Translating via another language

[Eric]

E.J. van Lanen says the following in his Three Percent review of "The Howling Miller" by Arto Paasilinna:

The Howling Miller is just the second of Arto Paasilinna’s thirty-plus books to be translated into English, the really excellent The Year of the Hare being the other. Before I start in on the book, however, I want to issue a complaint, which is maybe also a warning: The Howling Miller is not translated into English directly from Finnish. This is an English translation of the French translation of the Finnish original. To me this is unacceptable—at a certain point you’re getting into Google Translate territory with these translations of translations—although I understand that such things go on from time to time, and that perhaps Paasilinna’s style, which seems to be very clear, simple, and straightforward, holds up well to this kind of treatment. And, if I’m remembering correctly, The Year of the Hare was also translated into English from the French translation. So my impression of Paasilinna’s style might be more than a little influenced by the way he’s translated into French.

Source: Three Percent: The Howling Miller (As picked up in the BlogSpy section here.)

Is there any need, nowadays, to have a book translated via another language? Surely this is just because there are more translators from French around and if the story's good, the publisher isn't too worried about subtleties. But when the style is the story. What then?

[Mirabell]

We had this discussion, didn't we, in the context of the Ishmael Kadare translations into English via the French. At the time I believe I expressed my disbelief and disgust and probably also told of the strange habitus of German publishers to routinely translate Japanese and Bengali books from the English.

[Eric]

Quite right, Mirabell, we had this discussion. But what were the conclusions? I think we tended to agree that you just don't, in an ideal world, translate via another language. But we don't live in an ideal world. By quoting from Ed van Lanen, I am once again trying to highlight the fact that publishers are not always on the side of translators that know the source culture, but are out to make a quick buck, while appearing "cultured", whatever that may mean.

With regard to Bengali books via the English into German, spare a thought for Martin Kämpchen. He has also been described here before:

Martin Kämpchen

[Mirabell]

oh pish
nothin to do with publishers at least not here
if reviewers picked up on that sort of thing
or readers
but they just don't care

you speak german, don't you. here is the first paragraph from two murakami translations. one is the translation of windup bird chronicle (MIster Aufziehvogel) via English

Als das Telefon klingelte, war ich in der Küche, wo ich einen Topf Spaghetti kochte und zu einer UKW-Übertragung der Ouverture von Rossinis ‹Die diebische Elster› pfiff, was die ideale Musik zum Pastakochen sein dürfte

The next is from a translation directly from the japanese in an earlier collection of short prose.

Als diese Frau anrief, stand ich gerade in der Ecke und kochte Spaghetti. Die Spaghetti waren so gut wie fertig, und ich pfiff zusammen mit dem Radio die Ouverture aus Rossinis ‹Die diebische Elster›, die perfekte Musik zum Spaghetti-Kochen.

Granted, even translations from the same language are bound to be different but there are huge differences here.

[Eric]

Thanks for the Murakami comparison. The main difference I see is that in one version it is clear that the phone call was from a woman. Then one translation specifies the wavelength, the other just mention a radio. Nor is an "Ecke" exactly the same as a kitchen.

These things may, or may not have stylistic significance. But if such differences are continued for page after page, you get the feeling that you are reading two different books.

[Mirabell]

Originally Posted by Eric

But if such differences are continued for page after page, you get the feeling that you are reading two different books.

exactly my point.

[Eric]

If you translate via another language, you tend to compound the differences. There will already be a slight shift, when translating from Japanese into English. Then a further shift when the English is interpreted by the German translator. It's like a kind of Chinese Whispers effect.

But it can also depend on how near the intervening language is to the source (i.e. original) language.

When the Hildi Hawkins translated Viivi Luik's Estonian novel from the Finnish version into English, she did a good job. But this is likely to be because Estonian and Finnish are similar languages, and the Finnish translator will not have had to struggle so much to reproduce the Estonian original. So the version that Hawkins was translating from was "purer", so to speak, than if she'd translated it via the Italian, Danish or Russian version.

But Japanese is miles away from English, as it is miles away from German.

