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Re: Translations in general

From: Ralf Tauchmann <ralf.tauchmann~at~t-online.de>
Date: Sat, 5 Feb 2000 15:56:03 +0100
To: jvf~at~math.technion.ac.il

Skravitz~at~aol.com schrieb:
> I think we agree that in general JV's English translators have done a poor
> job. I ask the Forum three related questions. 1) Have JV's translators into
> languages other than English done a better job? 2) Have other French
> novelists, say Hugo and Dumas, fared better with translators? 3) In general,
> do translators do a good job?

Dear friends,

To start with the last question: In general, do doctors do a good job? Or
authors? Or publishers? Or bricklayers? You will always find better and worse,
light and shadow - at all levels.

As to question 1):

The best Jules Verne is the French one. Let us be grateful for every good
translation.

In Germany, the best translation of all - in my eyes - is Walter Gerull's
version of "Les Enfants du capitaine Grant" (1950s?). No wonder that the Swiss
Diogenes publishers republished this translation in 1978 while ordering a lot of
new translations (so the average of the old German translations was not good
either).

The publishing house was very proud of the new translations, but the Swiss
author Arno Schmidt - who always defended Jules Verne as an author and was
therefore quoted by the publishers - checked by way of example the new German
translation of "Journey to the Centre of the Earth" and wrote a very interesting
article about that (result: the translation is not as good as the publishers
would have liked it to be).

Recently, I saw a German publication of Gordon Pym and "Sphinx des glaces"
grouped in one volume. The publisher said in his preface that the many
"superfluous" dialogues in the JV book "had to" be deleted for "better reading".
So, do publishers generally do a good job?

Question 2:

Translation is substitution, "Ersatz". It will always be difficult for good and
genuine literature to cross linguistic borders. Language and thought are kind of
Siamese twins. You will never be able to separate such a couple without loss or
damage. My favourite example is Sigmund Freud and his principle of "Lust". The
German word "Lust" covers the full spectrum of emotions from every day language
"I would like to" down (or up) to physical sexual desire. The German language
uses this word with a lot of prefixes: "Unlust" (reluctance, listlessness,
bored...), "Verlust" (loss), "Wolllust" (voluptuousness, lust)... The principle
derived by Freud was already kind of hidden in the German language.

To conclude: Bad translations should tell us that Jules Verne as an author is
better than his sometimes bad reputation. Otherwise we would have translations
better than the original. I've never heard about that.

By the way, the German Gutenberg e-library has no JV book on the web, because
the names of the JV translators were not indicated in the old German
publications. So the copyright meant to protect authors (and translators
according to their contribution) has become an obstacle to the main wish of
every author, which is to spread his ideas and his work as widely as possible...
Internet and copyright are no good matches (publishing either no translations at
all [German] or poor ones [English]).

I encourage everybody to learn French. You will find no better Jules Verne
novel in any other language.

Best regards,

Ralf Tauchmann
(German/English/French translator)
Radebeul, Germany
Received on Sat 05 Feb 2000 - 16:56:36 IST

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