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Alexander Dan Vilhjálmsson discusses how he translated his own novel into English:

I never intended to translate my own book. The way it happened felt almost as if by accident. I self-published a fantasy novel called Hrímland in 2014. I was exhausted after the process, but soon after I decided to try out translating it. Gollancz had opened their submissions for a limited time, and I used that for motivation. It was just supposed to be an experiment to see how on earth I would manage to translate this work. I never imagined it would go anywhere. That book ended up becoming Shadows of the Short Days.

See, I knew this was the kind of book where I couldn’t just hand it off to a translator and get a good result without massive interference from myself. I wanted to find out how I could do it, and perhaps in doing so learn something new about how I wrote in English.

Writing fantasy fiction naturally lends itself to a lot of worldbuilding – and that worldbuilding is done through language. In Icelandic, I had pillaged my country’s archaic vocabulary when coming up with fantastical terms in universe, also looking up old kenningar, poetical words and phrases. I turned these words into species, warrior-castes, sorcerer names. Icelandic also lends itself well to making up new words – a language with a lot of compound nouns is fun that way. So, when I looked how I would tackle the translation, I had to decide what to keep and what to translate into English.

When is something too precious to worldbuilding lost in translation? When is something a bit too untranslatable, too culturally important, or just too damn cool to be turned into English?

A whole lot, according to the glossary at the end of the book. […]

In the Icelandic text, the ravenfolk speak a very strange type of Icelandic (or, well, Hrímlandic). Their corvine vocal cords can mimic human languages effectively, but they care little for the ways of land-bound species. They much prefer to speak in the rough caws of their native skramsl (which is an archaic word for a raven crowing). They speak a faux type of Old Icelandic, like something you see when reading the Sagas of the Icelanders. The Sagas took place in the 9th to 11th centuries during the settlement of Iceland, written a few centuries later. In universe, the náskárar learned the human tongue then, and have since not bothered with updating it much.

So how do you translate someone speaking fake Old Icelandic in English? […] This is where it becomes convenient being the author as well as the translator. I did something a bit strange. I rewrote their dialogue and kept a lot of Icelandic words in there. Like, a lot. They almost speak Icelandic half of the time, although it’s the same kind of strange, faux Old Icelandic. The fusion feels like something from another world, a different time, and the English reader gets a real sense that these bastards really are speaking the old tongue. This was a big part of why I wanted to do the translation myself. I knew I wanted to do something unorthodox with them, as with so many other parts of the world.

Even if it’s just mundane things like not translating landi as moonshine.

I personally think those are pretty dubious decisions that another translator would sensibly have avoided, but hey, it’s his book, and it’s fun to read about. (There are more details at the link, of course.) Thanks, MattF!

Joel at Far Outliers is posting excerpts from Iain MacGregor’s Checkpoint Charlie: The Cold War, The Berlin Wall, and the Most Dangerous Place On Earth, and there’s a point of Hattic interest in Checkpoint Charlie’s Other Names; after explaining that the well-known term comes from the NATO phonetic alphabet (there was a Checkpoint Alpha at Helmstedt/Marienborn and a Checkpoint Bravo at Dreilinden/Drewitz), MacGregor continues:

Checkpoint Charlie was now designated the major crossing point for Allied personnel, foreigners, and diplomats in the heart of Berlin. The Russians simply called it the “Friedrichstraße Crossing Point,” and their East German cousins the Grenzübergangsstelle (“Border Crossing Point”) Friedrich/Zimmerstraße—which was geographically where the checkpoint was located.

Naturally I wanted to confirm these statements, but it turns out the Russian Wikipedia article is named Чекпойнт Чарли, and does not mention that there was any more common Russian version (and when I did a corpus search on Фридрихштрассе I found nothing relevant); furthermore, the Russian Wikipedia article mentions Yulian Semyonov’s spy novel Бомба для председателя (written 1970), whose text contains many mentions of “Чек Пойнт Чарли” [Chek Point Charli] but none of any “Friedrichstraße Crossing Point.” Does anybody know anything about either Russian or German usage back in the ’70s?

