Good English translations?
November 14, 2004 8:37 PM   Subscribe

What/who are some good translations/translators of books into English?
posted by casarkos to Society & Culture (8 answers total) 2 users marked this as a favorite
 
Richard Pevear & Larissa Volokhonsky's translations of Dostoevsky are well-regarded.
posted by kenko at 8:41 PM on November 14, 2004


Books by Stanislaw Lem translated by Michael Kandel are uniformly better than those translated by others.
posted by interrobang at 8:41 PM on November 14, 2004


From Spanish, Gregory Rabassa, Helen Lane, Edith Grossman.

Supposedly, Rabassa's translation of One Hundred Years of Solitude is so good that Garcia Marquez credited him with improving on the original.
posted by vacapinta at 9:03 PM on November 14, 2004


AVOID anything translated from Russian by Constance Garnett.

Stark Young's translation of "Seagull" (by Checkhov) is brilliant.

Nabokov did a masterful multi-book translation of Pushkin's "Eugene Onegin", but it's more scholarly than readable. For pleasure, I prefer Walter Arndt's version.

Nabokov's translations of his own works are great (of course). Particularly any version with lotsa annotations.

I don't think anyone in English has ever come as close to Goethe's "Faust" as Walter Kaufmann.

Robert Fagels's "Illiad" and "Odyssey" are the new watermark, though Fitzgerald's "Odyssey" is beloved as well.

By far -- the best translations I ever read were Old English pieces ("Beowulf" and other things) by Burton Raffel. Amazingly, he takes more liberties than most translators I've read, but he still catches the flavor and cadence with eerie consistency. He always comes up with a startlingly apt phrase. (This is particularly effective in some of the more enigmatic OE pieces; the riddles and homilies, etc.)
posted by RavinDave at 10:29 PM on November 14, 2004 [1 favorite]


Novels in translation that I've enjoyed include, from the Spanish, Edith Grossman's translation of The Adventures and Misadventures of Maqroll by Álvaro Mutis and Margaret Jull Costa's version of Javier Marías' A Heart so White; from the German, Anthea Bell's translation of W.G. Sebald's Austerlitz and David McLintock's version of Thomas Bernhard's Extinction; From the French: David Bellos' translation of Georges Perec's Life A User's Manual, etc.; From the Norwegian: Elizabeth Rokkan's translation of Tarjei Vesaas' The Ice-Palace; from the Portuguese Giovanni Pontiero's translation of Jose Saramago's The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis; from the Hungarian George Szirtes' translation of Laszlo Krasznahorkai's The Melancholy of Resistance; from the Italian, William Weaver's translations of Italo Calvino's If on a Winter's Night a Traveller and Carlo Emilio Gadda's That Awful Mess on the Via Merulana...
posted by misteraitch at 11:07 PM on November 14, 2004 [1 favorite]


One reason Kandel's translations of Lem are better is that they're translations from the Polish, while the other translations are via French or another intermediary.

Gilbert Adair's translation of Georges Perec's La disparition is pretty amazing.
posted by kenko at 7:20 AM on November 15, 2004


Having read a lot of Russian literature, I second the notion that P&V are a lot more readable than Constance Garnett.
posted by cameldrv at 11:04 AM on November 15, 2004


I'm interested in getting some opinions on Moncrieff's translation of Proust...
posted by mr_roboto at 12:00 PM on November 15, 2004


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