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abandoned book #1
Jan. 5th, 2008 11:00 pm A few months ago I read and enjoyed the Ruth Rendell-ish Icelandic crime novel Silence of the Grave (2002; trans 2005 Bernard Scudder) by Arnaldur Indridason. I gave it an informal review somewhere -- I now can't remember where -- and commented to the effect that the novel had managed to transcend its somewhat plodding translation. I'm afraid that, with the same translator, Yrsa Sigurdardottir's mystery Last Rituals (2007), which I am Officially Abandoning on page 124, isn't capable of the transcendence.
This is, I'd suggest, not entirely the translator's fault; he has clearly produced a sort of working translation which his publisher has chosen to put into print without benefit of copyediting (or, possibly, proofreading; perhaps the proofreader got as bored as I eventually did). Here's an example (page 57) of the opacity one encounters all too often:
"I'm not surprised you asked," the doctor replied. "Harald Guntlieb obviously practiced body modification, as it is called in the countries where the habit originated. At first we thought that the state of his tongue was connected with the disfiguration of the body, but then we noticed it had healed so much that he must have had it done some time before -- it's in a different league from tongue studs in perversity, I really must say."
There's a lot here to puzzle over, such as: ". . . it's in a different league from tongue studs in perversity . . ." What exactly is meant by this? The dead Harald is fairly youthful, so could we be talking about adolescent perversity: put studs in your tongue to piss off the parents? Or are we talking about tongue studs as a sexual perversion? Nearly seventy pages later, having checked back several times to refresh my memory of the passage, I still am not certain.
Elsewhere the text reads, on occasion for pages on end, like the kind of piece which might inspire the tutor of a creative-writing evening class to write "Promising!" in the margin even as s/he knew the student was going to have to work some years yet before producing anything a publisher might seriously look at. And, after over 120 pages of it, I decided I'd persevered long enough; if the original were as interesting and challenging as the Indridason novel I might have kept on going, but Last Rituals is (at least, to judge by the first 124pp) an entertainment rather than anything deeper. Nothing wrong with that, of course, but entertainments should be smooth, palatable, easy reads rather than protracted struggles. Perhaps whoever publishes the mass market paperback will take the trouble to give the text the copyedit it so sorely needs; perhaps pigs might fly.
** Next up: Grub (2007), by Elise Blackwell, a new version of one of my favourite novels, George Gissing's 1891 masterpiece New Grub Street.
This is, I'd suggest, not entirely the translator's fault; he has clearly produced a sort of working translation which his publisher has chosen to put into print without benefit of copyediting (or, possibly, proofreading; perhaps the proofreader got as bored as I eventually did). Here's an example (page 57) of the opacity one encounters all too often:
"I'm not surprised you asked," the doctor replied. "Harald Guntlieb obviously practiced body modification, as it is called in the countries where the habit originated. At first we thought that the state of his tongue was connected with the disfiguration of the body, but then we noticed it had healed so much that he must have had it done some time before -- it's in a different league from tongue studs in perversity, I really must say."
There's a lot here to puzzle over, such as: ". . . it's in a different league from tongue studs in perversity . . ." What exactly is meant by this? The dead Harald is fairly youthful, so could we be talking about adolescent perversity: put studs in your tongue to piss off the parents? Or are we talking about tongue studs as a sexual perversion? Nearly seventy pages later, having checked back several times to refresh my memory of the passage, I still am not certain.
Elsewhere the text reads, on occasion for pages on end, like the kind of piece which might inspire the tutor of a creative-writing evening class to write "Promising!" in the margin even as s/he knew the student was going to have to work some years yet before producing anything a publisher might seriously look at. And, after over 120 pages of it, I decided I'd persevered long enough; if the original were as interesting and challenging as the Indridason novel I might have kept on going, but Last Rituals is (at least, to judge by the first 124pp) an entertainment rather than anything deeper. Nothing wrong with that, of course, but entertainments should be smooth, palatable, easy reads rather than protracted struggles. Perhaps whoever publishes the mass market paperback will take the trouble to give the text the copyedit it so sorely needs; perhaps pigs might fly.
** Next up: Grub (2007), by Elise Blackwell, a new version of one of my favourite novels, George Gissing's 1891 masterpiece New Grub Street.
