Natalie Schachar at Tablet has one of those oddball translation stories I love, Yiddish-Speaking Wizards and Dragons Invade the Shire in ‘Der Hobit’“:
For one of his first translation projects after his retirement, Barry Goldstein, a former computer programmer, found an empty table at his local Starbucks in Boston and settled in to work on the “Treebeard” chapter from J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings trilogy. But Goldstein soon realized that he needed something more sizable to occupy his time: 95,022 words later, he had translated the entire text of The Hobbit, the prequel to the Ring series, into Yiddish. […]
While Goldstein grew up in a Yiddish-speaking home—his father’s roots were in Lithuania, and his mother was born in Kaminets-Podolsk—he never took to the language as a child. In fact, he vividly remembers the time that he escaped through a window in order to cut class at the Jewish school where he learned Yiddish. Years later though, he started taking Yiddish classes and soon found himself as J.R.R. Tolkien’s foremost and only Yiddish-language translator.
Sales are in the low three figures, but you don’t translate into Yiddish to make the big bucks. Also, Schachar links to Yale UP’s New Yiddish Library Series, a worthy project I hadn’t been familiar with (or had forgotten). Thanks, Paul!
Amazon lets you Look Inside at a few pages. (My Yiddish is very scanty, but I guffawed at several points; Gandalf sounds a lot like my grandma.) Unfortunately the Yiddish seems to be rather poor, according to the reviews there (“Der Hobit is more a relexification using words found in Yiddish dictionaries than a translation into anything resembling comprehensible Yiddish”). Maybe some Yiddish-fluent Hatter can tell us if they agree.
My Yiddish is also too weak to provide an informed opinion on the book’s literary merits. Noteworthy, though, is that in the front matter Barry Goldstein thanks Leah Robinson and Raphael Finkel for their help in editing the work. Finkel was among the very first people to post Yiddish material on the web, including a complete scan of Harkavy’s 1910 Yiddish-English-Yiddish dictionary. See here for a wealth of links that he’s put together. Perhaps noteworthy: They’re both computer programmers.
Hobbit shmobit. Why on earth translate much the worse of the two books?
I’m referring to the trilogy as a single book, so by all means construe my remark as referring to the worst of the four.
Tolkein wrote in 1938 (or at least drafted; the record is apparentlyunclear as to whether it was actually sent) a famously nasty response to a German publisher who was trying to condition paying for the rights to make a German translation of The Hobbit on confirmation of the author’s Aryan status (“I regret that I am not clear as to what you intend by arisch. I am not of Aryan extraction: that is Indo-Iranian; as far as I am aware none of my ancestors spoke Hindustani, Persian, Gypsy, or any related dialects.”). In hindsight it would have been funnier if he’d conditioned the German rights on the publisher’s undertaking to simultaneously prepare and publish a Yiddish edition.
To be fair to Rütten & Loening, it was German law, not their personal attitude, that required a declaration of “Aryan origin” from all authors, for among the thousand and one things that Jews couldn’t do in the Third Reich was publish anything. But the rest of the letter is worth reading:
Tolkien sent this and another letter which refused to make any such declaration to his British publishers; this one remained in the latter’s files, so presumably the other one was sent.
Dearieme: As far as I know, there is no language into which The Lord of the Rings has been translated without a previous translation of The Hobbit. For one thing, it is much shorter. For another, it is not nearly so difficult to translate.
Though Joyce and Tolkien were near-contemporaries (Joyce was born ten years earlier), they could hardly be more different in style — one the quintessential modernist, the other so archaic as to be downright postmodern. But they both strain English nearly to the breaking point. Indeed, there is a passage in Ulysses that reads like a parody of Tolkien:
And here’s Tolkien, rewriting a scene from Beowulf into a language that is (as Le Guin calls it) “less extraordinary English, or rather English that is extraordinary for its simple timelessness”:
Now I ask you, what is any poor suffering translator to make of either of those? What hope has he of rendering either in its full richness of language into any other tongue of Men? Tolkien even wrote a glossary of all the names in The Lord of the Rings that should be translated by sense, and what their sense was, but for various stupid reasons this has been either unavailable to or disregarded by most translators, with the result that they have generally made a balls of Tolkien’s nomenclature.