Last year Asymptote featured Nina Perrotta’s interview with David Buchta of Brown University about teaching and translating the Bhagavad Gītā. It’s full of good things; here are a few excerpts:

NP: Could you talk a little about the Sanskrit-to-English translation challenges of the Gītā in particular?

DB: A big question I’ve seen with translations of the Gītā is “What do you do with the word yoga?” There’s a recent translation by Gavin Flood, where he focuses on how this word, particularly as it comes up in the Gītā, pairs up with another word, sāṅkhya. He translates sāṅkhya as “theory” and yoga as “practice.” I think there’s something insightful in this. Now, there’s obviously something really simplistic about those translations, but I’ve been studying this stuff for years, and seeing it that way, I thought, “That’s a nice way of thinking about it!” Of course, you need to go and explain what you mean by it.

A lot of translators would leave the word yoga untranslated, because if you think about what yoga means and how it’s used in the Gītā, and the range of meanings of various things that were called yoga in that intellectual and philosophical context, there isn’t anything similar that you could really point to in English. But there’s a problem with leaving the word untranslated, because it’s now an English loanword. It means something totally different as an English loanword than what it meant in the Bhagavad Gītā.

A third approach is to use an etymologically based translation of the word yoga. It’s related to this verb meaning “to connect” or “to yoke” in English, so some people will bring in this notion of joining or connecting. They’ll come up with a translation based on the etymology of the word. But there’s a big problem with that that I can turn back to in a bit.

NP: What are some of the things that yoga meant in the Gītā?

DB: Typically, in a context like the Gītā, the word yoga meant something like a spiritual practice (which is why “practice” isn’t a particularly bad translation for it), a path that led to the goal of some level of self-awareness, self-realization, enlightenment. In the Gītā, one of the main ways in which yoga is presented is more specifically called karma-yoga, which is essentially the practice of “detached action.” Totally different from doing “hot yoga” (I’m using scare quotes) and twisting your body into pretzels. […]

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Valentin Rasputin’s 1974 Живи и помни (Live and Remember) begins softly and tentatively, like the Kreutzer Sonata: in the frigid winter at the start of 1945, the aging Mikheich discovers that his trusty old carpenter’s ax has disappeared from its hiding place beneath the floorboards of the Guskov family’s bathhouse. The thief took some tobacco and a pair of skis as well, but it’s the ax Mikheich can’t stop complaining about, and since whoever took it couldn’t have been from the village (no local would have taken the skis), he figures he’ll never see it again. He’s still muttering about it when his daughter-in-law Nastyona comes home and wonders tiredly why he’s going on about some hunk of metal when the entire world has been turned upside down. (“Nastyona” is an unusual diminutive form of Nastasya; in a nice touch, you discover halfway through the book that she was called Nastya, the usual diminutive, until she married Andrei and his father started calling her Nastyona — since then, everyone does.) But at night, just as she’s falling asleep, something pops into her head and she can’t stop thinking about it. In the morning she sneaks off to the bathhouse and has a look around, but doesn’t notice anything amiss. She can’t let it go, though, and the next day she leaves a loaf of bread there. For two days nothing happens, it’s still there, and she decides she must be wrong, but she replaces it with a new loaf anyway — she can’t get over the fact that no stranger would have known to look under the floorboards. Sure enough, two days later the loaf is gone; she finds crumbs and a cigarette butt. Now she’s sure.

As she suspected, her husband Andrei, who went off to war over three years before, has returned; he finds her in the bathhouse and tells her his story. After fighting and being wounded in the battle for Moscow, at Smolensk, and at Stalingrad, he was wounded so badly he had to be sent to a hospital in Novosibirsk to recover, and he was told by fellow recuperating soldiers that he would surely be sent home. But instead he was ordered back to the front; full of resentment and sure he would be killed this time, he went to the station and found himself unpremeditatedly getting on a train going the wrong way, to Irkutsk, and realized he was going to make his way back to his native village, Atamanovka on the Angara. He tells Nastyona he came back to see her — not his mother, not his father — and she mustn’t tell anyone he’s there: “if you do, I’ll kill you.” He tells her where he’s staying (in a disused house on the other side of the river) and she sneaks across on the ice to bring him his rifle and some food.

