What's the point of having a blog if you can't indulge in a bit of shameless self-publicity from time to time? I made a précis of my article Lost in Translation and sent it as a letter to the Editor of the Times and they published it this morning.
Simple pleasures.
Michael Gove in The Times yesterday speculated that "reading great literature in
translation involves a loss of nuance, a sacrifice of subtlety, which
few will admit to. It is not in the translators' interests to
acknowledge what's lost in the process, and neither is it in the
authors' . . . surely the suppleness
of language in the original doesn't come through in the same way as
when we're reading our mother tongue".
While acknowledging that reading a book in translation will not be exactly the same experience as reading in in the original language, on the whole I believe that the differences may not be large as Michael Gove fears, and in any case, will probably not matter all that much.
Last year I read the John E Woods of Thomas Mann's Magic Mountain and a few months later I read Polish writer Pawel Huelle's "prequel" to Magic Mountain, Castorp which was translated by Antonia Lloyd Jones. What struck me is the complete consistency in "voice" between the two books. The Hans Castorp in Magic Mountain is precisely the same person in Castorp. This says much about the skill of the translators of course, but the consistency of style between the two books suggests to me that not a lot was lost in the translation of either book.
