December 09 Group Read: Translation or Translations

The December theme is "Translation or Translations" which means you can read a book about the art of translating or a book which has been translated from a language not your own. The latter field is really wide-open, choices are many, so fulfilling this theme requirement should be EASY!

First, please don't abandon the conversation on the November "India" thread for this one. Conversation here begins DECEMBER 1st, no early posters here, please.

Second, there is no need to post what you will read on this thread, just what you read for the theme when December rolls around. It'll be a surprise to everyone this time!

I'll list a few books about translation, and some suggestions on how to find translated books if you need help. As I said above, this should be easy.

*Books about translation: Tell us a little about the book, the author and what you found interesting in the book.
*Translated fiction: Tell us the title and author, the translator and the language translated from, and the country of the author (and the language you are reading in if not English). For example:
Departing at Dawn by Gloria Lisé (Argentina), translated from the Spanish by Alice Weldon. Then tell us what you thought about the book in general and any comments about the translation. How did it read? Did you think the translation was done well? Did it read so well that you that the fact that it was translated didn't even come to mind? Perhaps some of the LTers who are also translators (i.e. polutropos, gingerbreadman, citizenkelly) will pop in and comment.

It's always good to read the first post before one starts posting!

A couple of books about translating (that can be enjoyed by non-academics!)

If This Be Treason: Translation and Its Dyscontents, A Memoir by Gregory Rabassa.

"Translator, Trader" by Douglas Hofstadter. This is a 100 page essay on translation attached to the back of a new translation of Francoise Sagan's That Mad Ache.

There's another book by a woman author... I will have to come back an fill this in later.

And some other resources on translation: (and rather than copying all the links, here is one link to a page with numerous interesting links: http://www.belletrista.com/2009/issue2/linkswelike.php )

Resources for translated fiction are endless. Pick a country and do a tag search here on LT. Pick "Spain", for example and you'll have choices from Dreams of Reason by Rosa Chacel to Prime Time Suspect by Alicia Gimenez-Barlett to The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafon.

There are magazines (hardcopy and online) which can point you to international literature.
World Literature Today, Three Percent, Words Without Borders, Belletrista...etc. See the links page listed above.

Literary Prizes: Many of the works by Nobel Prize winners are translated, as are those on the Neustadt Prize winner list, and theImpac Dublin lists.

Sometimes publishers try to hide the fact that a book is translated so it doesn't always say on the cover. If you have any doubts, check the copyright page. Example: The Tongue's Blood Does Not Run Dry by Assia Djebar does not show a translator on the cover, but the translator is listed on the title page. Why does a publisher try to hide that fact? Well, that's one of the topics we can discuss in December!

Happy hunting and we'll see you all in December!!!

Just spotted on another thread a review of Translation is a love affair which looks ideal reading for this month.

(PS: hope it's OK to post this. The book looked too good to resist. I haven't told you what I'll be reading...)

>3 wandering_star: That sounds like a very appropriate book, Wandering_star! Thanks.

And here we are safely arrived at December! Ready? Post your comments on any book in translation or book about translation at any time. Don't forget to mention the translator and what language the book has been translated from...

I'm soon to finish an Annie Ernaux novel (translated from the French) and will post soon!

This theme inspired me to read some essays by Leevi Lehto, Finnish poet and translator. Here a quote from his essay titled In The Beginning was Translation:

"Let me start by quoting my 'official statement' concerning my translation of Charles Bernstein’s 'Besotted Desquamation', a poem that can be seen as consisting of 27 sections, with all the words in each individual section sharing the same initial letter:

When I sat down to translate the poem into Finnish, I was disappointed, confused even, to find that the words my dictionary suggested for replacement seemed to begin with just about any letter. (…) I began (…) to have doubts as to the very fundaments of the profession of translation. I mean, how can we imagine to translate anything, when we cannot even get the first letters right? Eventually, I think I did find a problem to the solution. What I did was to put the original away – for good, I never looked at it again. (…) I then proceeded, not to translate, not even to rewrite, but to write the poem, exactly the way Charles had done before me…"

Essay available online at http://leevilehto.net/?page_id=76

Another interesting work "by" the same guy is a "translation", or maybe a transformation, of one day's newsfeed of Finnish News Agency into a prose work by alphabetization (sp?) of the sentences. An extract from the section H is available at http://leevilehto.net/?page_id=91

He is also working on the (second Finnish) translation of the Ulysses, possibly finished already but unpublished so far.

