What are the Best Books You Have Read in Translation?

[imatitle]

What do you think gets lost in translation?
Translation seems to me like a necessary evil...
I am always apprehensive about reading books in translation. Do you think translation - not in absolute terms - makes up for the pains and time of learning a new language? Do you think that one should have a certain number of languages in their reservoir and only resort to translation in special cases? Or that it doesn't make much of a difference?
And what is this thing that one feels when going through translation that is lacking?
Do you like translations that are - as much as that is possible - lexically and syntactically faithful to the original, or ones that take such liberties?

[chasestalling]

When speaking of a timeless classic that which is lost in translation is negligible as the rate of additional translations which improve on its predecessors is bound to be a fixture unto eternity.

As to lesser works, why bother.

[stlukesguild]

I don't know if newer translations "improve" upon the older. Rather, it would seem they simply offer an interpretation of the work that is more in line with the time in which it was made.

[JBI]

Depends, certain publishers like pushing public domain or older, cheaper, translations, which for the most part, don't work.

In truth there is no factor that says old translations are bad, but most translators seem to a) build on previous translations, and b) modernize the idiom, so that language itself has changed over the past 100 years, so has the way the wording of translations.

[patrickbeverley]

Ralph Manheim's translation of The Tin Drum by Gunter Grass is pretty unbeatable.

[Hypercrit Htd]

Some new translations quite amusing. Apparently it necesssary to change words around for purpose of secure copyright. But changing Word mean change meaning. They better be careful!

[ThousandthIsle]

I don't know if newer translations "improve" upon the older. Rather, it would seem they simply offer an interpretation of the work that is more in line with the time in which it was made.

I don't know, I think if I were a translator, a large part of being driven to re-translate a work which has already been translated (especially more than one time), would be to improve it - to make the translation more true to the original text.

If my native language was the language the original was written in, I think I would also labor to channel the particular beauty and mastery (or what have you) of the author into the translation.

[patrickbeverley]

If my native language was the language the original was written in
Interestingly, this is hardly ever done.

[stlukesguild]

I don't know, I think if I were a translator, a large part of being driven to re-translate a work which has already been translated (especially more than one time), would be to improve it - to make the translation more true to the original text.

If my native language was the language the original was written in, I think I would also labor to channel the particular beauty and mastery (or what have you) of the author into the translation.

The original text that is being translated (be it the Bible, Dante, or Homer) never has any need of being "updated" or "improved". A translations, however, will always be somewhat biased in the sense that how Homer was seen by the Augustan age, and realized in Pope's translation, was not the same as Homer was seen by the Romantics, the Victorians, or our own age. As Dante Rossetti stated in the preface to his marvelous translations of The Early Italian Poets, "The only true motive for putting poetry into a fresh language must be to endow a fresh nation, as much as possible, with one more possession of beauty. Poetry not being an exact science, literality of rendering is altogether secondary to this chief aim. I say literality- not fidelity, which is by no means the same thing..." As JBI stated, languages change over time... and so we often seek out "fresh" translations for this "fresh" language. There is no way that I would think that Pope's Homer, Dryden's Virgil, Rosetti's Dante and Cavalcanti, Longfellow's Dante, or the King James Bible are inferior to more modern translations. If Pope's Homer is imagined as being too Augustan in style, Robert Fagles' efforts will eventually be seen as being just as dated... just as much of their time. I have yet to come across a superior translation to the King James Bible. Robert Alter has offered the Pentateuch, the "David Story" and the Psalms in marvelous translations that seek to retain a greater fidelity to the original Hebrew... at least for our time... but I question (with the exception of the Psalms) whether they are inherently better. Most of the contemporary literal translations of the Bible are absolute travesties, although there are some very good translations of various books: Mitchell's Job, the Bloch's Song of Solomon, and Alter's efforts. Perhaps only the Psalm's (excepting the great King James translation of the 23rd) have been greatly improved upon... largely because they were translated as English prose and not poetry. It's for this reason that Phillips Sidney, George Herbert, Christopher Smart, John Milton, Henry Vaughan, and any number of other British poets have sought to translate various Psalms into English poetry.

[JBI]

The contemporary 'accurate' versions aren't even accurate, as they avoid scholarship and ignore Hebrew language study, and metaphor.

To be honest, I have read the original in Hebrew, and the fact remains that aside from the better scholarship done by Jews on the book (Jewish commentary outstrips Christian commentary by centuries, and offers a much older, much more contexted form of criticism) the book is much better in the King James Version. The KJV is far more poetic, and far more enjoyable to read. The language of the original doesn't have the same poetic aesthetic, and is often over-didactic (which is horrid for such a didactic book) over-repetitive, and unbearably archaic (the idiom is laughable at times, and the language far less realistic). Still, in truth the translation will always be a hampering to anyone wishing to pursue bible studies, and should be taken into account whenever commentary is read on the book.

In other words, be skeptical of theology, commentary, and criticism on anything not based on the original. Only someone reading the original, with a full understanding of the context of the words, can actually begin to unravel the intended meaning of the work.

Though this be true, one does not need the context, or the commentary to enjoy the book. The translation is a more enjoyable read. Still the problem arises with the fact that the book is taken to be fact by so many people, and therefore every translation must be taken into account to understand the criticism on it (one must read the Old English version of the Bible that still remains to us in MS to really understand the context of something like Beowulf, or of Caedmon's Hymn).

[chasestalling]

Do you like translations that are - as much as that is possible - lexically and syntactically faithful to the original, or ones that take such liberties?

Lexically yes, syntactically no. There are words which do not translate, in which case employing clumsy phrases that sacrifice melody for precision of sense and meaning, seems to me the ethical thing to do. As to syntax, if a translator is translating into English a language where subject/object/verb is the norm, he needn't stylize the English so that the foreign author sounds like Yoda.

[PeterL]

Some authors translate their own works, Nabokov for example, and others oversee the translation, as does Eco. I have little faith in translations that the author doesn't have anything to do with.