the only Russian book ive ever read is “a day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich” which apparently the version I’ve read wasn’t that great and there’s better ones out there …
I tried reading an English translation of Finnegan’s Wake, but it failed to hold me. I find it much better to open the pdf and turn on text-to-speech, to create a weird atmosphere for doing stuff. That that book has been translated into other languages is almost terrifying to me. Chinese? Yikes.
If you’ve avoided reading Don Quixote because it’s translated your really missing out. One of the few classics I would highly recommend and quite possibly the most amusing book I’ve ever read
Apparently I’ve read and enjoyed more translated books than I remember reading. From this thread alone, I’ve read the Iliad, the Odyssey, the Aeniad (all in college), 100 Years of Solitude (also college), One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, a bunch of Middle English including Sir Gawaine, and a few others.
The Barsac Mission is actually by his son, Michel Verne. I learned this after I read the story, which was printed in two parts by ARCO in hardcover and Ace in paperback. I’ve only recently gotten hold of a copy of Jules Verne’s original story, The Fact-Finding Mission ( Voyage d’études) , which Verne himself did not finish. I suspect he didn’t finish it because it involves a French mission into the Congo, and when he found out the atrocities that Belgium was committing there he had no interest in continuing.
There are no “fantastic” elements in Jules Verne;s original.
When his son took the basic concepts (he re-used none of the original writing), he shifted the action to the northwest, away from the Congo, and introduced fantastic elements, including flying machines, the use of unmanned drones (called “wasps”), and a call for help using a radio transmitter (which had already happened before he wrote, but was still new). I think Michel Verne ought to get a bit more credit – he did try to use even more advanced science and technology in his stories. But he loses points for publishing his own stuff as his father’s, without proper attribution.
You can read the Jules Verne original here –
Vice, Redemption and the Distant Colony
2012
BearManor Media
Albany, GA
I have a Chinese acquaintance (native tongue Mandarin, but he also has an excellent command of English). He is a big fan of Chinese author Liu Cixin’s sci-fi trilogy Remembrance of Earth’s Past (the first of which at least is well known in the west as The Three-Body Problem), and convinced my wife and me to read them.
I thought to ask him his opinion of the translation, and he surprised me by answering that they are in his view actually quite clunky in Chinese and he prefers to read them in the English translation!
Conversely, there is an extremely popular English novel in Chinese, that is rather ordinary and unknown in the original (forgive me, I have forgotten the name). One of the things the Chinese love about the Chinese version is the beautiful / talented use of language - a credit to the translator, since the original had none of those characteristics.
Gabriel Garcia Marquez has praised the English translation of One Hundred Years of Solitude very highly. It’s definitely worth seeking out.
Some publishers are trying out using AI for translating books:
The publisher is now owned by Simon and Schuster.
Personally I find it doubtful the quality would be acceptable.
A friend of mine in the Gaelic publishing world has been complaining about this for a while. Large companies can, on the cheap, translate a book into “Gaelic,” and if they sell three copies, well, it’s worth it to them. Companies such as my friend’s which employ translators in the community have much higher costs for books, and the end-used doesn’t necessarily perceive the difference in quality, only in cost.
Maybe translation helps focus some works. Murakami mentions this in the prologue of his first novel, Hear the Wind Sing. He says that when he first wrote it, he wasn’t satisfied with the results. He translated it himself into English and then back into Japanese, which he thought improved it a lot.
Speaking of Murakami I’m now reading his A Wild Sheep Chase. One of the things mentioned in the book is a “blood cyst”. The description given sounds an awful lot like a cerebral artery aneurysm. For those who have read the book and know Japanese, does the original read as aneurysm, or did Murakami use a term that sounds just as vague in Japanese as “blood cyst” sounds in English?
A bit off topic, but you might enjoy the film of The Brothers Karamazov starring Yul Brynner as Ivan and Maria Schneider as Grushenka.
The actress from Last Tango in Paris?
Maria Schell, actually. Maria Schnieder was 6 years old when that movie came out.
By the way, as the Wikipedia article mentions, the English version is a restored “directors cut”. The earlier Chinese version was toned-down for publication.
Oops, sorry.
Also tangential, “Book of Love” was a
2022
English/Spanish
Rom-Com / Road Movie
that has been described as a love letter to Mexico,
activated by the conflict of Translation and Authorship.