The Art of Translation, pt. 5

I hope this series on the Art of Translation has given you a few things to think about when you approach translated literature. There's a whole world of fantastic books out there waiting to be read, and it would be a shame to shy away from them just because you have to read them via translation.

Perhaps in the future I'll make more observations on the subject and decide to share them with you, but for now, I'm calling this the end of the series.

That said, I'd like to spend one last post talking a bit about some exceptionally well-translated books for you, just to give you a few examples (and reading suggestions – hint, hint).

Without further ado:

1.

In my review of Six Four by Hideo Yokoyama, I said, “Six Four is easily the best-translated, and – to whatever extent this can be determined around the translation – the best-written book I’ve read from Japan.” This is because all of the pieces fell into places just right: the use of idiom, description, and sentence structure totally worked. It wasn’t clunky (like, for example, Vampire Hunter D by Hideyuki Kikuchi and translated by Kevin Leahy, which felt downright jarring to read). In fact, we might even say that Six Four felt like it could have originally been written in English.

(Okay, so I guess that it was one more piece of advice on judging a translation: does it feel like it could have been written in English originally? – if so, that’s probably a good translation [though of course this still doesn’t say much about the accuracy of the translation]).

So Six Four is the best translated book (that I’ve read so far) to come out of Japan. Sweet!

(Oh, and, to give credit where credit is due: it was translated into English by Jonathan Lloyd-Davies. Thanks, Jonathan!)

2.

The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco was originally published in 1980 in Eco’s native language of Italian. Incredible, fast-paced, highly intriguing book, full of wit, nuance, history, and literary references galore. And, in reading William Weaver’s English translation (1983), you would never once even think to guess that it was written in any language other than English. The book reads so fluidly, so perfectly in English, I would almost say it’s hard to believe it didn’t start out that way.

If you want a fantastic example of Italian translation at its absolute pinnacle, The Name of the Rose is a great place to start. (And, by the way, it’s definitely a 5-star book all the way, so you should read it for that sake, too. Truly a joy to read.)

3.

And finally, you might want to brace yourself, because I saved the best for last: A Void by Georges Perec

Here’s the first remarkable thing about A Void:

In the French language (the book’s original language), the most commonly used letter is ‘e’. And so, because Perec loved having fun and being crazy with his writing, in the original French version of A Void, the letter ‘e’ doesn't appear (with three exceptions: je ["I"], et ["and"], and le ["the"]). And it uses real words, too – he didn’t simply take random words and leave out the ‘e.’ He solely used words that simply didn’t have ‘e’s. (And it’s a full-length novel, mind you, not a short story.)

Whoa! Epic, right?

Here’s the next remarkable part (which might be even more epic, actually):

Just like in French, the most commonly used letter in English is also ‘e’. And so, in the spirit of fun and challenge and amazingness, in the English translation of A Void, translator Gilbert Adair translated the entire book while still accomplishing the same feat: no ‘e’s.

Holy cow.

If that isn’t translation at its finest, I can’t tell you what is. Seriously. 

Aside from these three specific books, I've always been a fan of Jose Saramago's common translator, Margaret Jull Costa (translating from the Portuguese); as well as Zoran Zivkovic's long-time translator Alice Copple-Tosic (translating from Serbian); and William Weaver's translations of Italo Calvino's books (translated from Italian). (In fact, you'll remember that William Weaver also translated The Name of the Rose, which was my example #2 above - it seems that guy really knows his stuff.)