Retranslation

[Eric]

I'm translating a story that has appeared in English before. A few thoughts, in answer to rhetorical questions:

1) Why don't you just copy the other translation?
Because I am in this case translating the story directly from the original language, not via a third, as was the case last time. And the previous translator was not a native-speaker of either British or American English. If a story is translated via a third language, there will be inconsistencies. And the style, vocabulary and so on may be somewhat different. So copying it, then altering it, would be a tedious and long-winded process. Quite apart from any copyright problems that could arise; plagiarism is frowned upon.

2) Where does an existing translating help you?
An existing translation is definitely a help, as there are always things that remain obscure in any text. Every translator has blind spots. So someone else's translation is a useful back-up. If you only have the original text to go by you can also miss things, leave out a whole sentence, or similar. (That happened to me today.) Also, a translation into, say, French or German can be useful. Again, the French or German translator may have noticed or understood things you didn't. And sometimes the previous translator finds more felicitous expressions than you have thought of. The "why didn't I think of that?" factor is always present.

3) Will your translation be more widely available than the previous one?
I hope so. The previous translation was done by a Russian whose English was very good. While I freely admit that even at one remove he sometimes found clever expressions that I didn't, making me envious, the last time the story (dating from 1972) was translated into English it came out in a pretty obscure edition. It was published by Progress Publishers in Moscow in an anthology of stories called "The Love That Was" back in 1982. This anthology was printed, in English, in an edition of 3,700 copies worldwide. How many of these copies ever reached the West I do not know. I know the exact number of copies printed because one very useful thing printed in the back of every Soviet book was the publishing details, including the edition, the price [2 roubles 90 kopecks, in this case], the date the final manuscript was sent to the printers, and a few other details.

Author: Mati Unt
Story: "An Empty Beach"
Original language: Estonian
Previous translator into English via Russian: "Holly Smith" (the pseudonym of Sergei Roy, a Russian translator, editor and journalist)
Previous title: "The Naked Shore".

4) Why did you change the title?
Reading the story through, I thought that the word "beach" was more appropriate, as I've actually been to the island where the story is set. The word "naked" was probably added by the person translating the story into Russian, because the story is about a love triangle, jealousy and a little sex. But for me, the word "empty" conveys the original title better.

*

So, those are some practical, as opposed to theoretical, considerations that go through your mind when translating a text that has appeared in English before.

[Stewart]

Because I am in this case translating the story directly from the original language, not via a third, as was the case last time. And the previous translator was not a native-speaker of either British or American English. If a story is translated via a third language, there will be inconsistencies. And the style, vocabulary and so on may be somewhat different. So copying it, then altering it, would be a tedious and long-winded process. Quite apart from any copyright problems that could arise; plagiarism is frowned upon.

Probably one of the biggest retranslated (to English) writers is Ismail Kadare, with most of his works coming to us from David Bellos, via the French of Jusuf Vrioni. When I was reading Agamemnon's Daughter, I did find myself wondering about mentions of Parisian architecture and whether they had been placed there by Bellos, Vrioni, or Kadare. Kadare may have used references to Albanian landmarks, which our ignorance would have missed or misunderstood, so Vrioni transposes these to the target culture (French) when translated from the Albanian. Then, comes Bellos to bring it into English, the French cultural references stay in place. (If that was the case.) Would English architecture have become a better reference point?

[Eric]

I'll look into this when I have more time. Did Kadar? write "Agamemnon's Daughter" in Albanian or French? Or did he cooperate closely with Jusuf Vrioni? And so on. I note an interesting article called "Twice Removed" on the Complete Review website. Not read it yet, though:

Twice Removed: The Baffling Phenomenon of the Translated and then Re-Translated Text: Case Studies - the complete review Quarterly

[Stewart]

It was translated from the Albanian by Jusuf Vrioni to French then translated from that French by David Bellos.

[hdw]

I'm sure the reason why I have never been able to get into Dostoevsky is because I've approached him through antiquated Penguin translations. All that "my dear chap!" stuff gets me down, especially when the speaker is supposed to be a low-life character from the Moscow underclass. Maybe I should try again with a more modern re-translation.