I notethat the runes (specifically, the Old English fuþorc) on Thror’s Map, shown with the article, have not been translated: the plain runes by the pointing finger still read FIVE FŒT HIGH ÞE DOR AND ÞRŒ MAY WALK ABREAST: Þ[ror and] Þ[rain], and the “moon-letters” read STAND BY ÞE GREY STONE HWER ÞE ÞRUSH CNORCS [sic, knocks] AND ÞE SETTIŊ SUN WIÞ ÞE LAST LIGHT OA [sic] DURINS DAY WILL SHINE UPON ÞE KEYHOLE.
In addition, the printed Hebrew script looks grossly out of style with the rest of the map. The translator or the publisher should have gotten someone to calligraph the new text.
What the Joyce excerpt reminds me of is someone whose name I forget, who wrote in English-as-it-would-be-without-the-French-borrowings (not a whole work, only an experimental paragraph or two, I think).
someone whose name I forget, who wrote in English-as-it-would-be-without-the-French-borrowings
The Anglish Moot
That bit of Joyce sounds to my ear rather more obviously like a parody of G.M. Hopkins. I wonder if anyone has attempted to translate Hopkins into Yiddish?
I wonder if the bit a little later in the same Joyce passage where he’s shifted style from Anglo-Saxon to around the blurry line between Middle and Early-Modern is more Tolkienesque:
“And in the castle was set a board that was of the birchwood of Finlandy and it was upheld by four dwarfmen of that country but they durst not move more for enchantment. And on this board were frightful swords and knives that are made in a great cavern by swinking demons out of white flames that they fix then in the horns of buffalos and stags that there abound marvellously.” etc etc
If I were going to translate children’s books into Yiddish or whatever, I think I’d start with Winnie the Pooh rather than The Hobbit. But each to his own. I suppose it’s obvious where Hat would start.
Off-topic (not that I dislike the current topic):
Has anyone hereabouts read Jared Diamond’s latest work The World Until Yesterday; What Can We Learn from Traditional Societies?
There is a whole chapter on multilinguism people here can resonate with. Assuming I am not the only person who reads whatever he publishes, his message will hopefully spread amongst non-linguists.
Sorry about the duplication. Posting takes so long I don’t know if it happens. Is my problem here or there?
From one skeptical review: “as I read the text, I found that I agreed with Diamond in inverse relation to my pre-existing knowledge about whatever subject he was addressing. When Diamond was writing about topics that I know in depth, I felt as though he was leaving out important information; when I didn’t know what he was writing about, I was thoroughly convinced. Diamond is a generalist and will always paint with a brush that a specialist finds too broad. The danger lies not in simplifying source material by leaving out extraneous details, but in selectively highlighting only the facts that support one’s argument and casting contravening cases aside.” (FWIW, I’ve never read any book by Diamond myself – they’re in that category of popular-bestseller where once I’ve read two or three different reviews summarizing the book’s general thesis I feel like I wouldn’t gain any incremental benefit from actually reading the book itself.)
If I were going to translate children’s books into Yiddish or whatever, I think I’d start with Winnie the Pooh
Too late. But you can easily improve on it, because this edition uses the Latin alphabet.
Sorry about the duplication.
I deleted the duplicate comment but left this one in case anyone wanted to discuss the multiple-posting issue (which I know nothing about).
John Cowan: I believe there is a typo in your Tolkien quote: at the end of the second sentence of Aragorn’s answer to the guard “…as you knew well are you asked, I guess” should be “…as you knew well ere you asked, I guess”.
And yes, just trying to translate that passage of Tolkien’s into French gives me a headache. Indeed the actual French translation of “The Hobbit” and “The Lord of the rings” is…flat. It is very straightforward French prose with little if any attempt to capture the archaic flavor of the original.
