Books that reproduce in English characteristic aspects of a literary style associated with a particular foreign language
April 8, 2009 12:55 PM Subscribe
Edmund White's Caracole was once called "the finest French novel written in English." What are some other books that reproduce in English characteristic aspects of a literary style associated with a particular foreign language?
In the Cantos, Pound often attempted a style that he associated with Chinese poetry, at moments even inserting Chinese symbols.
posted by mammary16 at 1:41 PM on April 8, 2009
posted by mammary16 at 1:41 PM on April 8, 2009
Patricia Duncker's Hallucinating Foucault struck me as an English attempt to replicate a French style of writing of such books as Gide's The Immoralist and Philippe Sollers' A Strange Solitude. Not those books specifically, but whatever genre they represent -- there must be a name for it.
I may be completely mangling this, or simply remembering it wrong, but I think I once read a description of Gravity's Rainbow as being like a novel written in German, translated into English, and then translated back into German.
Susan Sontag's early novels (such as Death Kit) have been described as being written in "translatorese" --- that is, written in a kind of styleless/affectless English characteristic of European novels translated into English.
posted by jayder at 2:02 PM on April 8, 2009 [1 favorite]
I may be completely mangling this, or simply remembering it wrong, but I think I once read a description of Gravity's Rainbow as being like a novel written in German, translated into English, and then translated back into German.
Susan Sontag's early novels (such as Death Kit) have been described as being written in "translatorese" --- that is, written in a kind of styleless/affectless English characteristic of European novels translated into English.
posted by jayder at 2:02 PM on April 8, 2009 [1 favorite]
Kenneth Rexroth once said of Wallace Stevens that he was the greatest French poet who ever wrote in English, or something to that effect. I think that the effect of French poetry--as evidenced for instance in Stevens' translations of Léon-Paul Fargue--on Stevens has been obscured by those critics (Bloom, Vendler) who see Stevens as primarily a Wordsworthian neoRomantic poet.
Stevens studied with the philosopher Santayana at Harvard, and so the opaque philosophical bent of his work is also inclined to merge with the French tendency in modernist poetry to get increasingly philosophical. Eliot's interest while at Harvard in the philosopher Bradley, combined with his interest in certain French poets (he translated Saint-John Perse and admired Jules Laforgue), gives his work a somewhat foreign tint as well. Indeed, I believe Hugh Kenner once commented that a great deal of modernism in English reads as if it had been translated from another language. Samuel Beckett, for instance, is an example of someone whom French literature influenced tremendously.
Finally, every time I read the original poetry of Paul Auster I am reminded of the translations he has done of French poets like Jacques Dupin and others: the hermetic strangeness of them reads like poems translated from French.
posted by ornate insect at 2:24 PM on April 8, 2009
Stevens studied with the philosopher Santayana at Harvard, and so the opaque philosophical bent of his work is also inclined to merge with the French tendency in modernist poetry to get increasingly philosophical. Eliot's interest while at Harvard in the philosopher Bradley, combined with his interest in certain French poets (he translated Saint-John Perse and admired Jules Laforgue), gives his work a somewhat foreign tint as well. Indeed, I believe Hugh Kenner once commented that a great deal of modernism in English reads as if it had been translated from another language. Samuel Beckett, for instance, is an example of someone whom French literature influenced tremendously.
Finally, every time I read the original poetry of Paul Auster I am reminded of the translations he has done of French poets like Jacques Dupin and others: the hermetic strangeness of them reads like poems translated from French.
posted by ornate insect at 2:24 PM on April 8, 2009
Maybe this is backwards, but, from the "Translator's Note" forwarding Albert Camus' The Stranger:
"Camus acknowledged employing an 'American method' in writing The Stranger, in the first half of the book in particular: the short, precise sentences; the depiction of a character ostensibly without consciousness; and, in places, the 'tough guy' tone. Hemingway, Dos Passos, Faulkner, Cain, and others had pointed the way."
posted by fantastico at 2:57 PM on April 8, 2009
"Camus acknowledged employing an 'American method' in writing The Stranger, in the first half of the book in particular: the short, precise sentences; the depiction of a character ostensibly without consciousness; and, in places, the 'tough guy' tone. Hemingway, Dos Passos, Faulkner, Cain, and others had pointed the way."
posted by fantastico at 2:57 PM on April 8, 2009
This is maybe not quite a direct answer to you question but Max Knight's translation of "The Gallows Songs." by Christian Morgenstern is a wonderful piece of art. Playful, funny and delightful but also exact, respectful and meticulous. He manages to juggle, and resolve, word plays in both languages yet the poems still appear effortless. Reading his translation of "The fishes song" next to the original makes me fart with laughter every time.
posted by BadMiker at 3:35 PM on April 8, 2009
posted by BadMiker at 3:35 PM on April 8, 2009
Backwards like fantastico, but: In the early stages of his writing career, one criticism of Murakami Haruki was that his novels sounded like they were translated from English. There were even stories about how he would write the first draft in English and then translate it himself, but I'm pretty sure they're apocryphal.
(Weirdly, Murakami's work is now so dominant in the English-language Japanese-lit scene that the tone Jay Rubin used in translating his most popular works has, it seems to me, become the tone for translating serious modern Japanese fiction.)
posted by No-sword at 3:48 PM on April 8, 2009
(Weirdly, Murakami's work is now so dominant in the English-language Japanese-lit scene that the tone Jay Rubin used in translating his most popular works has, it seems to me, become the tone for translating serious modern Japanese fiction.)
posted by No-sword at 3:48 PM on April 8, 2009
Oscar Wilde's Picture of Dorian Gray has been described as "the only French novel ever written in English," but to be honest, I don't know whether that refers to its style, subject matter or tone, nor even who said it. I think "French novel" is a code phrase in the writings of Wilde and his contemporaries, but don't know why except that it comes up curiously often (as in lists of Wilde's reading habits). I'm sure a lot of people know the point of this, but that's a question in itself.
Google's no help.
I second Nabokov. Obviously translations don't count for this, but I remember Nabokov praising one of his son's translations (Invitation to a Beheading) as accurately feeling like Russian prose without attempting to Americanize the sense of of the words, which was precisely what he'd wanted.
posted by thesmallmachine at 7:26 PM on April 8, 2009
Google's no help.
I second Nabokov. Obviously translations don't count for this, but I remember Nabokov praising one of his son's translations (Invitation to a Beheading) as accurately feeling like Russian prose without attempting to Americanize the sense of of the words, which was precisely what he'd wanted.
posted by thesmallmachine at 7:26 PM on April 8, 2009
Several months ago, I made this comment in this thread:
Patricia Duncker's Hallucinating Foucault struck me as an English attempt to replicate a French style of writing of such books as Gide's The Immoralist and Philippe Sollers' A Strange Solitude. Not those books specifically, but whatever genre they represent -- there must be a name for it.
I just learned that there is a French term for this genre, récit.
posted by jayder at 7:00 AM on January 2, 2010
Patricia Duncker's Hallucinating Foucault struck me as an English attempt to replicate a French style of writing of such books as Gide's The Immoralist and Philippe Sollers' A Strange Solitude. Not those books specifically, but whatever genre they represent -- there must be a name for it.
I just learned that there is a French term for this genre, récit.
posted by jayder at 7:00 AM on January 2, 2010
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posted by hermitosis at 1:03 PM on April 8, 2009 [1 favorite]