Miss Herbert and Translation
A.S. Byatt Adam Thirwell’s Miss Herbert in the Financial Times:
Miss Herbert is a thoughtful, and frequently hilarious, study of the nature of literary translation. It is also a work of art, a new form. Juliet Herbert was the English governess of Flaubert鈥檚 niece, Caroline. She wrote a translation of Madame Bovary, which Flaubert approved, and which has disappeared, unread. This ghost is a central character in a tale of conversations between writers, languages and forms.
Flaubert鈥檚 carefully wrought style, his 鈥渕ania for sentences鈥, makes him in one sense untranslatable. The same could be argued of James Joyce鈥檚 layered wordplay, local detail and complicated rhythms. Novelist Adam Thirlwell, the author of Politics, discusses the tension between literal translation of words and attempts to translate a 鈥渟tyle鈥. He argues that 鈥 always with some slippage or accidents 鈥 styles can be translated and transmitted. He has a cosmopolitan taste in novels, and describes his own canon, ranging from Cervantes to Machado de Assis, from Italo Svevo who was taught English by Joyce, to Witold Gombrowicz and Bohumil Hrabal.
It sounds like a really interesting book. Politics was published by HarperCollins/Fourth Estate in the US, but I doubt that they’ll be picking up this one. I wonder if anyone here will (or already has)?
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