This is going back a long way. I think Horace’s poems were quite good.
Digressing a bit: we had four books each for French and German A Level, and the French choice (it depended on what board you did A Levels for) was greatly superior: Beaumarchais, Mariage de Figaro; Gide, La Porte Étroite; Mauriac, Le noeud de vipères; hm, can’t remember what else. German: Goethe, Götz von Berlichingen; Schiller, Wilhelm Tell (those are the least interesting Goethe and Schiller plays I can think of); Bergengruen, can’t remember which Novelle – maybe it was Die Feuerprobe; can’t remember the fourth. I know the first book I ever succeeded in reading in German, after O Levels, when we were allowed to choose a book from a mixed box, was Ricarda Huch, Der letzte Sommer, which was ideal for a first read in what seemed a difficult language at the time.

Breon Mitchell has won the Schlegel–Tieck Prize for translation from German for his new version of The Tin Drum by Günter Grass. The TLS:

Günter Grass’s first novel, Die Blechtrommel, was published in 1959 and Ralph Manheim’s translation of it in 1962. In 2005, Grass invited his new translators on a tour of the city of Gdańsk, where (as Danzig) the novel is set. According to Breon Mitchell, who wins this year’s Schlegel-Tieck for his new version of The Tin Drum (582pp. Harvill Secker. £20. 978 1 846 55317 2), “on that summer day in Gdańsk, translators both old and new had gathered once again with a special goal in mind – new translations to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of Die Blechtrommel”. While paying proper homage to Manheim, Mitchell points out that “each sentence in the new Tin Drum now faithfully replicates the length of the sentence in Grass’s original text, and no sentences are broken up or deliberately shortened”. Eschewing the smoothing out which some translators are prone to (perhaps for fear of appearing too literal), Mitchell singles out an example of his method: “He was also the Formella brothers’ boss, and was pleased, as we were pleased, to meet us, to meet him” (Manheim: “He was also the Formella brothers’ boss and was glad to make our acquaintance, just as we were glad to make his”). As Mitchell says, he has “sometimes placed the sound and rhythm of a sentence above normal syntax and grammar”, while honouring a “syntactic complexity that stretches language”. The results will certainly have met with Grass’s approval. Mitchell also provides an extensive glossary.

So what was the original German?

Auch war er der Chef der Formella-Brüder und freute sich, wie wir uns freuten, uns kennengelernt, ihn kennengelernt zu haben.

Fair enough. I found that on scribd and wonder how long it will be up there.

A recent entry in Susan Bernofsky’s weblog Translationista pointed out that Oliver Pötzsch’s Die Henkerstochter, translated into English as The Hangman’s Daughter, is doing very well. It hadn’t even made my radar, but apparently it’s ‘popular literature’! That reminds me of Frank Schätzing’s Der Schwarm, which did really well as The Swarm (and I even read two-thirds of it in German, but I felt it departing from sense after that).

Bernofsky also mentions the great success of Stieg Larsson books, and the fact that to look at amazon’s website, you wouldn’t think they were translations, because the translator isn’t named. From that she mentions the translator, Reg Keeland, an American, who has a weblog on translation. Reg Keeland is not his real name (he’s Steven Murray), but he was so disgusted at the UK-ification of his translation, done with no time for him to react before publication, that he changed his name for the books:

The printed version of the books was edited in the UK, and the US publisher didn’t do a lot of editing to them, I don’t think. Can’t say exactly because I haven’t read them since I finished translating in 2006. Watch out for: dogsbody, exiguous, gallimaufry, anon, forsooth, and other such British interpolations in my originally American translation! And I sure wouldn’t say “get ahold of” unless I was writing some rural Appalachian story…

This sounds worse than what the Americans did to A.S. Byatt, forsooth!

This is an odd question. It must refer to large and difficult books one expects to be rewarding. I think perhaps Blackstone’s Commentaries, although I’ve read a little bit. Here they are online. But ‘always’? I can’t have wanted to read them much before 1976. But I think memory has drawn a veil over the rest.

Charlie Bavington has a translation blog called A Pragmatic Eye, which I seem to have missed till now.

A few links to make up for not posting:

Supreme Court blogs

The UKSC Blog has a post on other supreme court blogs in other countries, in particular Ex Tempore in Ireland:

“Ex Tempore” is a lawyers’ latin term meaning, roughly, “at the time.” Unusually for a Supreme Court, the Irish Supreme Court resolves a large proportion of its cases ex tempore, by issuing its decision orally at the conclusion of the argument, without issuing a written judgment. The name “Ex Tempore” also captures the strengths and limits of any blog that covers a working Court: the blog posts are timely and off-the-cuff.

Also Strasbourg Observers, a project of Ghent University to observe the European Court of Human Rights. There’s also an ECJ blog, and of course the SCOTUSblog. Court artist was also new to me, as was The Court (Canada).

North American English dialects

Rick Aschmann has developed a site where he collects YouTube videos and locates their pronunciation on a map. About himself he writes:

I am a professional linguist and a Christian missionary, working in indigenous Amerindian languages. My work has nothing to do with English, so that is why this project is just a hobby.

A few readers have asked where I am from, and what dialect I speak. Actually, I am the total opposite of the kind of people I am looking for for the sound samples on my map: They have each been born and raised in one specific place in the U.S. or Canada. I was born in Mexico City, the son of Christian missionaries, and moved back and forth between Mexico and various places in the U.S. throughout my childhood, spending most of my time in the U.S. in the Oklahoma City area. My parents met in Mexico.

Agony aunt on relationships with German men

Jill Sommer recently had an entry on her blog – it’s the latest one today – I gather it will be deleted in a week’s time, so this link may be dead. The entry was posted in June 2008, and the comments have developed into an exchange between mainly American women who can’t understand the signals German men are sending or not sending, with Jill taking the role of the agony aunt. One of them refers to her ‘joining the forum’, so I suppose they have little idea of the main topic of the blog. I can’t offer any advice on this subject myself, even though the locals believe the only reason a British woman would move to Franconia would be to marry a German (they don’t regard this as an insult, I mean the fact that marriage dictates one’s life).