Translated literature - books, websites

[Eric]

I do remember, now that you've reminded me. This is rather an eye-opener, Miss Maggs. If all you have written is true, this is a veritable scandal worthy of TV programmes such as Panorama or Newsnight.

You say:

The British Library must statutorily receive a copy of each book published on the British Isles and in Ireland. It is then their obligation to research the data and provide UNESCO with a bibliography of translations published in all fields of writing. Unfortunately, for some odd, altogether wonderous reason, the Her MAjesty's National Library (over on the Isles ) has not supplied the Index Staff with any records since 1990!!! Britian is amongst the worst laggers participating in the entire project. The staff are dubbing this behaviour a veritble streak of British eccentricity.... hmm...

It's more than eccentricty. Without wishing to prejudge the whole issue, it could very well be another instance of Britain, which is in the doghouse for many things at present, failing to fulfil its promises. But a couple of my recent translations were published in the USA and even Hungary. So I'd have to look again to see whether those are, or are not listed. Since we last discussed this in June, I have moved house and will have to try to remember and investigate everything again.

I'll investigate this. It's all rather interesting.

[chuvak6]

Actually, one of the unfortunate things about living in America is the small percentage of translated literature that we have from other parts of the world. However, I actually am doing an internship right now for a very small press which only publishes literature in translation, which is great. They only publish 10 or 12 books a year, but they're always interesting and sometimes from this little-heard of places.

Their website is:
Open Letter Books

I speak Russian and have seem some pretty "shabby" translations, that I know we've all run across, but their translations are actually really great, and I'm very excited that the first fully-translated The Golden Calf will be coming out in December! At last Americans can have access to this hilarious and insightful book! Can't wait to see what their picks will be for next year...

[Purple Peacock Books]

We have been translating French literature (modern classics and contemporary) into Bengali for the past 5 years now and have done Genet, Duras, Gavalda and now Atiq Rahimi. We are looking to spread our wings and find more world literature. Any ideas where to find details on this?

[Eric]

Maybe you should ask Anisur Rahman, a Bengali from Bangladesh, who runs a series of evenings and workshops dealing with Swedish literature (plus Tagore), here in Uppsala, Sweden. He will no doubt know about Sweden and Norway, beyond the usual names such as Ibsen and Strindberg.

[Eric]

I've mentioned And Other Stories, a new British publishing venture by subscription at another part of the WLF. Their website is at:

www.andotherstories.org

[Loki]

In my experience, UNESCO's Index Translationum is not helpful at all, with so many omissions as to render it worse than useless. I have never found it the slightest use in trying to discover what books by a particular author have been translated.

I just did a quick check and found not one of my thirty-odd published translations mentioned.

To give an example of how bad the Index Translationum is, Georges Simenon, who is one of the most translated authors in the world, with hundreds of translations in umpteen languages, has one single entry (a translation into Romanian in 2002). Quite frankly, I can't see who the Index is for, or what its purpose is.

I've discovered the Index some days ago, and while I was pretty satisfied with finding it at the beginning, I soon became disappointed. From some quick searches I've found out that some works where not there, and your post confirms my bad impression. However, I think it is reasonable after all: the aim of the Index is highly/too ambitious, as I don't believe we can find all translated works in all the languages in a single database. I haven't yet found a database specifically built for literature translated into Italian.

[Eric]

One of my grumbles about the Index (apart from the name sounding like the list of banned books once issued by the Catholic Church) is that it hadn't got a couple of my translations on it last time I looked (which is not recently). I'm just another translator, but as Estonian books don't get translated that often, it makes you wonder by what criteria UNESCO people (probably a team of three people at the most) choose books to list.

