On translation.

I have read very few texts in both their original tongue and in an English translation. Apart from cribs of O level Latin set-texts half a century ago, the only ones which spring to mind are Gil Blas in Smollett’s translation, Il gattopardo, and a few pages of Il cane di terracotta, before I gave up the English version in disgust.
A few days ago there was a discussion on Radio 4 between translators of The Little Prince. They had approached their task from different perspectives: one seeking to make the text seem the product of a twenty-first century Englishman, another to preserve its original tone. Although both positions have their merits, my sympathies lie with the latter. It’s sometimes true that viewpoints which strike the foreign reader as bizarre may well be normal for the culture which has produced the text, thus creating a case for finding an everyday equivalent in that of the reader; but if literature is to fulfil its function of enlarging the mental horizons of the reader that case needs to be dismissed. So while Smollett’s Gil Blas is great fun to read, it keeps the reader firmly within the digressive tradition of the 18th century English novel rather than conveying any sense of Le Sage’s tight structure and finely-chiselled prose. When Chaucer uses the word Bishop rather than High Priest in Troilus and Criseyde or Shakespeare has clocks striking in Julius Caesar they’re writing from within a belief system that, viewing all societies as essentially the same, has no problem with altering their accidents to conform to current practice - no longer a tenable position. As for the translation of Il cane di terracotta it somehow coarsened Montalbano, making him seem a hard-boiled American cop rather than a sensitive Sicilian commissario. Not from what he said - the translation was accurate - but from how he said it: the register was slightly out of kilter. And register is crucial. When I was translating Troilus and Criseyde into Italian, an Italian friend advised against Troilus addressing Criseyde as Lei rather than tu. But I felt it important to preserve the formality of the original (you rather than thou) which was so integral a part of courtly love.
Which brings me to Wallander. My wife and I first met Mankell’s detective in the Swedish television series, then saw some of the BBC version starring Kenneth Branagh, and finally read a translation of the first novel featuring Kurt. The translation seemed fine and the plot was engaging if not as feverishly absorbing as those of Larsson. But the Swedish television series was better. And better too than the BBC version. Now it’s not unusual for a film to be better than the book it’s based on: The French Lieutenant’s Woman was spoilt by Fowles’s self-consciously clever and slightly preachy tone- irritating the reader in the same way that Melvyn Bragg irritates the listener - which Pinter’s film-script mercifully jettisoned. What I find difficult to pin down is why I preferred the Swedish to the English television version. Both series were made by the same company, Yellow Bird, and both were filmed on location in Sweden. Perhaps it’s because one felt that the Branagh version was merely a translation of the Swedish - although they shared no plots - rather than an imaginative reworking in the tradition of Sturges’ treatment of Kurosawa’s The Seven Samurai in The Magnificent Seven. Of course, if the Swedish version hadn’t been screened, I guess I’d have been perfectly happy with the English one. In the same way I’d have probably quite enjoyed The Terracotta Dog if I hadn’t previously read Il cane di terracotta.

The Truman Show

On Sunday I returned home from my daughter's wedding. It was my third visit to Dubai. The place is certainly different. Somebody I met there summed it up as being like The Truman Show. I think she was spot on. The place is unnaturally clean. Everybody speaks English, even Asians who were born in Dubai and whose ancestors have never lived in the UK or the States. As my son remarked, the buildings look as though they belong in Sim City. Each one is plonked down as an autonomous item in the way a child might place his lego constructions on a play-mat. It defies reality in the same way that an economy based on sub-prime mortgages does. On Sunday we flew into Fiumicino. There are certainly some parallels between Ancient Rome and Dubai. Both were the stupor mundi of their day. But Rome was sustainable because it was built in a fertile region not a desert, and its wealth came from running a huge empire, not from bubble economics. I hope for my daughter and son-in-law's sake the bubble lasts a few more years before it bursts and the skyscrapers collapse back into the lone and level sands.

New Tricks Swedish style

Yesterday I finished reading the final volume of the Millennium Trilogy: The Girl who Kicked the Hornets’ Nest. In some ways it was a gothick version of the BBC police series New Tricks, as both involve old codgers returning to active operations. With one difference: the BBC series is basically a comedy, Larsson’s is a nightmare. The BBC has three pensioners - played by Dennis Waterman, James Bolam and Alun Armstrong - recruited to a newly established section devoted to investigating cold cases. Larsson has just two geriatrics - Gullberg and Clinton - but they make Bolam et al seem positively sprightly. Gullberg is 78 and suffering from terminal bowel and bladder cancer, Clinton spends alternate days on dialysis. Unlike their English counterparts, they have returned to a long-established, sinister and highly secret organisation within Sapö, the Swedish security police, known to the very few who are aware of its existence as The Section. And they have returned not to right past injustices but to prevent those formerly committed by The Section being uncovered - and to perpetrate fresh ones. Unlike the redoubtable Amanda Holman, their boss, Wadensjöö, is only nominally in control.
Larsson’s novels have several irritating features. The main character, Blomkvist, like his creator is an investigative journalist. A great deal of time is spent on telling the reader what a wonderful job his magazine is doing rather than simply letting him discover this for himself. Every other page tells us how Blomkvist is irresistibly attractive to women and is a wonderful shag. Unless Paul Newman was using ‘Larsson’ as a pen-name, the author’s wish-fulfilment is a fantasy too far. The prose is often leaden, not helped, one suspects, by an American translator whose grasp of English grammar is less than perfect.
Yet none of this really matters. After around fifty pages of the reader’s feeling rather distanced by the author’s thinly-disguised self-congratulation the magic kicks in as the plot goes up a gear and one is completely swallowed by the story. Not great literature to feed the soul, but very effective entertainment.
Unlike Kate Atkinson. Her plots grip, but she also leaves you feeling that you’ve gained fresh insights into human nature. Her characters have real inner lives and her portrayal of a woman suffering from Alzheimer’s in Started Early, Took my Dog was a frighteningly convincing forecast of a condition I’ve, statistically, a good chance of experiencing first-hand in the fairly near future. I’ve now read all four of her tales featuring Jackson Brodie and they just get better and better. I’m sorry that Larsson won’t be writing any more books; I’d be devastated if Atkinson’s came to an end.