Gianrico Carofiglio, Howard Curtis, and a translator's challenge

(Games People Play)

A reader's complaint, an incautious reply, and a translator's thoughtful explanation have revived one of this blog's oldest questions: What cultural and linguistic challenges does a translator face?

The complainer objected to the name chosen for a poker game in the Gianrico Carofiglio novel translated in English as The Past is a Foreign Country:

"The fat man cut the cards and said, 'Five card stud.' He said it in the same tone of voice he'd used all evening. What he thought of as a professional tone. A good way to recognize an easy mark at a poker table is to see if they use a professional tone.

"He dealt the first card face down and the second one face up. A professional gesture, as if to prove my point."

"Who is Carofiglio kidding?" my reader objected. "There's no other way to start a game of five card stud. Playing the first card face down and second one face up wouldn't tell you jackshit about anybody."

I speculated that five-card stud might be a rough English equivalent for a game in the novel's original version whose Italian name English and American readers would not recognize, and it turned out I was right. Rather than a lapse on Carofiglio's part, I wrote, "We've uncovered some sloppy work by the translator, then."

Today the translator weighed in with a reply that made me ashamed of my flip comment. That translator is Howard Curtis, and here's what he had to say:

"Sorry I've only just seen this thread. As translator of The Past is a Foreign Country, I'd like to comment on the above remarks about my `sloppy work' on the poker aspects of the book. Not being a poker player myself, I had to do some research when translating these sections, and `five card stud' did seem to be the most accurate translation of what was being played at that point. The poker references were checked and approved by someone at the publishing house who knew about poker, and the original UK edition carried a preliminary note explaining that this was an Italian version of the game, employing a 32-card deck. I haven't seen the US edition, so I don't know if this note was reproduced."

Having written about the challenges translators face, I should have speculated about Curtis' choice rather than dismissing it. In any case, it appears this problem was difficult, if minor. The U.S. edition of the book does, indeed, offer an explanatory note, but is that enough? I'd read the novel without noticing the note.  The poker references passed muster at the publishing house, but not with a reader out there in cyberland (Ireland, actually). Could translator or publisher have chosen another way to explain the game?

I suggested that the translator might use the original Italian name a time or two in the text, perhaps with an unobtrusive explanation, and let context take care of the rest. Would that have worked? I don't know, but I am reminded once more of how bloody difficult a translator's job can be, especially if the work in question is popular fiction, where ease of reading is paramount.

***

Howard Curtis is an experienced translator from French, Italian and Spanish. Among novels discussed here at Detectives Beyond Borders, his translations include works by Carofiglio, Jean-Claude Izzo, and Caryl Férey.

© Peter Rozovsky 2011

Sian Reynolds: An interview with Fred Vargas' translator, Part II

Blogging may be lighter than usual for the next day or two. In the meantime, here's an interview from 2008 with Sian Reynolds, translator of Fred Vargas' crime novels, with a brand-new comment from another prominent translator of crime fiction.

***

In Part II of our interview, Sian Reynolds discusses the challenges of rendering colloquial French into colloquial English and her approach to a text she is about to translate. She also reveals that readers can look forward to at least one more Fred Vargas translation. (Read Part I of the interview with Sian Reynolds here.)

What is the most difficult problem you have encountered as translator?

In fiction, as already mentioned, I think it has to be dialogue. and particularly such aspects of it as dialect, extreme colloquialism, slang, expletives (of the ‘good grief’ sort) and of course puns and wordplay. You have to find convincing speakable equivalents without sounding either too fuddy-duddy or using current colloquialisms that might date. A particular problem for example, is the common French word ‘un type’ which just means ‘a man’, but the register is more the equivalent of ‘bloke, fellow, chap’ – all of which are today a bit marked as old-fashioned in English, because so many people both sides of the Atlantic now say ‘guy’. On the other hand, peppering the text with too many ‘guys’ runs the risk of making it sound like an American intrusion into otherwise British English, which is what I write. (Of course many French books are translated ‘into American’ as the French say, that is entirely into American English.)

Swearing is another potential pitfall. French colloquial speech uses a number of terms which if translated literally sound rather stronger in English (merde, je m’en fous, etc.) Given what we know about the characters, you have to save four-letter words for times when the context calls for them. The reverse can be true: French translators of say, James Kelman, have been known to tone down the language, arguing that a French equivalent of the character wouldn’t have every other word in the sentence the same f-word.

How do you approach a text you are about to translate? Do you read it through one or more times to get a sense of the work before beginning the formal job of translation? What is your primary task as a translator of fiction?

I always read the text first if it’s fiction. For non-fiction it’s not so essential – you’ll get there in the end. But much crime fiction, as you know, is constructed backwards – as a rule you move back from the discovery of a crime to what occasioned it. You need to know the end to understand the beginning. Then in the course of translating a novel, I probably read the text tens of times in both languages, always noticing more things – (sometimes minor inconsistencies that have slipped in, but are probably only noticed by me, since most readers don’t read a novel many times over.) Your task in general is to do as good a job of conveying the original as possible – but no translation is ever perfect or ‘definitive’, and no two translators will come up with the same solutions.

Translators of poetry often speak of the tension between trying to produce a faithful translation and one that will flow smoothly in its "host" language. To what extent is this tension present in translating fiction?