On the more conventional side of translation business, I am now reading The Plague in Finnish, translated from French. Interestingly, in the context of this discussion, there are two translators mentioned: the actual translator, and another who has done a "new revised translation". Should I be curious enough to get an earlier edition with only one translator to see what the revisions mean? I don't know.

In recent years there has been some talk, and a few why-questions uttered, about new translations of oldish works. At least Robinson Crusoe, Peter Pan, Pippi books and Edgar Allan Poe's stories, and probably more, have been translated again.

Funnily, in some cases, the first translations seem to have become canonical, important and untouchable to those who have read them decades ago or, especially in the case of Pippi, in their childhood. It is as if people were afraid that a new translation would make the old one somehow disappear, or even their own years-ago-reading-experience.

61. The True Deceiver by Tove Jansson translated into English by Thomas Teal
LTER ARC

Once upon a time in northern snowy Swedish climes there was a woman who every morning before dawn took a walk with her wolf-like dog, that had no name. Katri Kling has a head for numbers and a driving ambition: to move with her brother Mats into the mansion of Anna Aemelin, a children's illustrator. Once ensconced in a position as housekeeper/companion to the aging artist, she is determined to pay for the building of a boat that Mats has designed.

Jansson's novel is an exquisite gem exploring the mysteries and vagaries of human relationships. At the beginning of the novel each of the three major characters seems to be encased in a bubble of their individual personalities. Katri needs to control all the variables of her world; Mats is lost in the romance of sea-faring ventures; and Anna, a keen observer and intimate detailer of the world of the forest floor, is driven by her youthful fans to include flowery bunnies in her otherwise otherwise naturalistic woodscapes. Subtly each character each character evolves and influences the perceptions and actions of the others as the long Scandinavian winter begins to give way to spring. Jansson does not tie the novel up with a neat conclusion -- the ending is unsettling, but the reader leaves the book with a heightened awareness of how interconnected we all are.

I'm sure I shall revisit this book often , and I've already ordered the other books by Jansson that are affordably available in English.

The True Deceiver by Tove Jansson, a Finnish novelist who wrote in Swedish, was originally published in 1982. The ARC of the NYRB 's English translation by Thomas Teal does not contain the introduction by Ali Smith that will be included with published version.

Somehow I had missed this thread before. I have so many translated books to choose from . . . but I think I will try to find something that stretches my usual reading a little, maybe something that is "translated" from a very different culture as well as from a different language.

>6 eairo: That sounds like a very interesting read. Wonder what he would have to say about a translation of a translation. Where would that leave the reader? Two steps further from the original? The first example that pops into my head is Polish author Stanislaw Lem's Solaris, the English edition of which is a translation from the French, which is a translation from the original Polish (I am reminded here of the game of "telephone" where an original phrase is passed from person to person until it becomes unrecognizable from the original...). Just thinking...

Cleaned Out by Annie Ernaux, translated from the French by Carol Sanders

First, my comments on the book:

Cleaned Out tells a coming-of-age story of Denise Lesur, the daughter of a working class couple who own a bar and café in a poor neighborhood. Denise, now twenty and a college student, has just had a back alley abortion and the circumstances lead her to recount her life story during the post war years in France. The central conflict begins when her parents, like so many, hoping to give Denise a better life than they have had, pay for her to go to private school. As Denise becomes educated she resents her family heritage more and more.

The first person narrative and the voice of the book seems like a cross between stream-of-consciousness and a rant. It is vivid, raw, crammed with emotion and angst, swinging from a pernicious resentment and 'hatred' of her unsophisticated parents and the culture she grew up in, to a virulent self-loathing. It's a mere 120 pages, with only two chapters and composed of long, long paragraphs - it was difficult to find a place to stop. But I needed to stop about every 20-25 pages because of the intensity of the narrative.

The story has many elements of other coming-of-age stories - a moving away from one's parents, a sexual awakening, a search for identity. I was reminded the young man in Albert Memmi's Pillar of Salt in places. The title, of course, refers to her abortion, but she is also losing her childhood, and perhaps exhausting some of her anger through this raw narrative, a different kind of cleaning out.

