My attention has been directed (thanks, Trevor) to an entry in a Guardian Unlimited blog by Lee Rourke, headed ‘What goes into a great translation?‘ and dealing with Michael Hofmann’s new translations of Kafka.

The difference is noticeable from the very first line, so immediate are Hofmann’s translations. For instance, and to use Kafka’s most famous opening sentence, here’s Hofmann’s offering:
“When Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from troubled dreams, he found himself changed into a monstrous cockroach in his bed.”
Compare this to any previous translation, and you’ll see, for a start, that there is no dilly-dallying with style; the prose is swift, direct and without obfuscation, as, one presumes, Kafka intended.

Now a new translation every couple of decades may be a good idea, but the way this is phrased does tend to throw a ripple through one’s BS detectors. Kafka writes a plain sentence – were those other translators so wide of the mark? And the praise of the term cockroach also seems misplaced.

It is the word “cockroach” that tickles me the most. At first it seems incongruous (as pointed out in Nicholas Lezard’s recent Guardian review). But it is clever. In the original Prague-German, Kafka uses the word “ungeziefer” which literally translates as “vermin”. Kafka wanted to denote the marginalised, detested individual. Hofmann could have used the word “vermin” but, though still denoting something to be looked down upon, it would have taken us away from the crucial image of the insect (although it is interesting to note that when Kafka contemplated his story being illustrated he envisaged a picture of a man lying in the bed and not an insect). So Hofmann uses the word “cockroach”, the duality of which is unmissable. A brilliant stroke.

Hmph. It’s a problem for the translator that Ungeziefer is rather unspecific and leaves the reader to create an image. But the later behaviour of the insect implies it can eat some things that Gregor turned his nose up a couple of days earlier, but other things it can’t eat, whereas a cockroach could presumably eat anything. It has the sense of vermin, but not the sense of vulnerability. Beetle or bug would make more sense.

So this entry has produced some great comments, starting with Killigan:

“as, one presumes, Kafka intended” … That “one presumes” kind of undercuts the grand evaluative pronouncements on the quality of the translation. Have you read him in German?
“It is, most importantly, Kafkaesque.” Was Kafka’s writing Kafkaesque in the first place? That adjective means something along the lines of “nightmarish, alienated, dark”, a reduction or distortion which completely overlooks the matter of Kafka’s style or non-style, which is what you would have it refer to.
“Particles”, and especially “the very particles”, sounds suspiciously like literary pretension itself. What charlatan said that? Deleuze, perchance?

I love the ‘Kafkaesque’ remark. Can I manage to be Marksesque?

Killigan quotes Nabokov on the cockroach question in great detail. Rourke replies somewhat lamely, ‘I have read this story many times; it was never Kafka’s intention for the reader to take this tale literally (you know that).’ If literalness doesn’t matter, why don’t we translate it as a spider, then? Cockroach shmockroach.

I can’t say anything about Hofmann’s translation, but there are a number of the less famous renderings of the first sentence here. And although one may quibble (vermin isn’t countable in my English [actually, it’s a collective plural – see comments]), none of them look as if they greatly embroidered the text.

As for the rest of Kafka’s work, which Hofmann has apparently also translated, it should be of interest that the Muirs, for instance, did not have the original text at hand. I remember hearing that Malcolm Pasley gave a talk on Kafka – in the 1950s – and afterwards a woman came up to him and said she had a suitcase of Kafka manuscripts in the attic. Which Pasley published, and it made him. In Wikipedia, scroll down to Publications and dates. And it says of the translations:

After Pasley and Schillemeit completed their recompilation of the German text, the new translations were completed and published — The Castle, Critical by Mark Harman (Schocken Books, 1998), The Trial, Critical by Breon Mitchell (Schocken Books, 1998) and Amerika: The Man Who Disappeared by Michael Hoffman (New Directions Publishing, 2004). These editions are often noted as being based on the restored text.

That’s where Hofmann is interesting, when he translates the pre- or post-Brod versions of The Trial, The Castle and America.

Trevor found this via Conversational Reading, which has had a couple of interviews of literary translators this month and will be having more.

An article by Jan Keuchel in Handelsblatt, Frau Thiemes Gespür für Sprache, describes the role of Stephanie Thieme, a lawyer who has also studied German at university level, in making German statutes easier to understand (I see from her firm’s website that she has also worked as a publisher’s editor).

Seit 2002 arbeitet die Anwältin und Germanistin im Redaktionsstab der Gesellschaft für deutsche Sprache beim Bundestag – und prüft die „sprachliche Richtigkeit und Verständlichkeit“ von Gesetzentwürfen. „Ich bin eigentlich der Stab“, sagt die zierliche Frau. Es gibt nur ihre eine Stelle.

