Aus krummem Holze

YMMV.

The upfront aus/als parallelism, nearly a rhyme, is absent in the translation, and “kann nichts ganz Gerades gezimmert werden” is a bit of jovial guttural yodeling lacking in the English version.

In contrast, “Against stupidity the gods themselves contend in vain” improves Schiller’s “Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens”, but that was a throwaway line to begin with.

But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t read works in translation. Native English speakers, like me, are insular enough already…

i will certainly agree with jacob christensen that Kant’s German certainly left much to be desired (i think he contends only with Apel for worst German philosophical style of all times).

The atmosphere of a language has a great impact on (philosophical) non-fiction too. Consider Hegel and Heidegger: i think we can safely say that they used the “ontological feel” of the German language not only to guide their philosophical musings but also to lend a special profoundness to their texts that almost entirely disappears in translation. A translation of Kant doesn’t loose much (and might gain in readability) but a translation of one of the Hs can only be considered a guide to the original. You don’t need to know a word of German to study Kant; that would be unthinkable for H&H, imho.

… the translation gains the “timber”, it loses the verb “zimmern“, which carries an immediate association with craftsmanship.

They have the same root (cf. the Dutch for “carpenter” is “timmerman”) and “timber,” correspondingly, does still have an association with craftmanship. You don’t use the word unless you’re describing wood that’s to be worked on or integrated into some human construction; firewood isn’t timber, for example.

I do prefer the translation, just because it’s smoother.

I (almost) always choose the original, despite that this generally requires greater effort.

It took me a year to read the Tin Drum in German and actually enjoyed the translation better.

Carlos Fuentes, who lived in Washington,DC for many years and speaks flawless virtually accentless English, was asked why he doesn’t translate his own works. He said that he just isn’t comfortable doing that.

I’m always suspicious of poetry translations. I mean how close can you get when you have to not only translate the phrases but do so in a way that has the proper meter and rhyming structure?

Since I only speak English, this is alas something I’ve never been able to track down. Ironically nobody expects us to read Shakespere sonnets that have been translated into modern English, even though very few of us could carry on a conversation with him in his native environment.

I hate having to read in translation any book that was written in the only foreign language I can read (French). I only like to read translated poetry in dual-language editions, and only from languages I know some words of and whose sound I can at least approximate (Spanish, Italian, German) so I can at least get some idea of the word-music.

Even so, in the spirit of the blog entry, I can think of one famous quote that does sound better to me in English. Pasteur’s “Le hasard ne favorise que les esprits préparés” is known to almost every English-speaking scientist as “Chance favors the prepared mind” which seems more succinctly epigrammatical than the original.

“For once, the translation beats the original.”

I’ll say! I can’t make heads or tails of that jibber-jabber! What is that, French or something?

does not translate his own works into Portuguese

It is or was until very recently a rule with most publishers to commission translations only from native speakers of the language being translated into, so that in most cases they would be at least marginally less fluent in the language of the original.

The reasoning is that the first priority is a fluent text for publication, but it’s clear that this could lead to the occasional inaccuracy.

Presumably exceptions like Nabokov are discounted by publishers’ agents.

I really feel for the poor slob who has to translate poetry that goes out of its way to avoid “meaning”. What’s the point of trying to “translate”, say, Mallarmé?

Ingrid, since you are Dutch, try and translate into English: Na Reagan komt zonneschijn.

For those who do not speak Dutch, the meaning is: There is a silver lining behind every Reagan.

Literally: After Reagan (Dutch: regen = rain) there will be sunshine.

I highly recommend Milan Kundera’s “Testaments Betrayed” on this issue.

Samuel Beckett tended to write in French and do his own translations into English. I suspect lots of the writers who don’t despite being able to, consider writing a better (or perhaps just more profitable) use of their time. Umberto Eco’s only translation that I know of was one of Nerval’s Sylvie, and he’s certainly had the opportunity to do more!

Guy, it’s good to see one more person taking up Des von Bladet’s individual approach to European geography, but in that particular geopolitical state of affairs, “East Belgian” is the word you’re looking for, not “Dutch” :-) .