This is Ernaux's first book and she said she wanted to transgress boundaries, to "use not the refined style that I use as a teacher of literature, but an idiom that, by being brutally direct, working-class and sometimes obscene, would take issue with the French tradition of the polished sentence, of 'good taste' in literature." The voice of Denise Lesur certainly reverberates in one's skull long after you've closed the book. Author's first books are always interesting, as is where they go thereafter. I will look forward to reading more Ernaux in the future.

Now the translation:
Since I am not comparing the English and French texts of this book, I can only comment on how the translation reads in English. Considering that Ernaux chose to use a raw, angry working class voice for this book, I thought the translation was superb. In a diatribe such as this there can be no awkwardness, nothing to interrupt the flow, and Sanders' translation is terrific in this respect.

I read mostly in translation so I like having this as an easygoing December reading month.

Translucent Tree

I had to write a professional review for this book (for Avaland's wonderful belletrista.com) but since it's not out yet I won't paste that but I will reflect on a few of my feelings on the book.

The book is by Nobuko Takagi, original title of Tokō no ki (透光の樹), and is translated from the Japanese by Deborah Iwabuchi. Literally the title is "Tree of thinning leaves". I find the title was very well translated as translucent. Using 樹 as tree instead of the more common 木 was interesting as the first has a timber/wood kind of feel to it making me think of something more deadened. Much like the relationship present in the book. Two deaden characters who have trouble expressing their feelings to one another, hiding behind branches and leaves but if one looks well, those branches and leaves are quite translucent to their true feelings. So yes, very apt title.

In terms of the book itself I had trouble reviewing it because my thoughts on the book just kept going back and forth between enjoying it and not. I think this was mainly a translation issue (a lot of the book just fell flat) but also a question of personal taste. It's a book about romance and love, no doubt about that. But I don't need to be told that. I don't need the characters to discuss this for me to understand what the book is about. As I mentioned though, that's just a matter of taste on my part.

I did like how much could be interpreted from the book, how she always made us question what was really being shown.

I'm interested in getting this in the Japanese since it's a straightforward read which would help me get back into reading. Plus, I really do feel like a better translation would have helped.

6 -
Thanks for the insight on what you read. Very interesting.

Translations seem to be the topic of the month.

A few anecdotes:

Another group is currently reading Les Miserables which I have already read but I've been following their threads and have been helping settle any translations questions.

One person asked me to translate a word to help understand a certain concept Victor Hugo was trying to portray to which I explained that there were various ways of translating it because Hugo was fond of puns. As an amateur translator and language enthusiast I've always been impressed with translators who have been successful in translating puns and jokes. Not the easiest thing.

Another person asked me what my opinion was on a more correct translation between two versions of the book. I ended up choosing a mix of the two for my translation and noted that I chose it due to the tone of voice I perceived. To translate a tone of voice! Not very easy.

I just read Hugo's Le dernier jour d'un condamne (The last day of a condemned man) in which Hugo uses "argot" (jargon) for some of his prisoners. Prison jargon seems like it could be straightforward but reading it I was simply amazed! In fact, Hugo provided translations of the jargon into non-jargon French so that the reader could understand the text. So, when presented with a song written entirely of jargon, my first thought was: if I were translating this into English, how would I translate this?

A few sentences from when another prisoner relates a story to show my point:
a) The sentence in argot.
"Mon pere a epouse la veuve, moi je me retire a l'abbaye de Mont'-a-Regret."
b) Literraly translated into English:
"My father married the widow, I retired to the Mount-to-regret Abbey.
c) What it really means.
" My father was hung. I'm sent to the guillotine."

Very interesting I think.

lilisin--fascinating exercise! So, in the original, does Hugo write the sentence in argot and footnote it to translate it for the rest of the world?

I am one of those reading Les Miserables. I can read French, but not as a native speaker. So, I read one of the English translations and when I have questions in my mind about the translation I go to the Gutenberg on-line in French to see if I can clarify my issues. Sometimes it works, but sometimes it doesn't!

13 -
So, in the original, does Hugo write the sentence in argot and footnote it to translate it for the rest of the world?

