Varieties of English and translation

[Flint]

I'll give one example. Some British people who had become used to reading the Russian novelists - Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Chekhov - through Constance Garnett's translations (which still tend to be, incidentally, the translations you find available on the net) in British English, feel uncomfortable with the modern translations by Pevear and Volokhonsky - in American English. Conversely, American readers tend to reply that there's no reason why Raskolnikov or Anna Karenina should speak with a Home Counties accent.

Talking about translations from other languages, you might perhaps think, for example, that works in American Spanish had better be translated into American English, and there have actually been lots of Latin American novels translated into English by American translators: Lysander Kemp did a beautiful translation of one of Vargas Llosa's early works, Edith Grossman has translated plenty of Vargas Llosa and Garcia Marquez stuff - among others -, Natasha Wimmer has translated Bolano (although Bolano's first translator was Chris Andrews, who is Australian).

Acting on this 'principle' you'd think works originally written in European Spanish or in European Portuguese would be translated by British translators, and again we have some examples: Margaret Jull Costa who has done most of Marias and Saramago. But of course things aren't as simple as this and you have Edith Grossman translating Cervantes (the little I've read of her translation of Don Quixote seems OK) and Lydia Davis translating Flaubert and Proust. Why shouldn't they?
Fortunately or unfortunately – depending on your viewpoint – there isn’t one English language – yet

[Eric]

Flint, Brits are abysmally ignorant about translations and can easily be palmed off with, as you mention, Constance Garnett when there are umpteen better translations, such as the Magarshack for Dostoevsky. But a Brit is a Brit and a Yank a Yank. Writing anodyne "mid-Atlantic" English is not the solution.

Nevertheless, as I keep repeating, I, a Brit, have now published four translations with two different American university presses. If you work with the editor, things can be achieved. I've never read an Edith Grossman translation, but she is in my good books because she has written that lucid little book "Why Translation Matters". I would have no trouble reading American translations (not least because the four books I've translated have, in effect, become American translations). There are masses of people that are second-generation Estonian (that's the language I've been translating from) in the USA and Canada, but very few indeed have bothered to become literary translators from Estonian, and work at their style and vocabulary.

Colloquial dialogue is much more tricky. Where the standard, educated language dominates, British and American English are much closer together. But someone from Georgia (the U.S. state) and someone from Yorkshire would have considerable difficulties understanding one another broad dialects and regional usage, I feel. Here it would be better for a person from the same country to translate. (Look at the dialogue in the J.B. Priestley novel "The Good Companions" if you want examples of Yorkshire usage of English.)

But it is not an all-or-nothing matter.

[Flint]

Colloquial dialogue is much more tricky. Where the standard, educated language dominates, British and American English are much closer together. But someone from Georgia (the U.S. state) and someone from Yorkshire would have considerable difficulties understanding one another broad dialects and regional usage, I feel.

I guess in some cases colloquialisms had better be left out altogether, hadn't they? - to give a different example, I don't think a Russian porter speaking Cockney would sound too good to me.

[Hamlet]

Guys, I must admit I've gone with the translations of Dosto' work you've already mentioned, but part of that is about availability, and even cost perhaps; but I was always aware that a translation is only giving you a version, a partial picture, is incomplete and that each has its strengths and weaknesses but unless you learn Russian, you're always somewhat "stuffed".

And you may even be "stuffed" with Russian in the bag, as Dosto' is subject, like most classics, to interpretation, or perhaps as Western Europeans we lack aspects of insight into the Russian soul, so it's doubly difficult to appreciate, this is probably stretching the point, but you know what I mean....

[Eric]

Of course it's about cost. The Garnett translation will probably be out of copyright by the 70 year rule. So it's a free-for-all between Cheapo Books and Ripoff Classics to rush a new print into print. Not a new edition, but an exact copy of the old text with shiny new covers and a printface that you immediately realise is a photocopy of the original. So they've put no work into renewing the book, or writing a new introduction but simply reprint the book - and hope to make lots of money. That's how it works. A lot of the dictionaries reprinted by Hippocrene Books are also like that. They keep quite about where the original came from and reprint without anyone's permission.

