Translations with High Style

August 9, 2008 6:52 AM

I'm looking for some particularly good translations (into English) of world literature, from *any* place, period, or genre.

I am interested in expanding my reading of literatures from around the world, but I am tired of stale, wooden translations. Becoming multi-lingual in order to read these works in the original is on the to-do list, but not feasible anytime soon.

So I am on the hunt for great translations of world literature into English. I am happy to read anything, so long as the translation manages to be lively whilst retaining the sense of the original.

I don't require that translations work over-hard to wring the text of its peculiar local flavors (drastically 'updated' diction in the classics, or French farmers speaking in cockney accents, to name two instances, have turned me off translations in the past), but I realize that it's a balancing act. I just want to clarify that I'm not afraid of the 'foreignness' of world lit (in fact, that's the main draw), but rather I am sick of how stilted a lot of translations sound.

In short, I am very interested to find translations that display a high degree of stylistic elegance, while maintaining an allegiance to the sense of the original.

Thank you all so much.

posted by scarylarry to media & arts (29 comments total)

Any of William Weaver's translations of Italo Calvino. I love Marcovaldo.
posted by flabdablet at 7:21 AM on August 9, 2008

Robert Fagles' translations of Homer's Iliad and Odyssey. I didn't really care much for the Iliad until I read his translation. And my students liked it, too.
posted by sarahalisonmiller at 7:36 AM on August 9, 2008

I'm a big fan of Katherine Woods' translation of Le Petit Prince (The Little Prince) by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. Talk about timeless classic.

There is argument about whether the newest Howard translation is better or worse than Woods' from the 1940s, but that's best analyzed by those bifluent in French and English (some Amazon reviewers, for example) and familiar with Saint-Exupéry's style and meaning. It seems the nitpickier reviews I had read about the new Howard translation (nitpicky is good for translation reviews) don't like it as much as Woods' version. I know I certainly balk at Howard's "Anything essential is invisible to the eyes" compared to Woods' "what is essential is invisible to the eye."

Yes, it's a children's book. In fact, it's probably much easier to pick up nuances of foreign languages with a set of translated children's books, assuming the translations were decent to begin with, of course--I'm sure the original French version is easy to find. Woods' version of The Little Prince, though, is available only secondhand, but the softcover is cheap last I looked on eBay. Woods' translation version has a white cover/dustjacket compared to the new blue.

Of course, I don't think any language translation can be completely perfect due to linguistic and underlying cultural nuance.
posted by Ky at 7:40 AM on August 9, 2008 [1 favorite has favorites]

Gregory Rabassa's translations of One Hundred Years of Solitude and The Autumn of the Patriarch by Gabriel Garcia Marquez.
posted by lukemeister at 7:48 AM on August 9, 2008

Meditations of Marcus Aurelius translated by Maxwell Staniforth

So many translations of Aurelius and you think you're reading the most boring dope ever to walk this old ball of dirt and water, but under the pen of Staniforth, Aurelius comes to life as warm, even poetic (which I bet he was) and not at all dry. I'm so thankful that this is the first translation I came across, I might otherwise have not gotten to know my old friend Marcus as well as I have, perhaps I'd not come to know him at all. Thank you so much, Maxwell.

The Four Gospels translated by E.V. Rieu

Long out of print but available through the magic of The Internet, this is the best translation of the Christian gospels (ie the first four books of the bible) that I know of. (I've not read it, nor any bible, for many years, but I'd bet it hasn't changed in the interim.) This scholarly translation takes all of the moralistic crap from KJV or, worst, The Living Bible (translated by a Dallas Baptist minister -- you don't suppose there's any eisegesis going on here, do you?) and dumps it into the trash. Though of course it does leave in the moralistic crap inherent in the gospels themselves, but hey, we are talking about ancients, waving palm leaves around, living in tents, shitting in holes -- they are going to have some unusual ideas, yes? Yes. Not broken into verses, which I believe started in KJV, it's books of prose, broken only into chapters, thus reads easily, not at all choppy.
posted by dancestoblue at 7:58 AM on August 9, 2008 [2 favorites has favorites]

This list might be worth a look.