Yes, exactly. There are additional documents in my book that explain the argot but I have not yet gotten to those yet. Although glancing at it now there is this written:
"Victor Hugo consacrera, dans Les Miserables (IV, 7) une veritable petite etude a l'argot et a ses racines sociologiques."
For those non-French speakers, basically in Les Mis Hugo also discusses the jargon in terms of it's sociologic roots. So that'll be something you can look for in Les Mis. I'm not sure what (IV, 7) is since I'm not sure how Les Mis is broken up in the (French) Folio edition. (Book 4, chapter 7 perhaps?)

As I mentioned in the other group's thread, feel free to come to me if you have questions on a translation. I don't mind as it's quite fascinating!

Interesting notes, lilisin.

I have finished another Swedish mystery by Åke Edwardson, Never End. Translated from the Swedish by Laurie Thompson.

I'm not going to add any review notes here, except to say that it is another very well done police procedural. The translation read very smoothly in English, smooth enough for me to not even think about the translation.

Is that not a goal of translation?

I've read some bumpy translations, but without being able to read in the original language, how would I know if that was the translator or the original writing (one has to assume here that one is not going to translate inferior writing...but can we assume that?) I guess this is why your observations, lilisin, are so interesting.

avaland -

I have also read some translations where I wonder if they haven't enhanced the original writing. That one is definitely difficult without reading the original but I have had that feeling before especially when it comes to translating into French.

One of the reasons I read in French is what I feel the language can do for writing. It is a fluid language and can easily translate books. It provides more flexibility when looking for corresponding words compared to say, English. So it would seem that this ease in the language could actually enhance the book. I can't help but wonder if I would have liked Translucent Tree better in French. I know also that I have read some books originally in English in French (not knowing they were originally English texts) and it definitely sounded different!

Which brings to my next point.
I can't remember having had any trouble with translations in French but I have had bumpy translations in English. Is this a question of language or a question of the market? In this case I would say the market. Many translations (in the States at least) seem to come from smaller publishing houses with smaller budgets. But all Translucent Tree needed was an editor. Seems like a reasonable fixable thing.

I didn't start out to read Dom Casmurro by Machado de Assis for this theme read, but it fits the requirements so I will comment on it her. Machado de Assis is said by some to be Brazil's finest writer; I have no idea if this is true, as I don't think I've read any other Brazilian literature. It was translated from the Portuguese, and I certainly never had the feeling I was reading a translated work. One thing I noticed was that I didn't have a clear sense of Brazil from this work; except for the casual reference to slaves, which was a bit unsettling, it seemed very "European" to me and I didn't get any feeling for the expanse of the Brazilian landscape or the energy of its cities.

The edition I read was translated by Helen Caldwell and has an introduction by Elizabeth Hardwick.

However, what I found most interesting about this novel, the story of a self-described "morose, tight-lipped man withdrawn within himself" who recalls his childhood romance and later marriage and jealousy, interspersed with his interactions with his extended family, neighbors, and friends, is that, although written in 1900 and depicting events of the mid- and late 1800s it is written in a startlingly modern, almost metafictional style. That is, the author frequently mentions that he's writing this book, refers to events from previous chapters by chapter number, discusses whether he should or shouldn't include certain events, etc. He also is excellent at characterization, bringing both major and minor characters to life. All in all, I admired the book more than I enjoyed reading it.

I am hoping to read some other translated work this month, but it depends which books on my teetering TBR piles call out to me.

I'm reading a Buddhist novel Little Pilgrim by Ko Un, a Korean poet. Sometimes, the poetry doesn't always work for me in this book, which is mostly prose. And maybe that is the translator, or the difficulties of rendering Korean into English. I did write a review, which I will copy here: (Gosh, I can see that I avoided talking about the translating in the review).

I have found this to be a beguiling book, following a little boy (Sudhana) and his exceptional experiences while he travles around South India. He has an inner need to taste all the different ways that people (and for that matter, supernatural beings) demonstrate thier own Buddha path. In some cases, these people don't seem to have much to offer, but they all build a certain roundedness to ones character, and perhaps gives the seeker some modalities that can draw upon on their own path. There is both a restlessness and a goal orientation in this story, two aspects that don't often meet. This book is written by a Korean who had been a Buddhist monk. The first half of the book had been serialized in a magazine. This is really a retelling of the Gandavyuha Sutra, and the book itself was translated by a collaborative efort of Brother Anthony of Taize with Young-Moo Kim, a poet and professor at Seoul National University.