Re-translation can sometimes shed new light on a text, although I admit that the following example is rather unusual. Last year I was commissioned by a freelance theatre director in London to re-translate a short play by the Swedish actor Erland Josephson, who starred in various films by Ingmar Bergman. Josephson also worked with the Russian director Tarkovsky on the latter's last film, and Josephson's play was a slightly fictionalised comic take on one day and night during the shooting of that film.

Josephson's play had already been rendered into English and broadcast on the radio, and this theatre director had heard it and decided to try it in the theatre, with actors simply reading their parts from the front of the stage. This went down quite well, so he decided to commission a new translation with the intention of staging it properly.

When I sent him the finished version, he was surprised and delighted to find that there were two more characters in the play than he had realised. Obviously their parts had been excised in the radio version, presumably in the interests of conciseness.

Harry

[Eric]

Yes, I remember Erland Josephson, not so much for a creepy part in an early Bergman film, but for role as the Jewish money-lender, who smuggles the children out of the bishop's manse in a trunk, in "Fanny and Alexander".

Talking of Alexander, I met the Russian interpreter Tarkovsky used for that last film of his, "The Sacrifice", called Layla Alexander, when I was working in Stockholm in the 1980s. Interesting what Harry says about the discovery of two characters that had been wallpapered over in the radio version. Maybe she's one of them.

As for Dostoevsky, there are several modern, or fairly modern, translators. I happen to have, for instance, "The Devils" in a translation by Michael R. Katz and another by David Magarshack (and in an ancient Dutch and very modern Estonian translation). Scandinavianist David McDuff has also translated Dostoevsky into English.

[Eric]

Heidi, because native-speakers of English often read no foreign languages at all up to a literary level, translators can manage to produce inaccurate translations and still get them published. So it does not surprise me at all that you disagree with what a particular translator has done with a poem.

It is a rather vague area of copyright law that you are dealing with. If you keep some lines the same, alter others, it would be have to be decided whether you are, in effect, stealing part of someone else's work, or whether the translation of the lines would be inevitable, whoever was doing the translation.

But I don't think there is an international copyright police force waiting to pounce on every "criminal" writing three lines of poetry exactly the same as a published translator in their blog. You should simply be honest and say "Translated by Heidi Adonis, with reference to a previous translation by XYZ". That should surely demonstrate the fact that you are not trying to pretend his or her translation was your own.

[Eric]

A concrete example about one retranslation and comments about it.

A number of stories by Kafka have been retranslated into Dutch. The reviewer Wil Rouleaux, in yesterday's edition of Dutch daily Trouw, does what I think a good reviewer should do and always make some comment on the translation, but not to let this information dominate.

Rouleaux says (my translation):

Willem van Toorn's new translation is somewhat more modern regarding choice of vocabulary, and is more literal than the sometimes rather free, but by no means bad, translation by Nini Brunt. Small mistakes made by his predecessor do not occur in his translation. Van Toorn sits squarely in the saddle and has a good eye for detail. In short, an excellent translation, which can be highly recommended. What a pleasure to be able to read such gems of world literature in excellent Dutch.

Most of the three-column review concentrates on details about Kafka and his writings. Rouleaux does provide one example of a subtle improvement in the newer translation in one sentence. What he says when comparing the translations is short but relevant. A comment on vocabulary, literalness and minor mistakes.

What, of course, is required of a reviewer who comments on such things is that he or she can read the source language, so that the comparison of the three texts (original; first translation; second translation) holds water. If Rouleaux were only comparing one Dutch translation with another, he could not prove, one way or the other, that the translation was good or bad regarding accuracy and fidelity.

[Eric]

I'm doing a bit of retranslation right now. But only one short-story. This was translated into English in an anthology that is hard to get hold of nowadays, but the translation was pretty good. I was tempted to peep at the other translation, but have now gone and lost it. But this may be a blessing in disguise.

