This week I wrote a defence of the new Persuasion adaptation for The Critic in which I defend the millennial American version of Austen against the stuffy English Janeite version. It took me a few days to work out what I think of this novel. Like the modern Japanese fiction I have read (as yet, not a huge amount) this is very observational. And short. This is not, however, a Japanese novel. Elisa Shua Dusapin is a French-Korean writer living in Switzerland. She writes in French.
A note on the translation. My experience is that English-language translators are more prone to strangle prose than translators in other languages I read. (I sometimes amuse myself by reading translations side by side.) The English translations seem overly obsessed with making everything confrom to English grammar (which in some ways is a pretty strict grammar), and they often remove things that were meant as stylistic devices to make the sentences more grammatical. A particularly horrific example was the translation of P.O. Enquist's autobiography A Walking Pine, in which he does not end questions with question marks to catch the sardonic hopelessness of Northern Sweden, and also sometimes ends statements with one or more question marks, or puts exclamation marks mid-sentence. All this is gone in the English version. I also find that Bolaño loses all rythmic intensity in English. It robs the language of so much playfulness and possibility!
A note on the translation. My experience is that English-language translators are more prone to strangle prose than translators in other languages I read. (I sometimes amuse myself by reading translations side by side.) The English translations seem overly obsessed with making everything confrom to English grammar (which in some ways is a pretty strict grammar), and they often remove things that were meant as stylistic devices to make the sentences more grammatical. A particularly horrific example was the translation of P.O. Enquist's autobiography A Walking Pine, in which he does not end questions with question marks to catch the sardonic hopelessness of Northern Sweden, and also sometimes ends statements with one or more question marks, or puts exclamation marks mid-sentence. All this is gone in the English version. I also find that Bolaño loses all rythmic intensity in English. It robs the language of so much playfulness and possibility!
Interesting will look forward to next!