Some I've particularly enjoyed: Margaret Jull Costa's translations of Javier Marias' A Heart so White and Tomorrow in the Battle Think on Me; David McClintock's translation of Thomas Bernhard's Extinction; Anthea Bell's translation of W. G. Sebald's Austerlitz; Edith Grossman's translation of The Adventures and Misadventures of Maqroll; George Szirtes' translations of Laszlo Krasznakorhai's The Melancholy of Resistance and War and War; and William Weaver's translation of Carlo Emilio Gadda's That Awful Mess on Via Merulana.
posted by misteraitch at 8:19 AM on August 9, 2008 [1 favorite has favorites]

In the science fiction realm, Stanislaw Lem is recognized as having a fabulous translator. "Notes from a Bathtub", "Princess Ineffable", "Solaris".
Mikhail Bulgakov's "The Master and Margarita has a few translations, and I can't remember which I read, though I loved it. (illustration of black cat on cover).
Here's the wiki on it:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Master_and_Margarita
For my money, given the examples in there, I'm going to re-read it, this time the Karpelson translation.
100 Years of Solitude is in my top 5 favorite books.
posted by asavage at 8:23 AM on August 9, 2008

On the advice of Cortázar, García Márquez waited three years for Rabassa's schedule to become open so that he could translate One Hundred Years of Solitude. He later declared Rabassa's translation to be superior to his own Spanish original.
posted by lukemeister at 8:41 AM on August 9, 2008

Seamus Haney's translation of Beowulf is vivid and compelling.
posted by workerant at 8:59 AM on August 9, 2008

Crap. Seamus Heaney. My typing scuks.
posted by workerant at 9:00 AM on August 9, 2008

Lydia Davis's translation of Proust Swann's Way is excellent and to my mind much more accessible the canonical Moncrieff volumes.

Natasha Wimmer's translation of Roberto Bolano's The Savage Detectives, previously, is also great. There several dozen distinct voices she brings to life, especially challenging in translation.

The new translation of War and Peace is supposed to be much closer to the original and much better, though I have not read it. Reviewed in the NYRB here.
posted by shothotbot at 9:24 AM on August 9, 2008

French farmers speaking in cockney accents, to name two instances

This isn't by any chance in reference to a translation of Guy De Maupassant? I had a similar reaction to a rendering of one of his stories.

One of the best translations I have read is Edith Grossman's Don Quixote. The dialogue between Don Quixote and Sancho Panza in particular is just delightful.
posted by palimpsest at 9:44 AM on August 9, 2008

Try the little book Canek, by Ermilo Abreu Gomez, translated by Mario L. Davila and Carter Wilson.
posted by gudrun at 10:09 AM on August 9, 2008

José Saramago's books are well-translated (from Portuguese); Blindness is a Nobel Prize winner for literature and is fantastic in general.
posted by Solon and Thanks at 10:16 AM on August 9, 2008

Adair's translation of Georges Perec's La Disparation (English title: A Void) is fairly impressive, considering both the original and the translation do not make use of the letter "E". It's the sort of oulipian feat that could easily be boring, but the story ties very closely to the typographic constraint. The translation is fairly loose, including a bit of cultural translation as well (for example, the original features famous works of French literature rendered E-less, but since they wouldn't be very familiar to English readers, Adair chose to render E-less some famous works of literature in English (including Hamlet's soliloquy, "Ozymandias", and very impressively Poe's "The Raven").

Quoth that black bird: "Not again."
posted by ErWenn at 11:59 AM on August 9, 2008

Lots of wonderful suggestions above. Following in the vein of ErWenn's suggestion of A Void, you might also like Zazie Dans Le Metro, as translated by Barbara Wright. She has done wonderful translations of many of Queneau's novels, and writes thoughtfully about the process as well. I recommend Zazie particularly because it's an awful lot of fun to read.