[hdw]

I've just finished translating a Swedish biography of the Russian Futurist poet V.V. Mayakovsky. The book contains copious examples of Mayakovsky's poetry, in the author's Swedish translation, which I've translated into English along with the rest of the text. So Mayakovsky's apparently very vivid and idiosyncratic Russian is being filtered through Swedish into English. There's no other way to do it, as I don't know Russian apart from a few words and what I can guess from my slight knowledge of Polish and Czech.

Of course, to appreciate any poetry properly and to understand why it has made an impact in its country of origin, you need to try to read it in the original language. If much of a novel is lost in translation, that applies in spades to poetry.

Harry

[Bjorn]

Originally Posted by hdw

I've just finished translating a Swedish biography of the Russian Futurist poet V.V. Mayakovsky. The book contains copious examples of Mayakovsky's poetry, in the author's Swedish translation, which I've translated into English along with the rest of the text. So Mayakovsky's apparently very vivid and idiosyncratic Russian is being filtered through Swedish into English. There's no other way to do it, as I don't know Russian apart from a few words and what I can guess from my slight knowledge of Polish and Czech.

Just out of curiosity - I've seen several translations of books which incorporate quotes from other works, where the translator has used previous existing translations for the quotes (which I suppose is even preferable in many cases, if the older translation is familiar to many readers). Is there any particular reason you couldn't use previous English translations of Mayakovsky? Is it a copyright issue?

[hdw]

While translating Bengt Jangfeldt's biography of Mayakovsky I've had at my elbow the volume of translations by Herbert Marshall (London, 1965) and also "Vladimir Mayakovsky: vol.2, Longer Poems", published in 1986 in the USSR. It has been helpful to check Bengt's Swedish against these English versions, but they are frankly not very good - Bengt is quite scathing about the Marshall versions - and as Bengt is recognised as a world authority on Mayakovsky, I take the view that his Swedish versions will be true to the originals, so the best I can do is to render his Swedish as faithfully as possible into English. But as I said before, there is no substitute for reading poetry in the original language - even if you have to use a dictionary to make sense of it.

The translation is hanging fire at the moment, and Bengt has not yet studied it in depth, but if he gets a definite expression of interest from a publisher then it will be all systems go and we will decide what to do about the poetry along with everything else (e.g. the captions to the scores of photos still have to be translated, along with the notes and bibliography).

There was a flicker of interest a while ago from Farrar, Straus and Knopf (?) in the US, although they might want an Americanised version of my English!

Harry

[Bjorn]

Ah, OK. Thought it might be something along those lines. I've read a couple of things about the Jangfeldt book, and despite not being a huge Mayakovsky fan I'm very tempted to pick it up. Glad to see it getting translated.

Is Mayakovsky all that well-known in English-speaking circles, btw? I've gotten the impression that his cult status in Sweden is something that only goes back to the late 60s when he was rediscovered by key figures of the anti-establishment movement, but I might be wrong.

[hdw]

I'm not active in poetry and poetry-reading circles so I don't honestly know what kind of profile Mayakovsky has in the English-speaking world. I suspect not high. Years ago Yevtushenko was the Russian that everyone here had heard of.

Jangfeldt's Mayakovsky biography has already gone through several other translations. The French one is being published by Albin Michel. Jangfeldt was - naturally - very keen to see a good job done on the Russian translation, and in January this year it was topping the non-fiction bestseller list in Moscow. He was laughing when he told me that he - "an old enemy of the people" - had got a good write-up in Pravda.

Harry

[Eric]

Reading HDW's posting #8 caused me to Google for Mayakovsky. I immediately saw something I had never known before: he was of Ukrainian Cossack descent, and spoke Georgian to his schoolmates. So even Mayakovsky himself will have been an interesting polyglot mixture of a man. This background may, in part, account for Mayakovsky's idiosyncratic Russian. And despite my tendency to purism and translating straight from the original, this would be taken to absurd lengths if it were suggested that a good translator of Mayakovsky's poetry must learn not only Russian, but Ukrainian and Georgian as well, to pick up all the nuances.