I don't approve of retranslation, but when you do, I have found that you are freer if you don't look at the previous one(s). They can baulk you, hold you up, as either their version seems much better than what you've been working on, or you are annoyed at the inadequacy of the previous translation. Either way, you end up spending so much time comparing and adjusting, filching and rejecting, that it is just as quick to translate straight from the original foreign text.

If something you are translating has been translated into a foreign language, one you happen to know, you can then read that translation when there are things you don't understand in the original. But as the translation isn't into your language, it doesn't baulk your efforts in any way.

[hdw]

I'm currently enjoying Andrew Wawn's The Vikings and the Victorians: Inventing the Old North in 19th-Century Britain, and I've had some correspondence with the author as he mentions an intrepid Scottish aristocratic lady traveller in Iceland about whom I'm trying to write something myself.

Wawn, who is Professor of Anglo-Icelandic Studies at Leeds University, gives lots of extracts from Victorian translations and re-translations of Old Norse literature, and often compares rival versions. I could quote from almost any page of his book, but I'll confine myself to the section where he has some fun at the expense of translators of Nj?l's Saga, in particular the notorious episode where Unn complains to her father Mord about her marital problems with her husband Hrut. Firstly, the most modern translation available, from 1997:-

Mord said to his daughter: 'Now tell me everything that's happened between you two, and don't make things worse than they are.'
'So be it,' says she. 'I want a divorce from Hrut, and I can tell you what my main grievance against him is: he is not able to have sexual intercourse in a way that gives me pleasure, though otherwise his nature is that of the manliest of men.'
'How can this be?' said Mord. 'Give me more details.'
She answered: 'When he comes close to me his penis is so large that he can't have any satisfaction from me, and yet we've both tried every possible way to enjoy each other, but nothing works. By the time we part, however, he shows that he's as normal physically as other men.'

In comparison [Sir George] Dasent's translation may seem comically evasive. Old northern bonders [yeoman farmers] may have called a spade a spade, but their greatest Victorian admirer appears disinclined to call an enlarged penis anything at all:

and then Mord said to his daughter -
'Now, tell me all that is between you two, and don't make more of the matter than it is worth.'
'So it shall be,' she answered, and sang two songs, in which she revealed the cause of their misunderstanding; and when Mord pressed her to speak out, she told him how she and Hrut could not live together, because he was spell-bound, and that she wished to leave him.

=====

Proof positive, I think, that every age needs its own translations!

Harry

[Eric]

I agree there, Harry. I hate it when they translate, for instance, pushy Pushkin's "Evgeni Onegin" 22 (!) times, I think it is, into English, leaving much other poetry ignored. But in order to prick through the obtuseness of the Victorian censors, we sometimes sorely need the retranslation of classics.

There seems to be an arrant brand of hypocrisy at play when drooling on about European classics for every man and penguin, whilst in fact excising the good bits, which might just have drawn unwilling, snail-like schoolboys to read the classics with more gusto.

[waalkwriter]

This is more of an open question on a topic that has perked my interest, and so I wanted to throw it out there for all of the numerous people on this site who actively involve themselves in professional translation.

How do you tackle re-translating an older work? For instance a work which may have been translated some 80 years before, and the technique is no where near as precise, is clumsy, and is all around dated. Do you still take into account the influence of that translation? Do you study it, take notes on it, do you work to emulate and improve that translation? Or do you go fiercely independent, tackle the work on your own, trying to put something out that is fresh, relevant, and untouched by the influence of it's predecessor? I assume that likely it is a mixture of both, but where, for you, does the balance lie?

[hdw]

We've discussed this topic before.

http://www.worldliteratureforum.com/...anslation.html

Harry

[waalkwriter]

My, my, oops.

Well have you discussed this other topic:

I was also wondering what a professional does when translating an older text that obviously reads as antiquated to a native speaker, like Dickens would to an English speaker? I mean that comes to form part of the novels tone and the experience for the reader, but is that translatable? It is hardly reasonable to ask a translator to rewrite the story in Victory or Shakespearean prose, so is this thus lost in translation? This is to say nothing of variant regional accents and trying to perhaps find compatible ones in the language you are translating it into.

