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In the book I've just translated from the Estonian, and in Swedish novels set in the countryside, you get names of people which either reverse the order of the family name and Christian name (e.g. Johanssons Elmer, Fredrikssons Maria), or give names where the place they come from is mentioned (e.g., in translation, Wyre Forest John or Southwold Farm Charlie and, maybe, John o' Groats).
Do any people from the UK or USA know of such instances. Because I want to use calques for Estonian names that don't sound too clumsy. The names should stick out a little, being rural usage, but shouldn't look so silly that they stop the flow of reading.
In the book I've just translated from the Estonian, and in Swedish novels set in the countryside, you get names of people which either reverse the order of the family name and Christian name (e.g. Johanssons Elmer, Fredrikssons Maria), or give names where the place they come from is mentioned (e.g., in translation, Wyre Forest John or Southwold Farm Charlie and, maybe, John o' Groats).
Do any people from the UK or USA know of such instances. Because I want to use calques for Estonian names that don't sound too clumsy. The names should stick out a little, being rural usage, but shouldn't look so silly that they stop the flow of reading.
Hmm, a bit of a quandary. I would think a rendering like "John o' Groats" would annoy more than one American reader. It might go over fine in the UK. Is it not possible to leave the names, even the place names, in the original language, as if they were part of the characters' names? English-language readers don't bat an eye at "Don Quijote de la Mancha," for example.
I, too, have had to deal with rural speakers' using other people's names last name first. In an oral history I recently translated from Italian, in fact, several of the "speakers" did just that, but not consistently, and the writer seems to have recorded this way of mentioning names faithfully. I have also browsed through a translation from Italian--by no less a translator than William Weaver--that reproduces the last-name-first order of names. A note somewhere or other explains that this order is a marker of peasant upbringing.
I respect Weaver's choice here, as I think it's a legitimate one, but, for several reasons, I chose not to emulate him in my translation of the oral history. For one, how would you punctuate, if at all, a name in last-name-first order? Smith John, which is simply not standard English, or Smith, John, which smacks of officialese? For another, with or without a note, the last-name-first order is likely to distract the reader.
So, I resolved to have all spoken names appear first name first. I thought that resolution would solve all my problems. But no! Because the speakers didn't put the last name first consistently, I sometimes had trouble figuring out what the family name was and what the given name was. Not with all names, of course, just with those where the given name could be a family name, and vice-versa.
Names are fascinating. I grew up in a Scottish fishing-village where a small number of surnames, and certain first name/surname combinations, were very common, so nicknames or "by-names" were essential. My dad used to come back from the pub and say he had been chatting to The Lion and Young Tiger, then Blind John came in ... It was like a code, and you were constantly translating in your head.
As my own surname of Watson was by far the commonest name, members of the extended clan were known as Puckie (my grandfather), Patchie (his 2nd cousin), Dirty Jack (my mother's uncle-by-marriage), Star Jeems (skipper of the "Morning Star"), Hanksie, Watsie, Ruser (my great-grandfather) and so on. The local word for grandfather was "dye", and once a man reached venerable age and acquired grandchildren, he might be known as, e.g. Dye Philip (Philip Gardner), or - an exceptional case - Dye Hammy (one of the Smiths, whose mother was a Hamilton), or an elderly woman might be known as, e.g. Granny Mags (my great-grandmother Margaret Watson), even to people they weren't related to.
Up in the north-east of Scotland, by-names were even entered alongside baptismal names on marriage-certificates, to make absolutely clear who had married whom. An article in Blackwood's Magazine in 1842 recorded that at the time of writing, there were 25 men and boys called George Cowie in the small fishing town of Buckie.
I had ancestors from Auchmithie, in Angus, where the majority of fisherfolk bore the surnames Spink, Swankie or Cargill. In my family-tree I have a set of great-great-grandparents called John Spink and Jessie Spink (n?e Spink). Both had fathers called David Spink. By-names must have been in operation, and I would love to know what they were.
Harry
It's a quandary, and a real-life one for me now. That's why I brought it up.
Surely you sometimes hear John from X (X being a place name). Smith John would be the Hungarian way of doing it. But Smith's John may be acceptable in English.
And in the USA there are names which describe, nicknames if you like, such as Buffalo Bill and Wild Bill Hickock. And there are constructions such as Jones the Post, in Wales (for what the Americans would probably call the mail man), echoing the Scottish situation where many people have the same surname.
I've been thinking about all those solutions. It's just that I've got to be consistent. Estonia, Sweden, Finland, Germany and several other countries (usually influenced by German culture) do have similar ways of presenting names.
Have you put your query to SELTA? Some of our fellow Swedish-English translators must have come up against this problem in translating novels set in the countryside, especially Norrland.
In her translation of Sara Lidman's Nabots Sten, Joan Tate uses nicknames like "Scratch-Cat" and "Digger Abdon", "Moonhill" and "t'Basket". Presumably these are faithful renderings of the Swedish dialect names. She also makes much use of "Our" as in
"So our-Laurentia did ...
Nay, our-Sofia
Our-Laurentia, I tell yer!
Our-Sofia!
Let's bet on't".
This use of "Our" followed by the name of a family member is still found in the north of England and Scotland. Where I come from, boys known to their mates as Bill or Jimmy would be "Oor William" or "Oor James" to their parents. The favourite Scottish cartoon character - whose strip has appeared in the Sunday Post for decades - is "Oor Wullie".
Harry
The "our" thing was a good idea, Harry. I changed one to "our" the other day, but hadn't thought of it as a general method. It just didn't enter my mind, for some reason. I'll have a look now.
As for SELTA, have they posted a lot on their chatsite recently? Because I get the feeling that I'm not receiving postings, but maybe people aren't writing anything. There have been a few technical problems with my postings thither and receiving them thence.
There's a photo of Sara Lidman in a much younger guise (1969) than I've seen her before in the Kenya issue of 10-tal that I've just bought entitled "Sara i Kikuyuland" by the Ume? University expert in East African literature Raoul Granqvist. I remember Joan Tate and Mary Sandbach, two of the more well known translators from Swedish.
I haven't received any posts from SELTA for some time - usually it's just Peter Linton passing on a request for a translator for something esoteric. It's too much trouble to actually go to their website and see if there's anything new there, and I'm not doing it just now as it's midnight + 30 and I must go to bed.
Finished one of my specimen translations tonight - the one about melancholy, depression, anomie, ennui, impotence, erotomania, insomnia, lycanthropy and various other delusional mental states through the ages, with learned references to Robert Burton, Samuel Butler, Max Weber, Virginia Woolf, Old Uncle Tom Cobley and all, so feeling strangely euphoric and light-hearted.
Harry
What's SELTA? Never heard of it. I'm glad I'm not excerpting or translating from such a depressing book. The book I've been translating is not always a bundle of laughs, but it does have its comic interludes. I wonder how Anthony Powell, a man with quite a wry sense of humour, adjusted to the Burton when he had to read the whole thing for Duckworths, many moons ago. I've got the Burton myself, but have never got geared up to actually reading it. It's midnight plus 51 over here in darkest Sweden.
Mirabell
14-Oct-2010, 00:17
What's SELTA? Never heard of it.
here you go
SELTA - Google Search (http://www.google.com/search?q=SELTA+&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:de:official&client=firefox-a)
the sneaky use of this new tool called google is a service I provide. Pay me later.
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