The biggest question in translating poetry, according to the translators I know, is whether or not to preserve the form of the poem: its metre, rhyme, line length and so on. Views differ strongly. As it happens, in the latest Vargas (This Night’s Foul Work) one character sometimes speaks in 12-syllable alexandrines, (a pastiche of Racine’s plays,) and they were the devil to translate because 12 syllables, with a break after the sixth what’s more, is not at all common in English verse; but it seemed important to keep it, because of all the text references.

On the general question of ‘readability’, all translators in my experience face the same old dilemma: ‘whether to take the reader closer to the author, or the author closer to the reader’, i.e. make it more faithful to the original, or more ‘at home’ in the target language. It’s a matter of genre in some ways. My view is that it’s important that the reader should be aware that he/she is reading a translation, and not imagine that the book was originally written in English. Hence my decisions to keep things like street names and occasional French words in the original. But Fred’s books are very readable – if quirky! – in French, and I try to get as much of that across as possible, so that reading them is (I hope) fun.

A personal note: As a non-fluent speaker and reader of French, I find it easier to read social science than fiction and easier to read the philosophes and publicists of the 18th and 19th centuries than I do Montaigne, whose work I love in English translation. Is this often the case with non-native speakers of French? If so, why (other than Montaigne's meandering sentences)?

You’re right, Montaigne is very, very hard to read in French. Sixteenth-century authors are much more difficult generally than seventeenth and eighteenth because they wrote before French grammarians had set about rationalising the language. Eighteenth-century texts are written in much clearer French. Montaigne’s vocabulary and syntax as well as his own style, make it a real challenge. There are some modern French editions which have ‘modernised’ his French to make it more comprehensible for today’s French readers – worth a look.

With the publication of This Night's Foul Work, four of Fred Vargas' books about commissaire Jean-Baptiste Adamsberg and one of three about the Three Evangelists will have been translated into English. Can readers expect more translations of Vargas into English?

You’ll have to ask the publisher that – but at least one more is in the pipeline: I have just finished translating the first Adamsberg story, originally published in 1991.

(Read Part I of the interview with Sian Reynolds here.)


© Peter Rozovsky 2008

Technorati tags:
Sian Reynolds
Fred Vargas
French crime fiction
Crime fiction in translation
translation

Will `indy' e-books kill translated fiction?

The estimable Christa Faust wonders what the rise of electronic and independent publishing will mean for translated fiction:

“If `indy' eBooks are the wave of the future, will translation and foreign editions become a thing of the past? Will each country (or each group of people who share a common language) become like a literary island, reading only their own books?”

Christa's apprehensions appear to me plausible, at least in the short term. The exacting labor of translation seems ill-suited to the supposedly liberating amateurism of electronic self- and independent publishing.

Will translators want to bring their skills to bear on a publishing model whose financial return is uncertain at best? If not, what will happen to the market for translated writing?

© Peter Rozovsky 2011

Meet the man behind crime fiction's most despicable character

Some good miscellaneous material in recent days, including this video interview that Roger Smith did with the man he says inspired the character Piper in Smith's novel Wake Up Dead.

Piper is the worst fictional human being I have met, a killer, a rapist, an utterly callous gang leader, and a perpetrator of the most despicable acts.

He does most of his fictional thing in Cape Town's Pollsmoor Prison, as close to an earthly hell as anything in crime fiction. And the man whose prison tales inspired his creation, who says he committed in real life acts as horrific as the fictional Piper's, looks and sounds like the kindliest old man you'd ever want to meet.

***

From Bob Cornwell comes word that Crime Scene: Italy is now available, following on similar comprehensive portraits of the crime fiction scenes in France, the Netherlands and Switzerland. These are thorough and compact packages, covering authors, publishers, magazines, Web sites, bookstores and history. And all are available free to view online or download as pdf files.

High fives to Cornwell and the International Association of Crime Writers. They deserve a public service award of some kind.

***

And, from Jeff VanderMeer, a proposal for funding translation of “non-realist" fiction into English — "non-realist or whatever term denotes the totality of fantasy/SF/horror/surrealism/magic realism/etc. without dividing things into the false camps of genre and literary."

© Peter Rozovsky 2010

Bouchercon II — My translation panel

This Bouchercon is set up a bit differently from the 2008 version in Baltimore, with more panel discussions in each time slot, and most taking place in smaller rooms. Four simultaneous events was the norm in Baltimore; here in Indianapolis there are six or more.

The smaller rooms meant a near-full house for my translation panel with Robert Pépin, Steven T. Murray, Tiina Nunnally and Yrsa Sigurðardóttir. I was especially pleased that the panelists asked questions of one another, which meant good give and take. Nunnally told the too-many-cooks-spoil-the-stew story that led to her removing her name from the British translation of Smilla's Sense of Snow. In this case, one of the cooks was the author.

Robert Pépin had little patience with the suggestion that translation is an art, though his description of his own practice sounded suspiciously like art to me. He was also a bit of a jambon, a lively presence who was the first of the group to comment on another panelist's reply. Happily, the rest followed suit, and we had a real discussion going that ended far too soon. Fifty-five minutes for four intelligent panelists, me, and a roomful of questions? I ask you!

Nunnally's translations include works by Karin Fossum, Mari Jungstedt Hans Christian Andersen, Knut Hamsun, Astrid Lindgren (Pippi Longstocking), and quite a few more. She has also written two mysteries whose protagonist is a translator. I hope to have more to report about the books soon.

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

Out of English, into French: A translation question

I hadn't read Michael Connelly before. Now I'm reading him in French in preparation for my panel at Bouchercon 2009.

