Stuff

Here are one or two things I noticed over the weekend.

I'm sorry to say that Barbara Amiel compares the gaoling of her husband, Conrad Black, to the Dreyfus case. I admire Ms Amiel's skills as a columnist, but it's difficult to gainsay what Roy Greenslade says in The Guardian about this preposterous analogy.

In his Times column, Michael Gove comments on literature in translation:

I've always harboured the suspicion that reading great literature in translation involves a loss of nuance, a sacrifice of subtlety, which few will admit to. It is not in the translators' interests to acknowledge what's lost in the process, and neither is it in the authors', if they're still alive and earning. But surely the suppleness of language in the original doesn't come through in the same way as when we're reading our mother tongue.

We all know that the weight, cadence, rhythm, colour, connotations and allusions of Dickens's or Waugh's language must be, to an extent, sacrificed when they're rendered in German. So what am I losing when I pick up Thomas Mann? And if I am losing something is it better to revel in the work of a second division Brit (James Hogg, George Meredith) than persevere with a foreign classic knowing you're not getting the best out of it? Can readers help? Are there some foreign works that lose nothing in translation? And if so, why?

Michael is one of the best-read and most cultured men I know, and I hesitate to reach for the nearest brickbat. But it is, at best, a category mistake to talk about what is "lost" in a translated work of literature. A translated work of literature, done well, is a work of literature in its own right. I can certainly think of great writers - indeed, the very greatest writers - of whom this is true. You can't reasonably talk of "sacrifice" in the the Scott Moncrieff translation of Proust into English, and the Schlegel-Tieck translation of Shakespeare into German.

Here's a thoughtful review by Max Hastings of a new book on the Korean War. Hastings writes:

Those such as the British reporter James Cameron, who denounced Rhee's regime and UN support for it back in 1950, were wrong. Everything is relative. Rhee's rule was fractionally less ghastly than that of Kim Il Sung. Vindication for what the West did in that barren peninsula almost 60 years ago is to be found in the two Koreas today: one a thriving democracy and economic tiger; the other, one of the most wretched tyrannies on earth. Unlike most conflicts, the Korean war was worth fighting.

I'm certain this is right. Korea was a terribly unpopular war with immense humanitarian costs - 54,000 American lives, a million Chinese lives and 3.5 million Korea lives. And it was strictly necessary, to defeat a direct case of Communist aggression.

Comments

[dj]

That should be 54,000 American lives lost.

[Oliver Kamm]

Of course it should; sorry for my typo, which I'll now change.

[Anthony]

'You can't reasonably talk of "sacrifice" in the the Scott Moncrieff translation of Proust into English, and the Schlegel-Tieck translation of Shakespeare into German.'

Yeah, right. You're talking Moncrieff/Proust, but we all know you're thinking Hockridge&Bell/Asterix. ;)

[antrastan]

What is a translated work of literature, done poorly, if not one in which something is lost?

[David Duff]

An even more ticklish problem is looming larger over the horizon, that is, the 'translation' of Shakespeare's English into modern English. Not so much for the benefit of the man in his study, but for the playgoer in the audience. As an amateur, I have directed several Shakespeare plays and, I confess ('mea culpa'), that after a deal of nail-biting I have transposed the odd word from its incomprehensible original into its modern equivalent. However, it is obvious to me that it will not be too long (a century?) before whole passages might need 'translating'.

[LeaNder]

"and the Schlegel-Tieck translation of Shakespeare into German."

Not sure if we can call that a bowdlerized version, but it's slightly dated anyway. Very, very bad example.

[Mark B.]

I don't see how it is a 'category mistake'. Something distinctively Proustian was present in the original but isn't there in the translation. That's really all that's meant. That's not to deny that the translation isn't just a shadow of something else but a new creation, wherein the source language has invigorated and disturbed the target language in all kinds of interesting ways. I'm sure you must know Walter Benjamin's great essay on this subject.

[Steve]

Mao found the Korean war useful as well. He sacrificed large numbers of Chinese who belonged to units of the Red Army that he deemed unreliable. He sent them into battle in their droves relatively unarmed and forced North Korea to keep the war going until the sacrifice was made.

[Albert]

Moncrieff's translation might not "lose" anything, but it certainly adds a lot of nonsense. It makes Proust sound like a pompous French intellectual needing a good parody. I suspect that most of the "I tried Swanns Way and gave up" stories are due to Moncrieff's version. Reading the later heavily revised translation was a revelation.

I take your point about translations potentially being great literature in their own right, but that's the point: the work in question is the translation, not the original.

[Albert]

Moncrieff's translation might not "lose" anything, but it certainly adds a lot of nonsense. It makes Proust sound like a pompous French intellectual needing a good parody. I suspect that most of the "I tried Swanns Way and gave up" stories are due to Moncrieff's version. Reading the later heavily revised translation was a revelation.

I take your point about translations potentially being great literature in their own right, but that's the point: the work in question is the translation, not the original.