# Literary Translation



## HALETH✒🗡 (Aug 9, 2022)

Some time ago when we discussed Dostoevsky I was asked by @Olorgando to provide some insights on the fidelity of the translations of the great Russian writers into English. I've decided to create a thread on this topic as literary translation (not only from Russian but from any language) is a very interesting theme to discuss.

Almost all Russian classical literature has been translated into main languages with literary tradition many times. For example, “The Queen of Spades” by Aleksander Pushkin has been translated into German at least 13 times and into French at least 16 times. Why do we need so many translations? Each translator chooses which feature of the original text to keep as losses in translation are inescapable. Typically, old translations convey the meaning of the plot as clearly for a foreign reader as possible, while modern translators pay attention to accuracy, lexical, syntactic and stylistic features, even if they make it difficult for a foreign reader to understand the plot. This difference between old and new translations is logical because readers have already learned the plot and now they want more details.

Sometimes even a word can be an important detail. Vladimir Nabokov found three Russian words that can not be translated into other languages. These words are “пошлость” (“poshlost”), “истина” (“istina”) and “тоска” (“toska”). An adjective formed from the word “poshlost” means vulgar, banal, smallness of spirit, silly, wretched, kind of horrid, contemptible, shabby, beastly, cheap, coarse and evil at the same time. In the play “Three Sisters” by Anton Chekhov there’s a phrase: “И другие тоже, как я. Пошлость! Низость!” Let’s see what different translators have suggested:

Mulrine: “And the others were doing the same. It’s contemptible. Degrading.”

Senelick: “And the others did the same as me. Shabby and vulgar and vile!”

West: “And so did the others. Oh, how beastly! How petty!”

Carson: “And the others did what I did. How cheap! How low!”

By contrast, the word “istina” is almost always translated as “truth”. However, this is not quite right. The word “truth” would be a good equivalent to the Russian word “правда” (“pravda”) which is the antonym of a lie, while “istina” is fundamental truth in philosophical and scientific sense. Translators face with a problem when these two Russian words are used side by side. For instance, in “War and Peace” by Leo Tolstoy there’s a word combination “истинная правда” (“istinnaya pravda”) that consists of these two different words in Russian but in English it would be something like “truthful truth”.

As for the word “toska”, it can mean mental pain or boredom and annoyance. Thus, Michael R. Katz in the translation of Dostoevsky’s “Crime and Punishment” used different equivalents to the word “toska” depending on the context. In the episode with Rodion Raskolnikov the translator chose the word “depression”, while in the episode with Dounia Raskolnikova he wrote: “The subject bores me”. The word “toska” is like a Swiss knife from which you can get both a screw and a nail file.

Translating poetry must be even more difficult than translating prose. One of the main complications is that Russian words are usually longer than English words. Such literary techniques as alliteration and assonance can be tricky too. When I first became interested in literary translation a few years ago, I noticed that A.S. Kline had lost alliteration in translation of Anna Akhmatova’s “At Tsarskoye Selo”. A.S. Kline translated the verses about Pushkin like that:
Dark-complexioned, he wandered these alleys,
Was sorrowful on this lake shore,
And a century later we cherish
The faint stir of his footsteps.
The meaning has been conveyed correctly but the alliteration, that in the Russian text resembled the rustle of steps with the help of the sound of the repeated letters, has been lost in translation. (It was a good lesson for me. When I translated G.B. Smith’s “O, sing me a Song of the Wild West Wind” from English into Russian, I tried to do my best to save the sound of the wind in my translation. For those who can read Russian here’s what has come to my mind: “О, спой мне увертюру урагана”.) I don’t know which translator of Akhmatova’s poems to recommend but I’ve found a brilliant translator of Nikolay Gumilev’s poems. Gumilev is my favorite poet. And the translator’s name is Martin Bidney. I’ll give you some links to Nikolay Gumilev’s poems translated by Martin Bidney but there’re a lot more videos on the YouTube channel.
















Going back to Dostoevsky, I should say that understanding his books is not so much a matter of translation as a matter of a reader’s worldview. @Rivendell_librarian wrote that he had struggled with “Crime and Punishment”. You definitely shouldn’t struggle with Dostoevsky if you want to understand his books.  I’d recommend @Rivendell_librarian to read “The Idiot” by Dostoevsky. Maybe you’ll like it more than “Crime and Punishment”.