Deuil Interdit (The Closers in the original version) brings Harry Bosch back to the Los Angeles Police Department after a three-year retirement. Among other things, I learned in the opening chapter that the French word for badge is badge.

Elsewhere, the police chief asks Harry if he had heard talk of the décret dit de consentement (roughly decree — that is, of consent) under which the department now operates. The term has the air of something the translator thought needed explaining to French readers, and I presume it means consent decree. This raises an interesting question: When translating legal and other technical terms, how does one strike a balance between fidelity to the original sense, and comprehensibility to readers in the target language?

(Michael Connelly's French translator, Robert Pépin, will be a member of my panel on crime fiction and translation at Bouchercon 2009.)

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

Stieg Larsson — debut novelist

Two of the rare measured comments I've read about The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo suggested that Stieg Larsson wrote too much like the journalist he was and that, like many another first-time novelist, he wrote long.

I liked the comments because they humanized the man behind the astonishing Larsson phenomenon. Once you start becoming the focus of conspiracy theories and notorious court cases (in Europe) and once your books start getting displayed next to volumes about Michael Jackson (in Philadelphia), calm discussion starts looking for its coat, making its excuses, and glancing nervously at the door.

So I regard with affection what I take to be traces of the first-time novelist in the first two hundred or so pages of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo. One such trace is the occasional wordiness in routine exposition. Ordinarily I don't like that sort of thing; here, it made Larsson seem more human.

But I especially liked co-protagonist Mikael Blomkvist's rants against his fellow financial journalists, and I take Blomkvist as a stand-in for Larsson. Here are two examples:

"In the last 20 years, Swedish financial journalists had developed into a group of incompetent lackeys who were puffed up with self-importance and who had no record of thinking critically."

and

"The article was written by a columnist who had previously worked for Monopoly Financial Magazine ... who cheerfully ridiculed anyone who felt passionate about any issue or who stuck their neck out. ... The writer was not known for espousing a single conviction of his own."

If that's a first-time novelist failing to separate himself from his character, so be it. Those passages are fun, and that's what reading is for.

(Stieg Larsson's English translator, Steven T. Murray [a.k.a. Reg Keeland], will be a member of my panel on crime fiction and translation at Bouchercon 2009.)

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

Merde!

Merde is the glue that holds Fred Vargas' three evangelists together:

"Ils cherchaient. Un autre fou dans la merde."

and

"Dans la merde" demanda-t-il?"

"Précisément. ... Ennui, désillusion, écriture en solitude."

"Mais alors il est dans la merde ... Tu ne pouvais pas la dire tout de suite?"

and

"(L)es trois chercheurs de merde se retrouvèrent tassés autour d'un grand feu."

and

"Ils sont bien emmerdés les médiévistes avec ça."

Marc, Matthias and Lucien, the three "evangelists" of the novel's English title, come together because all are in merde. Too bad that merde, or rather its English equivalent, is frowned upon in American publications. But even then, shit is both far harsher in tone and far narrower in meaning than merde.

Siân Reynolds, who translated Vargas' Debout les morts into English as The Three Evangelists, told Detectives Beyond Borders last year that:

"Swearing is another potential pitfall. French colloquial speech uses a number of terms which if translated literally sound rather stronger in English (merde, je m’en fous, etc.) Given what we know about the characters, you have to save four-letter words for times when the context calls for them."

She renders merde variously as down on his luck or in a bad way, chercheurs de merde as seriously unemployed historians, and "Ils sont bien emmerdés les médiévistes avec ça" as "Not so easy either, for the poor medievalists."

The translation loses the unifying, amusing effect of the repeated merde, both meaning and sound, but what can a translator do except shrug, mutter a quiet merde!, and get on with her work?

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

Your daily crime fiction chuckle

Nemesis may be Jo Nesbø's best novel, more tightly constructed, sticking more closely to its central story than his others, with only hints of the flashbacks that are such an integral part of The Redbreast. It muses philosophically but unobtrusively on revenge both personal and national and, as usual with Nesbø, it contains wonderful deadpan humor. One of my favorite bits mixes humor and philosophy:

"`One of the most celebrated bank robbers in the world was the American Willie Sutton,' Raskol said. `When he was arrested and taken to court, the judge asked him why he robbed banks. Sutton answered: Because that's where the money is. It's become a standing expression in everyday American English and I suppose it's meant to show us how brilliantly direct and easy language can be. To me, it just represents an idiot who got caught. Good robbers are neither famous not quotable."

I'm not sure where that stands on a scale of philosophical weightiness, but it sure adds to the pleasure of reading the novel. As always with Nesbø in English, Don Bartlett has provided a fluent, unobtrusive translation with the added small pleasure of leaving street names in the original Norwegian.

========

Nemesis, which comes after The Redbreast and before The Devil's Star in order of original publication, highlights the desirability of reading the books in that order rather than in order of their appearance in English. Devil's Star was first of the three to be translated, followed by The Redbreast and Nemesis.

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

On translating Andrea Camilleri

Earlier this year, I linked to an article by Stephen Sartarelli about translating Andrea Camilleri into English.

I singled out Sartarelli's assessment that Camilleri:

"writes in a language that he has been the first to grace with literary status. An invented language, in the sense that, though made up of existing manners of speech and writing, it has never before been assembled in quite this fashion."

The article turns up as a preface to Does the Night Smell the Same in Italy and in English Speaking Countries? An Essay on Translation: Camilleri in English by Emanuela Gutkowski.