That sets up the basic situation; for the rest of the novel, she tries to keep him hid and supplied while fending off the increasing suspicions of her in-laws — the police have been by to ask about Andrei’s disappearance. Their relationship is well portrayed: they become closer than they had been for years, but they’re still in different worlds; after a lyrical passage in which she shares her fond memories of prewar life with him, we learn that he has stopped listening because he’s obsessed by his own terrible memories of the war. The screws are tightened when she discovers she’s pregnant (of course, they’ve been making love); she asks him if he might risk coming forward — surely they’ll forgive him? — but he says they don’t forgive you for desertion: “If they could shoot me and then revive me and shoot me twice more, they’d do it.” Her desperation and his steely resolve are brilliantly portrayed; I was reminded of both Crime and Punishment and Anna Karenina, and this book can hold up its head in that company. The war ends (he knows without being told, because he hears the guns being fired off in celebration across the river) and her pregnancy starts being more apparent; the tension builds unbearably until the final page. This is a magnificent, tragic novel, and I recommend it without reservation; the translation by Antonina W. Bouis seems well done, so even if you have no Russian you can appreciate it. It’s even better than Последний срок (Borrowed Time; see this post), and I might never have read either if I confined myself to Russian lit’s greatest hits and started with his famous Прощание с Матёрой (Farewell to Matyora). Score another one for my obsessively thorough chronological reading program.
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The eudæmonist has a fine post called Diabolo, l’emigrette & la dame de pique that begins fetchingly as follows:

It’s always the way of things, you are merrily reading a newly acquired translation of Pushkin’s ‘Queen of Spades’ instead of starting your workday, and as you are waiting for the Countess to return from the ball in section three and encounter the not particularly pleasant Hermann (not quite Germain), you observe, with Pushkin, with Hermann, the decorations in the Countess’s room – the porcelain shepherdesses, the trinket boxes, the fans, the bandalores.² The bandalores? The bandalores – ah, yes, the yo-yos.³ This seems like an odd addition to a lady’s tchotchkes, so you consult a second translation (because of course you have more than one to hand), which translates the word in question as ‘tops’.⁴ This seems less objectionable as bric-à-brac, but now that you’re looking into the matter you simply must know: what on earth was Pushkin talking about? In consulting with a learned colleague, you learn that Pushkin used the word рулетки (note the plural), which despite its similarity to roulette (which would keep up the gambling theme) the ever (over) helpful lexicographer Dahl defines as a ‘French toy’ on a cord that sounds very much like a yo-yo.⁵ […]

The matter could end there – you know what Pushkin meant, after all – but you feel that you should add that the OED is not particularly helpful on the bandalore, hazarding no speculation on its origins and taking a limited view of its history. The entry does include a reference to an 1864 issue of The Athenæum which mentions Thomas Moore’s gossip about the Duke of Wellington toying with a bandalore (originally published in Blackwood’s), as well as another quotation indicating that even in 1824 a bandalore was a sadly ‘gone-by’ toy, such as an old bachelor’s servant might use to divert an irruption of children. This incidentally makes it plausible for a countess to have a few lying around circa 1833/4 – which would be of a piece with the rest of her out-of-date style.

This does not, however, give you much of a sense of when or or where or why the bandalore was a fashion, and the word keeps running through your head, spinning away only to whirl back again, so you delay the beginning of your work still further to find some seven or more references, including a letter from Horace Walpole to Miss Mary Berry dated 12 October 1790, in which the toy/game is mentioned: ‘I have dined to-day at Bushy with the Guilfords, where were only the two daughters, Mr. Storer, and Sir Harry Englefield, who performed en professeur at the game I thought Turkish, but which sounds Moorish; he calls it Bandalore.’ [N.b.: I have added the italics for Bandalore based on the printed version at the link — LH.] There is also the deeply dull Dramatic dialogues for the use of young persons (1792) by Elizabeth Sibthorpe Pinchard, in which bandalores are called ‘Prince of Wales’s toys’ because ‘They are all the faſhion. The Prince of Wales brought them in’ (pp. 10–11).⁶ Sixteen-year-old Mary Spilsbury exhibited a painting of ‘The bandalore, or fashionable toy’ at the Royal Academy, also in 1792.⁷