The Russians love rhyme and metre, even now. Strictly metred poetry means you should take a look at the original to see the rhymes and rhyme schemes. From what I can see at a glance from an anthology I've got, Mayakovsky does go in for rhyme quite a lot. His poem about six nuns and the one about the "bruklinskiy most" aka Brooklyn Bridge, (both 1925), still rhyme, while the Modernists and others in Western Europe had discarded rhyme. I don't know what the solution is; at least if you know the rhyme's there, it's a start. Whether you can reproduce it in any way is another kettle of fish.

*

I myself have been faced with the problem recently that Björn brings up in #9. I have recently translated an Estonian novel with Bertolt Brecht poems in it. They were given there in Estonian. So I asked Suhrkamp, who handle Brecht rights, to find me the originals and any translations into English. In order to avoid making the copyright situation more complicated (these poems were necessary for the rhythm of the novel), I retranslated them myself, directly from the German. But I did of course take into account how Ralph Manheim and others had translated them. So in my case, as I happen to know German, I retranslated them. But obviously, the existing translations of the Brecht poems were just as good if not better than my own. And equally obviously, if you don't know the source language, you have to resort to other solutions.

*

Returning to HDW and Mayakovsky, I like parallel text translations, because then the translator can't trick you completely. British and American translators were, in the past, notorious for inaccuracy, because they thought that Russian was so obscure that no one would check. So indeed, I would trust Jangfeldt more than Marshall.

*

Another issue: Yankspeak. I have now translated two novels from Estonian for Dalkey in Illinois. To my surprise, the Yank-Brit problem was less than I had imagined. Colloquial dialogue is very difficult-different, but neutral dialogue, and the prose bits in between the dialogue, are usually fairly close. I didn't know what a "faucet" was till I was over 20, but with a little goodwill on both sides, it can work. And these things are not static. I've even seen the word "flat" in an American text referring to an apartment, not a puncture.

*

I feel that Mayakovksy is indeed quite well known in British poetry circles. How many Brits have actually read him is another matter. But because of his stormy life and ultimate suicide, the skeleton of his biography at least is known in Britain. (Not well put, that.) I agree that a lot of Brits too, 30-40 years ago confused their love of onion domes, balalaikas and vodka with a love of a Communist system they had never lived under. So Mayakovsky will have had a boost in the 60s-70s.

[Eric]

I was thinking again about this idea of translating via another language, assuming you don't know the original language, or so imperfectly that you can't translate from it.

One solution, mostly for prose, is to look at two translations, into different languages. So, if you want to translate a Catalan novel into English, you could look at, perhaps, the Spanish (aka Castilian) version, and perhaps also the German or French one.

The Spanish version will be the best guide, because many leading Castilian authors, and translators from Catalan into Castilian, live in Barcelona. So the Castilian-Spanish translation will be done by someone who is intimately acquainted with the source culture. The German or French translation could act as a back-up where you don't understand either the Catalan or Castilian sentence, phrase or word.

I think that would minimise the risks involved, but there would still be pitfalls and pratfalls.

[peter_d]

It sounds like a reasonable solution to me. However it is a lot of extra work if you have to check versions in other languages as well. Wouldn't it take three times as long? It might be easier to search a bit harder for someone who does know the language and let him or her do the work.

[Eric]

Precisely, Peter D, a lot more work. It's easier to make one translation from one version, i.e. the original. But that means you've got to know the source language well.

You can do this sort of thing for a short-story, But it would be a nightmare for a novel. I was thinking about a literature which is neglected in, say, English because there are so few translators, e.g. some small East or Central European one via German, or, indeed, Catalan via Spanish. But in Britain even things written in large languages like French, German, Italian or Spanish don't always get published in translation.

You could team up, as some translators do. One translator does the story from Catalan to Spanish, then a Brit or American does it from Spanish to English. But once again, this is not practical for a novel, because no English-language publisher wants to pay two translators. So unless the Spanish translator is already translating the Catalan novel for a Castilian-language publishing house and getting paid by them, it is a cumbersome and expensive method.

I would personally only translate via another language in the case of short, straightforward, unrhymed poems, where the contents dominate, and style, idiom, allusions, and the like are minimal. But I would only do it if I knew something, however little, of the original language. Totally relying on a translation is a risky business.