Tongue lashing
J.M. Coetzee wonders whether his books are easy to translate…
Books of mine have been translated from the English in which they are written into some 25 other languages, the majority of them European. Of the 25 I can read two or three moderately well. Of many of the rest I know not a word; I have to trust my translators to render fairly what I have written. Whether that trust is well placed I find out only rarely, when a bilingual reader who has compared translation with original happens to report back to me.
Some such reports come as a jolt. In Russia, I discover, The Master of Petersburg has been renamed Autumn in Petersburg; in the Italian version of Dusklands, a man opens a wooden crate with the help of a bird (what I wrote was that he used a crow, that is, a crowbar).
Most reports, however, are reassuring…
Articles like this one always remind me of a great cartoon that appeared in Spy many years ago. In it, an astonished and artsy-looking translator is asking a beleaguered author, “Do you not be happy with me as the translator of the books of you?”
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