There is much more, including the French term l’emigrette and “the diabolo, another string-and-bobbin based toy which, according to the 1911 Britannica, originated in China and was popular in France around 1812 as le diable” (not to mention the footnotes and some colorful images); the only one of the terms I was familiar with was yo-yo, and I am struck by the fact that neither it nor bandalore has a known etymology, though for the former the OED says, rather irritatingly, “probably from one of the Philippines languages.” (As for the latter, I beg leave to doubt the statement at the M-W entry that its Look-up Popularity is “Top 26% of words.”)

Joe Moran is generally a good and thought-provoking read; I’ve quoted him here more than once. I just came across an essay he published last year called “Good Sentences Are Why We Read” (an excerpt from his book First You Write a Sentence); it’s something of a jumble, beginning in a fairly rote way (“No one can agree on what a sentence is. The safest definition is typographic”) and going on to more interesting material that involves quoting lots of other writers:

A sentence can be a single word, or it can stretch into infinity, because more words can be piled on to a main clause for ever. The Czech writer Bohumil Hrabal wrote a whole novel (Dancing Lessons for the Advanced in Age) containing just one sentence. But he said that his comic sensibility was shaped by a short one he once read on a dry cleaner’s receipt: Some stains can be removed only by the destruction of the material itself.

Marcel Proust, who in The Captive wrote a 447-word sentence about a sofa, said that he wanted to “weave these long silks as I spin them” and to “encircle the truth with a single—even if long and sinuous—stroke.” For Proust, a sentence traced an unbroken line of thought. Cutting it in two broke the line. Depending on its line of thought, a sentence can be a tiny shard of sense or a Proustian demi-world, brought to life and lit up with words.

This next bit is intriguing, but I’m not sure how much to take seriously and how much is the Higher Thumb-Sucking:

Scientists at the Institute of Nuclear Physics in Kraków analyzed more than a hundred classic works by authors such as Dickens, Joyce and Beckett, and found that the sentences behaved like a mathematical multifractal: a structure whose smallest part resembles its whole. The best writing is self-consistent. It sounds as if it comes from the same breathing body standing in the same place, rather as wine from a certain terroir is said to have, from its climate and soil, a taste irreplicable anywhere else. What special terroir makes a piece of writing irreplicable? Its sentences.

(I’m not fond of “irreplicable” — it gets a few other Google Books hits, but I fail to see how it’s in any way preferable to irreplaceable, which is actually in dictionaries. [N.b.: There is a difference in meaning, as commenters explain below. I still don’t like it.]) There’s some more good stuff in there, along with filler (“Rhythm holds meaning”) and utter tosh (“Bad grammar is usually a sign of something deeper amiss with the rhythm”), but I want to focus on that “447-word sentence about a sofa.” You can see the sentence about halfway down Nathan Brixius’s page (“A sofa that had risen up from dreamland…”) and the original French here (“Canapé surgi du rêve…”), but why pick on that one? It’s only Proust’s third longest! The longest, 958 words according to Brixius, is from Cities of the Plain I and begins “Their honour precarious, their liberty provisional…”; you can see the French here (“Sans honneur que précaire, sans liberté que provisoire…”), and I note that it’s only 858 mots in French, that succinct tongue. (We discussed long sentences back in 2016.)

Andrea Moro, Professor of General Linguistics at the University School for Advanced Study in Pavia, writes for the MIT Press Reader about an interesting experiment:

At least since the pioneering work of Nobel Prize-winning electrophysiologist Lord Edgar Adrian we have known that no physical signal is ever completely lost when it reaches the brain. What we’ve more recently discovered is surprising: Apparently electric waves preserve the shape of their corresponding sound waves in non-acoustic areas of the brain, such as in the Broca’s area, the part of the brain responsible for speech production.

