{"id":287956,"date":"2011-10-31T15:46:54","date_gmt":"2011-10-31T15:46:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.wdev.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent-dev\/2011\/10\/31\/balls-of-gold\/"},"modified":"2018-04-16T16:16:52","modified_gmt":"2018-04-16T16:16:52","slug":"balls-of-gold","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/2011\/10\/31\/balls-of-gold\/","title":{"rendered":"Balls of Gold"},"content":{"rendered":"

Over at Salon,<\/a> Kevin Canfield has a nice piece about the challenges of translation and the way translators are underappreciated:<\/p>\n

\n

Gavin Bowd, the English translator for Michel Houellebecq, was working on the controversial French novelist\u2019s \u201cThe Map and the Territory\u201d \u2014 Knopf will publish the first American edition in January \u2014 when he came to a chapter about a character who\u2019d decided to commit suicide at a legal euthanasia clinic. As the book\u2019s narrator put it, the clinic\u2019s medical staff was \u201cgoing to \u2018se faire des couilles en or,\u2019\u201d Bowd recalled. \u201cLiterally: they were going to turn their balls into gold.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\n

Herein lies the translator\u2019s dilemma. Bowd\u2019s mission is stay as loyal as possible to the original text. But in this case, a strict translation would be ridiculous. \u201cI translated: they were going to make a killing\u201d in fees, Bowd added via e-mail from Scotland, where he teaches French at the University of St. Andrews. \u201cIn the context, I prefer that.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\n

These are the kind of decisions that translators make on a line-by-line basis. Readers don\u2019t notice these artful adjustments, but their enjoyment of literature in translation is dependent upon them. But even as the American appetite for foreign fiction \u2014 Stieg Larsson\u2019s \u201cMillennium trilogy\u201d remains a bestseller, Haruki Murakami\u2019s just-published \u201c1Q84\u201d is a huge hit, and the months ahead will bring big new English editions from international stars like Umberto Eco, Roberto Bola\u00f1o and Peter Nadas \u2014 the translators of these works typically labor in anonymity. Some even crave it.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

For long-time readers of this or similar blogs, a lot of this—especially the litany of gripes—will sound familiar, but it’s still fun to read:<\/p>\n

\n

It\u2019s true in America, but it\u2019s even truer in Britain, that there is a kind of cloud of disapproval over translators and translations,\u201d said David Bellos, a translator of novels by Ismail Kadare and Georges Perec and the author of the new book \u201cIs That a Fish in Your Ear? Translation and the Meaning of Everything\u201d (Faber and Faber). \u201cReviews in the [Times Literary Supplement] of translated books \u2014 if they mention the translating at all, it\u2019s to disparage it. Bit by bit over the years, I\u2019ve come to realize that these are very effective devices for holding the foreign at bay. It\u2019s a way of comforting yourself: \u2018Oh well, I only read English, and I don\u2019t really have to take these books from elsewhere terribly seriously because they are only translations.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\n

Though he chuckles about it \u2014 \u201cBellyaching is part of the community, I\u2019m afraid,\u201d he said \u2014 Bellos has a good case when he says that translators deserve better. \u201cA long novel \u2014 maybe you get $10,000, in dribs and drabs. A bit on signature, a bit when you deliver the manuscript, a bit when it\u2019s published. How many of those have you got to do in a year to make that a living? More than is really conceivable to do well,\u201d he said. \u201cYou would have to translate at 90 miles an hour and not revise. Most literary translators don\u2019t want to do that, even if they could. You can\u2019t really live as a literary or book translator in the English-speaking world as a full-time job and also sleep.\u201d [. . .]<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\n

Not too long ago, Imre Goldstein completed a translation of Hungarian novelist Peter Nadas\u2019 1,100-page \u201cParallel Stories,\u201d which comes out in the U.S. in November (Farrar, Straus & Giroux). Does Goldstein believe translators are appreciated, and properly compensated, for the work they do? \u201cI do not,\u201d he said in an email from Tel Aviv.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

BTW<\/span>, you can check out part of Goldstein’s translation of Parallel Stories<\/em> by clicking here,<\/a> and can read a nice chunk of Bellos’s book here.<\/a><\/p>\n

\n<\/a>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Over at Salon, Kevin Canfield has a nice piece about the challenges of translation and the way translators are underappreciated: Gavin Bowd, the English translator for Michel Houellebecq, was working on the controversial French novelist\u2019s \u201cThe Map and the Territory\u201d \u2014 Knopf will publish the first American edition in January \u2014 when he came to […]<\/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":[43866,14806,43856,40786,1646,526,5676],"class_list":["post-287956","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","tag-david-bellow","tag-imre-goldstein","tag-kevin-canfield","tag-read-this-next","tag-review","tag-salon","tag-translation"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/287956","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=287956"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/287956\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":319926,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/287956\/revisions\/319926"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=287956"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=287956"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=287956"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}