I also just read Fat Skeletons by Ursule Molinaro, which is not in translation, but which is largely about translation.
posted by dizziest at 12:22 PM on August 9, 2008

For Slavic languages (as well as German), Michael Henry Heim is a very fine translator; he's probably best known for his work with Milan Kundera and his recent edition of Thomas Mann's Death in Venice. If you find you enjoy his work, scroll down here to check out some other selected translations of his.

I've also enjoyed Margret Schaefer's translations of Arthur Schnitzler's short stories and novellas (including "Dream Story," the basis for Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut), and Christopher Middleton's translations of Robert Walser.

And if you really have a hankering for turn-of-the-century stream-consciousness in the tradition of Ulysses that will take you years to read, there's always Sophie Wilkins' and Burton Pike's translation of Robert Musil's Man Without Qualities.
posted by scody at 1:07 PM on August 9, 2008

turn-of-the-century stream-consciousness in the tradition of Ulysses that will take you years to read

This was actually meant to be an endorsement, by the way, but I can see how it might not come across that way for everyone.

Forgot to mention two other translations I've particularly enjoyed: Sandor Marai's Embers, (trans. Carol Brown Janeway) and Patrick Suskind's Perfume: The Story of a Murderer (trans. John E. Woods).
posted by scody at 1:29 PM on August 9, 2008

Royall Tyler's translation of the Tale of Genji (Japanese, ca 1000 years old) is very good, especially in terms of balancing fidelity to the original (however you want to define that) and readability. Jay Rubin's translations of Murakami Haruki are also very good. Seidensticker's Kawabata translations are as much Seidensticker as Kawabata, but they're still generally very readable, and since there won't be any alternatives until Kawabata's work goes into the public domain (which may be never), you may as well enjoy them.
posted by No-sword at 6:02 PM on August 9, 2008

If you're interested in reading about translation as an idea and a process, you could do a lot worse than Douglas Hofstadter's Le Ton Beau de Marot, which is a considerable work of literature in its own right.
posted by flabdablet at 6:20 PM on August 9, 2008

dancestoblue: Long out of print but available through the magic of The Internet, this is the best translation of the Christian gospels (ie the first four books of the bible) that I know of. (I've not read it, nor any bible, for many years, but I'd bet it hasn't changed in the interim.) This scholarly translation takes all of the moralistic crap from KJV or, worst, The Living Bible (translated by a Dallas Baptist minister -- you don't suppose there's any eisegesis going on here, do you?) and dumps it into the trash. Though of course it does leave in the moralistic crap inherent in the gospels themselves, but hey, we are talking about ancients, waving palm leaves around, living in tents, shitting in holes -- they are going to have some unusual ideas, yes? Yes. Not broken into verses, which I believe started in KJV, it's books of prose, broken only into chapters, thus reads easily, not at all choppy.


J.B. Phillips, who translated the Living Bible, was just about the opposite of a Baptist Minister. He was an Anglican priest with a degree in Classics from Cambridge. I'm don't like his translation choices in the Living Bible either, but he wasn't some modern American fundy trying to beat people over the head with the Bible. In fact, no Bible-thumper would take the liberties that he took with the translation. Interestingly, he and Rieu once were interviewed together about the translation philosophies. The OP might want to look at that link if he's interested in a Gospels translation. Also of interest might be the Richmond Lattimore New Testament, which, like Rieu's was translated by someone best know for his Homeric scholarship and who avoids some of the pitfalls of translations out of the Biblical scholarship tradition.