Indeed I strongly suspect that an adequate translation of Tolkien into any language (French or Yiddish or whatever…) would have to be a collaborative effort: I doubt any single translator could handle the prose (with all its differences in dialect), the toponymy, the poetry as well as the songs.
Why on earth translate much the worse of the two books?
He didn’t – he started with it, but decided to do The Hobbit instead.
Come on, Hat, give us a line or two of Hoary Patter in Yiddish.
Multiple posts: When I post something here, the machine appears not to respond. It appears that it is timing out. Then, I press “send” a second time. And sometimes a third!
Inevitably, after five minutes, three copies of the post appear on the screen. So, I think it must be a very long tube over to your house, LH. And before my content arrives over there, I get an itchy trigger finger because I think my prose may not see the pixels of day.
So maybe the answer is to develop a detached calm, and press “send” only once.
I have attempted the detached calm approach, but it seems to want to go on forever. I stop the process, look at the last comment, and post again if my post isn’t there. Next time I’ll count the seconds.
Only 5 seconds that time, which is more usual.
The problem is that the delay between “post” and the appearance of the comment can vary considerably, no doubt for obscure technical reasons, and just waiting for the comment to appear is frustrating because it seems impossible to use the computer for other things (actually, the computer does remember, even if you close the page). But patience usually wins!
And yes, just trying to translate that passage of Tolkien’s into French gives me a headache. Indeed the actual French translation of “The Hobbit” and “The Lord of the rings” is…flat. It is very straightforward French prose with little if any attempt to capture the archaic flavor of the original.
I wonder if part of the reason is that Standard French has changed so little since the 17th century (or earlier), a few quirks of spelling excepted.
Another part of the reason is probably that the works of that period that are still widely known are classicist plays full of Latin and Greek, not so much of archaisms. English has Shakespeare and the King James Bible; without these, few people would even known that thou ever existed, for example.
Yet another may be how centralized it is. At least within England, various words and phrases Tolkien used probably remind the reader of some shire or other in addition to appearing archaic. Modern spoken French in Europe is remarkably uniform; there are a few regional words left, but they aren’t widely known.
The “in held hat sat staring” passage from Joyce is most amusing – I couldn’t help laughing – and it does sound at times like a parody of GM Hopkins. Was it intended to be? Perhaps it was meant to be a parody of the whole class of writings overly reliant on Old English prosody – but I have no idea if Hopkins was not the only member of that class.
JWB: Quite right, I think. Of course, there is no question of actual parody or influence: it is very unlikely that either Tolkien or Joyce regarded or read the other. Tom Shippey discusses their similarities and differences in Author of the Century (one of those cases where the omission of an article is significant).
Etienne: Thanks for the correction. The text I copied from is obviously OCRed and insufficiently corrected. Indeed, it is only in this century that either Ulysses or The Lord of the Rings has gotten anything like a decent critical text.
I think in truth that this flatness you mention is characteristic of French translations. Consider Job 40:15. In the King James Version, it is “Behold now behemoth, which I made with thee; he eateth grass as an ox.” Even in the New International Version of 1978 (where it is printed as verse) it is “Look at Behemoth, / which I made along with you / and which feeds on grass like an ox.” But in the Segond version of 1880 it is “Voici l’hippopotame, à qui j’ai donné la vie comme à toi! Il mange de l’herbe comme le boeuf.”
I ask you! “Behold now behemoth” becomes “Here is the hippopotamus”? How bathetic is that? Luther at least split the difference with “Siehe da, den Behemoth Nilpferd, den ich neben dir gemacht habe; er frißt Gras wie ein Ochse.” To be fair, the 16th-century versions do say “Voici Behemoth”, but they are little read. There is also a modern French translation of the KJV, made for the usual tendentious reasons, and its wording is “Voici maintenant le Béhémoth”.