Less opaquely, Ingrid is Belgian, despite living in the Netherlands.

Ingrid,

You comment that “many translated works are not able to capture the exact meanings of the original text”. Depending on your own fluency, though, *you* might also be unable to capture the exact meanings of the original text. Me, I’m happy to read Spanish newspapers, I certainly miss things in Garcia Marquez and Juan Ramon Jimenez, and Cervantes is a fog. So it’s hard to say whether I would lose some feeling, or idiom, or meaning, by reading in translation—I’m perfectly capable of losing feeling, idiom, and meaning on my own.

To take the example from #19, imagine a German reader with middling command of English coming across “American as apple pie”. The reader might skim over it and dismiss it as unintelligible, or look it up, or even, quite reasonably, take away the opposite meaning! Such a reader is better served by having the translator, who knows perfectly well what the idiom means, find a suitable way to convey it—they’d be better served by reading “typischer Amerikaner” than by muddling past the original.

“Traddutore, traditore”, yes, but sometimes “lettore, traditore”. There’s a balance between a translator’s superior insight (imperfectly conveyed into the target language) and the reader’s imperfect understanding (minus the extra layer) So, the question isn’t “Is it better to read the original?”, but rather “How fluent do you have to be before the balance swings?” And of course it will vary from author to author.

(The ideal solution, of course, is to read the original with an expert translator hanging over your shoulder making comments.)

One more thing–anyone fluent in French got an opinion on Lowell Bair’s translations?

His Stendhal and Dumas read very well in English (particularly his Charterhouse), but I’ve not sat down & tried them against the originals.

“Is the English text a revision of the original, & thus expresses Beckett’s later intentions?”

How fluent was he in English? What, if any, dictionaries did he use?

Ben M, #28: I think your specific example underestimates people’s ability to work out things from context—certainly, I first came across the phrase in writing and didn’t give it a second thought.

As for the wider point that people don’t always get every nuance of a text on first reading it; of course! And that’s true for first languages just as it is for second languages; and with more exposure, it becomes less of an issue. I imagine, if you haven’t read any Jane Austen, that you would miss things on your first encounter with her that you’d be picking up easily by your third novel.

Guy, #32; English was his first language, he had a degree from and had taught at a decent university, and he’d worked as a gofer for James Joyce. It was good, in short.

There is always the completely masochistic approach when you decide that while you can’t read the original (because, say, three years of middle school Russian is just not enough to read Bulgakov) you decide to buy the book in a language that is by far not your best, but you like it, and figure it would be fun to read the book in it. This is why I own a copy of Master and Margarita in French. I never did get through it though. My French is pretty good, but it turns out not that good.:(

henry said:

The first translation of “The Master and Margarita” allegedly translated “dentist” as “Dante scholar.” Probably not an improvement.

I happen to be rereading Master and Margarita (again) and was confused by dantist in the Russian. There’s a perfectly good Russian way of saying dentist: zubnoi vrach [tooth doctor]. Dantist sure looks like it comes from the name Dante. If you know French (which has only given me pain throughout my life), you might eventually realize the “Russian” word is based on dentiste (Fr.). The impossible task for translator: let the English-speaking reader know we’re talking about a dentist, but that Bulgakov is transmitting Frenchy overtones, for whatever reason (to indicate pretension, perhaps—or maybe dantist isn’t pretentious in Russian?), or just using one word where two would do. Just for fun, I might render it “the dentist Dante Ivanovich.” Would Bulgakov mind? Let him come and get me!

In re Nabokov: he tended to extensively rewrite his Russian novels when he “translated” them in to English. I don’t think he translated any of his English books into Russian.

Guy: How fluent was he in English?

Well, true, he was Irish ….

(Guy is probably pulling my leg, of course.)

