Hard Reads, Lost in Translation

By Samuel Goldman • August 12, 2012, 9:33 AM

Millman and Dreher are having fun comparing the toughest books they’ve finished and not finished. They’re responding to a top ten list of the hardest reads in Publisher’s Weekly by a couple of literary critics.

One observation about these lists, others around the web, and the comments they’ve attracted: they don’t always consider the challenges posed by translation. Consider Being and Time, which more than one blogger has described as especially brain-busting. Although a hard book in any language, it’s considerably easier in the original German, in which Heidgegger’s neologisms are less jarring. On the flipside, I can’t imagine trying to tackle Ulysses auf Deutsch.

Books’ difficulty, then, can depend considerably on the translation. Personally, I was unable to finish even one of Dostoyevsky’s novels in the old Garnett versions. The recent editions by Richard Pevear and Laura Volkhonsky, on the other hand, were, if not exactly a breeze, then certainly a joy. I’m really grateful to them for allowing me to enjoy such an important author.

Multilingual readers, are there any books that you’ve found easier in the original than in translation? What about translations of classics that were more or less difficult?

Posted in Art, Books, Ideas. Tagged Dostoyevsky, hard reads, Heidegger.

13 Responses to Hard Reads, Lost in Translation

Noah Millman says:

August 12, 2012 at 10:04 am

It goes the other way as well. I am given to understand that even in Germany students often read Kant in English translation, because the process of translation clarifies his abstruse prose. Not being a German reader myself, and never having tackled Kant in English, I’m in no position to weigh in on this question.

Agree on Prevear and Volkhonsky’s translations of Dostoevsky and Gogol; they are magnificent, and a huge improvement over what the world had before. I’m less sold on their Chekhov as a distinct improvement over older translations. And I’m reading the Garnett translation of War and Peace (because that’s the translation I had around), and it’s a breeze.

I read Eugene Onegin for the first time last year or the year before, I forget in what translation, and I just wasn’t blown away. And Russians are always telling me: that’s because it’s untranslatable.

The most amazing job of translation, though, has got to be the Asterix comics. The dialogue is basically an endless series of puns, and the comics are published in dozens of different languages. I have no idea how the translators do it.
Noah Millman says:

August 12, 2012 at 10:10 am

One other point on translation. I’ve studied the Hebrew bible in the original since I was a kid, but I’m still not fluent in biblical Hebrew the way I am in English. So it was enlightening to read the Robert Alter translations of Samuel and Genesis. I can’t say you really get the experience of the Hebrew, but there’s an immediacy to his translations that relates to a quality of the Hebrew that I’ve never found in English translations. That said, the good old King James has a rhythm to it in English that makes it eminently memorable and quotable, and that is another quality of the Hebrew that doesn’t translate as well with the Alter – because the rhythms of Hebrew and English are different. That’s often the way it is with translation – a translation that does an especially good job of capturing one quality of the original necessarily sacrifices other qualities. It’s not as simple as a tradeoff of meaning for mellifluousness.
tbraton says:

August 12, 2012 at 2:15 pm

“And I’m reading the Garnett translation of War and Peace (because that’s the translation I had around), and it’s a breeze.”

I am reminded of a comment made by a professor of literature when I took a course on the novel. He said that he was struck by remarkable similarity between the writing styles of Tolstoy and Dostoevky (which are in Russian as different as Faulkner and Hemingway) until he realized that they had been translated into English by the same person, one Constance Garnett.
Oisín says:

August 12, 2012 at 7:49 pm

I was reading two different translations of ‘Being and Time’, and actually enjoying picking up the differences in approach; similar to the kind of detective work I had fun with, decoding and digging through Shakespeare’s layers of meaning in school – with those editions that had those Talmudic-like glossaries between lines or on opposite pages.

There is no ‘A is A’ equivalency with this sort of thing. I think Borges was having fun with this notion when he suggested (I think) that a translator could actually improve on the original. Didn’t the translator of the Rubaiyat basically rewrite it, to the extent that he could be considered its author, in English at least? And poor James Mac Phearson was harangued and beaten down for basically a creative retelling or compiling of the myth cycle of my own namesake, Ossian, as a translation.

My teenage reaction to ‘Being and Time’ was instant disgust, annoyance, and rejection (similar to my reaction to modern art – or rather, art-historians’ and critics’ reactions to same). A good guide (who read and taught his work in yet another, third language) was an essential grounding for me. The dynamic argument and discussion drew out the meaning far more than a static “there it is” by any one translator.
Carl says:

August 12, 2012 at 7:52 pm

You’ve never experienced Shakespeare until you’ve read him in the original Klingon.