Warning: avoid the home page of this site, kingjamesfrancaise.net, which is infected with a Trojan that may allow malicious persons to take control of your Windows computer! The other pages, including those I have specifically linked to, appear to be safe.
Etienne, I have not read Tolkien in either English or French, but according to the wikipedia.fr page on Le Hobbit, there are two French translations: the first one dates from 1969, but another one was published in 2012. Perhaps you saw the 1969 one. According to the same source, Tolkien had suggested a translator who had earlier worked with him, but who was passed over by the publisher. I can only speculate, but the fact that The Hobbit was written for children may be responsible for the “flatness” of the first French translation. (I have not looked up Le Seigneur des Anneaux).
David: There are differences between the various centuries of French prose, just as in English, although the modern editions with standardized spelling may hide some of those differences, again as in English. But the best preparation for translating Tolkien into French (according to what I can gather of his style) might be familiarity with 15th and 16th century authors, especially Rabelais (a famous word lover and coiner).
André Chouraqui translates the passage from Job as:
Voici donc Ḇehémot, l’hippopotame, que j’ai fait avec toi. Il mange de l’herbe comme un bovin.
The “in held hat sat staring” passage from Joyce is most amusing – I couldn’t help laughing – and it does sound at times like a parody of GM Hopkins. Was it intended to be?
The timing would work, as Hopkins’ poems were published by Robert Bridges in 1918, when Joyce was about halfway through writing Ulysses. But I can’t see anything particularly Hopkinsian about the Joyce passage; if it’s a parody of Hopkins, it’s a very feeble one. (And who would parody a poet in prose?) If anything, it reads more like William Morris. But I doubt Joyce was intending a parody of any specific writer. The idea, supposedly, is that we are witnessing the birth of the English language just as Leopold Bloom is witnessing the birth of a baby, although of course when you think about it this conceit is nonsensical (unless he had written the passage in Proto-World).
For a French (and English) translation of the Bible that cannot be called flat, try this, by Antoine Fabre d’Olivet.
Premièrement-en-principe, il créa, Ælohîm (il détermina en existence potentielle, LUI-les-dieux, l’Être-des-êtres), l’ipséité-des-cieux et l’ipséité-de-la-terre.
At-first-in-principle, he-created, Ælohim (he caused to be, he brought forth in principle, HE-the-Gods, the-Being-of-beings), the-selfsameness-of-heavens, and-the-selfsameness-of-earth.
The “infare under her thatch” is generally taken as an indication that the proximate source is Saintsbury, whose work also provides exemplars for some of the other Oxen styles.
Marie-Lucie: I hasten to add that both quotations above are extremes of style: by no means is the whole of either work written in this fashion. But in The Hobbit, as to a lesser degree in The Lord of the Rings, the style actually parallels the plot. The book is, among many other things, about the journey “there and back again” (which is the subtitle) of a fairly modern, mid-19th-century person into an archaic world, as well as being a Bildungsroman. As such, the style starts out conversational and chatty, almost Winnie-the-Pooh’s style, that of an adult author addressing child readers. From Chapter 1, “An Unexpected Party” (I have here and elsewhere broken up Tolkien’s long paragraphs):
But by Chapter 17, “The Clouds Burst”, this “children’s book” reads like this:
Well, the good end happily and the bad unhappily (for that is what fiction means) and the time comes for Bilbo to part from his friends the dwarves, living and dead:
You’ll note that Bilbo’s conversational modern style is in full play here against the archaic style, but you’ll also note that (as Shippey points out) the two are saying the same thing. The archaic world and the modern world meet, each in its own unmistakable style, like East and West in Kipling’s poem, but as in that poem, unified in the end.
What is more, Tolkien was well aware of this. In a letter to a reader complaining of his “tushery”, he wrote:
Googling for that Tolkien letter pointed me to this essay by Tom Simon, which expresses what I mean to say much better, if at far greater length: by comparison, my remarks are “lighthearted, quickworded, and soon over”, though scarcely Elvish. I am working through Simon’s other essays now.
