing it to echo through St. Augustine, “To Carthage then I came, where a cauldron of unholy loves sang all about mine ears,” all the way to T.S. Eliot:
To Carthage then I came
Burning burning burning burning
O Lord Thou pluckest me out
O Lord Thou pluckest
burning
(The Waste Land, lines 307-311)
I am positive that Fagles’s translation is more faithful to the original Latin than Mandelbaum’s, but what I’m wondering is, does it matter? Which is more important, the accuracy of content or the accuracy of art?
The “newest” classic out right now is Anne Carson’s An Oresteia, three Greek plays about the fall of the house of Atreus. I have read some of Carson’s poetry and her essays (Eros the Bittersweet is an amazingly readable volume of essays in which she examines the Greek concept of Eros), and I’m excited to dig in to her latest effort.
On a more modern note, our foreign fiction section gets more and more traffic every day. Carlos Ruiz Zafon‘s prequel to The Shadow of the Wind, The Angel’s Game (signed first ed) was just released in the U.S. I finally got around to reading The Shadow of the Wind recently; it’s unputdownable, and I can’t wait to read Zafon’s latest. There are so many great foreign writers available to read in English, but unfortunately not everything makes it over here. New York Magazine ran an article, “Lost in Un-Translation,” about some books we English speakers are missing out on.
One heroic effort to make more non-English books available is being undertaken by the publisher Europa Editions. These paperbacks with stylish covers provide English speakers with some of the best foreign novels, memoirs, and narrative nonfiction. Hopefully we’ll see some of the books mentioned in the article above soon, published by Europa. I’ve read Muriel Barbery’s The Elegance of the Hedgehog, and her second book, Gourmet Rhapsody, will be out soon. I just picked up a book of novellas by Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt, The Most Beautiful Book in the World, which Lisa highly recommends.
Take a look at your bookshelves–how many of your favorites were originally written in another language? I’ll bet there’s more than you think, so hopefully we’ll continue to benefit from the tireless efforts of translators to make our literary oeuvre more complete.
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