The delights of novels in translation – Part 2
A few months ago we looked at the current interest in “foreign” fiction and how authors such as Elena Ferrante and Henning Mankell have, seemingly overnight, become instant best-sellers for English readers hitherto cautious about any authors not born on English-speaking shores. The key element in this success is of course the often-unheralded translator, so when the Observer’s Rachel Cooke brought these translators out of the shadows, so to speak, interest was immediately aroused (Observer, July 24, 2016).
Translators of foreign literature are at the very top of the linguistic tree; they have to be, since thousands of people are going to be reading their words and will associate a particular translator with the actual author of the book.
Melanie Mauthner began life as a sociology lecturer, before becoming a translator. She is best known for translating the works of Rwandan novelist Scholastique Mukasonga. whose first novel was Our lady of the Nile. Mauthner explains how she works. Translation is not just about rendering a book from one language to another. It is about conveying the mood, sound, feel and texture of the original author’s prose. Is there an appropriate English equivalent voice resembling the author’s own? There are many different versions of English these days with African Caribbean or Latin American or Polish accents. Which, if any, of these might be appropriate? A key aspect of translation is to confer and discuss with the author, and this is now so much easier with email. References which may appear obscure to the untutored eye suddenly become clear once the context is understood.
The runaway foreign best seller of the moment is undoubtedly Elene Ferrante’s Neapolitan quartet which everybody seems to have read, or be reading, or intending to read. Her translator is Ann Goldstein. She is winningly modest: “the idea that a translator would be at all well known strikes me as amazing.” She came late to languages, inspired by a desire to read Dante in the original. Her approach to the task is more clinical than Mauthner. She wants her translation to read well and flow naturally in English, of course, but she recognises that she is not a novelist, and her intention is not to re-write. Unlike Mauthner she has had no direct contact with the reclusive Ferrante and sees no need to do so.
The starting point for Deborah Smith was that she wanted to be a translator, embarrassed that she could only speak English. “Korean was a language I knew few people study and I felt that made it interesting………… I didn’t fall in love with Korean. I wanted to be a translator because I love English.” A bold decision, but one which paid off. She has now translated several books from Korean, the best-known being The Vegetarian by Han Kang. Smith is fortunate in that Han Kang not only has good English but also believes that translation is itself a form of creative writing.
Don Bartlett, translator of, amongst others, Jo Nesbø, had a more traditional introduction to translation, having completed an MA in literary translation at the University of East Anglia. He is currently working on volume 5 of Karl Ove Knausgard’s 6 volume autobiography, My Struggle. He underlines an important lesson for all translators that “[for a translator into English] it’s better to be in the UK, because you’ve got English all around you, and people may say things , and you think, yeah, that’s the one.”
Translators translating only into their mother tongue and living in their mother country is the surest way to ensure a natural, idiomatic translation, which is why translators working for Anglia Translations are always based in their mother country.
All these translators have greatly benefited from the boom in foreign fiction, which is no longer classified under the generic title of European fiction, but defined by category. As the audience for foreign fiction grows so there is a corresponding awareness of the importance of translators and translation, which can only be helpful to companies like Anglia Translations!