The book is marred by a tendency to weigh down obvious statements with citations not just in footnotes but in the body of the text. If you can ignore that academic affectation, Gutkowski, a lecturer in English and translation studies at the University of Catania in Sicily, has interesting things to say to readers of Camilleri's Salvo Montalbano mysteries.

Her numerous quotations from Camilleri's L'odore della notte and its translation as The Smell of the Night (The Scent of the Night for delicate UK readers) highlight the sorts of choices a translator must make when literal renderings would make no sense in the "reception" language. Thus "Ho avuto una botta di culo incredibile, Mimi" becomes "I hit the goddamn jackpot, Mimi."

"The expression cannot be translated," Gutkowski writes, as the literal translation `I had a terrible ass-hit' appears to be nonsense." Sartarelli's choice is anything but nonsense, and he gets the tone just right.

Sartareli made wise choices as well in areas of linguistic untranslatablity, where Montalbano's distinctively Sicilian manipulations of grammar lack precise English equivalents. Such a locution, says, Gutkowski, is Montalbano's introduction of himself by "Montalbano sono" (literally "Montalbano I am") rather than the standard "I am Montalbano" or "It's Montalbano."

His choice of words thus violates normal word order in the interest of a strange, self-conscious formality. Just try getting that across in translation. Sartarelli's choice: "Montalbano the name." That, too, captures the tone, I'd say.

And then there's Catarella, Montalbano's thick, excitable, language-mangling colleague. I'd had ambivalent feelings about Sartarelli's rendering his speech in an English full of malapropisms and misspellings. Seeing his version beside the original, I appreciate the sensitivity he has to the strange, clanky sound of Catarella's speech.

"Vossia di pirsona pirsonalmente è?" becomes "Is that you yourself in person?" which both preserves the sense and offers an elegant substitution (you/yourself) for Catarella's cracked alliteration.

=================

Camilleri makes artful use of clichés, mostly to show how they drive Montalbano nuts. I wrote about those clichés and what Sartarelli does with them here.

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

Another translator speaks

Stieg Larsson's English translator has started a blog called Stieg Larsson's English translator. Early posts concern Larsson and translation, both in combination and separately, as well as miscellaneous pieces on such topics on how translator Steven T. Murray (Reg Keeland) learned Swedish and Danish.

I have special fondness for a post called Nuts & bolts of translation (1), which declares, among other things, that

"We are proud that our translations at Fjord Press were remarkably error-free, compared to most books today, now that publishers are cutting back on copy editing, or eliminating that step altogether."

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

Have you read Stieg Larsson's "Men Who Hate Women"?

Yes, you likely have, though you may not know it. That's the literal translation of Larsson's original Swedish title (Män Som Hatar Kvinnor) for the much-honored novel known to English readers as The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo.

The title of the book's Italian translation is a literal rendering of the Swedish: Uomini che odiano le donne. So are the Danish, Norwegian and Dutch titles, and the French is virtually literal: Les hommes qui n'aimaient pas les femmes. (The German title goes in a different direction, but that's a matter for another post, unless Bernd or Lars wishes to weigh in here.)

For now, why do you think English-language publishers decided not to translate the novel's harsh title? This is not a trick question. I have read or heard nothing on the subject, so educated guesses, provocative polemics, informed speculation and inside dope are all welcome.

P.S. The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo is the first and only book of Larsson's Millennium trilogy to have been translated into English. All three books have been translated into French and German and two into Dutch. That's one area in which English does not lead the way.

© Peter Rozovsky 2008

Technorati tags:
Stieg Larsson
Swedish crime fiction

Ken Bruen and Jason Starr in German

The German blog Krimi-Couch, which bears the charmingly straightforward tag line "denn lesen ist spannender" ("Because reading is more exciting"), brings the news that Ken Bruen and Jason Starr's Bust, which may be the funniest crime novel ever, is scheduled for publication in German translation this month under the title Flop.

I recommend this hilarious tale of scamming, psychopaths, sex and kidnapping in any language (Read a chapter at the Hard Case Web sites in English or in German), but the book's German title is especially interesting. Bust in the original partakes of several of that versatile word's English meanings, including the amplitude of the key female character's bosom. The German publisher appears to have homed in on one of those meanings. If anyone out there knows of any special meanings or resonances flop might have in German, please let us know here at the Detectives Beyond Borders foreign desk.

A short item about Bruen on the same blog says just two of his more than twenty novels had previously been translated for publication in Germany. That may surprise those of us who assume readers of English are uniquely deprived of translated crime fiction.

In a late-breaking news flash, it transpires that Bruen and Starr have signed an option deal for a film version of Bust and that a screenplay has been written. The only apprehension anyone should have about a movie is whether it could possibly be as good as the hilarious, violent, still somehow tender, etc. and altogther wonderful book. (Hat tip to new father Declan Burke at Crime Always Pays.)

© Peter Rozovsky 2008

Technorati tags:
Ken Bruen
Jason Starr
crime fiction in translation

Mike Mitchell, part II: An interview with Friedrich Glauser's translator

(Read part I of the interview with Mike Mitchell here.)

Talk briefly about some of your other translation work and about how that work compares with translating Glauser.

That is rather difficult, as I’ve translated over 50 books. Whenever I start a book by a new author, I work on it until I feel I’m getting under the skin of the writer, that I’m getting an English ‘voice’ which is a satisfactory equivalent of the original; critics might not agree, of course, but in most cases there does seem to come a point where I start to feel more comfortable with the translation. That is how I approached Glauser, but I can’t think of any direct comparison with other writers I’ve translated. He’s not just the only crime writer I’ve translated, he’s the only Swiss writer and the only 1930s author — though I don’t know if that’s really relevant.

