Here's the first paragraph of a great novel from Machado de Assis, "...the greatest author ever produced in Latin America . . ." (Susan Sontag, The New Yorker). The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas. - Machado de Assis The book is spectacular, but this sums up what the character thinks of the importance of his efforts pretty well.
In the town, there were two mutes, and they were always together Carson McCullers, Heart is a Lonely Hunter
The pure products of America go crazy... William Carlos Williams. Let us go then, You and I, When the evening is spread out against the sky like a patient etherized upon a table... T.S. Eliot. Stately, plump Buck Mulligan descended... James Joyce.
- So, who are you? - I am a part of the force that always yearns for evil, yet is always doing good. That's my translation, anyway. This is the epigraph to Bulgakov's Master & Margarita, possibly the best novel ever written in Russian. If I am not mistaken, the epigraph is taken from Faust.
Yes, its a line from Goethe's Faust, which heavily influenced M&M, of course. The Russian translation, however, is far more elegant. I've never seen an English translation rendered well.
Well there's this, from Fritz Leiber's "Ill Met in Lankhmar": http://www.bigsoccer.com/forum/showpost.php?p=6197307&postcount=1 Then there's this, which I also cited in the same thread: From Evan Connell's Son of the Morning Star: Custer and the Little Bighorn And this: McMurtry, Lonesome Dove
Shurik's translation sounds pretty good to me. Perhaps I will found the time to read it after I am done with my Faulkner. I'm such a slow damn reader.
Conversely I've never seen an Russian translation of an English text rendered well. I blame the lack of synonyms.
"Complacencies of the pegnoir, and late coffee and oranges in a sunny chair, and the green of the cockatoo mingle to dissipate the holy hush of ancient sacrifices." --Stevens, "Sunday Morning" (might not quite be exact)
No, I meant that particular line. I think Russian fiction doesn't translate too badly into English, actually. Russian poetry, however, is almost worthless in translation.
W. S. Merwin's translations of Osip Mandelstam are wonderful--they're better than Merwin's own poems. However, I suspect that Merwin isn't concerned with fidelity with the originals. They thus likely fail as literal translations but succeed as poetry.
"Muchos años después, frente al pelotón de fusilamiento, el Coronel Aureliano Buendía había de recordar aquella tarde remota en que su padre lo llevó a conocer el hielo." -Gabriel García Márquez, Cien Años de Soledad
Lozinsky's translation of Shakespeare, I always though, was wonderful. As is Pasternak's Hamlet. Nabokov's Alice in Wonderland is a nightmare as far as fidelity to the text is concerned, but a hoot on its own. Instead of supplying the text with annotations, Nabokov just went and completely Russified it. You just can't appreciate Alice properly until you see her parodying Pushkin: Kak dynya vzmyvaetsya Veshchii Omar... Oh, brother... And, of course, the Litvinova's Harry Potter is a freakin' horror story. It's one of those cases when the lack of respect for the author combined with a weak knowledge of modern colloquial English come together to create something entirely unrecognizable.
In my jaunt in Ukrainian secondary school (don't ask), the Shakespeare texts they had there, were translated terribly. That said, trying to translate from the original into Modern English and then into Modern Russian is quite hard. Similarly, many texts in French have suffered the brunt of horrendous translations to the point where you question the ability of the translator, or indeed the purpose of it being translated. That said there are some fine translators out there, who more than cope with the job and often improve a fairly pedestrian text and bring life to it, simply by offering it a different lexical construction or throwing some more adjectives and synonyms at it. Some English translations of foreign books actually out-do their original texts. *coughFranzKafkacough* Interesting. A lot my research concerned the translations of various texts. Some are mainly concerned with translating word for word without a care for idioms and the audience they are writing for. I'll have to check that out. Ah yes. Old Gary Potter is giving Russian kids (but mainly adults) a bum deal. Ah to hell with it, let's just all learn a foreign language of our choosing so we can read texts in their original format.
For the most part they work quite well. I'll take your word on the Russian poetry. Pushkin lacks that certain edge when its written in English.
Many years later as he faced the firing squad, Coronel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice. Hey I understand Spanish! (Either that or I have the English text in my drawer. ) The final line oth, is the killer...
Ah, firing squad. That's what I couldn't understand. Bojendyk - I've never read Merwin's translations, I'll see if I can find them. As for translations in Russian - Pasternak's Hamlet, as Shurik mentioned, is absolutely brilliant.
Hmmmm. I'm guessing Pasternak would really capture that dark introspective tone that the play has... I've always read Doctor Zhivago as one of the most dark and anagogical books of all time. Like his poetry as well.
I've never liked Dr. Zhivago, but Pasternak was the most talented Soviet era poet in my opinion, ahead of Akhmatova and Tzvetaeva. Probably Mayakovsky as well. Oh, and miles, miles, MILES better than Yevtushenko, whose poetry sucks.
