By The Same Translator

[Stewart]

I was drawn to a comment by Asylum's review of Joseph Roth's The String Of Pearls whereby, on the subject of the translator Michael Hofman, it's noted:

Hofmann, unusually, is named on the cover, and the By the Same Author page also includes a list of books By the Same Translator.

A fantastic idea! If I like a translated work then it would be good to see what else they've turned their attentions to. The nearest thing I've ever seen to this was the About The Translator section in Jenny Erpenbeck's The Book Of Words where it says the translator, Susan Bernfosky, is working on a biography of Robert Walser. Not quite the same thing.

[pontalba]

Interesting. I notice that for the two Sandor Marai books I have there are different translators, I wonder if that is part of the problem [for me] in not caring for Casanova in Bolzano a quarter as much as I did Embers.
Carol Brown Janeway translated Embers, and George Szirtes translated CiB.

I know I have something else around here translated by Janeway, can't lay my hands on it at the moment though.

[Howard]

Embers is the one of the best known recent examples of the occasional practice of double translation, i.e. translation through the intermediary of a translation in a third language. Carol Brown Janeway, who is a respected translator from German but doesn't, from what I've read, know any Hungarian, in fact produced her English version of Embers via the German translation of the original text. George Szirtes, on the other hand, is Hungarian-born and is a very respected translator from that language. So, theoretically, his version of Casanova should be closer to Marai than Janeway's of Embers. If Pontalba found the former less engaging than the latter, that may have more to do with the qualities of the respective books than with the translations - I couldn't say, not having read either.

[Eric]

If the language is particularly rare (from a British perspective) it seems OK to translate via a second language. But with all the languages of the EU, plus several countries outside, such as Iceland, Ukraine, Russia and Switzerland, I cannot believe that a publisher who is serious about the quality of the translation, can't find someone to do a direct translation.

It's just that publishers like to give translations to people they already know, and if they have a French, German or Spanish translation in their hand, they would rather phone their trusty translator than find a reliable one from Latvian, Catalan or Hungarian.

But it is obvious that someone steeped in the three last-mentioned literatures, someone who not only knows the language in question, but the background culture and history, is likely to have more of a feel for the translation.

If the only translator available from a very rare language is not a literary translator, someone with no feel for literary style and nuance, then the publisher, desperate for a translation, after a Georgian, Saami or Galician author wins the Nobel, can legitimately resort to the second-best option - double translation. But under relaxed and serious literary circumstances, this quick fix profit-maximising practice should be avoided.

[Dabbler]

This will be an interesting exercise, to find analogous passages in both books Pontalba mentions and stare hard at them to see the extent to which one might attribute their differences to translation. Casanova in Bolzano and Embers might almost be seen as text-book examples (in English translation) of prolix versus austere, with the entire tones of the stories being correspondingly different. On first reading, that seemed to be the author's deliberate intention. But on second reading? Who knows?

[pontalba]

Embers is the one of the best known recent examples of the occasional practice of double translation, i.e. translation through the intermediary of a translation in a third language. Carol Brown Janeway, who is a respected translator from German but doesn't, from what I've read, know any Hungarian, in fact produced her English version of Embers via the German translation of the original text. George Szirtes, on the other hand, is Hungarian-born and is a very respected translator from that language. So, theoretically, his version of Casanova should be closer to Marai than Janeway's of Embers. If Pontalba found the former less engaging than the latter, that may have more to do with the qualities of the respective books than with the translations - I couldn't say, not having read either.

I suspect it is both. Embers has a more fluid feel to the prose, but now that I think of it, there was repetition, but said repetition was softened by the word choices. CiB was choppier and tended to repeat in more or less the same wording immediately upon itself.
I'm trying to make it clearer, but that's about it.

Dabbler,
Boy, wordy and circular is about right for CiB, and I think it is so much more noticeable in CiB because of the [to me] clumsy translation.

I thought I had another book translated by Janeway, but I might have only noticed that she translated Perfume, a book I was not going to bother reading, but I think I will now, if only to get the feel for her style.

[Eric]

What is needed is for someone not only to compare the two English translations and guess at what is going on, but someone who knows Hungarian too, so that the originals can be compared, as well as the translations. Are the books different in style, or are the translators different by temperament?

I've often seen this kind of debate about the re-translations of 19th century Russian, French or German classics into English. People write whole paragraphs comparing various English translation of Dostoevsky or Mann. But the linguist's elephant in the library is: what we need is someone who can read the original to set out the differences, whilst comparing with what the author actually wrote. It seems weird to compare two views of a landscape, both in a mirror, without actually looking directly at the trees, grass and mountains.

I realise that having y'r actual Hungarian speaker on a forum such as this is a bit of a luxury, but it would cut out all the guesswork. I agree that intuition tells you that someone doing a direct translation from the Hungarian is likely to tackle rhythms and other stylistic features more successfully, as every interposed translation gets you further away form the original.

[pontalba]

I have to eat my words re Casanova in Bolzano, I returned to it and cannot say how happy that I did. Yes the first part is slow as molasses in January, but the last 100 pages or so are exquisite.
Just had to interject that thought. Eat crow so to speak.

[Stewart]

I'm wondering if it might be an idea to add the translator's name to the Tags that accompany our threads here so that you can click on a translator's name and have a list of threads relating to other books they've translated appear. For example: George Szirtes.

[Stewart]

I'm wondering if it might be an idea to add the translator's name to the Tags that accompany our threads here so that you can click on a translator's name and have a list of threads relating to other books they've translated appear. For example: George Szirtes.

Almost as if to prove I've nothing better to do with my time, I've went through all our book threads and tagged the translator(s) to them.

[Eric]

A reply to something written long ago by Stewart: I think translators will appreciate your effort. We don't need to muscle in there and push out the original author in an attempt to become famous. This happens the other way round in the theatre, when a big name adapts a play by a Russian, and "forgets" to mention that he knows no Russian himself, but has based all his "improvements" on a text translated by someone whose name is suppressed.

[Eric]

Anyone seen articles recently about literary translation, in the British or U.S. press? I haven't.