The Sins of Translation

There's a nice review by Clive James in The Atlantic of the new translation of Madame Bovary—James is particularly harsh on the way in which the new translation renders, in places, Flaubert's French as contemporary Americanized slang. I noticed exactly the same tendency in the Beth Archer Brombert translation of Svevo's novel Emilio's Carnival (Senilità). There are several jarring expressions in the Brombert translation which it takes no knowledge of the original Italian to recognise as clearly poor translations, since too contemporary. In my case it isn't even particularly literary quibbles that irk me; I found that these sentences actually interrupted the flow of the narrative, leaping out as just plain strange sounding, in the context. On top of that, there were actual grammatical errors and other assorted typos that increased in frequency as it went on. It's not as if these sort of books are under the same sort of commercial time pressures as best sellers, so it's hard to explain the poor editing. Maybe it's just that there's no money at all to take the right sort of care. But I'd read proofs for free, and I'm sure lots of other people would too, given the opportunity. While I'm complaining, it strikes me as very strange that the Sydney University library doesn't have an electronic subscription to the New York Review of Books. There's a review by Coetzee of all of Svevo's novels, and a memoir, that I'd like to read, but it's raining, and I don't want to leave the house…