- Strange Horizons now has a weekly podcast! Get it through iTunes here, or subscribe manually to http://www.strangehorizons.com/podcast.xml.
- The Nebula preliminary ballot. Who knows which items will make the final cut, but I’m glad to see nods for David Marusek’s Counting Heads, Daryl Gregory’s “Second Person, Present Tense”, M. Rickert’s “Anyway” and Theodora Goss’ “Pip and the Fairies“. The novella category looks a bit half-hearted, although it occurs to me that if the jury added “Map of Dreams”, M. Rickert could potentially sweep the short fiction categories. And the oldest item still eligible under the wacky Nebula rules this time? “Little Faces” by Vonda McIntyre, from February 2005.
- There’s a new Internet Review of SF out, although inexplicably the article on worst SF TV episodes ever neglects to mention Torchwood.
- Victoria Hoyle on The Penelopiad by Margaret Atwood.
- Jeff Vandermeer offers twelve overlooked books of 2006.
- The dumbest article I’ve seen at Bookslut in a while.
- Jonathan Strahan interviewed about editing and Australian sf.
- The Ninth Carnival of Feminist Science Fiction and Fantasy.
- A website for The No Shows, aka the band from Justina Robson’s Quantum Gravity novel. Complete with hit single, would you believe.
- And finally: the deadline for nominations for the BSFA Awards draws ever closer. Send your votes to BSFA.Awards@gmail.com by midnight tomorrow. You can count on there being another post to remind you before then.
- Comment
- Reblog
-
Subscribe
Subscribed
Already have a WordPress.com account? Log in now.
vector-bsfa.com 
Why is the article at bookslut dumb? It’s only a version of what Translation Studies talks about, what Marcial Souto talked about and what John Crowley discusses in _The Translator_.
Some translators can become collaborators with their authors, but even then what you get is *their* filtration of what you need to know.
Asterix in French, is not Asterix in English.
Of course — on one level, the point the column makes is trivially true. But to my mind it exaggerates the point to absurd levels — I don’t think the fact that it may be hard to fully understand the context of a translated work is a good justification for effacing translated literature from your reading entirely. (Apart from anything else, I would argue that translations can have value independent of the original work; half of reading is what a reader brings to the book, after all.)
One thing not brought up in articles about ONLY reading foreign work in its native language is that unless one is totally fluent in the language the material is written in, you’re still going to miss the nuances. I’m not great at other languages so if I read the original French or German I’ll get a lot less out of the book than if I read an excellent translation.
Well, it’s only silly in as far it has to conform to the usual literary column sort of format, which makes it all more dramatic than it deserves to be, with the writer having a lot less to say about it than there’s space reserved for it…
The broader point, that translations no matter how well done are not the original work, still stands. Even on the mundane level at which I write I’ve experienced that there are things that are much more difficult to express in English than in Dutch and vice versa.
Ellen Datlow’s point, that reading a novel in the original language is no guarantee for “getting” it either, is also one I’ve experienced myself when I first started to read English and for many years afterwards.
However, learning a language well enough to be as confident as a native reader to get a novel is much less hard than it is to create a good translation true to the original author’s vision. In the latter, you need not only to be pretty much a native in both languages and cultures, but also very sure of what you’re reading into a given passage and translate is what the author actually meant to be there…
Needless to say, with sf especially, few translators are that good or take that much care. Most Dutch translations of English language science fiction I’ve read tend to “flatten” the book: losing dialect and idiom, of character voices, undsoweiter.