{"id":257806,"date":"2007-11-14T15:19:03","date_gmt":"2007-11-14T15:19:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.wdev.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent-dev\/2007\/11\/14\/reviewing-reviews-of-translations\/"},"modified":"2018-04-16T17:36:10","modified_gmt":"2018-04-16T17:36:10","slug":"reviewing-reviews-of-translations","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/2007\/11\/14\/reviewing-reviews-of-translations\/","title":{"rendered":"Reviewing Reviews of Translations"},"content":{"rendered":"

As touched upon in the roundup post I did about the Reviewing Translations panel<\/a> at the Miami Book Fair International, there are a lot of issues involved when reviewing a translation. Especially related to the hows and whys of commenting on the quality of the translation. <\/p>\n

To many, one of the big problems is the reviewer’s inability to read the book in the original. Instead he\/she ends up commenting on the English only, complaining about it if it’s too odd (“stilted, awkward rendition”) or if it’s too smooth (“dumbed down for Americans”). <\/p>\n

The ability to judge the quality of a translation is something I don’t really want to get into here. Or at least not now. (There’s a big philosophical divide when it comes to this topic, not only in terms of reviewing, but editing as well.) <\/p>\n

Over the weekend though, a reader contacted me because she was upset by this post of Ben Ivry’s review<\/a> of Sverre Lyngstad’s new translation of Knut Hamsun’s Growth of the Soil.<\/i><\/p>\n

As I mentioned in the post, I haven’t had a chance to read the translation yet—though I really want to—but I did include Ben’s negative comments about the translation. <\/p>\n

Personally, I thought his “evidence”—the use of the word “patten,” of “old people\u2019s theriac,” etc.—was interesting, and a valid critique of the translation. (At least it’s clear he read the book and didn’t just use the jacket copy as his review . . .) <\/p>\n

It’s only fair to point out some of the other reviews though, all of which are much more positive about the translation, such as the comment in the New Yorker<\/i><\/a> that “Hamsun\u2019s heroic translator, splendidly captures the author\u2019s voice as he guides his large cast into the stresses of the modern age.” <\/p>\n

And Julia Keller’s evaluation in the Chicago Tribune<\/i>:<\/p>\n

\n

Thanks to the new translation by Sverre Lyngstad, Hamsun’s novel is a moving and lyrical reading experience, a poetical blend of old and new, of the lasting and the transitory, of the stillness at the world’s core.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Whether or not this is a good translation is still a matter of debate, and not really what I want to focus on. (I assume it’s pretty good with some word choices that some people might disagree with.) <\/p>\n

What’s important is that once again, these positive evaluations of the translation are only a few words long—“splendidly,” “moving and lyrical, a poetical blend”—yet as readers we put faith in the reviewer’s viewpoint, despite the fact that neither Keller nor the New Yorker<\/i> reviewer probably read Norwegian.<\/p>\n

I’m probably not the norm when it comes to this, but I like to read reviews that include information about the translation. I just think that if at all possible reviewers should implicitly or explicitly explain their evaluation criteria in their review, especially when talking about retranslations. <\/p>\n

People still disagree about the best translation of The Master and Margarita<\/i>, and it goes without stating that evaluating translations isn’t an objective science. But to make the conversation more interesting, to get people engaged with these books, and to give translators a bit more credit when it comes to evaluating the choices they made, I think it would be best to avoid one-adjective pronouncements, good or bad. <\/p>\n

(And yes, I know that I’m totally guilty of this in the Three Percent reviews I write . . .)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

As touched upon in the roundup post I did about the Reviewing Translations panel at the Miami Book Fair International, there are a lot of issues involved when reviewing a translation. Especially related to the hows and whys of commenting on the quality of the translation. To many, one of the big problems is the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":292,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[67486],"tags":[1836,7356,7346,1646,8036],"class_list":["post-257806","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","tag-cwp","tag-growth-of-the-soil","tag-knut-hamsun","tag-review","tag-reviews-of-translations"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/257806","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/292"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=257806"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/257806\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":314376,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/257806\/revisions\/314376"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=257806"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=257806"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=257806"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}