[Eric]

Looking at the Index website, which I am doing now after a couple of years, it strikes me as how unnavigable it is. Here's the URL:

http://www.unesco.org/xtrans/bsstatexp.aspx


One daft thing I found was this, when I keyed in "Estonia":

Statistics on Index Translationum database for "Country = EST"

"TOP 10" AuthorCartland Barbara120Christie Agatha88Lindgren Astrid80Bô Yin Râ76Brown Sandra65Nurk Enn65Porgasaar Kristina64Roberts Nora63Doncova Dar'ja Arkad'evna58Gardner Erle Stanley51

This mysterious list does not explain what the numbers mean (number of book?) and even the non-Estonian scholar will notice that names such as Barbara Cartland and Enn Nurk and Kristina Porgasaar are mentioned. If this is translations into Estonian, what are Estonian names doing there? If it is for books out of Estonian why the names of the famous foreign authors? And I have never heard of the two Estonians, either as writers or translators. One has written a mathematics book that has been translated.

What are these UNESCO people being paid to do?

[Eric]

If you look at another part of the Index for me, Eric Dickens, you get the following. My surname is an unfortunate one, as search engines often throw up masses of Charles Dickens books.


Your query was: Translator = Dickens$

12 records found in Index Translationum database


1/12Meyer, Conrad Ferdinand: The complete narrative prose of Conrad Ferdinand Meyer (2 1881-1891 [English] / Dickens, David B.; Folkers, George F. / London: Associated University Presses [United Kingdom], 1976. 391 p. [German]

2/12Collins, Wilkie; Dickens, Charles: Der verschwundene Erbe [German] / Dickens, Charles / Freiburg im Breisgau: Herder [Germany], 1981. 191 p. [English]

3/12(Coumans, Paul): Dan Flavin in De Zonnehof [English] / Dickens, Eric / Amersfoort: Amersfoortse Culturele Raad [Netherlands], 1995. 51 p. ill. [Dutch]

4/12Windship with oars of light : Estonian modern poetry [English] / Dickens, Eric; et al. / Tallinn: Huma [Estonia], 2001. 258, (5) p. : portr. Tuulelaeval valgusest on aerud : valik eesti moodsat luulet [Estonian]

5/12Sand, George: The miller of Angibault [English] / Dickenson, Donna / New York: Oxford University Press [United States of America], 1995. xxv, 317 p. Le meunier d'Angibault [French]

6/12Things Estonian [English] (ISBN: 9985934172) / Dickens, Eric; Laats, Tiina / Tallinn: Eesti Instituut [Estonia], 2003. 24 p., ill. [Estonian]

7/12Roggeman, Willem Maurtis: Repetitions [Dutch] / Dickens, Eric / Oostakker: gedrukt in de grafische afdeling van het Glorieux-Instituut, Brugge: uitgever Galerie Roussel [Belgium], 1993. 15 f., co., ill. [French]

8/12(Lumiste, Rünno; Terk, Erik): Enterprises in technology-intensive business : TOOLKIT for coping with international environment and developing management competences [English] (ISBN: 9985875109) / Dickenson, Mollie; Tedre, Kristjan / Tallinn: Eesti Tuleviku-uuringute Instituut [Estonia], 2005. 100, 2 p. koos kaanega, ill. [Estonian]

9/12Estonia [English] (ISBN: 9985936450) / Dickens, Eric / Tallinn: Välisministeerium [Estonia], 2003. 71, 1 p., ill. 2nd ed. [Estonian]

10/12Unt, Mati: Things in the night [English] (ISBN: 156478388X) / Dickens, Eric / Normal, ILL: Dalkey Archive Press [United States of America], 2006. 316 p. Öös on asju [Estonian]

11/12Kehman, Anu; Palm, Jaanika; Väljataga, Ülle: Children's books from Estonia [English] (ISBN: 9789985936849) / Dickens, Eric / Tallinn: Eesti Kirjanduse Teabekeskus [Estonia], 2007. 24, 2 p. koos kaanega, ill. [Estonian]

12/12Kross, Jaan: Treading air [English] (ISBN: 1843430363) / Dickens, Eric / London: Harvill [United Kingdom], 2003. xiii, 345 p. Paigallend [Estonian]

[Eric]

An analysis of #49 as above:

1) The good news is that it has one of my translations of a book by Mati Unt, and one by Jaan Kross. Plus an anthology where I helped translate some poems.

