Category: Translation Thoughts

Oxford Translates Summer School

Summer camps were a fundamental part of my childhood years. As far as “mandatory fun” activities go, I wasn’t miserable, but I also wasn’t particularly enthusiastic: camp was just a thing that I did because my parents seemed to want me to, some parts of it were kind of fun, other parts just tolerable or occasionally a slog. It wasn’t until the summer camp I attended offered specific niche interest camps that I actually became excited about going to camp. The one that held the most sway over me was jazz band camp, where some twelve or fifteen of us spent a week rehearsing a setlist to be performed as a concert for our parents at the end of the week. Some kind of alchemy happens when you throw a bunch of nerds together and give them a shared objective to accomplish on a tight deadline. I was obsessed; I felt like I had finally found my people.

But time passes, people grow up and change, you become an adult with responsibilities and worries and no one organizes nerdy summer camps for you anymore. You remember that something had been magical, once, but the memories have lost all the visceral feeling of the magic.

All of that visceral feeling came rushing back to me during the Oxford Translates Summer Camp. I’d applied on a whim, not knowing what to expect, purely on the recommendation of a member of the Emerging Translators Network mailing list. Staffing arrangements meant that there was no specific Swedish to English tutoring group, so I spent the week with seven other translators all working into English from various languages: Assamese, Bulgarian, Hindi, Korean, Mauritian Creole, Portuguese, and Slovenian. In between tutoring sessions focused on our own particular texts, we could choose from a generous buffet of panel discussions and workshops on topics like ethics in translation, writing reader’s reports, translating various mediums (theater, poetry, graphic novels), editing, translator organizations, contracts and more. The sheer wealth of information, in addition to the exciting and stimulating work with critiquing my classmates’ translations (and having my own critiqued), left my head spinning at the end of every day. Honestly, I don’t think the spinning has quite stopped yet.

There are a lot of lessons from the summer camp for me to reflect on and digest, but it’s safe to say that most of all, I’m struck by the incredible warmth and generosity of my colleagues in the field. Translation, much like writing, has a reputation for being a solitary vocation. True, much of it almost by definition has to be done by yourself, and anyone who isn’t comfortable with working in isolation will probably struggle. It’s no surprise the these careers attract a large number of introverts. But that same isolation also seems to, surprisingly enough, build a robust sort of solidarity; it makes people more eager to connect, to share tips and resources and commiserations, rather than less.

It’s a weird and worrying time to be a translator right now, but this opportunity to be among my people gave me the support and the encouragement I didn’t know I needed.

 La Vengeance m’appartient: Translation

 La Vengeance m’appartient only has three stars (or close to it) on GoodReads and StoryGraph. I wonder: is it because their userbase is uncomfortable with ambiguous, difficult texts? Or is it because their userbase is, more often than not, reading in English?

I ask because there’s something in the English translation that I found clunky and off-putting that was completely absent in the Swedish. Both of their translators are prolific and well recognized: the English translator is a highly lauded figure in English/French translation and even won an award for his translation of another book by NDiaye, as did the Swedish translator. Is my inner ear not attuned enough to know the difference between elegant and clunky French? Or elegant and clunky Swedish, for that matter?

The point that springs to mind is all the various translations of War and Peace, and the fanfare that met the translation by Pevear and Volokhonsky. It’s substantially different from older translations, and is often accused of being clunky in comparison. Pevear and Volokhonsky, however, insist that a lot of the original Russian is actually clunky, and that previous translations have done a lot—too much—to smooth it over. And in the middle of all this you have Constance Garnett: linguistic wunderkind? prudish censor? How central should her translations be when it comes to Russian literature in English?

It doesn’t help, either, that I find Stump’s style of writing irritating of its own accord. Maybe I was primed to dislike it because I didn’t bother looking him up until I was already annoyed with the English translation, who knows. But he has plenty of interviews to comb through: Words Without Borders, Center for the Art of Translation, Asymptote, Ploughshares, etc.

I suppose I’ll have to follow this post with a part two where I solicit my francophone friends for their opinions.

Emil and the Detectives

Both of my parents moved at least part of their childhood libraries into our home where they became the foundation for my collection (and my brother’s, for that matter). Some of these ended up being my own favorites while others simply hung about the house, in various common area bookshelves, forever unclaimed and unread by either me or my brother. Not for any particular reason, either; I think I would just forget about them as soon as I left the room or hallway. Such was the fate of Emil and the Detectives, which I finally sat down to read because sometimes the world is a bummer and you just want to read children’s books from a happier time.

