I recently learned about the debacle that was the Swedish translation of Tolkien, and it got me wondering: “are there books that can only exist within a masterful use of the authors native tongue?”.
I recently learned about the debacle that was the Swedish translation of Tolkien, and it got me wondering: “are there books that can only exist within a masterful use of the authors native tongue?”.
Counterpoint to this, 'Sphinx' by Anne Garreta should have been impossible to translate from french to english. The book is a dark romance between two lovers whose genders are never mentioned and yet it still flows perfectly and imperceptibly. IN french you do this by saying 'their bodypart brushed against me' since the possessive takes the gender of the noun and not the possessor. There was a masterful and lyrical translation that captures the essence of the book without access to the same grammatical tricks.
That’s really cool, I always like it when authors do stuff like that.
Yeah! It's a great book. The translator Anna Ramadan is really talented, too.