My favorite book on translation is After Babel: aspects of language and translation by George Steiner.

I forgot to mention in Message 18 that Ko Un has been nominated by for a Nobel Prize, and so I would imagine he is considered a pretty good writer by his countrymen.

I will definitely look for After Babel -- thanks.

I am often reading a translated book, so I didn't even realize I happened to be actually able to do a "group read." Anyway, the one I'm currently on is Every Man Dies Alone by Hans Fallada. This was written in Germany just after WWII and first published in 1947, just published in English this year. It is based on an actual Gestapo file. It is the story of a couple who have just lost their son in the war and protest by leaving anti-Nazi postcards all over the city. It is getting rave reviews pretty much every where. I am only about a 100 pages in but I am enjoying it very much. I haven't noticed any translations issues at all except that the dork in me always tries to pronounce the streets, names, etc.

I am very curious to read about the author also. To summarize some of the notes about the author from the back flap, he wrote several international bestsellers before WWII. In 1932 Jewish producers made Little Man, What Now? into a Hollywood movie and he drew notice from the Nazis. He refused to join the party and refused to leave Germany. At the end of the war, he had an alcohol-related nervous breakdown and was in a Nazi insane asylum when he wrote The Drinker - in code. In 47 he died of a morphine overdose just before this book was published. I don't often read author biographies, but I would definitely read that one.

>16 lilisin: Another interesting topic with regards to translation is the translating of slang. I am of the opinion that expletives, for example, could be left in the original language.

Some of the stories I have had the most trouble with are ones which are told in the voices of teenagers or young 20s. Lilisin, you might remember that I whined about this on our Japanese theme read after reading the anthology of contemporary Japanese women writers. I came across another story in the anthology Decapolis, also in the voice of a young person, perhaps Czech; that didn't feel 'right'. Last night I was reading a story with another young protagonist by Helena Araujo, translated from the Spanish. Translating the slang must be the hardest thing (indeed, I think Rabassa mentions this in his memoir). Here is the line that bugged me, "So when Daniel jumped up, slapped his forehead, yelled yeeehah! Got it! and said something about a kidnapping..."

yeeehah? Do young teenagers in Colombia really say yeeehah? I don't even know any teenagers who speak English who would use such a phrase. It's a phrase associated with cowboys in movie and television Westerns.

However, on the other hand, the Ernaux book I read was told in the voice of a 20 year old college student who, in her anger, slips back into the working class lingo she grew up in. The translation is done very well and I don't remember once having a quibble with the translation...

This is cheating a bit since I read Resistance: A Frenchwoman's Journal of the War by Agnes Humbert in September. I think my thoughts about the translation are apropos of lilisin's comments at 16 above, however.

The book was written immediately after WWII, and is a diary/memoir. It was not translated into English until 2008. I thought the translator did an excellent job of conveying the author's personality and the spirit of her feelings, but somehow the "French voice" seemed to be lost in the translation. To me, the French have a particular way of expressing themselves that was not there.

I also read Every Man Dies Alone by Hans Fallada.( for some reason the touchstones don't like this title). I can't make a comment on the translation but I will be able to do a bit of comparison as I have another of Fallada's books by a different translator.

>23 LisaCurcio:
snip >>To me, the French have a particular way of expressing themselves that was not there.

SOme linguists say the way the French express themselves is tied up in their language, so any translation is an approximation only.

One of the most remarkable works of translation I read this past year (or anytime) was Berlin Alexanderplatz by Alfred Döblin and translated by Eugene Jolas. The reason I say it is remarkable is because the novel contains, worked into the prose, many ditties of various sorts, from military marching rhymes to ones that seem to be of the protagonist's creation, and the English translation captures their ditty-ish nature and rhymes so naturally that it took me a while to realize that they must have had a comparable rhyme and rhythm in German and that the translator recreated this in English.

Sorry to have been away. Believe it or not, while editing the group's page, I accidental hit the button 'leave this group' and knocked myself out of the group I started! ha ha! However, the problem is that I can edit the group now but not rejoin, so while I wait for the powers-that-be to fix the problem, I am here (and reading) as my alter ego.

>26 rebeccanyc: But don't you wonder how far they had to go from the origin words to get the text to also rhyme in English?

