Comentarii de Inepto Puero, translated by Daniel B. Gallagher, the curator of the Pope’s own Latin language Twitter feed.
When something like Harry Potter or The Hobbit appear in Latin translation, someone will inevitably suggest that it will be a fun way to learn Latin. Well… I always hope so, but usually I find that you need to be pretty well into learning Latin before such works are accessible enough to be useful to the autodidact. It will also be said that such a book will provide light, pleasurable reading to the experienced Latinist. Terrific, and I do in fact enjoy reading such stuff. But, in addition to the issues with which translation itself is fraught in general, the history and culture around the Latin language carries its own baggage which complicates any attempt to provide escapist reading in Latin.
I’ve been collecting such works for a few years now, so I have a catalogue of things I like to see in a Latin translation. Comentarii de Inepto Puero is satisfying by many of those metrics. It’s readable enough that an experienced reader of Latin can take pleasure from it with only occasional recourse to dictionaries or other reference sources. It is amenable to building reading experience either by the autodidact or by an instructor willing to put time into prepping supplementary materials. The Latīnitās does not needlessly expose itself to the wolf pack harrying of purists. It works from native Latin idioms wherever possible, minimizing the need to be familiar with the original language and culture and also giving a reader a chance to learn those Latin idioms through examples of usage. And I would say that the translator created a credible Latin version of the aggrieved adolescent voice of the protagonist and the humorous tone that supervenes his unreliable narration.
I don’t mean to suggest that the character is lying to the reader. It’s just that he himself doesn’t understand what a little shit he can be, but the reader does. And that layer of irony comes across in translation. It’s a funny story, well re-told in Latin and has already become my favorite read of all the Latin translations in my collection.
I’d love to get into a discussion of particular points of the translation, and to the accounting the translator gives for some of his choices in the American printing of the book (missing from the earlier European printing). On reading, I thought it was odd that Gallagher decided to translate the name of the story The Wizard of Oz differently from the previous translators of the entire book, Hinke and Van Buren. But in the appendix to the American printing, he does say that someone made him aware of that translation and he drew translations of names of characters from that source. This astonished me because I had assumed, based I now realize on nothing, that the field of translation-into-Latin was a web of intertextuality with everyone involved familiar with and responding to what came before them. I took a couple of courses on translation, and there I got a peek into a world in which translators are fascinated by the work of other translators, and they get together and talk shop about theories, methods and striking examples of translation. Translations-into-Latin, on the other hand, may well be a series of one-off side projects with little sense among participants that they are involved in a common enterprise.