The delights of novels in translation
A fascinating article in a recent Observer by their literary critic Rachel Cooke, talking about books in translation, a topic that has featured in a number of our blogs.
She writes of her delight in re-reading, for the first time in years, the precocious first novel of Françoise Sagan “Bonjour tristesse”. For Cooke, the translation was the one she knew almost by heart, done by Irene Ash. She decides to investigate a more up to date rendering, which would be perhaps more in tune with the 21C as opposed to the Ash translation of the early 50s. Cooke is shocked. The opening paragraph, which thanks to Ash has been engraved in her imagination, has been completely transformed by the later translation, done by Heather Lloyd. Of course, Cooke is not saying or inferring that one translation is better than the other, simply that the reader gets used to a particular version of a foreign classic.
As a student of modern languages in the 60s, my love of Proust was partly formed by the Scott Moncrieff version (yes, I did read most of it in the original French, but it is a rather long book! That’s my excuse). Scott Moncrieff, however, wins no plaudits for his translation of Proust’s masterpiece. Indeed, even a first year French student would have to award nuls points for “Remembrance of things past” as a rendering of “A la recherché du temps perdu”. But the rest of his translation remains a classic, despite some critics pointing out various mis-translations or clumsy locutions.
As Cooke says, we are often wedded to the original translation, especially if we read it during our impressionable younger days. We simply don’t want to read a more modern (and perhaps better, more idiomatic) version.
Finding the right translation, and indeed the right translator, has become a top talking point in the literary world as authors as different as Henning Mankell and Elena Ferrante vie for shelf space in the bookshops. What has prompted this seemingly new appetite for “exotic” fiction which explores the dark side of Oslo or the vibrant Naples society? Probably the simple answer is that good fiction travels well, because good fiction tells us something about the world, or a particular place or a human dilemma to which we can all relate.
And what makes them so successful is the brilliant way that translators can capture the nuances of locale and character in fluent idiomatic English which brings a story to vivid life.
In a future blog we will be looking at the work of these brilliant linguists who reveal the secrets of their trade, a trade which ultimately enriches our own experience.
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