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## Squint-eyed Southerner (Aug 9, 2022)

Fascinating-- thanks for taking the time to go into this.

It's not uncommon-- at least it used to be-- for a translator to leave a key word untranslated, allowing the reader to gain understanding from the surrounding context, thus retaining various connotations of the term through a kind of ambiguity.

One point on "accuracy": sometimes it can cause more confusion than it solves. I recall an example from the Penguin translations of Proust, where a stupid maid was described in the original as having a "_tete de bois_", an idiomatic expression in French, but the literal translation used, a "wooden head" would have no meaning to an English speaker. The review pointed out that a "free" translation into an English equivalent, such as a "thick skull" would be instantly understood.

One question I hope I didn't ask on your original thread: I confess _War and Peace _is still on my to read list, but my understanding is that the first 40 or so pages of the original is in French, in order to show how the upper classes were out of touch with the people.Readers of English translations miss this completely, and complain of "nothing happening", which I suppose is part of the point.

My question -- assuming this is true, of course -- is, do Russian editions print this section in the original, or do they translate into Russian?

Lastly, I'd very much like to see the points you made above applied to Tolkien!

If you're willing, and have the time, of course. 😊


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## HALETH✒🗡 (Aug 9, 2022)

Thank you very much! 

I agree with you that "thick skull" is a better translation than "wooden head". Maybe this is because "thick skull" is a neutral idiom. I mean, this idiom doesn't have cultural or historical background. But some idioms do and they can lead to an illogical mixing of cultures if a translator replaces one idiom with another.

In my copy of "War and Peace", which I got from my great-grandmother, the French phrases are given in the original but there're also footnotes with their translation. By the way, not all the beginning of "War and Peace" is in French. Actually, the text in Russian dominate over the phrases in French. And I wouldn't say that "nothing is happening" in the first chapters. A reader gets to know many memorable characters. One of them is Pierre Bezukhov who hasn't found out a lot about the society, in which he got, yet (almost like a reader  ). Of course "War and Peace" consists not only of action but also of the author's thoughts on history and philosophy. In my opinion, Leo Tolstoy's reflections are really deep, interesting and sometimes metaphorical. 

Sure, I'll try to write something similar about various translations of Tolkien if you're interested.


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## Squint-eyed Southerner (Aug 9, 2022)

Most definitely-- and I'm sure I'm not alone. 🙂


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## Olorgando (Aug 9, 2022)

Squint-eyed Southerner said:


> One point on "accuracy": sometimes it can cause more confusion than it solves. I recall an example from the Penguin translations of Proust, where a stupid maid was described in the original as having a "_tete de bois_", an idiomatic expression in French, but the literal translation used, a "wooden head" would have no meaning to an English speaker. The review pointed out that a "free" translation into an English equivalent, such as a "thick skull" would be instantly understood.





HALETH✒🗡 said:


> I agree with you that "thick skull" is a better translation than "wooden head".


Interesting. The literal translation into German, "Holzkopf", would be instantly understood.
From which I (gingerly) deduce that this term might be one unknown to the Anglo-Saxon invaders of the 5th century - who would have spoken a variation of "Niederdeutsch" or Low German, which really and actually means the language of the north German flatlands! "Hochdeutsch" or High German was that of the central and southern "highlands". Which were far more heavily wooded ...
But also it appears to have been unknown to the Norman invaders of 1066. Might again have to do with geography, as I assume Normandy to belong to the French flatlands, certainly compared to the Alps, Pyrenees, Massiv Central etc.
And in both cases it could be a term that developed in the respective languages after the invaders had crossed over to the British Isles ...


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## Elbereth Vala Varda (Aug 9, 2022)

HALETH✒🗡 said:


> Some time ago when we discussed Dostoevsky I was asked by @Olorgando to provide some insights on the fidelity of the translations of the great Russian writers into English. I've decided to create a thread on this topic as literary translation (not only from Russian but from any language) is a very interesting theme to discuss.
> 
> Almost all Russian classical literature has been translated into main languages with literary tradition many times. For example, “The Queen of Spades” by Aleksander Pushkin has been translated into German at least 13 times and into French at least 16 times. Why do we need so many translations? Each translator chooses which feature of the original text to keep as losses in translation are inescapable. Typically, old translations convey the meaning of the plot as clearly for a foreign reader as possible, while modern translators pay attention to accuracy, lexical, syntactic and stylistic features, even if they make it difficult for a foreign reader to understand the plot. This difference between old and new translations is logical because readers have already learned the plot and now they want more details.
> 
> ...


