The Icelandic translation of Dracula is actually a different book | Hacker News Reader

The Icelandic translation of Dracula is actually a different book

smithsonianmag.com

88 pointsfanf225 comments

I'm surprised the differences could have been kept out of mainstream literary research for so long. I read Dracula in my 11th grade english class. If it's taught in high school, you'd think there'd have been some sort of academic trading (foreign exchange, university collaborations, etc) between countries that noticed the differences. Sounds like they missed out on a chance to publish.

Well, it was Iceland circa 1902. It had a ~75,000 person population and was fairly isolated from the world. This run may have been as little as few (couple?) hundred books. I could see such a small run being ignored for a long time. How many of those weren't disposable weekend reads that ended up in the trash within weeks/months? I imagine once the initial novelty wore off, no one cared and Iceland's small number of Icelandic readers guaranteed that their version wasn't going far.

I also imagine some Icelandic people knew they had a different version, but Iceland, up until recently, was just a backwaters of Denmark. It may have been an amusing anecdote between Icelandics and the Danish or English who read the true version. Maybe an inside joke between a couple dozen people? Not enough to make the international press. Now its just a historic novelty on the smithsonian mag blog, not exactly the front page of the NY Times.

Up until recently? In Vampire years you mean?

> Stoker could, for example, have sent Valdimar an older version of his story

Back in the old days, I could see happening as purely a mistake and considering how global communication worked then I can certainly see this not noticed for quite some time. Stoker's publisher could have grabbed the wrong manuscript and sent it out. Considering the Amazon reviews claim that the second half of the book is, at best, a rough outline, then I'm guessing this is probable. It sounds like an unfinished and abandoned work that somehow got into production.

I believe it was actually pretty common in those days for translators to abridge and adapt much more freely than what would be considered acceptable today.

Especially if the medium was different, like publishing in a newspaper:

"originally published in serial form in an Icelandic newspaper in 1901"

I think now researches would like it to be directly based on some other version of Stoker's work, as that would give them more value, but I believe it's more probable that the translator did the adaptations himself. I guess it was for him just like today nobody expects the film based on the book to be one-to-one transcription.

Loosely related, in Italy, Mickey Mouse comics were traditionally written and drawn by Italian authors:

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

"The first issue of Topolino was published on December 31, 1932: it contained Mickey's first Italian story drawn by Giove Toppi.[1]"

"Nerbini hadn't correctly secured the publication rights, so when Emmanuel (Disney's representative in Italy) protested, Nerbini changed the title of the comic book into Topo Lino (Mouse Lino), replacing Mickey Mouse with Topo Lino, another mouse. When Nerbini bought the publication rights from Disney and KFS (King Featured Syndacate), he changed the title back to Topolino."

"In 1952, the comic book became a biweekly, and Italian stories increased. Italian stories were written mainly by Guido Martina"

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

"The number of Disney stories produced and published in Italy is far larger than in the US. Italian stories are regularly translated in other European languages (e.g., German, French, English, Greek)."

I have this version:

https://www.amazon.com/Powers-Darkness-Lost-Version-Dracula/...

It's a nice book and an interesting story. Anyone who loves Dracula, translation, or gothic stuff will probably like it.

So that's the translation back from the Icelandic that the article mentioned?

Have you read the original English version as well? If so, which do you think is better?

"Shorter and punchier" makes sense if it was originally intended to be published in serial form.

And the author was paid by the word.

You get Dickens-esque wordiness from pay-by-word, not short and punchy

most authors are paid by the word, even today

This sort of 'translation is basically a different product altogether' setup was still quite common in other media until rather recently. Just look how many video games were completely overhauled for other markets. Super Mario Bros 2 is the obvious and often wheeled out example, but stuff like Totally Rad and Decap Attack were absolutely nothing like the original works they were based on.

It was pretty common in anime too at one point. See Robotech, which is infamous for actually being three separate series stuck together into one.

But it's interesting to see an example where the original author was seemingly involved in modifying the story for local publication.

It's about the Dracula's monster

Was anyone else completely blocked from reading that article because all the ads wedged the browser?

Flawless with Firefox + uBlock Origin. I find that I am usually immune to whatever complaint that people have about unloadable articles on Hacker News.

Worked fine with Chrome+uBlock origin, but I did wonder why smithsonianmagazine.com requested permission to send me notifications.

Why would I ever want that from a webpage, except maybe my webmail or calendar?

I switched from using NoScript to a plugin called uMatrix. It's an improvement in many respects, and I believe it's available for both Firefox and Chrome.

The page took about 10 seconds to load fully on an 8-core laptop with 32 GB of RAM, and continued firing off pixel-tracking requests and pings to scorecardresearch.com for about 80 seconds.

All that for a short article which barely introduced the reader to an interesting topic. It was like a factoid crammed into five paragraphs in order to increase ad real estate.

I've started reading everything I can through a proxy that removes everything except for the text and hyperlinks.

Is this something you've set up yourself, or is there a service you can direct us toward?

I use textise.net

I tried setting up my own, but it was quite a bit harder to manage everyone's broken SSL than I first assumed.

Try whitelisting the site or disabling it for this session, there aren't any overt or annoying ads from what I can tell.

Yeah. I was interested but ended up closing it in under 5 seconds thanks to the ads.

grins

The Russian translation of Pinocchio is actually a different book!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com