L is for Lindgren

German stamp from 2007 showing Astrid Lindgren and Emil

Astrid Lindgren is apparently the 18th most translated author in the world.  Also famous as an active campaigner for children's and animal rights, she wrote over 50 stories including the Emil, Karlson-on-the-Roof, Bill Bergson (Kalle Blomkvist in Swedish) and Bullerby children series. But she's best known for Pippi Longstocking, the strongest nine-year-old girl in the world.

Pippi lives alone (apart from a horse, and a monkey named Mr Nilsson) because her mother died when she was a baby and her father is lost at sea. She is fiercely self-sufficient but becomes good friends with the children next door, Tommi and Annika. Her lack of manners and education have made her contraversial with adults but incredibly popular with children ever since the first publication in 1945. It was  felt (and still is, in some quarters) that she encourages rudeness and disrespect. Yet many more people claim Pippi as a role model: a feisty, free-spirited figure showing that there's nothing girls can't do.

 Adding to the fun of the Pippi books is the way she plays with language, inventing and mispronouncing words and names, singing nonsense songs, telling jokes and making up riddles. Obviously, this sets her translators a particularly tricky challenge! In the US Pippi Longstocking was translated in 1950 by Florence Lamborn, while it was translated in the UK by Edna Hurup in 1954 and published by Oxford University Press. Meanwhile, Pippi Goes Aboard (1956) and Pippi in the South Seas (1957) were translated by Marianne Turner. For a detailed comparison of these US and UK versions, see here: Pippi Goes Abroad by Madelene Moats.

Somehow, Pippi Longstocking completely passed me by as a child. Not only did I never read them, I'd never even heard of the books until they began to crop up regularly in discussions of children's literature in translation. So, coming to write about Astrid Lindgren now, I had some catching up to do...

I read the newest translation by Tiina Nunnally (also OUP), published in 2007 and illustrated by Lauren Child of Charlie and Lola fame. Nunnally's translation is described as "sparkling" by the publishers and it certainly reads well. Combined with Child's illustrations it brings a modern air to the book - there are a lot of typographical quirks strongly reminiscent of the Charlie and Lola books. Judging by the examples in the essay I linked to above, it seems closer to the Lamborn translation than the Hurup - perhaps unsurprisingly as Nunnally is also American. She has a deft touch with the word play too - just to use one of the examples quoted by Moats, Pippi makes up a little rhyming ditty as she cooks pancakes for her friends.

The Swedish text is as follows (the normal word for pancake is pannkaka so an extra syllable has crept in there too):

Nu ska här bakas pannekakas,
nu ska här vankas pannekankas,
nu ska här stekas pannekekas. (1945:14)

Hurup's version completely ignores the rhyme and the nonsense:

Here pancakes will be baked now,
here pancakes will be served now,
here pancakes will be fried now! (1954: 9)

Lamborn has:

Now we’re going to make a pancake, 
now there’s going to be a pankee, 
now we’re going to fry a pankye. (1977: 20)

We can now bring the comparison up to date by adding Nunnally's version:

Now it's time to make pancakes,
now it's time to flip panclips, 
now it's time to shape panchapes! (2007: 20)

To me, the last of these is the punchiest - Lamborn's is OK but doesn't scan so well.

From the reviews on Amazon it seems as though this version is succeeding in bringing in new readers attracted by the familiar style of the illustrations, which can only be a good thing. The physical book is also lovely and well produced. My only gripe is that the author and illustrator each get half-page biographies at the back of the book as well as name checks on the back cover and flaps. The translator, who has surely done as much as, if not more than, Lauren Child to make this book work just gets her name on the title page and the aforementioned "sparkling" in the blurb.

B is for Babar

A series that has been running even longer than Asterix is that of Babar the Elephant. Begun in 1931 by Jean de Brunhoff with Histoire de Babar, it has been continued since 1946 by his son Laurent, the most recent book being Babar's Celesteville Games. The first book was translated in 1933 as The Story of Babar and is now published in the UK by Egmont. While the American edition was translated by Merle S. Haas, the translator of the British edition is uncredited. (Translation theorists may also be interested in 'Time, Narrative, Intimacy and the Child' by Gillian Lathey: Meta: Translators' Journal, Volume 48, Number 1-2, May 2003, p. 233-240, which discusses various aspects of the translation itself.)

The Story of Babar tells of a young elephant who runs away to the city (a thinly disguised Paris) after his mother is shot by a hunter. He is adopted by an Old Lady, takes to dressing in a green suit and spats, learns to drive a car and so on. Once fully civilised, he returns to the jungle marries Celeste, becomes King of the Elephants and has three children.

The book I remember best from my own childhood is Babar's Birthday Surprise by Laurent de Brunhoff (1970). In it, Celeste has arranged for a giant sculpture of Babar to be carved into the side of a mountain. I'd actually forgotten the title and most of the plot is pretty hazy, but I vividly remember the illustrations and the lengths they have to go to to keep the present a secret.

A host of controversies rage around Babar - is it appropriate to read the death of the mother to young children? is the book colonialist propaganda or an ironic satire on the benefits of civilisation? - and so on.  (For a detailed take on some of these, see this article from the New Yorker: 'Freeing the Elephants; What Babar Brought' by Adam Gopnik, 22 September 2008.) Yet despite all this, these charming stories with their beautiful illustrations continue to be a global phenomenon, helped on by the TV cartoon series and no shortage of merchandising.