2) The bad news is most of the rest. What [the fuck] have I to do with the "world famous" Donna Dickenson and Molly Dickenson, neither of whom I have ever heard of? And Wilkie Collins plus Charles Dickens in German? And the Meyer entry?

3) What about the book of Jaan Kross short-stories that I translated for Harvill back in 1995? What about the book of stories by Friedebert Tuglas that I translated for the Central University Press in Budapest round about 2006? And the second Mati Unt novel also appearing about that time with The Dalkey Archive Press called "Brecht at Night"? The last three are whole books with ISBN numbers, not just a poem in an anthology or similar.

4) Entry 9/ implies I have translated something for the Estonian Foreign Ministry and does indeed give the ISBN number. But there is no explanation what 72,1 p. means in terms of numbers of pages, and whether I was translator or co-translator. I was co-translator for a book called "Estonia - Identity and Independence", but the ISBN number is not the same as this one.

I have also translated things from Swedish and Danish. I will now have a look whether the album I translated in 1985 and the Danish book by a resistance fighter during WWII can be found anywhere on this website.

[Eric]

I could get quite worked up about all this Index Translationum business, the work of an organisation run by what is supposed to be the biggest cultural organisation in the world, UNESCO.

I tried their search engine and keyed in "Jaan Kross" under Author. No entries. I had a brainwave and keyed in "Kross, Jaan". Four entries. Including my translation of "Treading Air" for Harvill, but not "The Conspiracy and Other Stories" for the same publishing house, almost a decade earlier.

Now I had learnt the system, I keyed in not "Mati Unt", but "Unt, Mati". There are quite a few translation entries for him there, but not that second novel about Brecht that I translated several years ago. And in Soviet times Mart Aru translated "Autumn Ball" into English, back in 1985. I couldn't find that or the recent Dalkey-published translation of "Diary of a Blood Donor" by Unt and translated by Ants Eert.

[Eric]

I'm now trying random authors. Amélie Nothomb has a respectable number of entries when you key in English as the target language.

Latvia. I tried Inga Abele into Swedish. No hits. Do you have to put the macron over the "a" of her surname? What if your keyboard doesn't do macrons? For fellow Latvian Regina Ezera, I keyed in only "Ezera" to avoid the macron over the "i" in Regina, which I can't do on my keyboard. There were a respectable number of translation entries for her, even into Estonian and German. But another Latvian, Knuts Skujenieks (no macrons) only had one entry, and none of Juris Kronbergs' translations into Swedish. Juris Kronbergs, who has been translating literature from Latvian into Swedish for some thirty years, and was for a time the Cultural Attaché at the Latvian Embassy in Stockholm, doesn't feature at all on the Index Translationum website. Matthias Knoll, who has translated several books from Latvian into German, only has one entry. The majority of works listed are Soviet Russian translations and with about 1,200 entries it is hard to scroll forward to find more recent translations, unless you know the name of the author.

Finnish. There are a few entries for Paasilinna into English. I think it's pretty accurate there. But Volter Kilpi, the Finn whose two volume book and one more have appeared in Swedish years ago in Thomas Warburton's translation (Warburton otherwise has many entries, but not for Kilpi), is not give an entry at all.

Swedish. Sven Delblanc into English. "The Castrati" and "Speranza", as expected. If you key in Larsson, you only get the girl tattoo book for Stieg Larsson (no women-haters!). Whereas when it comes to Henning Mankell, just about every single book by him in English is mentioned plus, of course, the names of the three principal translators, Tiina Nunnally, Laurie Thompson and Steven T. Murray. If you key in "Sem-Sandberg", there are only entries for the Finnish and Danish translations of his works, although I believe he has been translated into English and, I think, Polish and German.

Polish. Olga Tokarczuk is well represented, and into many languages. Ditto Stefan Chwin. Gombrowicz has many pages, but hardly anything there into English (this is not the fault of UNESCO).

And so on. My conclusion is that the Index Translationum is a very hit-and-miss affair and is presumably not a high priority of UNESCO's. UNESCO obviously relies on the input of writers' and literary promotion organisations in the member countries, but the whole thing should be more systematic. There are good things there, but because of the clumsy scrolling system, you can easily miss them.