These findings shed important light on the relationship between sound waves and electric waves in the brain, but almost all of them rely on one aspect of the neuropsychological processes related to language: namely, sound emission decoding. Yet we know that language can also be present in the absence of sound, when we read (as what we are most probably experiencing at this very moment) or when we use words while thinking — in technical terms, when we engage in endophasic activity.

This simple fact immediately raises the following crucial question: What happens to the electric waves in our brain when we generate a linguistic expression without emitting any sound? […]

Remarkably, we found that the shape of the electric waves recorded in a non-acoustic area of the brain when linguistic expressions are being read silently preserves the same structure as those of the mechanical sound waves of air that would have been produced if those words had actually been uttered. The two families of waves where language lives physically are then closely related — so closely in fact that the two overlap independently of the presence of sound. The acoustic information is not implanted later, when a person needs to communicate with someone else; it is part of the code from the beginning, or at least before the production of sound takes place. It also excludes that the sensation of exploiting sound representation while reading or thinking with words is just an illusory artifact based on a remembrance of the overt speech.

The discovery that these two independent families of waves of which language is physically made strictly correlate with each other — even in non-acoustic areas and whether or not the linguistic structures are actually uttered or remain within the mind of an individual — indicates that sound plays a much more central role in language processing than was previously thought. It is as if this unexpected correlation provided us with the missing piece of a “Rosetta stone” in which two known codes — the sound waves and the electric waves generated by sound — could be exploited to decipher a third one: the electric code generated in the absence of sound, which in turn could hopefully lead to the discovery of the “fingerprint” of human language.

Intriguing, certainly, but the MIT imprint inspires a certain skepticism, and I don’t know enough about this stuff to have a sensible opinion. All thoughts, as always, are welcome.

Once again it’s time for the Year in Reading feature at The Millions, in which people write about books they’ve read and enjoyed during the previous year, and once again my contribution is the first in the series, a tradition which I am honored by and enjoy shamelessly. This year I discuss David Graeber’s Debt, Charles Portis’s Norwood, Yuri Trifonov and Vladimir Tendryakov, and the two Trevor Joyce collections I wrote about here. I could have added Tessa Hadley and George Eliot, both of whom I’ve been reading to my wife at night (we’re almost finished with Daniel Deronda), but the piece was long enough already, and neither author is in particular need of my publicity. Dum spiro, lego!

1) Shocking Blunders:

Mark Thakkar, “Duces caecorum: On Two Recent Translations of Wyclif,” Vivarium 58 (2020) 357-383, is a review of Stephen Penn, John Wyclif: Selected Latin Works in Translation (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2019), and Stephen Lahey, Wyclif, Trialogus (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013). Some of the errors Thakkar exposes are quite shocking. I select two (both from Penn’s translation) as exhibits for my gallery of howlers.

Thakkar, p. 367:

Jesus’s famous aphorism that “many are called, but few are chosen” (multi sunt vocati, pauci vero electi) is jaw-droppingly mistranslated as “many of the elect are called poor” (p. 292).

Id., p. 368:

… both the Nicene Creed and the Apostles’ Creed contain professions of belief in the Catholic church (‘credo ecclesiam catholicam’ dicit utrumque simbolum), which Penn translates as: “the words ‘I believe in the Catholic church’ represent a symbol everywhere!” (p. 173).

Thakkar concludes his review with this observation (pp. 382-383, footnotes omitted):

[I]n countries like the UK and the US, where secondary-school Latin has collapsed outside the private sector, where few medievalists have an undergraduate background in Classics, and where lecturers would be embarrassed to sit in on language classes, most medievalists are only ever taught Latin while they are graduate students. What’s more, we have already reached the stage where, in some universities, medieval Latin is taught from scratch to graduate students by people who were taught it from scratch when they were graduate students. This is not necessarily unsustainable, but it can only be sustainable if the language is taught seriously and intensively as a major component of graduate study, which it almost never is. And of course the problems we are storing up here are not confined to Wyclif: they will affect almost all areas of medieval studies. If, therefore, we do not drastically improve the level of graduate training in medieval Latin, hopeless misunderstandings of medieval sources will increasingly come to scar the scholarly landscape. In the meantime, it is evidently worth reminding translators and reviewers alike, as Wyclif used to remind his contemporaries, that “if the blind lead the blind, both fall into the pit.”