Frau Thieme’s first degree was in German, but she studied law at the age of 37, and indeed, you probably need a German law degree for German lawyers to take you seriously (haven’t tried this).

Wer sich wie Frau Thieme mit 37 und zwei Kindern noch ans Jurastudium gewagt hat, ist aber sowieso nicht so leicht abzuschütteln. Unangenehm findet sie es allerdings, auf ihre Juristenausbildung zu verweisen, wenn sie mal wieder von einem arroganten Beamten abgebügelt wird. „Aber das hilft.“ Der Juristenrepublik, in der Juristen meist nur Juristen akzeptieren, sei Dank.

Apparently there have been 15 linguists doing this in Switzerland for 30 years now (Nießbrauch has been renamed Nutznießung, for example, although I haven’t checked the date), in contrast to one person in Germany for five years (she doesn’t directly deny that she is a ‘figleaf’).

(Via Handakte WebLAWg)

Time for another picture of the local wildlife.

This Canada goose thinks I have designs on its young, which are going through the ugly duckling stage.

I recently quoted a review of Ted Hughes’ ‘translations’ of poems from languages he did not speak.

In the latest TLS, parts of which are online but I don’t know for how long, since I receive my non-virtual copy with a few days’ delay, Robin Fulton, a Scots poet and translator of poetry from Scandinavian languages, has a letter to the editor quoting precisely the bits that irritate me. He finds questions raised about ‘how we use the word “translation”‘.

Sir, – Clive Wilmer’s review of Ted Hughes’s Selected Translations (June 1) is perceptive on many points but prompts larger questions about how we use the word “translation”. Of Pound he tells us that “In writing Cathay –- at a time when, incidentally, he knew no Chinese -– Pound discovered a mysterious process . . .”. People who translate from languages they can’’t read certainly move in mysterious ways, yet “’incidentally’” is an odd word to use here: surely it was of the essence of Pound’’s text that at that time he was unable to convey anything at all from a first-hand knowledge of Chinese?

…Of Ovid, Wilmer suggests that a “limitation in Hughes’’s art and outlook” helped him to imitate the Metamorphoses, “eliding the principle of order that unifies the poem and its vision”. It might be argued that “’eliding’” here means something more like “ignoring” or even “vandalizing” –- be that as it may, we are left wondering if the alleged limitation is a vice or a virtue in Hughes as a “translator” of Ovid.

Fulton concludes that it might be useful to use the title ‘poems inspired by other poems’ rather than ‘translations’. ‘Then we could take them or leave them and even admire them without imagining we have gained access, mysteriously or otherwise, to the worlds of the original authors.’

The Independent (and surely other papers too) has an obituary of Michael Hamburger, another poet and translator, who died on June 7. And by clicking around on the TLS site, you can find all the poems to be voted on for the current poetry competition, and an interesting article on French bread, but unfortunately not Hugo Williams’ commentary on changes in colloquial language.

Today is Prince Philip’s 86th birthday. In parts of Vanuatu he is worshipped as a god. He is the pale ancestral spirit who left to marry a powerful woman. BBC News is right that we should not make fun of these people for adapting their traditional myths to come to terms with becoming a British colony, now independent since 1980. It is unlikely they have heard of the remarks Prince Philip sometimes makes about foreigners.

A similar phenomenon is the worship of Rosamunde Pilcher in Germany. Her name has been fully Germanized: her first name is given four syllables, as in the German version of Roll out the Barrel, and her second name has acquired a non-English ch sound. This suits the regular TV dramatizations of her novels with a German cast. There’s one on tonight, but not to celebrate Prince Philip’s birthday.

LATER NOTE: the Phonetik blog has commented succinctly on this:

In den bildungsbürgerlichen Kreisen, durch deren linguistisches Interesse sich in der Regel die korrekte Lautung fremdsprachlicher Namen verbreitet, ist es verpönt, Pilcher-Bücher oder deren Verfilmungen zu kennen.

Piggy Bankrupt blogs about how he became bankrupt and how you can survive bankruptcy. You can even ask him questions, although he may not be thinking of the questions of EN>DE translators.

Bankruptcy happened to me in early 2006 and in an effort to share my experience I’ve since decided to write this blog. You will read what I experienced throughout the bankruptcy process and how credit cards, student loans and a business landed me with almost half a million pounds of debt.

LATER NOTE:

Piggy does not give bankruptcy advice and suggests you seek professional advice if considering bankruptcy.

(via Delia Venables)