This week I wrote a defence of the new Persuasion adaptation for The Critic in which I defend the millennial American version of Austen against the stuffy English Janeite version.
A note on the translation. My experience is that English-language translators are more prone to strangle prose than translators in other languages I read. (I sometimes amuse myself by reading translations side by side.) The English translations seem overly obsessed with making everything confrom to English grammar (which in some ways is a pretty strict grammar), and they often remove things that were meant as stylistic devices to make the sentences more grammatical. A particularly horrific example was the translation of P.O. Enquist's autobiography A Walking Pine, in which he does not end questions with question marks to catch the sardonic hopelessness of Northern Sweden, and also sometimes ends statements with one or more question marks, or puts exclamation marks mid-sentence. All this is gone in the English version. I also find that Bolaño loses all rythmic intensity in English. It robs the language of so much playfulness and possibility!
I wonder if the translation is worth it - I enjoyed the Swedish version a lot. Let me have a look if any of his novels have been more properly translated.
I think The Royal Physcians Visit survives translation slightly better. Though it is badly hurt too. The original is written largely in pluperfect, which is surreal, and the translation is in a cowardly perfect. (I think that are the correct terms for the tense forms in English.) The pluperfect has this effect on me when I read: it makes the text seem like a big wooden machine with ropes and levers; it reminds me a bit of how Brecht would want the staging to look like staging, so you would not forget you were seeing a piece of theatre; the texture of the text never really disappears, but janks on, which somehow fits perfectly with the plot which is filled with intersecting lines of tension and power, the whole thing is very much like a da Vinci-machine.
Ultimately, I guess it depends on what you want to read. The Royal Physician’s Visit is about power struggles at the Danish court in the late 1700s; The Walking Pine is about the Swedish literary world, and about alcoholism of a very late blooming type.
A note on the translation. My experience is that English-language translators are more prone to strangle prose than translators in other languages I read. (I sometimes amuse myself by reading translations side by side.) The English translations seem overly obsessed with making everything confrom to English grammar (which in some ways is a pretty strict grammar), and they often remove things that were meant as stylistic devices to make the sentences more grammatical. A particularly horrific example was the translation of P.O. Enquist's autobiography A Walking Pine, in which he does not end questions with question marks to catch the sardonic hopelessness of Northern Sweden, and also sometimes ends statements with one or more question marks, or puts exclamation marks mid-sentence. All this is gone in the English version. I also find that Bolaño loses all rythmic intensity in English. It robs the language of so much playfulness and possibility!
Thanks interesting thoughts. Would you recommend A Walking Pine?
I wonder if the translation is worth it - I enjoyed the Swedish version a lot. Let me have a look if any of his novels have been more properly translated.
I think The Royal Physcians Visit survives translation slightly better. Though it is badly hurt too. The original is written largely in pluperfect, which is surreal, and the translation is in a cowardly perfect. (I think that are the correct terms for the tense forms in English.) The pluperfect has this effect on me when I read: it makes the text seem like a big wooden machine with ropes and levers; it reminds me a bit of how Brecht would want the staging to look like staging, so you would not forget you were seeing a piece of theatre; the texture of the text never really disappears, but janks on, which somehow fits perfectly with the plot which is filled with intersecting lines of tension and power, the whole thing is very much like a da Vinci-machine.
Ultimately, I guess it depends on what you want to read. The Royal Physician’s Visit is about power struggles at the Danish court in the late 1700s; The Walking Pine is about the Swedish literary world, and about alcoholism of a very late blooming type.
Thank you
Interesting will look forward to next!