I'm now reading Lituma dans les Andes (spanish: Lituma en los Andes/english: Death in the Andes) by Mario Vargas Llosa. He writes in Peruvian Spanish but I'm reading the book in French translated by Albert Bensoussan.

The translation is excellent. As I've mentioned before I love French translations because they are just spot on and since Spanish and French are so similar, it's a lot easier I feel to get a good translation. Plus there is a huge market in France for translations so there really is a huge budget dedicated to it.

I have read Llosa in the original Spanish as well (I read Pantaleon y las visitadoras) so I know what his style is and this translation does really well. It's really good about keeping Peruvian words in the text when needed and letting us know, for example, with the French tourists in the book, what words were originally in French in the original Spanish book.

Anyway, I'm only on chapter 3 (out of 10) but it's quite good so far. Llosa is always full of intrigue!

- 22,
Avaland, I do remember that conversation. Expletives are difficult to translate, I agree. I think for romance languages (going from French to Spanish for example) you could translate the words. For Japanese say to English you might want to use the original. But at the same time, by not translating the words you'd be losing some of your audience. But then, as you mention, translating them as best as possible might still fail to be a match thus making your characters seem, well, out of character. I mean, think of all the weird words we've created in English: phat, dope, f*ing A. Some languages will have difficulty conveying those expressions with an equivalent word.

23 -
To me, the French have a particular way of expressing themselves that was not there.

25 -
Some linguists say the way the French express themselves is tied up in their language, so any translation is an approximation only.

Yes, the French have a particular way of expressing themselves. And yes, even the best translations of that will be an approximation only. But that is true of any language. I wonder what they mean by "tied up in their language" though. I'm not too sure what is being inferred there.

This is making me curious though to read some American books in French. It'd be interesting for example to see what is done with Cormac Mc Carthy's work.

I managed to find a book in Mt TBR which I think was perfect for this discussion: In Search Of A Lost Ladino by Marcel Cohen.

For those who don't know, Ladino is a sort of Sephardi equivalent of Yiddish - a language based on Spanish, with an admixture of words from Turkish, Hebrew and assorted European languages, which trace the movements of the Ladino-speaking community. I became interested in Ladino after going to a concert by a singer called Mor Karbasi, who sings in Ladino, Arabic, Spanish, Hebrew and other languages that represent her ancestry. As I type this I'm listening to an album by another singer with similar influences, Yasmin Levy.

Ladino is similar to Spanish, as you can see from the opening paragraph (the book is a bilingual edition):

Karo Antonio, Kyero eskrivirte en djudyo antes ke no keda nada del avlar de mis padres. No saves, Antonio, lo ke es morirse en su lingua. Es komo kedarse soliko en el silensyo kada dya ke Dyo da, komo ser sikileoso sin saver porke.

Dear Antonio, I'd like to write to you in Djudyo before the language of my ancestors is completely extinguished. You can't imagine, Antonio, what the death agony of a language is like. You seem to discover yourself alone, in silence. You're sikileoso without knowing why.

Spanish speakers might spot some differences in the two texts - the omission of "kada dya ke Dyo da" (every day that God sends), a difference in register. This is because the translation into English was done from Cohen's own translation of the book into French. The differences there may be due to the fact that Cohen has never been much of a speaker of Ladino, although he understood it when his family elders spoke it, and so the Ladino language is simpler and (according to the translator's introduction) contains a fair few errors. He usually writes in French, and perhaps this explains the more sophisticated register - he couldn't keep the simple tone of the original.

Additionally, when Cohen translated the book into French, he left untranslated the words of non-Spanish origin. This might be because the book was originally published in Spain, and therefore the way the book was translated into French tried to represent for the French reader the same experience that the Spanish reader would have had. It might also be a way of demonstrating the way that the language adopted new words as the community moved across Europe - leaving Spain in 1492 for Salonica, and gradually scattering further. A glossary at the back of the book tells us that 'sikileoso' is of Turkish origin and means 'anxious, oppressed'.

The book itself (which is very short) is in large part an elegy to the language, mourning its decline and coming death and celebrating what the language brings - childhood memories for the author, and an encapsulated history of the community of Ladino speakers. The community flourished under the Ottoman empire: "in the seventeenth century, envoys from proud Louis XIV had to learn Djudyo to do business in Greece and Turkey; that the first books printed in the Ottoman Empire were in Ladino". But the book also mentions the 54,000 speakers of Ladino who died in Auschwitz. Cohen suggests that Ladino is now, for the most part, an academic interest rather than a living language.