More seriously, Chinese philosophy (Confucius, Laozi) is much easier to read in Chinese.
Oisín says:

August 12, 2012 at 7:57 pm

I meant to say also: part of the attraction of musing over the layers of meaning in different translations of ‘Being and Time’ for me is: I live in an area where the countryside dialect of English has been influenced by what was known as “Yola” (“Ye Olde Language”) or “Forth and Bargy” (after old English geographical divisions of the Irish countryside here). This Middle English (Western Germanic) remnant still has outcrops in the local spoken language – but it also allows for a fun (well ok: to me), creative license in making one’s own neologisms for or interpretation of Heidegger, even just using the English translations as the code.
bjk says:

August 12, 2012 at 9:14 pm

I seem to remember reading that Strauss preferred the 1970 translation of Husserl’s Crisis to the German original.
Mike Ehling says:

August 12, 2012 at 11:13 pm

I’ve never read anything by Auguste Comte, but I understand that Comte was so impressed by Harriet Martineau’s very “free form” translation that he suggested that his students read Martineau’s translation rather than his own original.

As I say, I’ve never read this. My interest in Martineau is for her influence on later Victorian women’s literature, particularly Charlotte Brontë. Martineau’s novel Deerbrook had a particularly strong influence on Brontë’s Shirley, and Martineau’s autobiography includes a lot of “name-dropping” of her contemporaries.
Fran Macadam says:

August 12, 2012 at 11:20 pm

Gee, I read and greatly appreciated Constance Garnett’s translations – being novels of ideas that aspect was still powerful.
PDGM says:

August 13, 2012 at 1:23 am

I’m not sure that translation is not a timebound art. Garnett’s translations have a whiff of the Victorian or of the 19th century about their English; this seems less present, unsurprisingly, in the Pevear and Volkhonsky translations. And since many readers do not want archaic, or verging on archaic, styles of English prose, the more modern translation lowers the barrier to entry for Tolstoy, say. At least it has for me.

One aspect of writing that literate English readers and speakers are apt to forget is how even recent forms of English, relatively speaking, come across as old-fashioned, fogeyish even. I’ve discovered this when trying to teach Politics and the English Language by Orwell to contemporary American middle class middle to upper intelligence college students. It gets significantly worse when you try to teach someone like Orwell to first generation college students. Orwell might think he’s being crystal clear and direct; but by contemporary standards, he definitely sounds old fogeyish. And this judgement (judgment?) is only partly based upon youthful ignorance; the students are in fact picking up cultural values of English writers which they do not share, and hence that make the reading of works by those who do share them much more difficult.
PDGM says:

August 13, 2012 at 1:25 am

For that matter, try to read an 18th century translation of Homer; then compare it to a good late 20th century translation: a world of difference.
tbraton says:

August 13, 2012 at 2:13 am

“Gee, I read and greatly appreciated Constance Garnett’s translations – being novels of ideas that aspect was still powerful.”

Fran Macadam, that was why I was amused by Samuel Goldman’s observation that he couldn’t finish a Garnett translation of Dostoevsky and Noah Millman’s observation that he breezed through Garnett’s translatioon of War and Peace by Tolstoy. Garnett’s were the standard translations of both around the 50′s and 60′s when I read both, and I still have those Modern Library translations on my shelves. I read Crime and Punishment, the Brother K and the Idiot several times each as well as W&P and Anna Karenina and had no problem with any of them. I can’t read a word of Russian so I have no idea how good the traslations are, but, as my anecdote illustrated, reading a Garnett translation made no difference whether it was Tolstoy or Dostoevsky. On the other hand, I can’t read ancient Greek, but found the translations of the Iliad and Odyssey by Richard Lattimore and Robert Fitzgerald back in the 60′s as enjoyable as the later translations of both by Robert Fagles, all of which are still on my bookshelves. If anything, I prefer the Fitzgeald version of the Oddyssey to Fagles’.
Mike Ehling says:

August 14, 2012 at 11:18 pm

PDGM:

How about trying a 17th century translation of Virgil:

Arms and the man I sing, who, forced by fate
And haughty Juno’s unrelenting hate,
Expelled and exiled, left the Trojan shore.

Dryden’s Aeneid is incomparable!