News and a Bit of Grimm
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Important news: Swords In Darkness 4.2, The Chapterhouse of Elith, is just about done. If anyone out there wants a pre-publication copy—and is willing to write a review for Amazon, Goodreads, and the like—let me know and I’ll send one out in PDF or whatever ebook format you prefer. This offer is a bit pending, though: my current “beta-readers” (hate that term!) might say it needs a major overhaul first, in which case I’ll be going through it again before sending it for reviews by what I suppose would be gamma-readers.
Meanwhile, I’m getting cracking on Swords In Darkness 4.3, Temporary Title Here. (I haven’t made up my mind at all on a title.) This one riffs on fairy-tales of various kinds, so I re-read Vladimir Propp’s Morphology, which I haven’t read since grad school (more than 20 years ago—eek!), and of course I’m also reading a stack of primary sources as well as some interesting re-interpretations of fairy-tale material by modern authors.
In among the primary sources is, of course, Grimm’s Fairy Tales, and that’s where things get weird.
As you may know, the first two editions of Kinder- und Hausmärchen, of 1812 and 1815, were significantly different from the final 1857 edition. Some tales were added, and many more removed; more strikingly, the tales were edited heavily to make them more “appropriate” for middle-class children. The version most English readers know is Margaret Hunt’s 1884 translation of the 1857 edition. Oddly enough, the original versions were not translated in their entirety until 2014, when two translations came out simultaneously:
I’m waiting for a copy of Zipes’s translation from my library, but the Loo translation was very cheap on Kindle, so I bought it. (Might as well support self-publishers, right?) And it’s very odd. Interesting, useful—but odd.
By way of explanation, let me just show some bits from various versions. Let’s look at the first tale, The Frog King. In the classic Hunt translation of the 1857 edition, the tale opens like this:
In old times when wishing still helped one, there lived a king whose daughters were all beautiful, but the youngest was so beautiful that the sun itself, which has seen so much, was astonished whenever it shone in her face. Close by the King’s castle lay a great dark forest, and under an old lime-tree in the forest was a well, and when the day was very warm, the King’s child went out into the forest and sat down by the side of the cool fountain, and when she was dull she took a golden ball, and threw it up on high and caught it, and this ball was her favorite plaything. Now it so happened that on one occasion the princess’s golden ball did not fall into the little hand which she was holding up for it, but on to the ground beyond, and rolled straight into the water. The King’s daughter followed it with her eyes, but it vanished, and the well was deep, so deep that the bottom could not be seen.
Here’s Zipes’s translation, from the free sample available through Amazon:
Once upon a time there was a princess who went out into the forest and sat down at the edge of a cool well. She had a golden ball that was her favorite plaything. She threw it up high and caught it in the air and was delighted by all this. One time the ball flew up very high, and as she stretched out her hand and bent her fingers to catch it again, the ball hit the ground near her and rolled and rolled until it fell right into the water. (Kindle Locations 1002-1005)
And now here’s Loo’s translation:
Once there was a king’s-daughter, she went out into the wood and sat herself at a cooling spring-pond. She had a golden globe, it was her favorite play-creation, she threw it to heights and caught it in the air again and had her pleasure in it. Once the globe flew quite high, she had her hand already stretched out and her fingers curled, to catch it again, then it fell by and landed on the earth, rolled and rolled and straightly into the water. (Kindle Locations 940-944)
Comparing the first to the seventh edition, there are noteworthy changes, such as the phrase “when wishing still helped one,” and the insertion of a lime-tree and so on. None of it is, in itself, terribly significant, but unquestionably the 1857 version feels more literary and less oral. In some cases the alterations are more dramatic: mothers become stepmothers, fairies become evil stepmothers or witches, hints of sexual behavior (especially extramarital sex) are suppressed, and so forth.
But as to Zipes and Loo, the big thing is that Loo’s version doesn’t look like normal English at all. It’s a kind of crib of the German, not really a complete translation at all. Why is this?
I don’t know anything about Oliver Loo, nor have I been able to dig up significant information on the internet, although he did write a glossary of archaic words in Tolkien; beyond that, I know nothing. I suspect it’s a pseudonym, since all the other people called Oliver Loo seem to be of Chinese extraction and in Hong Kong or Singapore, and something about this book doesn’t feel like it’s the work of a Southeast Asian (I certainly could be wrong about that). What we do know is that Loo is an autodidact, as opposed to Zipes, who’s an extensively-trained academic Germanist, now retired after a fairly prolific career.
In his introduction, Loo tells us a number of things about his approach to translation:
What my translations aim to be are faithful translations of the first edition from 1812 translated as closely as possible from the original German text without additions, modifications, or removals of text. I really do mean faithful. I will say that they are accurate and authentic. My translations can be compared line by line with the original text. No words were added or deleted or changed from the text, except minor changes for clarity.
Loo goes even further than that:
The German and English languages are related enough that I was able to translate each clause and sentence by itself. Every period, comma, quote, semicolon, colon, dash, exclamation and question mark are in exactly the same position in the English translation as they were in the original German text. German generally does not use an apostrophe to show genitive possession, so I generally avoided them also in the translations.
In essence, then, Loo’s translations are sort of one step removed from Google Translate; to put that differently, it’s as though someone ran the original texts through Google Translate and then edited the results rather lightly. Comma-splices are normal, as you see above. Loo commonly uses neuter pronouns to refer to gendered persons (princesses are usually “it”) because—so he says—this is how the Grimms did it. I don’t grasp the intricacies of early 19th-century German well enough to comment authoritatively, but I am not convinced that these differences between German and English are actually meaningful at a textual level.
I’m not going to go on a big rant about the nature and theory of translation; suffice it to say, I think Loo’s work here is not very good qua translation, and that the considerable awkwardness of the quoted passage is by no means the most striking example. Based on the sample I’ve seen Zipes is definitely the way to go if you’re not going to read in German.
But I do think Loo’s version is useful. Because it’s really just a crib of the original text, you do get a sense of what’s normal in the German version. For me, that’s handy. I think if you were reading the German and wanted help, the Loo version would also be useful. It’s not a readable translation as such, but I’m glad I bought it (especially for $4.99).
Next time, I hope to have something more significant to say based on a comparison with Zipes’s work. And then maybe we can talk about translation more seriously.