Crimefest 2015: All hail Bartlett
(Here's Bartlett discussing his work. And here is a series of Detectives Beyond Borders interviews in which translators of crime fiction talk about their work.)
One edition of Cold Hearts carries a declaration by Jo Nesbø, another author translated from Norwegian into English by Bartlett, that Staalesen is "a Norwegian Chandler." The novel's early pages suggest that the comparison is a good deal less fatuous than such comparisons tend to be. Those pages are rife with wry humor and romanticism that might not have reminded me of Chandler had I not been prodded (this is no mere Chandler parody to pastiche, that is). But having read Nesbø's testimonial, I can well understand why he said what he did.
© Peter Rozovsky 2015
Labels: Crimefest, Crimefest 2015, Don Bartlett, Gunnar Staalesen, translation, translators
posted by Peter Rozovsky at 3:06 PM
3 Comments:
You make the case for "the fluency of its English rendering" when commenting upon translated works, and I suppose that matters more than faithfulness to the original; however, the real delicate balance seems to combine both qualities. In your opinion, whose work has been best translated into English in the past few decades. As for me, I am partial to Indridason's novels. Camilleri's also deserve special recognition.
I am inclined to agree. Sartareli's translations of Camilleri have been the subject of an academic study in Italy, and the man is a poet, so you know he is sensitive to the flow of words. (He is among the translators I interviewed. You can find the interview, and others, by clicking the appropriate link in the body of the post.)
I know, too, that Arnaldur's English translator, Bernard Scudder, was much mourned by at least one of his authors when he died in 2007.
A good literary translation should read so well that the reader is unconscious of reading a work in a language other than the one in which it is written. That may be one reason I appreciate good translations only after I've read less-good ones.
Here's a post I made some time back about a bad translation: http://detectivesbeyondborders.blogspot.com/2012/05/fact-that-or-is-it-possible-to-be-good.html
I should emphasize that "bad" refers to the translation's literary quality rather than its fidelity to the original. I'm not qualified to judge the latter.
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