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> Everybody admires his extremely deep knowledge of the Italian language and its nuisances, I would even dare to say "unrivaled" in our present day.

I always found it strange that in the U.S., conversations about, say, Foucault's Pendulum, don't really touch on the fact that people are reading a translation and not the original work. The vast majority of the readers probably wouldn't even be able to tell you the name of the translator.

I always wonder how different the translation is from the original, and how different it would be from other possible translations. I remember looking at different translations of Lysistrata and feeling like they were almost completely different plays.

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I always wonder about this too. Sometimes you get lucky and the original author translates it themselves (Waiting for Godot) or there's a translation that's endorsed by the author. But other times the best you can get is a widely-accepted translation, and even that's not always enough to assuage any fears that you're missing sometime.

I do think it's funny when the translator makes a point of shitting on other translations in the foreword. I think the version of Aristotle's Politics I read in college did that.

I really can't tell for certain, but I feel fortunate that Michael Kandel translated Stanislaw Lem's works; they read so well to me, I can't imagine them not being what the author meant. The fact that the poetry in "Cyberiad" works so well (in English) makes me feel he's a good and honest translator. You're right on Eco, though: I can't name the translator for Pendulum.

Funny. Lem, Eco are the two I always wonder about re: translations, because of their wit and wordplay. And of course all poets

I would add Murakami to that list. In my experience, Japanese doesn't translate all that well to English - although some Murakami's works, like "South of the Border", feels very close to Fitzgerald. I'm now a little surprised to realize that "Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World" was actually written before both it, and "Norwegian Wood".

At least for "Norwegian Wood", I found the translation to Norwegian to "feel" better than (the excerpts I've read) of the English translation. It's hard for me to say if that is because Norwegian is my first language, and I learned Japanese from living in Japan, or because there are some parallels between terse Nordic prose and poetry and Japanese. I could certainly see the Nordic sagas working "better" in Japanese than in English.

Re:saga-like literature, I first read Lord of the Rings in English, then the recent Norwegian translation "Ringdrotten". Ringdrotten feels almost more like a work on its own than "just" a translation, since it uses a wide range of Norwegian dialect features to convey the various species and social classes of LotR (making the language differences much more pronounced than in the English). Rather tough read though, due to archaic word choices.

Well, speaking of Italians, Dante is another great example. Reading a translation of the comedy that attempts to preserve the meter and/or rhyme is completely different from reading a prose translation.

If I'm not mistaken, Eco had a good hand in translating most of his works, or at the very least he was on good terms with, and selected, most of his translators. Given the character of his work, I'd find it hard to believe otherwise.

Well, why else would somebody bother making a new translation of an already-translated work unless they thought that existing translations were flawed?

I'm not just talking about acknowledging improvements; I read one introduction where he spent the majority of the time more or less calling a previous translator an idiot.

But another reason I could see to re-translate something besides previous translations being flawed is them being old. If a particular obscure work only has on English translation, and it's 100 years old, it seems pretty reasonable to want to translate it into more modern English.

For better or worse, anything sufficiently subtle or complicated can't be translated 1-1 across languages. There are too many problems of context, meaning, etc. For a strange example - the Intuit have 50 words for snow. How much subtlety would be lost translating that into English? It just wouldn't work.

[0] https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/there...

> have 50 words for snow

Untrue, but widely circulated and accepted myth [0]

[0] http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=4419

Fair enough, but the point still stands. Languages don't map 1 to 1.

I guess if you live in SV you might not have direct experience with this, but English has a lot more than one word for "snow".

In Seattle we have 50 words for rain

Rain, stupid rain, fucking rain, miserable rain...

In Seattle we have 50 words for surprise at the lack of rain.

Really? Like what? I can think of things like snow (sleet, flurries, blizzard, powder) but not any direct synonyms. We can't hold a candle to the Inuit.

Why would you have multiple words for the same thing, that don't carry different shades of meaning or uses? What do you imagine these 59 words are used for? Cute little nicknames?

I wouldn't say you should! I imagine the Inuit have a much more sophisticated understanding of snow than someone from Massachusetts.

Maybe not official oxford dictionary words for snow, but as a skier, I can think of: Powder, pow, fresh, fatties, corn snow, crud, corduroy, slush, champagne powder, wet snow, ice coast snow, flurries, whiteout, etc..

Some words describing how it lays, some describing how it falls, some describing what it turns into, moisture content, flake size. This is how you get to "50" (or just multiple) words for snow. English does it too. It's not just generic "snow" that gets described with 50 words... (but some are just flavor: pow, fresh whateveryougetthepoint)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eskimo_words_for_snow

tl;dr: they modify words by adding suffixes (e.g. instead of adjectives). So they have (can make) 50 words out of anything

Sometimes things go well if the translators are good enough.

I read Neuromancer both in English and Catalan, in there there were programs called ICE (Intrusion Countermeasures Electronics, so a firewall) and the programs to break them were called icebreakers.

