Fernando Pessoa’s Disappearing Act (2017)

I'm a native-level (European) Portuguese speaker, and although I can get through the beginning, it is with some effort.

I'd describe the style as being akin to stream of consciousness, but with a somewhat jumbled sentence structure on top. Of course, I use the term 'jumbled', but I'm sure it's intentional, and it does have a striking effect because of that.

I'm native speaker and I'm currently reading Grande Sertão: Veredas.

The beginning of the book (first 100 pages) is really hard, mostly because it use words that are not commonly used nowadays but also because some of the words are written as spoken. Some people like to read it loud because of this. I've tried myself for some paragraphs and it really made sense to me :)

Most books lose a bit of their magic when translated. However books full of neologisms and regional dialects are nearly impossible to translate without butching it. That's the case of Grande sertão veredas. You can tell the same story, but you'll probably miss the most important part of the book, which is the way it was written, the names of the characters, etc.

Look to literature that is "punny" or very culturally specific. An example: The title The Importance of Being Earnest is itself a pun on the character's (eventual) nature and name. Translating that to another language you'd need to change the name of the character to maintain the pun in the new language, which may not be feasible. That's a small example, but it's common in some books or plays to see things like this used frequently, especially in dialog.

Poetry is language subject to some constraint, and it's generally impossible to translate it faithfully while also obeying the original constraint. If you look at Disney's song translations, they follow the rhythm faithfully, are pretty good about following the meaning, usually follow the choreography badly, and don't even try to preserve rhyme. (Even in languages in which poetry is supposed to rhyme.)

From another perspective -- there is a lyric in the song Shiny, in Moana, going c'est la vie, mon ami. That's not actually English. How do you translate it from English? This line was translated into Russian as c'est la vie, mon ami. Russians can be expected to be familiar with French, at least at this level. Languages at a greater cultural distance -- including Vietnamese -- don't translate it at all. Intriguingly, the line was translated into French as c'est la vie, mon ami. This preserves the meaning perfectly -- it's more accessible to the French audience than it is to the American audience! -- but it completely loses whatever the implication was of saying the line in French as part of otherwise English dialogue.

It's very difficult to translate anything that simultaneously expresses multiple things. You're doing well when you preserve a single aspect of the original.

Finnegans Wake is probably the classical example. The latter books by William Gaddis also lose a lot (sometimes everything?) because they are so dependent on spoken American English. Cormac McCarthy is also sometimes hard to translate due to orality and some obscure language.

Part of the problem with Grande Sertão: Veredas is that it is has a very inventive, very oral aesthetics that is based on a local dialect and a culture that is unknown (except very superficially) to most of its readers even in Brazil. The burden on a translator to transfer all of that to the foreign reader is immense.

Any work that involves a lot of puns and dialect will be hard to translate, as will anything that uses a lot of rhetorical flair. Puns are often impossible because they involve a "collision" of meaning between two words. If this collision isn't possible in the translated language, the best thing the translator can do is try to come up with their pun. Dialect and slang also will be hard, because slang is kind of a capsule of the culture it comes from. So the translator is going to have to choose a more normal world, losing the original flavor, or pick some slang from the L2, thus bringing an "import" into the world of the work. Rhythm and prosody depend on the harmony between the sounds of the words in the original language. Of course, the words of the translation language will have an entirely different set of sounds, and perhaps the grammar won't even permit similar acts of parallelism. As a stupid example look at

>Vini, Vidi, vici

>I came, I saw, I conquered.

Notice Latin doesn't require the pronoun I. But literally translating "Came,saw, conquered" sounds like it was written by a petulant 14 year old. Secondly, Caesar's clauses are a nice triplet of two syllables. The English version does pretty well there, until it reaches "conquered," which throws the rhythm off. I said it was a stupid example, because the English translates pretty well IMO, but hopefully I demonstrated the difficult work of the translator.

Off the top of my head, I think these would be tough to translate.

-Shakespeare. Too many puns, and the meter is tied to a rhythm natural to English. All poetry is difficult really.

-Huckleberry Finn. Heavy dialect, which often involves the racial prejudices of the time. How can you translate that part? Nothing will be as disrespectful as the word is in English. Furthermore, how do you translate something like: >It must a been close on to one o’clock Do you preserve the grammar error? What's the difference between "close" and "close on"?

-Faulkner. Same as Twain, plus some very heavy rhetoric.

-Joyce. Same as Faulkner, but more puns, heavier rhetoric. If there's anything harder to translate than Finnegans Wake, let me know.

-Gadsby. This book does not contain the letter E! E is the most common vowel in English, but it's not in many other languages. Is the translator "cheating" if constrains the same letter? Amazingly this problem has been tackled in the translation of a different book, La Disparation, a French novel also without any e's either. The English translation, A Void, avoids the character too. However, omitting the E would be too easy in Russian, so that version doesn't contain any O's.

On this topic, Douglas Hofstadter's book Le ton beau de Marot is organized around this and related topics: poertry, translation, language and literary play, and the challenges and freedoms offered translators, all woven in typical Hofstadterian fashion with a breathtaking array of topics and observations. One of my favorite books, and it may interest anyone who, as you say, is fascinated by translation and its difficulties!

Fair warning: the book gets a bit dark in parts (he wrote it after his wife's death, and covers that a bit), but not overwhelmingly or throughout.

ETA: To address your original question, Hofstadter's book is organized around the challenge of translating "Ma mignonne", a very tight little French poem by Clément Marot (hence the book title), and goes into great detail about the challenges it presents, with lots of different approaches and translations. He talks about many other significant challenges to the translator -- the one that comes to mind is La disparition by Georges Perec[1] -- a novel famously written without appearance of the letter e. It was translated into English by Gilbert Adair as A Void -- also lacking that most common of glyphs. Other unpublished e-less translations exist, as well.

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

Jabberwocky by Lewis Carroll has to be the definitive example I feel. Half of it is in a made up language but every English person instinctively knows what it means.

> English-language literature that is difficult to translate into other languages?

A few examples come to mind:

Ulysses by James Joyce

Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll

Naked Lunch by William Burroughs

The stream-of-consciousness style of flowing sentences, how the author plays with language, exotic or made-up words, sounds, subconscious associations - all contribute to a very challenging translation, I imagine.

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Edit: Oh, I'm a couple days late in replying, and others have mentioned similar works of literature.

To each its own. That is my list.

From the comments' guidelines:

"Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

What I love about his stories is that they could be easily applied to modern Portuguese society, and would be for the most part still up to date.

That unfortunately leads us to other philosophical questions, though.

I'm saving Camoes; gonna read Gaspar Correa "The three voyages of Vasco da Gama: and his viceroyalty" with that one (it looked good, but Fernao Mentes Minto is more of its own standalone thing). Most crazy thing I've yet read from Iberia is Captain Alonso Contreras Life; obviously not in Portuguese, and not too much about exploration, but it's just insane.

Ibn Battuta looks pretty cool; thanks for mentioning.