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/lit/ - Literature

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3078763 No.3078763[DELETED]  [Reply] [Original]

Who are your favourite translators, /lit/? Three that spring to mind for me are:

George Szirtes (Hungarian) - Satantango; The Melancholy of Resistance; War and War.

Margaret Jull Costa (Portugese/Spanish) - The Book of Disquiet; Blindness; A Heart So White.

John Nathan - The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea; A Personal Matter.

>> No.3078765

Lovely pic choice OP.

Robert Fagels' translations of Greek classics and Seamus Heany's translation of Beowulf

>> No.3078792

Nabokov's (or maybe the Nabokovs') translation of Lermontov's A Hero of Our Time was tremendous.

In general for Russian literature, you can't go wrong with Pevear and Volokhansky.

>> No.3078804

>>3078792
i've heard that nabokov's translations were generally abysmal.

>> No.3078829

Pevear and Volokhonsky

>> No.3079001

It's an interesting question because I've been wondering how to judge translations from a language I don't know. I speak four including english (not native) and of course I can compare translations between these, but how to rate a russian-english translation for example?

I could make a list of my favourite finnish translators but that'd hardly be relevant. Then again I've seen some english translations of russian books that "seem good" or "seem clumsy". A modern translation of Dostoyevski, for example, is quite different from a penguin classics print from the eighties but whether it's "better" or not I can't tell.

>> No.3079028

>>3079001
I basically just judge them as I would any other author. Fluency of prose, how adeptly they convey their themes, pacing, etc.

Criminally under-appreciated art, translating is.

>> No.3079039
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3079039

I almost abandoned hope of finding decent Lem translations into English to show my friends, but the I found out about Michael Kandel.
Very knowledgeable of the language and culture, he's surprisingly good at translating word play into English.

>> No.3079044

>>3079028
>Criminally under-appreciated art, translating is.

This. People really seem to think it's easy. Well so did I until I studied it at the university for a while. Being ~native-like in a language doesn't make you a good translator, nowhere close. The subtleties are overwhelming and you even have to do background studying to get the references right (translating references is fucked up, check for any non-english Ulysses).

>> No.3079050

>>3079044
>translating references is fucked up
I just felt like quoting this because it's So. Fucking. True.

Have to fucking read 10x more discourse about the book than the actual book itself just to do a respectable job translating it.