Some of this will retread what I covered in my post about Tristana, but that's my own fault for not getting around to finishing this sooner.
I read a lot of books in translation. My world books project necessitates it, and I suspect the proportion of books written in English that I read versus those not has gotten smaller since I started the project, but even before I started the project it's fair to say I read a lot in translation. Of the books I've read so far this year, half were written in English, and exactly half of the 34 books I read in 2018 were written in English.
Though I read a lot in translation, what that meant or how it affected my experience of the books I read wasn't something I gave much thought to probably until I read The Count of Monte Cristo in an edition whose translator is not even listed on the publisher's website. (If this Amazon reviewer is to be trusted, I should have read the version translated by Robin Buss.) Reading this edition of The Count of Monte Cristo was the first time I recall where the writing really got in the way of my enjoyment of the book. The story was still exciting, I still wanted to know what would happen, but the language was so stilted. It read like it was a literal, word-for-word translation from the French (perhaps it was) and it kept dragging me back to the act of reading (which is something an author might do intentionally with language, but was certainly not the case here).
Around the same time that I read The Count of Monte Cristo, the new translations of Proust started coming out, beginning with Lydia Davis' rendition of Swann's Way and followed up by the more-correctly-translated second volume title, In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower (which was previously translated as Within a Budding Grove), translated by James Grieve. I had recently finished the Moncrieff-revised-by-Kilmartin translations of In Search of Lost Time and I had the idea that I had to start reading the books all over again in the "right" translations. (Big thanks to Margaret Jull Costa for letting me off the hook on that one!) A couple years after that, Pevear and Volokhonsky's new translation of War and Peace was getting all sorts of media attention and it seemed like maybe translation was having a moment. (I eventually read their War and Peace and also their translation of The Idiot. Now when I search for them it sounds as though there has been a Pevear and Volokhonsky backlash, and perhaps a backlash to the backlash, but in 2007 they were all the rage.)
Of course, the big news translations are always the new translations of old classics; the translations that render old books in modern vernacular; those that reinstate the sex and other taboo subjects excised in older translations. I was working in a bookstore when the Robert Fagles translation of The Odyssey was released to much acclaim. (Here Penguin Random House doesn't fail to mention the translator on the book's webpage.) Maybe if that had been the version I'd been given in school when I was assigned The Odyssey a few years earlier, I would have actually read it. Then again, maybe not. But the translation of contemporary authors rarely gets so much attention. It's simply viewed as part of the publishing process. I was in Buenos Aires a couple years ago and saw a Javier Marías book on the new release table at a bookstore. I hadn't heard he had a new book, but I knew I could look forward to an English edition in the not-too-distant future. (Meanwhile, on the same trip, but in Santiago, I came across some José Donoso books that I'm not sure have been translated into English; or if they have, are not widely available.)
Recently, I was reading something about José Saramago that mentioned his English translator, Margaret Jull Costa. I knew I knew that name, but I didn't think it was from Saramago's books, so I googled her and realized she's also Javier Marías' translator. I've read thousands of pages of her work. She has a part - and not a small one! - in making some of my favorite books accessible to me. I loved this interview with her from 2011 that I found when I tried to learn more about her. Now I want to read more of her translations. So in February, I picked up Tristana, a book I knew nothing about, simply because it was translated by Margaret Jull Costa. She didn't translate either of the Saramago books I've already read, but I have some that she did and I'll get around to them soon.
Learning about the translator's process and relation to the work they translate has become a new fascination of mine. Just a couple weeks prior to reading the Margaret Jull Costa interview I mentionend above, I heard an interview, this one with Roberto Bolaño's English translator, Natasha Wimmer. And also this interview with Megan McDowell is full of interesting insights.