A lot of the book is about the vividness with which the language calls up the community - one section is a list of Ladino expressions: "when someone's getting upset over nothing: 'The fish is still in the sea but the oil has to be heated?' ... When someone had waited in vain: "He inherited a cucumber's ass'."

Cohen also discusses the inherent impossibilities of translation. "Do you remember what Kafka said about the German language? He explained that his mother would never be a mutter because she had nothing in common with Teutonic mothers. This is why Kafka felt he was totally incapable of evoking his mother in his writings. That's my case exactly. My madre wasn't a mère, nor was my nona a grandmother. Between the madre, or mama, of the Sephardim and the French mère, between all the sweetness of a nona or a vava and that of a grand-mère, are five centuries of life in the Ottoman Empire that sink into the unsayable."

A very interesting book for anyone interested in languages, or in the lost communities of Istanbul and Salonica that Cohen describes.

What a wonderful description of your book, wandering_star!

Cohen suggests that Ladino is now, for the most part, an academic interest rather than a living language.

On a trip to Israel in 1980, my husband (a native of El Salvador who spoke Spanish and English) communicated with my aunt* (a native of Yugoslavia who spoke Serbo-Croatian, Hebrew, and Ladino) perfectly well with both using the Spanish-based languages. I then got to hear Ladino as a "live" language. This aunt died a few years ago. Although not used much as a spoken language any more, it is still possible to hear Ladino used in some terrific recorded or live music, as noted above by wandering_star.

*ETA: My aunt did have family from Salonica (Greece).

I love Mor Korbasi's music, as well as performances I have heard of medieval Ladino music, and I like to geek out about language (to the extent that I'm able, as a non-linguist). That book is going straight onto my wishlist. Thank you for such an informative review, wandering_star. :)

As I said on your own thread, I am definitely looking for this one!

For Essa and all other language geeks, you might be interested in this from the Economist - just what is it that makes a language difficult? - http://www.economist.com/world/international/displaystory.cfm?story_id=15108609.

I've just finished A Pigeon and a Boy by Meir Shalev, translated from Hebrew into English by Evan Fallenberg. I don't have many comments on the translation, except that it was beautifully written in English. There were a couple of jokes and plays on words that had me wondering how closely Fallenberg had stuck to the original.3

This book won Israel's Brenner Prize for fiction. Its author is internationally acclaimed but I'd never heard of him till I found this book at the library with a "Reader's Choice" sticker. The first 50-100 pages were slow going, but the beautiful writing and the detailed characterisation kept me from sending it back.

A Pigeon and a Boy is a double love story. Yair Mendelsohn is a tour guide who takes bird-watchers around Israel. He tells his life story, set in present-day Jerusalem and Tel Aviv. He's unhappily married to Liora. Yair's Dad (called Yordad - the first of several jokes) was a pediatrician, and he features prominently. Yair was very close to his mother, and a lot of the book is told to her. Then there's Ben, his brother, his wife and their twin boys, and the Meshulam family. By the end of the book, it's as if you've met them all. Yair's mother gives him money when she is very sick and old, and tells him to build a house for himself. Eventually, he does, and there are some very funny scenes that reminded me of an un-schmaltzy Under the Tuscan Sun. The second story, also narrated by Yair, is about the Baby, a pigeon handler who lived on a kibbutz and fought in the 1948 war with Egypt, and the Girl, a pigeon handler at the zoo in Tel Aviv. I learnt lots about homing pigeons, and birds. There was a bit of magical realism, which usually makes me close a book at once, but luckily it was near the end and it was almost believable...

Shalev's characters are really well developed, all of them. There was a lot of Israel in the book, and I loved that - lots of detail about how it had changed from the first kibbutzes until now, but no overt politics. Shalev writes a weekly column for one of the Israeli papers, and I might have a look. I'll definitely be looking for his other books, especially The Blue Mountain.

30, wanderingstar -
Thank you so much for that fantastic review and thoughts! This is the first time that I will actually be buying a book I've never heard of based on an LT recommendation. Fantastic. I will also be purchasing this for my father who has a PhD in linguistics and is fascinated by this type of stuff.