I’m prepared to translate it into French only if I can title it L’obbit.
David: Modern Standard French is certainly not as unchanging as you make it sound, and good writers of historical novels set in the Middle Ages (for instance) can certainly create a “medieval” feel to the story by using archaic words and constructions. Maurice Druon’s LES ROIS MAUDITS is a good example of this, and indeed it would serve as a nice target-language template for any would-be Tolkien translator.
Indeed these days I’m reading a French translation of Hermann Hesse’s DAS GLASPERLENSPIEL (LE JEU DES PERLES DE VERRE), and the translator definitely knows how to give his French prose a nice “Renaissance” feel to it.
Marie-Lucie’s suggestion that Rabelais be read is a good one, too: creativity will be required of a translator of Tolkien’s work, and Rabelais had that in spades.
It is true, however, that French exhibits less tolerance of regionalisms than English: but do note that for readers outside the United Kingdom the regional variants of various characters’ speech would not evoke specific regions within the United Kingdom. Hence similar such variation in a translation can certainly be achieved, even where (as in a French translation) it would not evoke specific regions in readers’ minds.
John Cowan: French translations needn’t be flat, although poor ones are. In my experience published bad translations into French at least consist of strings of grammatically correct sentences, whereas the same is all too often not the case of published bad tranlations into English.
Possibly the best translated work I have ever read in French is Umberto Eco’s THE NAME OF THE ROSE: both the English and the French translations are good, but the English translation feels a bit “off”, stylistically, i.e. feels very much like a translation, whereas the French translation (which also has a very archaic, medieval feel to it) reads so smoothly that an uninformed reader could easily be fooled into believing that the novel was originally written in French.
That paragraph of Tolkien’s in answer to the reader complaining of “tushery” made me smile: even had I known nothing of Tolkien’s life I would have known that along with being a writer he was a teacher. The tone of the whole is that of a teacher dealing with a question on the part of an energetic student: first, reassuring the reader/student that the point brought up is legitimate; next, defining “tushery”, then, examining the alleged instances of tushery and finally demonstrating that the alleged instances do not in fact fit the definition. This is not at all the tone of an author defending his work: it is that of a first-rate professor of literature and philology engaging in a scholarly demonstration.
Thanks, Etienne. I just found another: “inclined to be at in the stomach” should of course be “inclined to be fat in the stomach”. Tolkien was remarkably objective about The Lord of the Rings, partly perhaps because so many years passed between his starting it in 1938, finishing it in 1949, getting it published in 1954-55, and the publication of the second edition (which is when it became really famous) in 1965. The foreword to the latter contains this telling passage:
Merci encore, Etienne.
About The Name of the Rose, unfortunately I have only read it in English, but I think that it would be easier to translate Italian into French than in English, because the two Romance languages are much more similar in structure than either is to English. Even idiomatic usages and frozen phrases are often very similar, while English equivalents are not. Of course, the Italian-to-French translator should still be very familiar with different genres and styles according to the period.
This reminds me of a comment by Gabriel Garcia Márquez on translations of Cien años de soledad: asked which translation he considered the best, he said something like “I hate to say it, but it is the American one”. He praised American translators in general, and as for French translators, unfortunately, “between Rabelais and Descartes, they chose Descartes”.
There are three translations into Norwegian, and I own two of them. I’ll type and add the paragraph from both translations when I have time and a decent keyboard.
The first one I read was Torstein Bugge Høverstad’s 1984 translation Ringenes herre into modern Bokmål. The paragraph reads as fairly straightforward modern Norwegian. Even if rather terse, it’s hard to find a register that evokes medieval language in Bokmål. But he might have used Sigrid Undset or Ragnhild Magerøy as a model.
Later I read Eiliv Groven Myren’s 2006 Ringdrotten into Nynorsk. It uses different historical norms for the varieties of high speech and dialects to represent the peoples and the broader varieties. Here the quoted paragraph reads as something straight out of a classic edition of Snorri. And still, it follows the English original closely. But that’s hardly a coincidence, since Tolkien himself probably modeled his polite dialogue partly on the terse speeches of the sagas.