[Eric]

Waalkwriter, let me try to answer your questions one by one. Your original questions and comments in italics, my replies in normal print:

How do you tackle re-translating an older work?

If it's not necessary by various criteria I wouldn't retranslate it at all. But if I were retranslating (and I've done this a couple of times this and last year with modern texts) I would read through the previous translation(s), but not necessarily follow it or them line by line when doing the revised translation. It is sometimes more fiddly to alter previous translations than just to translate straight off. But I would definitely consult the older translation - and reproduce some of the good bits, if there is no good reason to alter them. If you do that unaltered for whole paragraphs, you can be accused of plagiarism. But there's no harm in stealing a few good expressions, rather than altering them just for the sake of being original.

For instance a work which may have been translated some 80 years before, and the technique is no where near as precise, is clumsy, and is all around dated.

You have to strike a balance between showing that this work is old and was written decades ago, and writing modern English so your readers will enjoy the book for the story, not only for the quaint olde worlde English.

Do you still take into account the influence of that translation?

Yes.

Do you study it, take notes on it, do you work to emulate and improve that translation?

That depends on the book. But taking notes can be a long-winded way of doing things, unless you just make brief notes about things you would frequently change or block change throughout the text. You emulate what you think you can keep and has been well translated. And you improve where you think the text is old-fashioned, or the translation is simply wrong. But you have to feel your way forward. There are no rules written in a rule book. It's like with any sport: how to hold the bat or kick the ball has got to be tackled by your intuition. Or acting in the theatre. It's the same with finding felicitous expressions. You've got to feel they're right. This you can only learn by experience.

And, crucially, you must make sure your command of English remains very good, and that you can switch register where necessary. Many translators into English get so obsessed with the source language that they forget that it is their English that counts for most. You can always ask a source language native-speaker what a phrase means, but you must be able to reproduce it in idiomatic English on your own.

Or do you go fiercely independent, tackle the work on your own, trying to put something out that is fresh, relevant, and untouched by the influence of it's predecessor?

You can't be fiercely independent once you've looked at the previous translation. Because bits will enter your subconscious. So when you push aside the previous translation and think you are dreaming up brilliant new solutions, you feel foolish when you realise that you have simply copied parts of the previous translation dredged up out of your subconscious. Because you saw the words before, but had forgotten you'd seen them.

And, when you look again at the previous translation, you feel irritated when the previous translator found a better solution than you have. You must always admit defeat, as I did with an Estonian story some months ago, and realised that what I had was worse even in my own estimation than what the previous translator had.

I assume that likely it is a mixture of both, but where, for you, does the balance lie?

I would think that the balance should lie on the side of freshness, newness - otherwise, why bother retranslating the text in the first place?

[hdw]

My, my, oops.

Well have you discussed this other topic:

I was also wondering what a professional does when translating an older text that obviously reads as antiquated to a native speaker, like Dickens would to an English speaker? I mean that comes to form part of the novels tone and the experience for the reader, but is that translatable? It is hardly reasonable to ask a translator to rewrite the story in Victory or Shakespearean prose, so is this thus lost in translation? This is to say nothing of variant regional accents and trying to perhaps find compatible ones in the language you are translating it into.

Funnily enough, I once did something like this, but the translation was of a Roger Lancelyn Green Puffin children's classic about King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table, INTO German. This was several years after my wife and I came back from a two-year teaching stint in Germany, and I was asked to do this by a former friend and teaching colleague who had come under the spell (literally!) of a New Age guru-cum-wizard who ran a little healing-centre cum art gallery cum small publisher's, near Koblenz. This guy was a great admirer of King Arthur, who apparently had a message of healing for the world, and he wanted to make Arthur better known to the German people.

I made all the usual noises that translators make about how inappropriate it is to translate out of your native language into a foreign language, however well you know the target language, then I was offered DM 3,000, so I did it. Like dear Oscar, I can resist anything but temptation.