The post title is part of the Latin version of the final quote, from Matthew 15:14.

2) Soiled Undergarments:
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When I started reading this passage from Jason Farago’s NYRB review of two books by Édouard Louis, History of Violence and Who Killed My Father, I thought I’d add it as a comment to my previous post, but as I read on I thought it was too much for a comment and would make a good post on its own. History of Violence is about Louis’ rape by a man he picked up late on Christmas Eve, 2012, and his ambivalence about his decision to report it to the police:

What elevates History of Violence beyond the limits of its social determinism is the marvelous structure of its narration. It is style, much more than characterization, that gives the novel its moral and political force. “Tell it in the order that it happened,” one police officer tells Édouard, but Louis does nothing of the sort. The novel begins after the crime, back in Picardy, where Édouard is staying with his sister Clara. We jump from there back to the morning after the rape, then forward to the police station, then months into the future. Édouard and Reda meet on page 45 but don’t get to the apartment until page 80. The novel’s climax is not the rape, which occurs about halfway through, but rather the argument over whether to go to the police. Fracturing the account this way does more than a hundred Bourdieu-parroting apothegms to establish the social stakes of the novel, and to demonstrate how violence stretches past the personal.

Much of this comes to us not through Édouard’s first-person narration but through quotations from Clara, whom Édouard eavesdrops on back in Picardy, “hidden on the other side of the door” while she recounts the crime to her husband, “her voice compounded, as always, of fury, resentment, irony too, and resignation.” It is not only that: Clara speaks in a demotic, regional French that flouts grammatical rules and brims with class markers. Far more than The End of Eddy, this book uses popular speech as a compositional tool; Édouard’s Christmas nightmare returns to him, and comes to us for the first time, in the French he abandoned along with his given name. Indeed, Louis often interrupts Clara’s working-class French with italicized asides in Édouard’s more formal language, the better to underscore their social distance.

This grinding between registers of French is the crucial trick of History of Violence. Hundreds of Clara’s sentences use a common colloquial form in which the subject of the sentence is followed by a redundant pronoun—for example, Reda il criait, literally “Reda he was shouting.” (This grammatical tic is called, in a coincidence some of Louis’s political opponents might appreciate, dislocation à gauche.) She uses nonstandard contractions like t’es or t’aurais, she uses the highly conversational quoi for emphasis, and she uses regional, lower-class pronunciations that Louis renders with misspellings (pis instead of puis, “then”). Multiple sentences are run together with commas or with no punctuation at all. As for Édouard’s own speech, more polished, more Parisian, Clara describes it as sounding “like some kind of politician” (“son vocabulaire de ministre”). Their father, in The End of Eddy, thought of such correct French as the language of “faggots.”

I found Louis’s rendering of Clara’s French winning in many places, hammy and overdrawn in a few. But the distinct linguistic registers disappear in Lorin Stein’s English translation, which makes almost no effort to reproduce them. A sentence of Clara’s like “L’usine elle embauche plus,” with both a redundant pronoun and a nonstandard negative, appears in English as the stiffly correct “They’ve stopped hiring at the factory.” “J’ai rien dit moi” becomes “I just kept my mouth shut.” Clara’s tumbling, unpunctuated run-on sentences get chopped up into bite-size morsels; conversational repetitions are omitted; colloquial ça’s and quoi’s get vaporized. All this makes the dozens of pages in which Clara, not Édouard, recounts what happened that Christmas Eve—at a personal, social, and linguistic remove—tonally indistinguishable from Édouard’s narration.

We discussed pis = puis earlier this year; I agree with Farago that the translator should have made some effort to bring across the difference in translation.