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Slight tangent into translations: I read two translations of the book "The Master and Margarita". My first read was so boring I couldn't help but stop reading
by ibudiallo 4mo ago
Slight tangent into translations:
I read two translations of the book "The Master and Margarita". My first read was so boring I couldn't help but stop reading before the end of the first chapter. I can't find the copy and the name of the person who translated it, but this one had all the Russian nicknames translated. It kept talking about a guy called homeless. I thought it was just a bad book and dismissed it for years. I couldn't understand what all the fuss was about with this book.
But then, I stumbled upon the translation by Diana Burgin and Katherine Tiernan O'Connor. Although I don't speak Russian, I think this is as good as it gets. They did a phenomenal job.
You can see the same effect with the mechanical translation of the book "We" by Yevgeny Zamyatin, where the government is called "United State" easily confused with the "United States". The translation that called it "One State" was so much better.
- anotherevan 4mo agoI still clearly remember in my early twenties being stunned to discover that the Astérix comics are originally written in French and then translated. Coming up with names like Getafix in English for the druid — incroyable.
- TheChetan 4mo agoI had a similar experience reading the “Count of Monte Cristo”. I gave up multiple times when reading the first translation.
- rciorba 4mo agoI read the first Dune books in Romanian, then re-read the first one in English, and I was amazed at how nice the translation was. I actually prefer it to the original. For example, stillsuit sounds really basic, but distrai, a portmanteau of "a distila" (to distil) and "strai" (old word for clothes) lands differently for me.
- buggy6257 4mo agoNow I’m wondering if “still” is meant to be short for “distill”…
- semiquaver 4mo agoOf course it is. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Still https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Still