The catalan translator (Joan Fontcuberta i Gel) managed to translate ICE to GEL (I don't remember what the acronym mean, but it made sense). "Gel" is "ice" in Catalan, also is one of the translator's surnames. And so we could have "trencagels" as "icebreakers" (literal translation).

So, yes, most things are not easily translatable, so when they are they stand up and show us the craftmanship of the translators.

Intuit (sic) actually have fifty words for different types of _taxes_, the snow thing is a myth...

> I always wonder how different the translation is from the original, and how different it would be from other possible translations. I remember looking at different translations of Lysistrata and feeling like they were almost completely different plays.

There's a great Radiolab episode that covers exactly that: http://www.radiolab.org/story/translation/

I'm reading Foucault's Pendulum right now, and even though I'm absolutely loving it, part of me feels like I'm missing out by reading a translation. The other part of me wonders whether those who read the original work missed out by not reading this translation.

> part of me feels like I'm missing out by reading a translation

In general I often feel the same, but in this particular instance it might make you feel better to know that William Weaver's translations are widely lauded.

Eco famously said Weaver's translation of The Name of the Rose was "much better than the original". :) And I've always found it pleasing to wonder if that might not even be true. One thinks of a translation as being necessarily inferior to an original, but depending on the two writers involved, there's no ab initia reason why it might not be better (for some given definition of "better", anyway - clearer, more accessible, more profound, etc).

Well I can easily see how great translators, could improve on top of the shoulders of another author's book.

Particularly if you start with a book centered about plot, structure, and other "macro" properties of good literature, and apply an author that excels on the "micro" structure part.

Jorge Luis Borges, or Vladimir Nabokov, with their great command of vocabulary, come to mind. They are also great authors that dealt with several translations. Borges, particularly, stated that translations could improve the original, and modified his translations where he deemed appropriate.

Good interview of William Weaver in the Paris Review which discusses some of his early days as a translator in post-war Italy: http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/421/the-art-of-tran...

Eco would probably point out that even a work in its native language is a translation of a deeper language inaccessible to all but the writer.

Whether he said it or you did, that is a really lovely statement

In general translators are almost anonymous, but actually in Eco's case, the translator of FP and many of his other books was William Weaver, who was kind of a "rock-star" among translators. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Weaver

My copy of Foucault's Pendulum doesn't even name the translator, I had similar thoughts to you on reading the first comment and had a look.

A contrast is with the works of Stanislaw Lem, all the English translations were done by the same person.

The translator[1] was apparently pals with Eco and translated several of his books. I got curious and ended up finding a paywalled diary of his experience translating the book[2].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Weaver

[2] https://www.jstor.org/stable/43470168?seq=1#page_scan_tab_co...

Weaver did excellent translations for much of Calvino's work, too.

Not paywalled. You have to create a free as in beer account, then you can read 3 articles every 14 days.

There have been several different translators for Lem. Michael Kandel, Louis Iribarne, Jean-Michel Jasiensko + Joanna Kilmartin and Steve Cox, Marc E. Heine, Barbara Marszal and Frank Simpson, and probably others.

Of these, Michael Kandel seems by far the best.

As a Muslim, I've noticed the same when it comes to the Quran. People think that they've read the Quran when in fact a large of its beauty is in the structure of the Arabic text.

I would say that is like the difference between the KJV and other translations of the bible. KJV is just plain wrong a lot of the time but the writing is very good.

Uh...no, it's like the difference between the original Greek/Hebrew and the translations.

There are many reasons to read the Quran aside from aesthetics. But I wholeheartedly agree.

It's funny you should mention translations as different: when Umberto Eco translated Queneau's Exercises in Style he had to rewrite more than a few. Many would consider all translations of that book as rewritings, new exercises. Some don't even have the same number of pieces.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exercises_in_Style

Translator, traitor; or translator, trader?

Check out Douglas Hofstadter's essay on just this topic.

This was the essay that got me thinking about translation not being a 1-1 exercise.

I would also recommend Eco's own Mouse or Rat: Translation As Negotiation.

He has a full book on this subject too:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Le_Ton_beau_de_Marot

I had this brought into sharp relief recently when I was reading Italo Calvino's If on a Winter's Night a Traveler (which has become one of my favorite books, coincidentally). There was a passage about how the "formal you" became an "informal you"—something that doesn't happen in English.

This passage, no matter how it was translated, would inevitably be jarring in English in a way that it wouldn't in Italian or even when translated to some other language which also makes that grammatical distinction.

Not that I'm complaining: if anything, it fit perfectly in a book as meta as If on a winter's night. It certainly made my experience deeper. But it also made it different than it would have been in other languages which makes you think...

I think, asked to make that translation, I'd have resorted to making all the characters in the play say "thee" and "thou" at appropriate moments, just so I had something to talk about.

You may be interested in Douglas Hofstadter's writing about translations of the poem Jabberwocky in <em>Gödel Escher Bach</em., excerpted here (at least in part, I thought there was more in the book):

http://www76.pair.com/keithlim/jabberwocky/poem/hofstadter.h...

It's interesting how translators decided to handle a poem that consists of so many nonsense words that are meant to evoke specific ideas in an English-speaking reader.

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