Translated works?

redcrew

Is Shakespeare Shakespeare in French? or German?

Or if I read Miss Smilla's Feeling for Snow (Danish in origin) do I miss something???

Discuss

humbert

Actually I'm really glad this thread was started. I've considered the same thing, you rely heavily on the translator in such cases and what I would like to ask is what the best translation of crime and punishment is? The most common being the David McDuff version.

MrJoeSoap

I've always wondered if Conrad was as good in Polish...

Maryan

Being a non-native speaker, I stopped reading the German translations because I realised that even good translations aren't the same as the originals. It takes me longer to read in English, but it's worth the effort.

I started with the Harry Potter books because I didn´t want to wait three or four months longer for the next sequel.

The new Tolkien translation was an attempt to use modern German for a rather medieval setting, probably to ease the reading, but I found it only annoying.

simu

No, translations never quite get there in my experience. Shakespeare's just odd in French! Still, if you don't read the language a text is translated from, the translation is better than nothing.

redcrew

has anyone read the transliation of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight by J.R.R. Tolkien? I know this might seem an odd refernence but I did it in college. This version, of the medieval poem makes sure to keep the same rhythm as the original...what does this count for in this debate?

And also, if we'll say I did read Danish, will I, as a non native speaker be able appreciate the intricacies that Danes get out of a book like Miss Smilla's Feeling for Snow? Or should I just read it in my native English to save hassle?

Odaise Gaelach

simu wrote:

No, translations never quite get there in my experience. Shakespeare's just odd in French! Still, if you don't read the language a text is translated from, the translation is better than nothing.

True enough. I'm reading Roadside Picnic by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky. Seeing as though my Russian ain't exactly brilliant, I have to read the English translation.

MrJoeSoap

Odaise Gaelach wrote:

True enough. I'm reading Roadside Picnic by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky. Seeing as though my Russian ain't exactly brilliant, I have to read the English translation.

Don't put yourself down.

hussey

Ross O'Carroll Kelly is being translated into russian!

:|

I had to study A Dolls House for my leaving cert, which was translated into english from..?(i should know that) but some of the class, myself included, had gotten different versions and quite a lot of it was different. There was some "very important" lines left out and such

lordgoat

I've read alot of Murakami books and i enjoy them especially the weirder ones, never considered what they would be like in Japanese as i found them to be so good it was never an issue.

redcrew

Henrik Ibsen wrote A Doll's House. See the problem here is that when these works were translated originally they were translated by people who knew both languages and so were capable of translating but what you also need is a translator with a writer's touch. This problem also happens with Chekhov.

If you have a good translator you are in a much better place to work from.

Brian Friel and Frank McGuinness have both 'translated' some Chekhov's works but they, to my knowledge, don't know Russian (Friel definitely not anyway) and so they got numerous other translations and rewrote the story in their own style. I've read these and their versions are far superior to many translations that I have read and so this adds another dimension to the problem. Someone like Christopher Hampton is also a great translator but then he is a writer in his own right too.

Tree

lordgoat wrote:

I've read alot of Murakami books and i enjoy them especially the weirder ones, never considered what they would be like in Japanese as i found them to be so good it was never an issue.

aye, loved the translated murakami stuff, not a hope of me learning japanese. I dont know if they lose much in the translattion but you can definitely see that the writing style is very different to regular western stuff

is_that_so

Garcia Marquez is an awful lot better in Spanish as is Isabelle Allende. I think the quality of a translation is in trapping the mood and style of the original. Walter Kaufmann's Faust is a good example.

BaZmO*

Oddly enough I was thinking about this recently while reading Patrick Suskind's "Perfume", a book that has obtained considerable cult status through it's English translation rather than it's original German print.

I suppose it's hard to tell whether a book looses something through translation unless you have actually read both versions. A good story is a good story, but on the language side of things it could loose quite a lot, i.e. the relationship between different words and their meanings when juxtaposed in their differing languages.