Young Emil from the small town of Neustadt is sent off to visit his grandmother in Berlin with a not insubstantial sum of money, but is robbed en route. A local gang of plucky young boys come to his aid, hijinks ensue, and Emil and the detectives get their man. It’s very wholesome without being cloying, which would explain why there are approximately one million (or just five) movie adaptations of it. It’s cute, it’s a fast read, it’s fun, there’s not much else to say.

For such a slim book, Emil and the Detectives invites a bit of a Wikipedia rabbit hole. The author, Erich Kästner, was the odd duck who was able to remain a vocal critic of the Nazis without being sent to a camp or having to flee the country. While his much more risque and controversial adult novel, Fabian, was the subject of Nazi book burnings, his children’s work was popular enough to keep him more or less out of trouble. Another one of his children’s books, Lisa and Lottie, eventually became the basis for The Parent Trap.

The English translation is another rabbit hole, though a murkier one. It was published thanks to the efforts of legendary children’s book editor May Massee. By all accounts, in addition to her publishing and editing work, Massee also produced the first English translation of Emil and the Detectives, though a later one by Eileen Hall is purportedly the most readily available one in Europe. And yet there’s not much to be found online or in Massee’s biography about any other translation efforts. Was this the only translation she ever produced, a la Alexandra Dick and The Dwarf?

There is lively discussion (read as: this blog post) around the subsequent translations of Emil and the Detectives, and how English translators have approached the question of slang and dialect in the story. My German is several years out of use by this point, though all of this is tempting enough for me to dive back in.

The Dwarf (and Alexandra Dick)

Revisited a book from last year in translation, purely for the fact that a work friend brought it up in conversation on two different occasions.

“It’s like…amazing. That translator found solutions that weren’t even there to be found.”

Dvärgen came out in 1944, and appeared in English in 1945 in a translation by Alexandra Dick. A year is not a long time to translate a whole novel, especially before the era of word processors and CAT tools and the Internet. Even more astonishing, then, that the translation is good. Or maybe not so astonishing? I suppose I don’t have the ideal frame of reference to make that call. Over seventy years later and this seems to be the only English translation in town. Why mess with perfection?

What struck my coworker was that Dick didn’t really have any other substantial translation career he could uncover beyond that one really good translation, leading him to wonder if it was “some genius on drugs.”

Fortunately, Steve Holland at Bear Alley Books did some fantastic detective work so I don’t have to! Turns out that Dick wasn’t entirely a flash in the pan. (I’d argue she was some kind of genius, and who knows about the drugs.) Her translation career was, indeed, fairly limited, with just Dvärgen and Birger Dahlerus’s autobiography, Sista försöket, to her name (the combination of which invites speculation on her personal anxieties about war and Nazism). Her literary career, on the other hand, was prolific. She put out some two dozen novels from 1937 to 1964—including three in 1944 and one in 1945, coinciding with when she would have presumably been working on Dvärgen. Then, for whatever reason, her writing career ended in 1964, maybe because she was living in Florence and why would you stay shut up indoors to write all day when you live in Florence?

Any review of this, like with the original, is superfluous. Good book, good translation, have at.

Stick (and Einar Heckscher)

Back in January I was having a few beers with the same friend who recommended The Power of the Dog and we got on to the topic of Elmore Leonard.

“Stick! There’s one for you. Classic Leonard.”

Elmore Leonard is a legend and there’s nothing interesting I can add to the conversation about him. What’s noteworthy is that I read Stick in English (available from the good people at archive.org) and then, immediately thereafter, the Swedish translation by Einar Heckscher. Unlike the last time I became fixated on a translation (Gösta Berlings saga), there’s only one translation (so far as I’m aware?) and thus no comparisons are possible.

My drinking companion was adamant that no Swedish translation of Elmore Leonard could possibly work. I didn’t really have an opinion one way or another, maintaining neutrality as a professional courtesy to a fellow translator. Nonetheless, I’m a hyperactive golden retriever when it comes to talking about books, and once I cracked open the Swedish version he was subject to a slew of random WhatsApp messages, complete with screenshots and photos, whenever I thought a particular translation choice was interesting. Which, despite heroic efforts on my end to practice at least a modicum of restraint, was still pretty often. Sorry, Richie!