In The Chinaman, Glauser has Studer observe that "detective novels seemed popular in Pfründisberg," and he names Edgar Wallace, Agatha Christie and Georges Simenon. What is Glauser’s place in the canon of crime writers? Within Swiss and German-language literature?

I’m not very familiar with the canon of Swiss literature, but (leaving aside all the arguments about the status and evaluation of the genre of crime fiction; German in the past has tended to have stricter demarcation between ‘light’ and ‘serious’ literature) Glauser is treated as a serious writer, not ‘just’ as crime writer, an important figure in 20th-century Swiss literature who has made a significant contribution to Switzerland’s self-image.

I think this ‘Swissness’ is particularly important, especially in the reception of his detective, Sergeant Studer, who is widely familiar in German-speaking Switzerland through films and television as well as the books; I suspect he is seen by many as embodying typically Swiss virtues. A contemporary writer, Hansjörg Schneider, has created a detective (Hunkeler) who is clearly modelled on Studer and was immediately recognised as such, though his background is Basel, not Bern.

As I’m sure you know, the major German crime-fiction prize is called the ‘Glauser’ — because, I think, he was the first German writer to give the crime novel literary ‘respectability’ (see comment above).

Glauser seems obviously to rank high among crime writers – perhaps something like a slyer, more humane and funnier Simenon. Why did it take so long for his work to be published in book form and translated?

Glauser’s crime novels first appeared as — very successful — serials in Swiss newspapers. Only two were published in book form during his lifetime, the other three in the years following his death in — in German terms — relatively little-known publishing houses. I believe his reputation spread in the wider German-speaking world some time after the war.

I suspect this publishing history is the reason why he didn’t come to the notice of English publishers before the war — Switzerland has never been ‘sexy’ to use a modern journalistic term; afterwards it was the war itself (Kirst’s ‘Gunner Asch’ novels) and coming to terms with the Nazi past (Grass, Böll) that attracted English attention to German writing. Also, Glauser’s style of crime writing is not in tune with the English tradition: the country-house mystery, the amateur, often upper-class, ‘sleuth’, Agatha Christie’s almost abstract ‘locked-room’ type puzzles, and a ‘Swiss Simenon’ lacks the attraction of Paris.

One of Bob Cornwell’s questions in “The Translators Unedited” concerned translators’ professional relationships with authors. In the case of Glauser, who died in 1938, where would you go with the sorts of questions you might have asked the author?

Generally with authors who are dead — or don’t respond — you have to make up your mind yourself, which is both a privilege and a duty, sometimes a big problem, though not with Glauser. Occasionally secondary literature or annotated editions can help, but not often for specific questions. I have a former colleague who specialises in Swiss literature I can ask for help.

Fortunately one paperback edition of the stories has very useful material, information on institutions, photographs of buildings etc, and another has explanations of Swiss terms for German readers, again very useful, as the Duden Swiss-German dictionary is out of print, and when I looked it up on Amazon there was a long queue waiting for a secondhand copy.

A further problem with true dialects, of course, is that they are written as they are pronounced, so even if one has a dictionary, one has to be aware of variant spellings. A small Swiss-German dictionary I have gives the word quoted above — ‘meitschi’ — in the form ‘maitli’. It does also give a brief account of pronunciation differences between Swiss dialects, of which it lists ten.

(Read part I of the interview with Mike Mitchell here.)

© Peter Rozovsky 2008

Technorati tags:
Mike Mitchell
Friedrich Glauser
Swiss crime fiction
German crime fiction
Crime fiction in translation
translation

Mike Mitchell, part I: An interview with Friedrich Glauser's translator

Friedrich Glauser had a more harrowing time of it than do most crime writers. Born in Vienna in 1896, he died forty-two years later after a life that included morphine and heroin addiction, diagnosis as a schizophrenic, service with the Foreign Legion in North Africa, and periods in psychiatric wards, insane asylums and prison.

These experiences are reflected in his crime novels, yet not in the way one might expect. Rather than self-pity, sensationalism and self-dramatization, his five novels about Sgt. Studer are filled with quiet humor and intense empathy with their downtrodden characters. Such empathy has led some critics to compare Glauser to Georges Simenon.

Glauser's reputation is such that the top prize in the German-language crime-fiction world is named for him, yet his work was never translated into English until Bitter Lemon Press brought out Thumbprint in 2004. Since then, Bitter Lemon has issued the remaining Studer novels as well: Fever, In Matto's Realm, The Chinaman and, this year, The Spoke.

To render Glauser into English, Bitter Lemon turned to Mike Mitchell, whose résumé as a translator includes works in several genres from all over the German-language literary map with occasional forays into French. Goethe and Oskar Kokoschka are just two of the writers whose work he has translated. His current projects include Kafka's The Trial for Oxford University Press.

Mr. Mitchell graciously agreed to answer questions on a number of Glauser-related subjects, including the challenges of translating a writer in whose work dialect plays an important part.

(This is part I of a two-part interview with Mike Mitchell. Read part II here.)
=========================================

How did you come to be associated with the project to translate Friedrich Glauser? Were you aware of his work before you took on the job? If so, what did you think of him? If not, what do you think of him now?

