Epistemophilia: why translation matters

For book club this month, we picked a translation of a French novel, The Gods Will Have Blood which, in addition to being one frakking awesome title, was a great book. The correct translation to read of this is by Frederick Davies for Penguin. Fortunately, there aren't a cornucopia of translations available to get confused by but avoid the previous one called "The Gods are Athirst" (a more literal translation of the French title, "Les Dieux Ont Soif.")

The quality of translation is of course essential to the experience and it's not uncommon for someone to look at an old translation and decide it was inadequate, regardless of how successful it was when it was published. I was listening to PRI's World Books podcast and they interviewed Ross Benjamin who has written a new translation of Job by Joseph Roth (1894-1939.) There is a story about it here.The novel is about the lives of Jews in Eastern Europe in the early 20th century. Roth himself was from Galicia (now part of the Ukraine), only a few miles from the Russian border.

The story takes an interesting turn due to the back story of the original translation by Dorothy Thompson which was a sold very well when it was published here back in 1931. Dorothy Thompson herself was an interesting lady. She was a journalist who was thrown out of Nazi Germany in 1934 for filing unflattering stories about Hitler. She was also the wife of Sinclair Lewis. She was considered very influential in her day.

As far as the need for re-translation goes, Benjamin said there is a discrepancy in the translation community over whether the poetry of the original text can be recreated in another language. He feels it should but other translators take a more practical approach. He also disagreed with some choices Thompson made in her word choices. Interestingly, she refers to the ghetto at one point as "the streets of the Jews" which implies it was a larger area than it really was. Benjamin said the correct translation should be "the street of the Jews" which changes the meaning considerably.