Ben (#28), I see the point your’re making; and I guess I was presenting the ‘rule’ I’m trying to follow rather than describing my actual practice – in practice I always read the original in English and German, but I don’t always read the original in French since I wouldn’t be able to get the exact meaning of many sentences. (In spanish I can only read easy parts of the newspaper, but I love dual language poetry in Spanish). There is a gain from reading in the original language, but if my estimate is that the gain will be smaller than the loss from not understanding, then I go for the translation. It requires a judgement for each book.

I very much enjoyed reading The Master and Margarita in Dutch, but still envy those of you who can read it in Russian !

I’ve also wondered: will anyone admit to reading “The Da Vinci Code” in translation? Isn’t such a translation practically guaranteed to be stylistically better than the original?

michael krember, re: #25: opinions differ on the quality of Pevear/Volokhonsky translations of Russian authors.

A few years ago I compared a few chapters from Master and Margarita in the Glenny (1967) and the new Pevear/Volokhonsky translation, and was dismayed by how consistently tin-eared and untrue to the original the Pevear/Volokhonsky translation was. I wrote up my impressions, with some examples of particular (simple) passages in the original and in both translations, but that’s in Russian.

The most unfortunate thing about the PV translation of Master and Margarita is their consistent habit of literal rendering of this or that Russian idiom or turn of phrase, which, being completely unremarkable and typical in the original Russian, becomes something weird or quaint in English, something perhaps to draw the reader’s attention and make them think they’re experiencing the author’s unique style or “Russianness” (no doubt lost in previous, imperfect translations!). When, on the other hand, something unusual is going in the original text, that feeling is lost in the PV translation, or, even worse, the meaning is garbled.

It’s puzzling that this happens so often, sometimes in the most trivial cases. The first chapter’s title, rendered “Never talk with strangers” in PV, is a phrase in Russian that matches perfectly the idiomatic English “Never talk to strangers”. The Russian verb does take the preposition “with”, but that’s the normal way of saying that in Russian, and “talk to” is its idiomatic translation. Larisa Volokhonsky, with her native Russian, couldn’t possibly be unaware of that; the only reason I could think of for PV to use “with” here is to deliberately slightly “strange-ify” the text where there’s nothing like that in the original. And that’s one of the subtler examples; distortions that are much more blunt in their apparently deliberate desire to make the text “weird”, “raw”, “Russian” can be found on just about every page.

My conclusion was that any feeling of authenticity, of perceiving Bulgakov’s style or anything characteristically “Russian” about the text that a reader might get from the PV translation would be fake. Based on just a few excerpts that I compared, the Burgin-O’Connor translation of Master and Margarita seemed to be the most apt, but even Glenny’s old 1967 translation, with plenty of its own faults, would be preferrable to the PV version. I haven’t tried reading PV’s translations of Dostoevsky and Tolstoy, but if their method there is anything like what they did in Master and Margarita, the results couldn’t be much better.

I’m always suspicious of poetry translations. I mean how close can you get when you have to not only translate the phrases but do so in a way that has the proper meter and rhyming structure?

William H. Gass’s Reading Rilke is an excellent study of just that task, taking samples from pretty much every published English rendition of the Duino Elegies and Sonnets to Orpheus and holding them up to the light.

Beckett composed in French to alienate himself from the language. (At least, that seems to be why he did it: his story shifted during his life.) This also makes his position on the English Lit syllabus somewhat idiosyncratic, especially if you hang around people writing doctorates on his French works. It’s cases like his that appeal to the ‘Cambridge’ approach to literary study, which cross lingustic boundaries to embrace common genres and themes, as opposed to the historical ‘Oxford’ approach which takes the national and historical sweep.

It’s probably a myth, but I remember someone saying that Kemp-Smith’s translation of Kant is so much clearer than the original that sometimes German students have been recommended to read Kant in English.

Comment 52 already, and nobody else has posted James Thurber’s reply to an admirer who told him that his output read very well in French translation: “Yes, my works lose something in the original”.

Comment 54 already, and nobody else has posted Hegel’s reply to a French philosopher who asked him if he could state his views more concisely: “These things can be discussed neither concisely nor in French.”

Great thread!