I'd like to hear what Ladrino sounds like as I read the exerpts you gave me with a Spanish accent. Kind of like when I try to read medieval French. I just read it as if it were modern.

I'm not reading a translated book this month, but I have this to contribute . . .

This past summer I bought To Kill a Mockingbird in Italy for my mother-in-law back here in Canada (she doesn't read English). The title in Italian is Il Buio Oltre La Siepe, which translates word-for-word as "the Dark Over the Hedge." I thought that was interesting, but it's been so long since I've read the book that I'm not sure if it fits. I wonder why they would change it so much.

I just finished Hypothermia by Arnaldur Indridason, translated by Victoria Cribb from Icelandic to English. It's a great mystery series, and the feel of Iceland really comes through. Cribb helped translate the last book in the series along with Bernard Scudder, who died during that book's translation. He had translated the previous 4 books.

The only issue I had was that Cribb must be British, because there were words like 'boot' for trunk, and 'lorry' for truck. It just struck me as odd, because, depending on where you live, the word chosen for a large vehicle that transports large items or the area behind a car used for storage depends on slang or usage.

Nickelini, I think that is a great title for the book. If you'll remember, there was the neighbor the children were afraid of, as well as the racially motivated rape trial that was the focus of the story. It is always interesting to me how titles are translated. Thanks for that one.

>38 raidergirl3: I also read Hypothermia recently but didn't see the note on Scudder's death. Thanks for that piece of information, raidergirl13.

>37 Nickelini: that is intriguing!

> 39 avaland, it was in Arctic Chill that both Cribb and Scudder were listed as translators, and Indridason dedicated the book to Scudder. I thought that spoke well of their relationship. Hypothermia was strictly Cribb.

>19 vpfluke: vpfluke Received After Babel through inter-library loan just before Christmas. Thanks for your recommendation. It looks excellent. I found helpful the insight of the first few chapters that all reading, especially of historical texts, is translation. I'm looking forward to the next chapters.

After Babel turned out to be thought-provoking. Steiner asks how can we translate if we do not understand what language is? My review is at http://www.blognow.com.au/twitham/214637/The_joys_of_Babel.html

Re reading historical texts as translation, one might say that not only is the past a foreign country but many of them. I am embarassed to say I have yet to read After Babel. I will.

Re. the premise of two types of books, Translation or Translations (translated books vs books on translation) excludes the middle, where you will find most of the books I have written. To get a good grasp of what translation between exotic tongues means, nothing substitutes for examples of translation thoroughly explained.

Sorry I missed the group in December. All my books are 100% readable at Google, but I am afraid I have not yet sent in the pdf of the sole exception that is mostly on translation, Orientalism and Occidentalism (actually "and" is an ampersand and the subtitle: Is the Mistranslation of Culture Inevitable?). It was sent in for scanning years ago and is, as a result, a bit harder to make out.

Please take a look at them. The penultimate one A Dolphin In the Woods includes discussion of other books that lie in the middle area as they are collections of multiple translations.

# 43

Your blog review of After Babel was quite good, and after reading the one you have on LT, I am wondering whether I shouldn't buy a new copy to get some of the additional text, and reread it. I actually read the book sometime in the 1980's. This is certainly Steiner's best book from my point of view.

#39, Based on wandering_star's wonderful review of In Search of a Lost Ladino, I've just read it and have nothing to add to that review, except to say that I found the use of the untranslated words fascinating.

I missed this thread completely back in December and suspect no one will read this now, but here goes anyway.

Rebeccanyc's comment in #26 re ditty translation from German to English brings to mind my translating experience.

I have translated some of the work of the great Russian poet Esenin into English. My Russian is sketchy at best, but I worked with Czech translations. Czech is of course a part of the same family of languages as Russian. Seeing Esenin's work in Russian and Czech side by side, I was jealous of the task the Czech translator had: the rhythms and rhymes often worked the same way in Czech because the words were the same or very similar. Translating them into English, this bond of course had to be broken.

And contributing to the discussion of expletives and slang translation, in my own writing, in scenes set in Slovakia, I will of course have the original Slovak place names, but frequently will also use the original Slovak expletive without translating it into English, trusting the English speaker will get enough of the gist from context.