Let's talk translations?

[takethewatch]

Does anyone have Opinions and/or Advice about translations to share? It's been a few years since my initial read-through of the Brick, and now that I have relapsed with a vengeance into this fandom, I am about due for another one (as soon as Life permits). I know not to read Denny--but I would love to see some discussion of the other translations out there (especially the new Donougher one) and their relative merits.

Comments

[takethewatch]

About the Donougher translation--is she thorough/awkward enough that it's more of a studying translation than a reading translation? As in a translation for the person who has already enjoyed the story and now wants to go back and get all the references and the nuances of the words? Or is it still readable (just maybe not as pretty as the original French*)?

*which of course I would love to read someday, isn't that the dream, but I know better than to try right now; I have the capability, I think, but not the stubbornness to stick with it sentence by painful sentence.

[tenlittlebullets]

Actually, one of the effects of Donougher's approach is that she's intensely readable--just, as mentioned, sometimes at the expense of the beauty of the prose. There's this translation pitfall where a word that was simple in French got borrowed into English and took on much fancier or more formal connotations, so if you pick the quick and easy translation when going French-to-English, the prose gets artificially puffed up with ten-dollar words. Donougher takes some pains not to do that; she goes for English syntax (possessive "'s" isntead of "of," etc) and less pretentious/more Anglo-Saxon vocabulary whenever she can, except for the occasional moment where she goes "fuck this" and drops something clunky and pretentious on you because it's more accurate. So it comes off simpler and more readable most of the time, and I actually went through it at a decent clip (a couple hundred pages per day) until I hit the parts that made me go "NOPE nopenopenopenope" and put the book down to cry about barricade boys. Which is Hugo's fault, not Donougher's.

(And since I am forever and always a shameless enabler of people who are interested in the original French: it's not going to get less slow and painful until you've plowed through a bunch of text with cheerful disregard for how patchy your reading comprehension is, and you might as well do that with something you already like and know well enough to not get totally lost. Sheer quantity is the only way I know of to stop deciphering and build up some reading flow, and quantity is definitely one thing the Brick doesn't lack. *enable enable enable*)