Simple — I was invited to translate him by the publisher. The owners of Bitter Lemon are Swiss, though two have lived in Britain for years and are fluent in English. They were setting up a new publishing house to specialise in European crime fiction in English translation, and it was natural for them to want Glauser, who had not previously been translated into English, as one of their first authors. I knew of Glauser as a 1930s Swiss crime writer, but I hadn’t read anything by him previously. As an academic I had specialised mainly in Austrian literature and culture, so for me, Swiss writing was a list of names I knew but had mostly not read.

A life like Glauser’s will lead many to speculate about connections between his life and his fiction. He set In Matto’s Realm in a sanatorium, for example, and parts of The Spoke, such as Studer’s talking to himself, strike me as something like what an inmate of such a place might write. What connections between the work and the life strike you about Glauser?

Behind the exterior of a detective story a novel such as In Matto’s Realm is a gripping and very moving picture of institutionalisation, something Glauser himself was well acquainted with; the background material to one of the German editions suggests it includes direct references to people and situations Glauser was familiar with. Incarceration in such institutions obviously never managed to break Glauser’s spirit, but there are frequent characters in his books who have suffered under the system; the curriculum vitae of: ‘brought up in poor circumstances — bound to a farmer at a young age — maltreated and underfed — caught stealing and sent to a reformatory etc etc’ occurs more than once.

What particularly attracts me about Glauser’s crime novels is the way his detective — Sergeant Studer — understands and sympathises with the disadvantaged, even if his job means he has to continue to investigate them. There is a profound sense of humanity permeating Glauser’s writing, which at the same time throws a keen light on social conditions in Switzerland in the 1930s, but coming across as a concern for individuals rather than as a political message.

You’ve discussed Glauser’s handling of dialect. I’d like you to talk about his use of, say, Bern dialect vs. standard spoken or written German and about the challenges this posed for you as a translator. Were there any passages that were simply untranslatable?

Not untranslatable in the sense of finding it impossible to convey the meaning, but it was very difficult to follow the way the main character switches from local dialect to standard ‘educated’ Swiss to very formal German. Fortunately Glauser himself comments on this at times, so I felt justified in occasionally adding a rider of my own of the type: ‘ ‘’Xxxxx”, said Studer, reverting to his Bernese dialect’, where, say, a remark by Studer in thick dialect is reported without comment.

In The Spoke this is complicated by the fact the Studer is operating in another canton (Appenzell) with a different dialect. Again, what I do is insert a few markers in the translation to suggest non-standard language, the precise nature of the language becoming clear from the narrator’s comments and one or two added ones of my own.

I live in Scotland, and there is a temptation to use a Scottish dialect (or dialects) for the Swiss, but I feel that would arouse the wrong associations in the reader (tartan, kilts, bagpipes etc). In other translations I have used British dialects a couple of times, but only for very minor characters in scenes which last half a page or so — and even then I’m not 100% happy about it.

One example of this was Studer’s use of the word ‘Meitschi’ (meaning ‘girl’) for young women he becomes emotionally attached to (in a fatherly kind of way) in the course of his investigation. It needs a word with emotional warmth, and the warmth is partly expressed in the use of a dialect word. In the first novel I translated I thought I had found a solution in ‘lassie’ — common in Scotland and, often also as ‘lass’, in Lancashire, where I grew up. But readers from the south of England complained that it stood out from the rest of Studer’s language. I think that criticism was justified, and avoided the word in later novels. But I didn’t find a word I felt had the same emotional warmth, and words the editor suggested sounded to me too southern English.

All that, I think, supports my view that dialect shouldn’t be translated into a dialect of the target language — unless the setting is ‘translated’ to the other country as well.

I was once asked if I would translate an Austrian play about a Jewish actor in the 1930s who loses his job, disappears and then reappears in the guise of a very Aryan Tyrolean farmer who is a ‘natural’ actor. I decided it was impossible to do his return to Vienna, speaking broad Tyrolese. Someone else later translated it using a Scottish dialect, but I have to say I wasn’t personally convinced by it.

A possibly related question: What was the biggest challenge for you in rendering Glauser into English?

I think the dialect was the biggest challenge. Also perhaps the way much of the narration is close to Studer’s mind — keeping the balance between clarity of exposition and the colouring of Studer’s feelings and responses.

(Read part II here.)

© Peter Rozovsky 2008

Technorati tags:
Mike Mitchell
Friedrich Glauser
Swiss crime fiction
German crime fiction
Crime fiction in translation
translation

An interview with Fred Vargas' translator – Sian Reynolds, Part I

Sian Reynolds is the only translator to win a Dagger from the Crime Writers' Association. In fact, she is the only two translators to win the award. She and Fred Vargas received the first Duncan Lawrie International Dagger in 2006 for Vargas' novel The Three Evangelists and repeated the next year for Wash This Blood Clean From My Hand. Professor Reynolds has also translated several books by Fernand Braudel, the seminal 20th-century French historian.

Sian Reynolds is professor emerita of French at the University of Stirling, Scotland. Her most recent crime-fiction translation is Vargas' This Night's Foul Work. In this two-part interview, she discusses Fred Vargas, the art and practice of translation, and why the merde flies so liberally in French writing. (Read Part II of the interview with Sian Reynolds here.)

You have translated one of the 20th century’s great social, or human, scientists, Fernand Braudel, into English as well as one of the world’s most popular crime novelists, Fred Vargas. How did you make the transition to translating fiction? How does fiction differ from nonfiction from a translator’s point of view?

