While looking for a copy of Jules Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, I discovered that most of the English versions of his book are based on a botched translation by Mercier Lewis, which contains many errors and deleted substantial amounts of the text. Many of Verne’s other works are reported to have suffered badly in translation.
See:
Is this sort of thing common? Are there other famous books that have been mangled by poor translations?
I’m not sure if it counts as famous, but I read (and loved) The Second Martian Invasion by the Akadi & Boris Strugatski, the Russian sf writers. I’ve re-read it sevaral times.
Several years ago I discovered another translation (called The Second Invasion from Mars this time) and it plodded. The spirit seemed to have been sucked out of the story… It wasn’t actually wrong, it was just lifeless.
I’ve also found reading some translated works by Calvino and Borges that some of their work seems to suffer from the same effect; sometimes what you’re reading doesn’t feel right and, on checking, you find it’s a different translator.
Get yourself a copy of The Annotated Jules Verne by Walter James Miller to see just how bad it was – Miller points out many of Lewis Mercier/Mercier Lewis (amazingly, he went by both names) howlers. “The disagreeable country of North Dakota” is how he translated “The Dakota Badlands”, for instance. But Lewis/Mercier also cut out huge portions of Verne because he disagreed with the politics, in the process cutting out a lot of the plot and science as well. Miller eventually published his own translation of 20,000 Leagues. He also did The Annotated From The Earth to the Moon, which was just as abused. IIRC, Mercier/Lewis cut out almost a third of that book.
Lewis Mercier wasn’t alone – he’s believed to have had apprentice translators working for him who were responsible for much of the botching. And there were translator unaffiliated with him who screwed things up as well – I read an edition of From the Earth to the Moon (I think Miller mentions this translator in his annotated edition) back when I was in grammar school who utterly ruibed the book.
It’s still going on. I came across a Verne site a while back that listed the errors and deletions in translations of Verne. Most books published since about 1960 are retty good and accurate, but even the Ace edition of “The Demon of Cawnpore” actually deletes an entire chapter because it dealt with the political history of India (Verne didn’t approve of a lot of Britain’s colonial actions), and that was in an I.O. Evans translation. Evans explained that it “wasn’t of interest”, but it’s actually important in explaining the actions of the villain. (I have the deleted chapter in another translation – pre-1960, interestingly).
I don’t know any other autrhor who’s been quite as badly mangled as Verne. I understand that Philip Jose Farmer extensively rewrote what was supposed to be a translation of some French author’s work (IIRC, it was a Verne-era piece), but I don’t know anything much about that. My translation of Kurd Lasswitz’ Two Planets (“Auf Zwei Planete”) is highly abridged, and no other translation of this highly influential work is available in English, but that’s not quite the same as mangling.
Robert Graves’ translations of the memoirs of the emperor Claudius.
It’s bad enough that all the Romans talk like stereotypical upper-class Englishmen, using early twentieth century slang, and that he uses modern place names (*France * instead of Gallia?), but then he calls the Roman legions *regiments * and their commanders *colonels * and tops it all off by using an African name for a Celtic weapon. You’d think the man had little, if any, actual knowledge of the ancient world.
What?
There’s a famous mistranslation (OK, famous for French/English translators) in the book The Tin Flute by Gabrielle Roy. In the original (called Bonheur d’occasion), the author wrote “la poudrerie explose”. “Poudrerie” is a Québécois term for powdery snow, and the phrase is supposed to allude to a blast of blowing snow one of the characters feels stepping outside alone on a cold winter’s night.
Translating it as “the powder box exploded” kind of ruined the scene. :rolleyes:
Hah! I’ve found the Philip Jose Farmer “translation”. It’s Ironcastle from 1976. It’s supposed to be a liberal translation of J.H. Rosny’s aine’s* 1922 book L’entonnant voyage de Hareton Ironcastle (“The Astonishing Journey of Harelton Ironcastle”) , but it’s substantially rewritten, more than Farmer hints, I understand (I haven’t read it. Or seen it in 30 years). The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction says it’s “so dramatically modified that it cannot be regarded as the same work.”
Real name: Joseph-Henri Boex, with an umlaut over that final “e”)