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Interviews from Conversational Reading  See this page for interviews with leading authors, translators, publishers, and more.
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The Danger with Translation
Wyatt Mason:
My professor, upon returning the paper, patiently explained that Helen
Tracy Lowe Porter, Mann’s erstwhile voice in English, had a habit of
serial inconsistency when it came to Mann’s German: words Mann used
repeatedly, my professor said, HTLP democratized into different
synonyms; where Mann varied his usage, HTLP regularized it. I can’t
verify the accuracy of my professor’s diagnosis of HTLP’s editorial
disorder, but I can say that such reading experiences shape the caution
I now take when talking about work in translation.
I have a strong suspicion I’ll re-read Doctor Faustus in a different translation at some point. It’s worth reading again, anyway.
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More from Conversational Reading: - More Mann to Come (?) I’m somewhat surprised to see that people seem to have responded rather favorably to my somewhat casually strewn thoughts on Doctor Faustus. They were even...
- Doctor Faustus I’ve been slowly making my way through Thomas Mann’s Doctor Faustus. Despite recently reading proust, Grass, and Kenzaburo Oe, I can pretty easily say that...
- Searching for (False) Danger Deconstructing how clubs construct their images: Grazian discovered this desire for danger in researching his previous book, Blue Chicago, about the commercialization of blues and...
- In Translation The Guardian asks 10 experts to recommend 10 writers not writing in English that we should be reading. Of the 10, 2 ring a bell:...
- Translation A pretty darn good piece on translation in the NYTBR. Here’s a good quote: Rabassa[, the major translator of Latin AMerican magical realist texts,] is...
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Charting the path to three gunshots--the one that killed filmmaker Theo Van Gogh, the one that disabled his Islamic extremist assassin, Mohammed Bouyeri, and the one that led to Vincent Van Gogh’s one hundred years earlier--Olsen tells three separate stories that resonate with one another on numerous levels: the logic of extremism, the role of the dissident in Dutch society, the limits of tolerance, the purpose of the artist, the feeling of the most important five minutes of your life. Read my interview with the author.
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Biblioklept on Patience (After Sebald)
Stealing from Conversational Reading
The Names by Don DeLillo (1982)
The Box Man by Kobo Abe (1973, English 1974)
Head in Flames by Lance Olsen (2009)
Agaat by Marlene van Niekerk (2006, English 2010)
The Weather Fifteen Years Ago by Wolf Haas (2006, English 2009)
Try the John E. Woods translation – it’s a big improvement. There’s also an excellent essay on translations of Mann in The Cambridge Companion to Thomas Mann. It’s very scathing of HTLP’s translations (and has a go at Woods too).
I have not read Doctor Fautus, either in the original German or in translation. As a translator, however, I do not think this criticism is entirely fair. English is a language that repeats itself uneasily. Our language has an enormous treasury of synonyms, which, historically, anglophone literature has used to its advantage. Most other European languages are not so inclined to the use of synonyms, even where they exist, and using the same word twice in a single sentence is far from taboo. There is certainly something to be said for consistency in any translation, but too much of such a good thing can lead an English translation to sound repetitive…a flaw the original text would not have had.