Until quite recently I translated only works by historians because it fitted my own academic interests. Translating Braudel was an education in itself. You tend to get typecast, so for ages no one asked me to translate fiction. The two are not as different as you might think. In both cases, you are concerned to provide as accurate an equivalent of the original text as possible for readers in the target language, and you need to be committed to the author’s project. Briefly, for history that nearly always means acquiring expertise in the context: doing a lot of reading around the text in both languages, so as not to mislead through ignorance. In fiction, the novel provides its own context, and you have to be attentive to the world the writer has created.

In the particular case of Vargas, that world is partly that of the classic French ‘polar’, or police-novel, but at the same time it has undercurrents from fairy-tale and medieval romance. And translating a detective novel always means being scrupulous about stylistic detail,because such texts are full of hidden references, often verbal, which may be clues.

How did you come to work with Fred Vargas? And how does it feel to be the only translator ever honored by the Crime Writers' Association?

I already knew Fred Vargas’s books well, and had taught them as examples of fiction and translation exercises with my students at Stirling. My former Edinburgh colleague David Bellos, now in Princeton, did two excellent translations of the first of her books to appear in English (Have Mercy On Us All and Seeking Whom He May Devour – shortlisted by the CWA). When his academic work prevented him having time to do more, Harvill Secker, with David’s encouragement, offered me a contract, since the publisher already knew my Braudel translations.

About the awards, Fred’s books weren’t the first translated books to win CWA daggers. For instance, the Icelandic writer Arnaldur Indriðason’s Silence of the Grave won the Gold Dagger in 2005, and his translator, Bernard Scudder, was thus honoured too, though I don’t know whether the prize was shared. And there must have been others. I’m a Henning Mankell fan myself.

The difference with the new arrangement, when the Duncan Lawrie International Dagger was created in 2006, is that for the first time, it included a separate CWA-sponsored dagger for the translator. I felt surprised, grateful and honoured to get it. I think it’s both generous and right of the CWA to recognise translators as a group, since their work is sometimes taken for granted. I’m sure the competition will always be very stiff. There are many terrific translators of foreign crime fiction these days!

I've just spoken of your working "with" Fred Vargas. To what extent is translation an act of collaboration with an author? To what extent is it an act of individual creativity on the translator's part?

With a living author, it’s always possible to have some communication. When I’ve asked Fred questions about particular points she has always been very cooperative. And she reads and speaks English well herself. But in general she has been pretty hands-off, and left it to me. The translator is a kind of representative of the English-speaking readership: Fred’s books are quirky and often fantastical, sometimes with historical elements, and much appreciated in France. They are about French characters usually in a recognizably French environment, and will necessarily seem a bit foreign to anglophone readers, so the aim is to make them enjoyable on their own terms – but in English.

In Wash This Blood Clean From My Hand, a group of Parisian police officers travel to Quebec for seminars with Canadian investigators. Vargas makes each group’s occasional misunderstanding of the other’s brand of French a source of friction. You chose not to render this into English. Could you give an example or two that help explain why you decided as you did?

I did aim to have the Canadian – Quebecois – characters speak in a different idiom from the French ones as much as possible, and had a Canadian friend read it through. The French spoken in Quebec is quite hard for French-from-France people to understand the first time they hear it. In the book, the French characters openly express their difficulty at following their Canadian colleagues’ speech. There is a distinct vocabulary, syntax and a set of colloquial idioms, as well as a particular accent. One short example which I cut (there are very few such cuts) is when Danglard is explaining Quebecois idiom to his colleagues, p. 109 in the French edition:

‘Par exemple, répondit Danglard, ‘Tu veux-tu qu’on gosse autour toute la nuitte?’

‘Ce qui veut dire?’ ‘On ne va pas tergiverser là-dessus toute la nuit’ [Eng: We’re not going to dither about it all night’]

The French are also surprised at immediate ‘tutoiement’ which I changed to ‘using first-names straight away’ which is (still, just) a slight European-North American difference. The Canadians on the other hand say that the French officers ‘talk like in a book’, so I tried to mark that too a bit.

The chief problem in this case is that English speakers from Britain have no problem understanding English speakers from Canada or the US and vice versa – we can always understand transatlantic English, even if there are some turns of phrase particular to Canada. The question of linguistic variants or dialects is very tricky in fiction. You could argue, for example, that many English people find it hard to follow Glasgow speech, so the quebecois characters could have been ‘lent’ a Scottish idiom – but in a novel about Canada that would sound pretty unconvincing! It doesn’t affect the plot at all, it merely adds to the atmosphere of ‘dépaysement’ – uprootedness, which Adamsberg in particular has to face in Canada. I felt in all honesty I should put a note in the book saying that I had cut a few examples of incomprehension, but I compensated by referring quite often to this misunderstanding, introducing as many Canadianisms as possible, and pointing up the friction in other ways.

A more humble problem arises in The Three Evangelists, where a character finds a beech tree has materialized in her yard and wonders who or what is haunting her in this strange manner. The uncanniness is magnified by the identical pronunciation of the French words for beech (hêtre) and a being (être). Perhaps, Sophia wonders, she is being confronted by something less innocent than a tree. ("Un hêtre. Un être?") You chose a different sort of wordplay for the English version. What factors guided your choice? How often does Vargas’ writing force you to make such decisions?

