Have you read any translated literature recently?

Interesting question. I haven’t recently completed a translated work, but I have one in progress: Godsong, a new verse translation of the Bhagavad-Gita, by Amit Majmudar.

As it happens, I’ve thought a lot about the question of translations and their relation to the original. One of the basic issues concerns whether to render the text literally or to convey its spirit by finding its equivalent expressions in the target language. The former may be incomprehensible to someone who does not share the cultural context of the original, never mind the nuances of the language, and the latter relies on interpretation that may depart significantly from the original author’s intent. When I’m really serious about a text from another language, I look at several translations side by side and read all the translator’s notes.

When I was studying the Heart Sutra, I laid out about 17 translations side by side with the original. Even though I didn’t know Sanskrit, I was able to wring a lot of information out of the source material. In the end I preferred one each: a very literal translation and a very fluent, poetic one.

But if it’s a pleasure read—a novel, let’s say—then I want something that is, if possible, as well written as the original, as competent and coherent, so that I can enjoy it in its own right. For instance, I enjoyed The Nakano Thrift Shop, translated from Japanese, and thought it worked well in English. True, a little knowledge of Japanese language and culture was helpful, but I didn’t notice the sort of unevenness and awkwardness that often occur in translations.

So—I think translations can be very effective when they’re done with care and sensitivity, but there will always be compromises when the author has to speak to us through an intermediary instead of addressing us directly.

Why do you ask?

I find that most of Isabel Allende’s work is translated very well. I don’t read Spanish, so I don’t know for sure, of course, but the translations seem to have a word usage and rhythm to them that is really a pleasure to read.

I think that good translations are a gift, to have missed such things would be a shame.

The most recent one I read was The Japanese Lover.

I started reading a translated version of Crime and Punishment and I just couldn’t get through it. I’m not sure if this translation was a new version or something that’s been read for years. I’ll have to look it up.

I am a big fan of the Inspector Montalbano series, written by Andrea Camilleri in Italian with a lot of Sicilian dialect thrown in. I read it in translation, and the translations are so good, it is like a short vacation to Trapani.

I finished one of them last Friday.

I like Chinese poetry but I don’t speak any Chinese. I can only understand it by reading and comparing different translations and sometimes by checking the meanings of a character in Pleco, an online dictionary. While much is lost in translation, sometimes everything, the essence sometimes miraculously survives the transition, or so I like to believe.

When it works the words create an image in my mind which is associated with a feeling. This can be deceptive and the effect may be due to the translator’s poetic imagination but if you spend a bit of time over the poems you may get beyond the translations to what the original poet felt and tried to convey. This at any rate is what I try to do.

Yes, certainly. A number of my favorite authors did not write originally in English. Within the past year I’ve read Thomas Mann, Murakami, Garcia Marquez, Borges, and Chekhov. I do sometimes wonder what is lost in translation, but being monolingual, I don’t have any other options. Sometimes I do enjoy reading about how the works are translated after I’ve read them (if such a thing is available).

@flutherother, what do you read?

@rockfan, I delved into Dostoevsky as a teenager and read four or five of his novels, but the one that stopped me was The Brothers Karamazov. I just couldn’t push past the middle, even with the enthusiasm I brought to it. I don’t know why those things happen, but sometimes it’s almost as if my reading engine broke down.

The ones I find most interesting and most beautiful are the Tang Dynasty poets; Li Bai, Du Fu, Li Shangyin etc. I own a few books of translations by various authors.

I looked here https://www.goodreads.com/shelf/show/translated-into-english, and discovered close to 10 books that I have read on this list.
Here is a longer list, and I’m pretty sure I could add to the number but they want you to click through each one, which I’m not going to bother to do, but I’m sure I would find other books that I have read as well,
http://flavorwire.com/415153/50-works-of-fiction-in-translation-that-every-english-speaker-should-read/2

I have also read several religious books that were translated into English.

Thanks, @flutherother. I’m going to look them up. Any particular collection or anthology to recommend as a starter?

You might like to try “Poems of the Late Tang” by A.C. Graham. As a bonus it contains a section on translating from Chinese.

I will.