(I don’t hold this against Høverstad. He acted as a consultant for Myhren’s translation, and I seem to remember that he’s been quoted to the effect that he also would have preferred using an archaizing Nynorsk to be able to hit the register.)
I have not (yet) read Nils Werenskiold’s 1973-75 translation Krigen on ringen into a rather conservative Bokmål variety (but people say it’s good).
Krigen om ringen. Damn’ autocorrect.
I think that it would be easier to translate Italian into French than in English, because the two Romance languages are much more similar in structure than either is to English.
That’s why when I get around to giving Stanislaw Lem another try I intend to read him in Russian translation, which has got to give a better sense of him than the English ones.
I took the dates of the Norwegian translations from the no.wiki article. I’m not sure of the Bokmål dates.
Anyway:
And:
It would be interesting to put these into a bilingual facing-page edition. Of course, it would be 2000+ pages long. As a substitute, I opened the same page in three tabs, one for English, one for Bokmål, and one for Nynorsk. My general impression is that the Nynorsk is closer to Tolkien’s English.
I’ve been poking around the ‘tubes for an excerpt from Hringadróttinssaga, but the only thing I have found is this verse:
Hann leitaði hennar lengi þar
og lauf frá mörgum sumrum óð,
um kalda nótt, er birtu bar
hin bleika festing tindrandi.
Þá skein á fjalli skikkja rjóð,
í skarti sést hún dansa þar
um svalan tind og svífa hljóð
í silfurmistri glitrandi.
Tolkien’s original:
The leaves were long, the grass was green,
The hemlock-umbels tall and fair,
And in the glade a light was seen
Of stars in shadow shimmering.
Tinúviel was dancing there
To music of a pipe unseen,
And light of stars was in her hair,
And in her raiment glimmering.
“Behold now behemoth.” OCS has simply “beasts” – I think it’s in the plural in OCS as it appears in the Hebrew original: “Но убо се, зверие у тебе, траву аки волове ядят.” (Using modern Russian spelling.) Lomonosov introduced the behemoth in his 1751 ode on Job:
Воззри в леса на Бегемота,
Что мною сотворен с тобой;
Колючей терн его охота
Безвредно попирать ногой.
Как верьви, сплетены в нем жилы.
Отведай ты своей с ним силы!
В нем ребра как литая медь;
Кто может рог его сотреть?
The first line makes a Russian reader chuckle because nowadays it literally means “look into the woods at the hippo” (бегемот and гиппопотам being synonyms in modern Russian), even though Lomonosov may have had a different beast in mind, and his early draft had “meadows,” not “woods.”
Correction: Det kan vere koma dykkar ikkje var heilt uventa.
The first line makes a Russian reader chuckle because nowadays it literally means “look into the woods at the hippo”
It makes me (and presumably some Russians) chuckle doubly, because it makes me think of Bulgakov’s cat.
That’s why when I get around to giving Stanislaw Lem another try I intend to read him in Russian translation, which has got to give a better sense of him than the English ones.
Probably. Solaris would only sound right to me in Russian (and I’m sure Lem would disapprove). But I wonder if similar culture can trump linguistic affinity? I’ve been trying to get around to finally reading Švejk and, since I don’t read Czech, wondering if the Polish translation or the German might be better. Obviously Polish is very close linguistically, but I’ve heard that the Greta Rainer 1926 German translation is closer to the spirit of the book – and contains lots of “Austrianisms”, so her version should have more authentic K.u.K. color. Any one here have an opinion?
John Cowan: I can’t understand why Francophone KJV-enthusiasts wouldn’t find e.g. http://www.biblemartin.com/bible/bible_frm.htm perfectly satisfactory. It ought to satisfy most common KJV-onlyist criteria generalizable to a non-Anglophone context that I can think of and ought to be free of modernist heresy. I can’t imagine it’s in a register of French sufficiently archaic that anyone satisfied with the KJV for 21st century Anglophones would think it needs updating.
