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.
Yeah! It's a great book. The translator Anna Ramadan is really talented, too.
I would expect translating Jabberwocky to be effectively impossible, even explaining it to a fluent ESL speaker is tough
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.
The real tragedy of being Italian is they’ll never understand the pagliacci pizza knock knock joke in the original Brooklyn accented English
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.
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.
Came here to say Finnegans Wake, the book is barely in English to begin with
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.
huh I never read this but I think my mom really liked it. Maybe I should
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.
I've heard that Shakespeare is difficult to translate to French.
Not a joke, I don't remember the source though, unfortunately.
I'll @ you if I find it. I'm going to look for it doggedly because this exists at the intersection of multiple oddly specific fascinations.
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
Not books but plays:
I think The Laramie Project would be very difficult to translate. Lots of idioms.
Shakespeare too. You either lose the rhythm or the content. I've read a lot of really bad translations of shakespeare.