One of the major difficulties was that Lancelyn Green had written his book in cod-Mallory, an approximation of 15th century English, but my trusty Collins dictionary included archaicisms among its definitions, so I managed, just. The wife of my friend in Germany offered to check each chapter as I translated it, and phoned me in a state of anguish when she saw the first one, saying, 'Harry, nobody speaks German like that any more!' (She didn't know much English herself). No, Gisela, said I, but that's the kind of English the author writes, so I have to render it into that kind of German. She also didn't like me calling Arthur Arthur, as he is Artus to any Germans who have heard of him. However, we got it done. And when I was sent a complimentary copy, I was delighted to have confirmation that I had been writing purple prose, as the text was printed in attractive shades of dark and light purple.

Harry

[waalkwriter]

Funnily enough, I once did something like this, but the translation was of a Roger Lancelyn Green Puffin children's classic about King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table, INTO German. This was several years after my wife and I came back from a two-year teaching stint in Germany, and I was asked to do this by a former friend and teaching colleague who had come under the spell (literally!) of a New Age guru-cum-wizard who ran a little healing-centre cum art gallery cum small publisher's, near Koblenz. This guy was a great admirer of King Arthur, who apparently had a message of healing for the world, and he wanted to make Arthur better known to the German people.

I made all the usual noises that translators make about how inappropriate it is to translate out of your native language into a foreign language, however well you know the target language, then I was offered DM 3,000, so I did it. Like dear Oscar, I can resist anything but temptation.

One of the major difficulties was that Lancelyn Green had written his book in cod-Mallory, an approximation of 15th century English, but my trusty Collins dictionary included archaicisms among its definitions, so I managed, just. The wife of my friend in Germany offered to check each chapter as I translated it, and phoned me in a state of anguish when she saw the first one, saying, 'Harry, nobody speaks German like that any more!' (She didn't know much English herself). No, Gisela, said I, but that's the kind of English the author writes, so I have to render it into that kind of German. She also didn't like me calling Arthur Arthur, as he is Artus to any Germans who have heard of him. However, we got it done. And when I was sent a complimentary copy, I was delighted to have confirmation that I had been writing purple prose, as the text was printed in attractive shades of dark and light purple.

Harry

Purple prose? Are you a synesthesia or however the term goes?

The reason I asked about reading original translations is that I recently got it into my head to translate one of Rilke's Orpheus Sonnets, something comically above my level of German, yet I felt one poem I understood very well, and I didn't like the English translation much, (which i referenced afterwords), they took too many liberties it seemed and changed the feel of certain sections which read much different, much better in German. Yet when I cracked out the book with the poem in it, my pencil and my dictionary I found myself unable to do anything other than trivially rephrase the original translation to my own annoyance. For instance Wissen wirs, Freunde, oder wissen wirs nicht? Reads well in German, to me at least, but it does not translate well into English; Know we, friend, or know we not, so all that occurred to me was to say Do we know, friend, or do we not. Ah it was such a beautiful poem, I particular remember the phrase "wie ein wandelnes Lied."

Much harder than it seems at first, translation is.

[hdw]

It was meant to be a joke (not hilarious, but a joke anyway). "Purple prose" is prose that is over-blown, over the top, and Lancelyn Green's prose is certainly that. But the end result of the translation is also literally purple.

See attachments.

Harry

[hdw]

Let's see if I can attach an attachment this time.

Harry

[Eric]

"Purple prose" is a perfectly acceptable and educated expression. I think I learnt the expression at university in the 1970s. Even now, in 2010, there is no reason to reject it. One must be careful not to mix the idea of "I've never heard of it!!!" with "it doesn't exist".

As for Rainer Maria, he is the sort of poet that you should not get it into your head to translate if you realise that your knowledge of the source language is inadequate. Translation is not an eternal competition between the good, the bad, and the illiterate. It does require some skill, built up over time. When I was younger, I used to try this sort of thing, but I now realise that trying to beat the masters by exhibiting one's youth and inexperience doesn't always work as a ploy.

So, the fewer bouts of "trivial rephrasing" the better. Translation is a skill and a profession, not just a weekend wank for amateurs.