We have the first story in a compendium of classic children's stories and, for what it's worth, read the death of the mother part. It seems quite popular with the boys but is rather long for a bedtime story at the moment. Here's hoping they'll discover it properly eventually, and maybe even branch out into the rest of the series!

Is That a Fish in Your Ear?

I've been meaning to review Is That a Fish in Your Ear? Translation and the Meaning of Everything by David Bellos for some time now, having been given it for Christmas. I found it a fascinating book and very entertaining, although not always as playful as its title. Whether or not it would be such an easy read for somebody with no prior knowledge of translation, I don't know, but I enjoyed the chatty, annecdotal tone as well as insights into aspects of the profession I'm unfamiliar with. The history of simultaneous interpreting, for example, or the mechanics of translation at the EU or the UN, as well as the dragomen of the Ottoman Empire. I also appreciated Bellos' spirited defense of the importance and possibility of translation - he firmly believes that everything can be translated - and the way he takes issue with the idea of les belles infidèles (beautiful but unfaithful, whether referring to women or translation),  poetry getting "lost in translation", that translation is no substitute for the original, and so on.

(I must confess that I was rather childishly pleased to see lolspeak among the languages into which the title is translated on the inside cover of the book: U has gots fish in ur eer?!11 Translayshun and da Meening of stuffz...)

I am, however, less convinced than he seems to be about the usefulness of Google translate, having seen articles like this one, for example, although I take his point that a sentence such as:

"On the part of for the protection of the mansion building occurring it was made valid that a feedback of the building condition was not at all possible on the time Klimts due to documentation lacking."

 is clearly nonsense, where an inaccurate translation produced by a human being would be impossible to spot without knowledge of both languages.

 This is such a comprehensive survey of the history and practice of translation that it would be impossible to summarise here. If you think it's going to be about The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (as some Amazon reviewers seem to have done), then you might be in for a disappointment. If, on the other hand, you're even the slightest bit interested in words, language or what it is that translators and interpreters actually do then I'd highly recommend that you read this book! 

Domestication vs Foreignisation via Red Rage

This post was originally published on Lisa Carter's Intralingo blog a month ago: http://intralingo.com/domestication-vs-foreignisation-via-red-rage/

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One of the eternal debates in translation studies is whether to favour the domesticating or the foreignising approach, and one of the most famous quotations on the subject comes from Friedrich Schleiermacher’s On The Different Methods of Translating of 1815:

  “Either the translator leaves the writer in peace as much as possible and moves the reader toward him; or he leaves the reader in peace as much as possible and moves the writer toward him.”

(For a more detailed look at the article as a whole, check out this excellent post by Susan Bernofsky at Translationista, which I discovered while making certain I’d remembered the wording correctly: http://translationista.blogspot.com/2011/02/friedrich-schleiermacher.html )

On only my second ever book translation, I got the chance to see a practical application of each approach. Allen & Unwin in Australia and Annick Press in Canada had jointly bought the rights to Rote Zorn by Brigitte Blobel and I was approached to translate it. Relatively early on, I enquired whether to use the metric or imperial systems for weights and measures, given the differing approaches of the varying readerships to metrication. Leave them as they are, I was told. We’ll sort that out later.

But that was only the start. In the end, the two editions of the translation came to exemplify the foreignisation/domestication debate. Red Rage is the story of Mara, a sixteen-year-old girl, her dysfunctional family and the problems caused by her uncontrollable anger. The Canadian publisher decided to leave the reader in peace and move the story to a generic city high school somewhere in North America. The Australian publisher decided to leave the writer in peace and keep Mara in her post-war estate* in Essen.

Now this is where things start to get interesting. If we move the writer towards a North American reader, as well as using miles, we have to change most of the characters’ names. Mara stays the same, but her parents Günther and Beate become Gary and Beth, for example. The nationalities of the immigrant neighbours change. Suddenly sixteen-year-olds can no longer (legally) drink beer or ride a moped.

It is certainly true that anger, fear, dysfunctional families and rough estates* can be found anywhere. Perhaps it is easier for a North American teen to identify with a character if they don’t have to worry about cultural differences. All the same, I regret the loss of Mara’s father’s back story. His one great achievement had been to escape to the West from East Germany; after that, though, he’d never amounted to anything, and this goes a long way to explaining the way he acts now. Obviously, once the translation is no longer set in Germany, this section has to go. It’s only a couple of paragraphs, doesn’t affect the main plot. But it does add something. The author put it in for a reason…

I’ve gained more experience since then. Perhaps if the situation were to arise again I’d argue the case for leaving the writer in peace. It depends though. The balance between the writer and the reader shifts from book to book. I recently translated a series of detective novels set in London. As a result, I aimed to make them as smooth as possible. To use the imperial system, to make the dialogue sound British so as to avoid jarring the reader. But maybe it would have been interesting to see ourselves as the Germans see us?

No, there isn’t a simple answer, but I’d be interested in what anyone else thinks about it!
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* UK housing estate = US housing project. Thanks to Amalia Gladhart for making me aware of that little Pond difference.