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?”.

  • bubbalu [they/them]
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    1 year ago

    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.

    • GinAndJuche
      hexagon
      ·
      1 year ago

      That’s really cool, I always like it when authors do stuff like that.

      • bubbalu [they/them]
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        1 year ago

        Yeah! It's a great book. The translator Anna Ramadan is really talented, too.

  • buckykat [none/use name]
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    1 year ago

    I would expect translating Jabberwocky to be effectively impossible, even explaining it to a fluent ESL speaker is tough

    • casskaydee [she/her]
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      1 year ago

      There's actually a section in my favorite book of all time Gödel, Escher, Bach that talks about two pretty decent translations of that poem into French and German. Here's an excerpt.

    • GinAndJuche
      hexagon
      ·
      1 year ago

      The real tragedy of being Italian is they’ll never understand the pagliacci pizza knock knock joke in the original Brooklyn accented English

  • iridaniotter [she/her, she/her]
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    1 year ago

    I mean, poetry in general can't really be translated. Take Classical Chinese for instance. You have a couple lines that due to the nature of Classical Chinese already has multiple interpretations, so you gotta make sure you figure out the right one. Then you translate that to English, but if it's an idiom then you either localize it or provide a few sentences of context. And even then you've lost the syllable and rhyme scheme, so perhaps you teach your English students to at least read Chinese even if they're not fluent. But Classical Chinese is so phonologically different that Mandarin pronunciation is only slightly better than just saying it in English.

  • Huldra [they/them, it/its]
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    1 year ago

    Somehow Finnegans Wake has been translated into many of the larger languages, and the wiki page doesnt mention anything about inaccuracy or being just fucked up, which boggles my mind.

    • RedDawn [he/him]
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      1 year ago

      Came here to say Finnegans Wake, the book is barely in English to begin with

  • GinAndJuche
    hexagon
    ·
    1 year ago

    I would argue that “Gormenghast”, by Peake, is so very much about the diction that a translation would lose something.

    The imagery is an attempt to paint with words that which is of a scope that canvas cannot contain it, but on top of that the sentences are brushstrokes. The way the syllables flow are delectable.

    It would take a talent equal to the authors in English in addition to a similar mastery of the language being translated to.

      • GinAndJuche
        hexagon
        ·
        1 year ago

        I was highly reticent for a while, but I read a review that described it as: (paraphrasing) a hauntology of fantasy if Tolkien was never published.

        If it weren’t for Tolkien, Peake would have dominated the genre with the power of his vision.

  • davel [he/him]
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    1 year ago

    Or the opposite.

    …Impossible not to properly translate? confusion

    • GinAndJuche
      hexagon
      ·
      1 year ago

      A book better in translation.

  • Egon
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    edit-2
    5 months ago

    deleted by creator