In that case an exact equivalent wasn’t possible, though the echo of ‘being’ was one solution. But there is a much more important example in the same book, which I can’t reveal: a clue is left on a car and the wordplay in French is ambiguous, with an effect on the plot. I thought a lot before coming up with my version which I think works OK and doesn’t give the game away too soon, while respecting the original. In the latest book, there is some play in chapter 1 on the word ‘parquet’ which means both the prosecution in a court of law and a parquet floor in French – you’ll have to see whether you think my solution works. This one doesn’t affect the plot.

(Read Part II of the interview with Sian Reynolds here.)

© Peter Rozovsky 2008

Technorati tags:
Sian Reynolds
Fred Vargas
French crime fiction
Crime fiction in translation
translation

... and, alas, another checklist of untranslated (into English) crime fiction

Krimi-Couch offers a list of crime fiction to be released in German this month. Among the new releases is Mensch ohne Hund, a translation of Håkan Nesser's Människa utan hund. That will bring to something over fifteen the number of this Swedish crime writer's books available in German. This compares with the two available in English.
==============================

Another question for readers: What crime authors would you like to see more of in English? Why?

© Peter Rozovsky 2007

Technorati tags:
international crime fiction
Hakan Nesser

Le trouble avec Harry

Je viens de trouver cette interview de Jo Nesbø qui comprend au moins deux déclarations intéressantes (et de plus un fait frustrant pour les lecteurs anglophones).

Nesbø dit qu'il a envoyé son personnage principal, Harry Hole, en Thaïlande dans Les Cafards parce que:

"J'étais fatigué de lire des polars scandinaves réalistes, qui traitent des problèmes quotidiens des gens dans les pays riches. Alors j'ai amené mon personnage à l'étranger, et j'ai pu également jeter un oeil sur le façon de penser scandinave depuis l'extérieur."

Il dit aussi qu'il ne se considère pas comme partie d'une famille des auteurs de polars scandinaves.

L'interview discute cinq romans de Jo Nesbø disponibles en français. Naturellement, seulment deux ont été déjà traduits du norvégien vers l'anglais.

© Peter Rozovsky 2007

Technorati tags:
Jo Nesbo
Norwegian crime fiction
Nordic crime fiction
polars norvégiens
polars scandinaves
Scandinavian Crime Fiction

Jo Nesbø on traitors, sunshine patriots and more

The social criticism in Jo Nesbø's The Redbreast goes beyond the humorous digs at presidential pomposity and, just possibly, Norwegian parochialism that I mentioned last week. Yasir Arafat and Ehud Barak get fleeting mentions in connection with a summit meeting set to take place in Oslo as the novel opens. But another real-life politician's name resonates far more strongly: that of Vidkun Quisling, the Norwegian fascist whose name became a synonym for traitor after he collaborated in the German Nazi occupation of Norway during World War II.

Nesbø has nothing but contempt for the neo-Nazis who plague 1990s Oslo, portraying them variously as apes and as children who refuse to grow up. At the same time, he is (or lets his characters be) just as hard on the "latter-day saints," Norwegians who were quick to declare their love of country — after Germany had been safely defeated. A murder late in the novel re-enacts Quisling's execution. The killer's identity makes clear Nesbø's scorn for the latter-day saints. Norwegians, those enthusiastic flag-wavers, could be just as nationalistic as Germans, he has a character say, and he means it as no compliment.

Did I mention that The Redbreast is also a murder mystery? The killings have their roots in World War II, in a cold, lonely Eastern Front outpost to which the novel flashes back frequently. Mysterious events happen there, in military hospitals and in wartime Vienna, and the moral lines are not nearly as clear as they become later. And love and betrayal, real and perceived, play as much a role as do political events.

Back in the novel's present, in 1990s Oslo, Nesbø's Harry Hole slowly uncovers the link to that World War II past, fueled by his customary mix of intuition, doggedness and alcohol, though there is far more to him than those hallmarks of the highly capable, highly angst-ridden detective.

I'd best stop before this post approaches the novel's 521 pages in length. Suffice it to say that the killing of a police officer precipitates a moving, formally surprising depiction of Hole's descent back into drink, that Nesbø knows how to make violence shocking by understating it, that he can darken a mood as few writers can, and that, boy, can he ever lay down plot lines for further novels. (Though translated into English after The Devil's Star, The Redbreast was written first and is set earlier.)

=========

A translation note: Don Bartlett chose not to translate most Oslo street names, a nice touch. Thus, one character lives at Vibes gate 18. This is interesting because gate is an archaic English word for street; hence the many streets in England that have gate as part of their names. Similarly, translators of Henning Mankell's novels leave untranslated street names that contain gatan. One may conclude from this that travel is broadening and that international crime fiction can be educational.

© Peter Rozovsky 2007

Technorati tags:
Jo Nesbo
Norwegian crime fiction
Scandinavian Crime Fiction

New translations of Latin American crime fiction ...

. . . into French.

The Ile noire blog recently published notice of a new series of Latin American crime novels translated into French. The imprint, L’Atinoir, has enlisted the Mexican crime novelist Paco Ignacio Taibo II as a literary adviser, and the comment on Ile noire discusses offerings in the series by two more Mexican writers: Eduardo Monteverde and Juan Hernández Luna.

I don't know Monteverde or Hernández Luna, but I did a quick search for English translations of their work on the Web site of a large American book retailer. Nothing turned up. This surprised me at least mildly; one might have expected an American publisher to be at least as interested as a French publisher in work coming out of Mexico. I've written here and elsewhere about the scarcity of translated crime fiction in English. This latest example hits close to home because the writers involved are from so close to home, and readers far away will get to read them before I do.

© Peter Rozovsky 2007