As usual, I am late to this thread. Goldstein’s labor over this translation is to be admired, but it’s extremely difficult to read (perhaps even more than the English original). I think it is possible to render The Hobbit into idiomatic Yiddish, but his translation is not that.
On the other hand, while that is true, my 9-year-old daughter did listen to me read it out loud without a whimper of complaint, while she found Motl Peyse dem Khazns, a classic by Sholem Aleichem, “zeyer nudne [really boring].” Mileage varies.
Vanya back in 2013, for what it’s worth I read Grete Rainer’s translation of Švejk back in 2010. I do perceive some commonality of sensibility with e.g. Stefan Zweig, though of course Hašek and Zweig have little else in common besides the country of their birth.
I perceive nothing particular in common with Bulgakov or other Russians of roughly the same time period—that said, I read all them (the relevant Russians) in German and a little bit in English. For me what seems to be a stronger influence of nineteenth-century French culture on the East Slavs is the biggest difference in mentality.
Han er ein or mearane, um ikkje augo våre er narra av eit slag trolldom. Seg, er du ikkje trollmann, einkvan spæjar send av Sarumann, eller hildringar han hev maksla?
Is there a conflict in the minds of people reading this, what with the trolls on one side and the trollmann with his trolldom on the other? Or is that so etymologically submerged as to be unnoticeable?
Interesting question. There’s no conflict between troll and trollmann. A trollmann is never a male troll, always a sorcerer or magician. A trollkjerring or trollkone OTOH is mostly a female troll, with the former maybe more often a troll and the latter more likely to be used for a magician or witch. The clear divide between trolls and sorcerers is rather recent anyway, with the “troll” word replacing older terms for giants like jutul and gyger, and with international ideas of sorcerers coming in.
I also think the connotations may be changing. Those growing up watching Disney Channel prefer magiker and magi to trollmann and trolldom. Magiker used to be fancy for tryllekunstner “illusionist”.
I’ve been trying to get around to finally reading Švejk and, since I don’t read Czech, wondering if the Polish translation or the German might be better.
Three Polish translations have been published so far: Hulka-Laskowski (1931), Waczków (1991) and Kroh (2009). I like the first of them most and the second least. Hulka-Laskowski was partly of Czech descent and his translation is peppered with Bohemisms and Austro-Hungarianisms. They give it a distinct kaiserlich und königlich flavour which the more recent translations lack despite their literary merits and faithfulness to the letter of the original.
Now I’m wondering which Russian translation of Švejk is the best.
Russians are mostly familiar with 2nd (1958) edition of translation by Bogatyrev.
However, like all Soviet translations, it suffers from typical Soviet hypocrisy and reluctance for use of strong words (and that’s really criminal in translating Švejk!).
If you really like Švejk, I would recommend you to learn Czech and read it in the original.
Failing that, read the Bogatyrev’s translation with these helpful notes
http://ukh.livejournal.com/?skip=90&tag=комментарии
it’s really painful to realize how much a Russian reader is missing….
Well, damn, I’m sorry to hear that. I guess I’ll read a good English translation if I ever get around to it; I’m afraid I’m never going to learn Czech well enough for the purpose.
tryllekunstler
The umlaut is interesting. In Icelandic ‘troll’ is tröll, whereas in Swedish the word for ‘conjure, do magic’ is trolla without umlaut.
I’m afraid I’m never going to learn Czech well enough for the purpose.
“You are linguist, no?
@JC: tryllekunstler – was that a finger macro from German? It’s tryllekunstner in both No and Da.
Anyway, trold seems to be native but trylle may have been formed in LGer – all bets on the umlaut are off.
Yes, an over-hasty read followed by a follow-the-fingers write instead of cutting and pasting, and fair enough: Low German and English between them have made a mess of all the languages around the Baltic Sea.
I just wanted to mention how truly delightful I find this thread no matter how many times I reread it.