[Howard]

I always feel a little sad when Constance Garnett gets slagged off in discussions like these. I think that you and I, Eric, as translators, should regard her as one of our heroines. Thanks to her, huge swathes of Russian literature became available to the English-speaking reader for the first time - she was a true pioneer. OK, maybe her grasp of Russian wasn't as good as it might have been (or so I've heard, having no Russian myself), and later translators must surely have produced more accurate versions. And yes, maybe her English was rather Home Counties, but then we all of us are limited by our particular circumstances. I remember reading her Dostoevsky and Chekhov in my teens (a long, long time ago), and feeling that a lot of the spirit of the two writers came across: they seemed quite distinct from each other, and I recognised that same spirit (in both cases) when I later read other translations of the same authors. So she couldn't have been too far off, I feel. It all just goes to show that in literary translation, conveying the spirit of a writer is far more important than absolute accuracy.

And yes, it's true, Garnett's translations are still in circulation because it's cheap to reprint them, but compared with the terrible translations of other 19th-century writers that are still around for the same reason (certain translations of Flaubert and Hugo are particularly awful examples I've come across) the Garnett ones really aren't bad at all.

[Flint]

As it was me who brought in the example of Constance Garnett's translations I feel compelled to say that it was never my intention to disparage Garnett's work. Constance Garnett's translations are beautiful, and for people of my generation they afforded the first contact we had with the Russian classics.
I mentioned her in the context of varieties of English, at no time did I make any value judgements on the 'quality' of her translations - I know no Russian so I'm hardly qualified to judge.

[Hamlet]

Of course it's about cost. The Garnett translation will probably be out of copyright by the 70 year rule. So it's a free-for-all between Cheapo Books and Ripoff Classics to rush a new print into print. Not a new edition, but an exact copy of the old text with shiny new covers and a printface that you immediately realise is a photocopy of the original. So they've put no work into renewing the book, or writing a new introduction but simply reprint the book - and hope to make lots of money. That's how it works. A lot of the dictionaries reprinted by Hippocrene Books are also like that. They keep quite about where the original came from and reprint without anyone's permission.

I've never seen a "cheap version" - I've always bought Penguins.

By cost, and your assumption that I was referring to outdated copyright is misplaced btw, I was merely thinking only of any specialist editions out there: parallel texts, hardbacks or similar. I'm saying that *one* picks up a copy as a general reader, rushing, on the hop, from a Waterstones or Amazon, and usually does this by buying an inexpensive paperback. Nothing more old boy.

Now, as to translations, I'm very fond of the name of Garnett, or any translator of these works, at the moment I'm reading M.A. Screech's Montaigne and Rabelais, the effort and techniques involved in good translations are apparent to those of us who value literature, and are not per se translators or l;anguage experts, for example, I always read the translator's introduction, the "how I went about this project and the 'what was lost or gained' aspects. *We* know we're missing "stuff".

The Loeb classics for example, annoyingly, much derided on Amazon by students for being too literal and not alowing for the spirit is absurd, and you know.... I ignore it, because I'm aware that each translation has a purpose and direction. That with say Homer's Iliad, I can access Chapman's famous early version, or a Loeb, or a Cambridge or Penguin, or oneof many others.

The choice of various producs is almost a part of the thrill, and the literary reviewers seem to love seeing new and successful translations ... "... a Homer for our time!" or what-have-you.

[Eric]

Howard: pioneers, heroines, and beauty. What translators should be aiming at now, in the 21st century is accurate representations of what the author said, trying to convey the nuances of what authors wanted to say, albeit to a foreign audience. We shouldn't turn Garnett and Lowe-Porter into objects of fetishism. We should turn to reliable people who can read the various translations of 19th century Russian classics, and examine, as close reading, who is the best.

The British amateur should be declared dead. It is time for literary translation to become a profession for men and women, not a pursuit for ladies with rich husbands, which it was in the past. Nowadays, the gender of a translator is of no importance. Indeed, some of the toughest things said about literary translation have been said by women (often American, Jewish, and laudably big-mouthed with it). That is why Edith Grossman's "Why Translation Matters" should by read by every reader who thinks that reading literature in translation is a head-in-the-clouds activity.

When I read a translation, I would like to think that this is as near as the translator could get to conveying what the foreign author said, not a kind of wallowing in English-language aestheticism for connoisseurs of fine words.