Versification, by the way, goes back to Parisian printer Robert Stephanus in 1551, sixty years pre-KJV, and was first used widely in the Geneva Bible. But you got pretty close for someone who clearly isn't all that interested in the facts. I won't take time here to address your rather one-dimensional view of folks living in the first century.
posted by Pater Aletheias at 6:23 PM on August 9, 2008

Ah, I apologize. Phillips did a different paraphrase. The Living Bible was Kenneth Taylor. I confused my paraphrases.
posted by Pater Aletheias at 6:26 PM on August 9, 2008

The W.S. Kuniczak translations of Henryk Sienkiewicz's works (Quo Vadis, the trilogy of With Fire and Sword, The Deluge, and Fire in the Steppe, and The Teutonic Knights) are wonderful. Earlier translations of his trilogy were supposedly practically unreadable. The only thing that bugged me was that the translator changed the spelling of the Polish names, to make them easier to pronounce for English speakers, but readers who don't read Polish might not notice.
posted by capsizing at 6:42 PM on August 9, 2008

Versification, by the way, goes back to Parisian printer Robert Stephanus in 1551, sixty years pre-KJV, and was first used widely in the Geneva Bible. But you got pretty close for someone who clearly isn't all that interested in the facts. I won't take time here to address your rather one-dimensional view of folks living in the first century.
posted by Pater Aletheias at 8:23 PM

I stand corrected, and humbled, too -- you'd think I'd check my 'facts' before posting here at this site.
posted by dancestoblue at 10:34 PM on August 9, 2008

Good question. What jumps out in my mind the books collecting translations of Ingeborg Bachmann by Peter Filkins. Filkins is primarily a poet and a professor of creative writing, and his first priority is elegantly preserving the spirit of whatever he's translating (*occasionally* to a fault -- occasionally favoring the spirit over the letter -- but I think this works in the case of his Bachmann translations).

Another well-known example I think you would love: Stephen Mitchell's gorgeous translations of Rainer Maria Rilke.
posted by kalapierson at 10:56 PM on August 9, 2008

Ah, I apologize. Phillips did a different paraphrase. The Living Bible was Kenneth Taylor. I confused my paraphrases.
posted by Pater Aletheias at 8:26 PM

I was in fact off base but not as far off base as I'd thought I was, upon reading your post. Only after I posted mine did I see your admission of confusion of paraphrases.

Kenneth Taylor was about as much a jesus jumper as any that there are now or ever have been, at least according to what I've been reading since posting my own admission of ignorance in this thread. His 'bible' was/is endorsed by Jerry Falwell, Bill Bright, Chuck Swindoll, Billy Grahem, probably other nuts also -- it doesn't bode well for it being world class. The Living Bible was his interpretation/translation of the American Standard Version of 1901. Taylor worked for fifteen years on the editorial staff for Moody Bible Institute, evangelical fundy city. And he wasn't a Baptist minister, though he did finish his 'education' at Northern Baptist Seminary, which appears to be pretty hokey, maybe not mail order but not too far from it, from what I can see. Worse, by far, he founded Tyndale press, to publish his bible -- you know, Tyndale Press (now run by his son), the publishers of the 'Left Behind' series, about the worst garbage to be found anywhere. And Taylor 'interpreted' his bible for his children, not his grandchildren.

I was wrong -- I confess it.
posted by dancestoblue at 12:13 AM on August 10, 2008

dancestoblue: ah, but you also wrote a really nice endorsement of Staniforth's translation of Meditations, which I also feel lucky to have encountered as my introduction to Marcus Aurelius -- a warm, poetic, thought-provoking, and meditative text indeed.
posted by scody at 12:40 AM on August 10, 2008

José Saramago's books are well-translated (from Portuguese); Blindness is a Nobel Prize winner for literature and is fantastic in general.

If you only follow one recommendation, please let it be this. Not enough people have read this remarkable book. Keep in mind that Saramago's preferred translator died halfway through the translation process, or so I recall.
posted by oxford blue at 6:40 AM on August 10, 2008

Somebody mentioned him already in regards to Italo Calvino, but i'm having a good time with a few books that were all translated by William Weaver - he seems to be the go-to guy for Umberto Eco, Calvino, Guiseppe Verdi and a slew of italian authors.

I've read his translations of Foucault's Pendulum and The Name of the Rose [both by Eco] and The Castle of Crossed Destinies [by Calvino]. Hardly ever, even in the labyrinthine Foucault's Pendulum where the entire plot zig-zags through the eyes of multiple lead characters does it lack finesse.
posted by phylum sinter at 3:45 AM on August 29, 2008