This translation of Stick came out in 1987, essentially contemporaneously with the 1985 original, as I guess is usually the case with popular commercial fiction. My biggest takeaway from the book, just viz a viz translation, was, “The internet is a life-saver.” How many times a day do I dump a term into Ecosia, Linguee, Folkets, Google ngrams, whatever else, just to wrap my head around it? How do you handle running up against the brick wall of foreign slang when you don’t have instant answers at your fingertips? If you can knock that one down, how do you dig through the slang of your own language beyond the scope of your personal usage? This is how I ended up asking my sambo and coworkers and bilingual friends how they would translate the recreational drug term “mainline” into Swedish.

My second thought was to wonder what a new translation would look like if it came out today. I think a lot more of the English would remain as calques, or be only moderately “Swedefied,” and I think there’d be a fair amount of förortssvenska. (Förortssvenska was already a thing when the book came out, but I don’t think the nearly-50-year-old Heckscher was spending a lot of time with teenagers in Rinkeby.)

My third thought was to go down a rabbit hole on the topic of Einar Heckscher himself, just because there’s actually information about him online. There’s a whole back catalogue of Swedish culture that I can’t ever hope to catch up with, and Heckscher is one of many, many items in there. I only learned about him, and by association the rest of his highly accomplished family, because I was curious about who translated this Elmore Leonard novel—judging by at least a couple Flashback posts,* though, I should have already been acquainted with Heckscher as a 70s prog rock figure from bands like Sogmusobil and Levande livet. A couple of interviews in Svenska Dagbladet and Socialpolitik got me up to speed, as did a couple of obituaries. Son Björn is hard to track down anywhere online, but his daughter at least followed in her father’s footsteps and translated? contributed to? a Swedish collection of Bukowski. Hard to say, since her father was also celebrated for his Swedish translations of Bukowski and that appears to be her only published work to date.

Incidentally, the Swedes on Flashback seem largely to share my drinking companion’s spitting rage at Heckscher’s translations, which can roughly be summed up as:

Han förvandlar allt till buskis och pilsnerfilm och förvränger allt han kommer över.

*Apologies for linking to The Bad Place, but as Flashback threads go it’s pretty innocuous.

Another point in favor for those left-field, organic and algorithm-free random book recommendations. Without the prompting and social context, would I have bothered to dip back into Elmore Leonard after a twenty years’ absence? Would I have gone down this weird little rabbit hole of Swedish prog rockers, politicians, and pundits? Absolutely not. But now I have, and so have you, and knowing is half the battle. G. I. Joe!

Gösta Berlings saga

It took several months, but I finally finished Gösta Berlings saga. I read it years ago in English; now it was time for Swedish. The only problem is that when you read dense Swedish for most of your work day, there’s not a lot of brain left over for dense Swedish for fun. As a result it took me much longer than it normally would to finish a book of this length and linguistic heft. (Not to compare the quality of writing in a Selma Lagerlöf novel to that of a financial report!)

It’s Gösta Berlings saga, it’s good, the end. What’s more interesting about the book is how many English translations there are. The English translation I originally read was the 1918 edition put out by the American-Scandinavian Foundation, which is essentially Lillie Tudeer’s translation with supplemental material from Velma Swanston Howard, and I remember it as a bit of a slog. I can’t put my finger on it, except to say that it felt very dull and dead. But there have since been three other translations and I thought it would be fun to look at how they all handle that iconic opening line.

The original:

Äntligen stod prästen på predikstolen.*

Or Äntligen stod prästen i predikstolan, depending on which edition you’ve read. Mine is from 1920, so på rather than i.

The Lillie Tudeer translation (1894):

The pastor was mounting the pulpit steps.

This is obviously, at a bare minimum, not particularly faithful to the original.

The Pauline Bancroft Flanch translation (1898):

At last the minister stood in the pulpit.

Already we’re much closer to the original.

The Robert Bly translation (1962):

At last the minister stood in the pulpit.

This translation is not a wholly new work but an edited and revised version of the Flanch translation, so not at all surprising it’s identical to the previous one.

The Paul Norlen translation (2009):

At long last the minister stood in the pulpit.

This translation is an entirely new work, and straightaway we have a little extra flavor in the text.

Since I’m writing this in English, I suppose I should leave off with a recommendation for which translation to pick up. Well, it goes without saying that I’d give a pass on the omnipresent Dover Thrift Edition or any other version of Lillie Tudeer’s translation. I’m the most curious now about Paul Norlen’s translation, though I have an all-or-nothing brain and so will probably burn through all three of the other versions in short order anyway.