This is extremely intriguing and thorough. 

Thank you for putting this post together-- so I could read it.


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## HALETH✒🗡 (Aug 10, 2022)

Olorgando said:


> Interesting. The literal translation into German, "Holzkopf", would be instantly understood.


What's your opinion about translating idioms in general?


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## Olorgando (Aug 10, 2022)

HALETH✒🗡 said:


> What's your opinion about translating idioms in general?


I can only compare German and English, but at least there I'm a native speaker of both, having grown up with both from earliest childhood.
And for all of the books I have in both languages (very few) it's a case of English originals and German translations.
For JRRT's works it's "The Lord of the Rings", in the older 1969/70 translation by Margaret Carroux, "The Hobbit", in a 2012 translation of Douglas A. Anderson's "The Annotated Hobbit", and "The Children of Húrin". I found the German translation in a general bookstore when it was published in 2007, then marched across the street (pedestrian area) with the freshly bought translation in hand to a specialized bookstore to order the English original.

To take CoH first, I read both books through immediately. So I could compare the German translation, read first while waiting for delivery of the original, and that original, read immediately upon delivery, at "close quarters", so to speak. My general impression was that CoH, being very much in the "Silmarillion" style, was more difficult to translate than LoTR or TH.

My latest re-read of LoTR was of the older German translation, as I mentioned in a post in the "What book are you reading right now?" thread in early March of this year. I think Margaret Carroux did a good job in her translation.
I commented on my latest re-read of TH (much rarer than those for LoTR) in July in the "book reading" thread:









What book are you reading right now?


Under Western Eyes by Joseph Conrad wow! Now critics might say "not much happens" but this is a novel of ideas, of character, of guilt - not action, though there is some dramatic action at both the beginning and end. There's some similarity with Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment and Conrad's...




www.thetolkienforum.com





One of the major differences between English an German is the former now only having "you" for both formal and familiar speech, while the latter differentiates "Sie" for formal and "Du" for familiar speech. "Sie", however, then does not differentiate between singular and plural!

One way out of this issue is the use of (somewhat) archaic forms of address. One is to use "er" instead of "Sie" or "Du" - "er" being the "he" in the triumvirate "he, she, it", "er, sie, es" (you note that "sie" has multiple meanings - no wonder Mark Twain got a bit worked up about the German language ). Another is to use the plural familiar "ihr", which might be used towards someone of higher rank rather than "er". Somewhat archaic, yes, but then so is a lot of speech in LoTR. It's not a book about our times. That is why I thought the use of the formal "Sie" in the German translation to be inappropriate and grating. Which makes me suspect that it is mainly the 1997 re-translation by Wolfgang Krege. He freely admitted that in his 2000 translation f LoTR, he imagined how JRRT would have written had he been an author of the 1990's. Krege came under massive criticism for this, and rightly so (I have *not* read his translation, and have *no* intention of doing so). Krege seems to have entirely missed the point that JRRT was emphatically *NOT* an author of the 1950's, or '40's, or '30's - thus the utter incomprehension of his works by so many "modernist" critics (btw "modernist" is a dirty word in my dictionary ... 😈 )

That point about authors not being 20th or 21st century writers - I sometimes wonder if we fully understand what was written in the 19th century; and actually, I seriously doubt that we do, at least fully. And almost all "great Russian writers" seem to have been 19th century writers, especially if you share the opinion of some historians that the 19th century only ended in 1918 - and began in 1789. This might be unfair to several Russian writers of the 20th century, it's just an impression I have at second-hand. I have read nothing of either group, but that's mainly because I prefer reading non-fiction. I also haven't read any of the German classics, or translations of English, French, Spanish, whatever, writers who would be considered "classics".


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## Elbereth Vala Varda (Aug 10, 2022)

HALETH✒🗡 said:


> Sure, I'll try to write something similar about various translations of Tolkien if you're interested.


I know I am!


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