More on translated crime

I think this article has been around for a while, but a botched link prevented me from getting to it sooner. It's in Crime Time, and it offers more thoughts on translated crime fiction, this time from Natasha Cooper. She finds awkwardness in the English translation of Andrea Camilleri's dialogue, and she praises the English version of The Seville Communion by Arturo Pérez-Reverte. (She calls the author Antonio Perez Reverte -- an especially bad mistake, since Cooper in the same piece singles out a copy editor for criticism.)

Cooper is sensitive to the difficulties a translator faces in capturing a work's emotional tone, and she singles out the translation of Jose Carlos Somoza's The Athenian Murders for praise (though she calls him Juan Carlos Somoza. She must have a mental block against Spanish first names. Either that, or Crime Time's site is being hacked.) That translation, she says, "works particularly well because [the novel] is actually about translation."

I would suggest that Mike Mitchell is at least as good as the translators Cooper fails to name. His fine English versions of Friedrich Glauser's novels for Bitter Lemon Press come up with ingenious and relatively unobtrusive renderings of Glauser's subtle use of German dialects.

© Peter Rozovsky 2007

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Crime fiction in translation