Did Nabokov translate his own books into Russian? I’m curious, because I would imagine that he would have the same reaction as Tabuchi: in Russian, he would have written a different book.

Anatoly mentioned his translation of Lolita; a perhaps more interesting instance is his expanded translation of Conclusive Evidence (1951) into Drugie berega [‘Other Shores’] (1954), and then his final reworking of the material as Speak, Memory (1966). If you can get hold of The Garland Companion to Vladimir Nabokov, a superb compilation of mini-essays on every conceivable aspect of his work (including chapters like “Nabokov and Bergson,” “Nabokov and Chateaubriand,” “Nabokov and Evreinov,” “Nabokov and Poe”…), the chapter on Speak, Memory (by Georges Nivat) has a fascinating comparison of the Russian and English versions (e.g., the varied play of sounds in “I fancied that strange, pale animals roamed in a landscape of lakes” and “mne mereshchilis’ tomitel’nye dopotopnye dali”).

Incidentally, it’s worth learning Russian just to read Nabokov’s novels in that language; to my mind, Dar is one of the great novels of the twentieth century, a status that I don’t think is accorded to the English version, The Gift. (I had the great pleasure of perusing the Russian text in its original locus, the beautiful cream-covered volumes of the Parisian emigré journal Sovremennye zapiski, lovingly preserved at the Slavic Department of the NYPL.) Trust me, as wonderful as his prose is in English, it’s twice as good in Russian (which, lest we forget, was his native language).

And WorldWideWeber, thanks for that devastating Karlinsky takedown of poor Glenny! “Dante scholar” was just the tip of the iceberg.

Bi 53: That sounds like Chang Chung-yuan’s “Tao: A New Way of Thinking”, which rendered almost everything with an interpretation.

There’s a dogma in Chinese studies that no poetic translation can be accurate and no accurate translation can be poetic (or even readable). Edward Schafer enforced this dogma, which probably traces back to a 50s dispute between Schafer’s teacher Boodberg (a Russian emigre Orientalist) and Kenneth Rexroth.

I base this conclusion on a snide comment Rexroth made on St. Petersburg military schools — which is where Boodberg (like the composers Musorgsky, Cui, Borodin, and Rimsky-Korsakoff) received his early education.

It’s wrong to judge the Irish simply from their drunkenness, filthy appearance and laziness. Many are quite bright.

Okay, but does NOBODY have the scoop on whether German students really read Kant in English?

Thanks, Aidan!

And while we’re talking about Marx, he found it necessary to invent, not mistranslate, Hegel’s most memorable quotation.

#65 Yes. And this is true of many of Berlin’s ‘quotations’, which often ‘improve’ on the originals—that is, tend to be both more elegant, and more striking.

Berlin should be taken with some skepticism. I saw a talk a couple of years back which showed fairly conclusively that, contrary to what he let on, his knowledge of Hamann and Herder was rather limited. The killer example given was a particular quote of Herder’s which Berlin used and reused as epitomizing Herder’s supposedly Counter-Enlightenment worldview. It turned out to be taken spectacularly out of context: rather than the telling aphorism IB claimed it to be, it was a single line plucked from a bizarre and atypical love poem to Herder’s wife (in which he was impersonating a glow-worm [sic]). None of that would matter so much, except that on Enlightenment and Counter-Enlightenment, Berlin is still taken as gospel by many. Maybe we shouldn’t so quickly “pardon him for writing well”.

When I was a philosophy student at Oxford many of my German fellow undergraduates would admit they found it easier to read Kant (_and_ Hegel, for the few people who did read him) in English rather than the original German. There is a certain intricate elegance to very long German sentences (Thomas Mann, W.G. Sebald — and Kant) if they are well-written which sometimes makes them hard to follow and is not usually carried over into other languages. And rightly so, because they just don’t have the same effect in, say, English or French.

In case you missed it: Andrew Lloyd Webber says that his next project will be staging The Master and Margarita as an opera. http://www.andrewlloydwebber.co.uk/sections/news/newsdb.php?article=13&section=news. Perhaps he’ll do it in the original Russian–but it will still be his music.