“Following Dehmel’s advice, for which I am thankful to this day, I used my time in translating from foreign languages, and even now I hold this to be the best way for a young poet to understand more deeply and more creatively the spirit of his own language. I translated the verses of Baudelaire, a few of Verlaine, Keats, William Norris, a short drama by Charles van Lerberghe, a novel by Camille Lemonnier, pour me faire la main.
“Just because every strange language at first offers opposition in its most personal turnings to those who would copy it, it invites forces of expression which, otherwise unsought, would never come to light; and this struggle to wrest from a strange language its most intimate essence and to mold it as plastically into one’s own language, was always a particular artistic desire on my part. Because this silent and actually thankless work requires patience and perseverance, virtues which I had neglected in the Gymnasium, through ease and boldness, it became particularly dear to me; for in this humble activity of transmitting the highest treasures of art I experienced for the first time the assurance of doing something truly useful, a justification of my existence.”
In conventional parlance, professional translations exist on a spectrum from “close” to “free.” A close translation reproduces the structure and diction of the original as accurately as possible in correct English. A free translation is one where the translator has taken more liberties.
What is the difference between “close” and “literal”? A “literal” translation has the same structure as the original text and direct equivalents for all the words, even to the point of nonsense: “I brush myself the teeth,” “He makes heat in Wisconsin today,” or “I make to myself cares around you,” for example. Pros don’t do literal translations unless they are working on a special task like explaining sentence structure to language learners.
Close translations are not nonsense, but sometimes they are too close.
I ran into a good example while researching the Quebec Winter Carnival. Its website has English and French versions of the same text. Here’s the French, which I would bet my life savings was written first:
Si vous ne connaissez pas encore le Carnaval, il est temps de remédier à la situation ! Le Carnaval est un festival extérieur qui célèbre l’hiver entre la fin janvier et la mi-février. Pour une période de 10 jours, la ville est transformée en fête des neiges avec ces nombreuses décorations, sculptures de glaces et lumières. Au rendez-vous : plusieurs sites d’activités pour les petits et grands, un défilé de chars allégoriques et des soirées musicales. C’est l’événement hivernal à ne pas manquer !
And here is the English:
If you don’t know the Carnival yet, it’s time to remedy the situation! Carnival is an outdoor festival that celebrates winter between late January and mid-February. For a period of 10 days, the city is transformed into a snow festival with many decorations, ice sculptures and lights. On the agenda: several activity sites for young and old, a parade of allegorical floats and musical evenings. This is the winter event not to be missed!
That’s a very close translation. It’s not nonsensically literal—if it were, it would have “several sites of activities for the smalls and the bigs,” and so on—but the English is as close to the French as you can get while still being normal English.
“Allegorical floats” is a noteworthy phrase. In fact, the French “chars allégoriques” simply means “floats.” “Chars” is a general enough word for vehicles (especially in Quebec) that it needs an adjective to specify the notion of vehicles decorated to represent something. Whereas if someone told me in English that I was going to watch allegorical floats go by, I’d wonder if there was an exam at the end.
For promotional materials, translators usually take a freer approach to match the style of advertisements in their language.
For example:
If you’ve never been to the Quebec Winter Carnival, it’s time to fix that! Carnival is an outdoor festival that turns our city into a celebration of winter from late January to mid-February. It’s ten days of fun in the snow among gorgeous decorations, enchanting ice sculptures and dazzling lights. There’s plenty to do for visitors of all ages! Highlights include the parade with elaborate floats and evenings of musical entertainment. Don’t miss this extraordinary winter event!
My brother and colleague, Scott Spires, has abandoned his old Lakefront Linguist blog for a Substack called Lakefront Review of Books.
A couple years ago he lent me his copy of the Wyndham Lewis book Self Condemned. I never got around to reading it so I gave it back to him, and now he’s written a review of it that makes me want to read it after all, darn it.
I’m pleased to report that a novel I recently translated is available on Kindle: Escape to Catania
And yes, even though the book takes place in Italy and the author’s name is Italian, it was written in German.
It’s the story of a woman police officer rebuilding her life after a personal betrayal. She requests a transfer to Sicily, where she learns more about the mafia and the European migration crisis. This volume is the first in a series, so it introduces characters and situations that will develop over time. If that sounds interesting to you, check it out at the link above.
A lot of my translation work is fairly dry and academic, so working on a novel with day-to-day life situations and dialogue was a fun opportunity. Many thanks to the author for selecting me to introduce her story to English-speaking readers.
For a time the Catholic Church was reluctant to approve Bible translations; now they are encouraged. What happened?
This post is for students, people caught up in arguments about history and religion, and anyone else who’s ever wondered about this issue. I hope it’s a useful introduction to the topic. If you find part of this post confusing, or if it doesn’t answer a question you would expect it to answer, leave a comment and I might make changes in response.
PART ONE: Practical Considerations
When people ask this question, they’re thinking about the mauve part of this map, where the head of the Church was the Bishop of Rome and the authorized version of the Bible was the Vulgate, a Latin translation of the Bible from Greek and Hebrew, written by St. Jerome in the late fourth century.
The first thing you need to understand to get a handle on the issue is how the linguistic landscape of Europe made Latin the favored language of education.
As Walter J. Ong explains in his excellent book Orality and Literacy, “Between about AD 550 and 700 the Latin spoken as a vernacular in various parts of Europe had evolved into various early forms of Italian, Spanish, Catalan, French, and the other Romance languages. By AD 700, speakers of these offshoots of Latin could no longer understand the old written Latin, intelligible perhaps to some of their great-grandparents. Their spoken language had moved too far away from its origins.
“But schooling, and with it most official discourse of Church or state, continued in Latin. There was really no alternative. Europe was a morass of hundreds of languages and dialects, most of them never written to this day. Tribes speaking countless Germanic and Slavic dialects, and even more exotic, non-Indo-European languages such as Magyar and Finnish and Turkish, were moving into western Europe. There was no way to translate the works, literary, scientific, philosophical, medical or theological, taught in school and universities, into the swarming oral vernaculars which often had different, mutually unintelligible forms among populations perhaps only fifty miles apart. Until one or another dialect for economic or other reasons became dominant enough to gain adherents even from other dialectical regions (as the East Midland dialect did in England or Hochdeutsch in Germany), the only practical policy was to teach Latin to the limited numbers of boys going to school.” (p. 112)
In other words, for much of the middle ages, if you wanted to translate the Bible into the vernacular, the first question was: Which vernacular? If you were in the German-speaking world, the answer couldn’t just be “German,” because there was no single standard form of German. Depending on where you lived, you might call the supreme being “God,” “Got,” or “Kot”. If you wanted to write “I believe in God the Father almighty,” your location would determine whether you wrote “Ih gilaubu in got fater almahtigan,” or “Gilouiu an god fader alomahtigan,” or “Ec gelobo in got alamehtigan fadaer”. Whatever you wrote, its geographical reach would be quite limited.
The vernacular also changes over time, whereas Latin—while not entirely immune to modification—is immensely more consistent as generations go by than the language people are shouting at each other in the streets.
Bear in mind, as well, that books required an enormous amount of time and effort to produce. Someone had to sit in a chilly scriptorium scratching away at parchment or vellum (itself laboriously produced from animal skins) with a quill, which had limited mobility and needed to be dipped in liquid ink repeatedly. Here is a good video about how books were made in the middle ages. In short: it took a while.
And then the translation process itself takes time. Consider how long it takes to think through the best way to translate each line of the Bible. That’s still the case today, but it’s even harder when you’re translating into a language that doesn’t yet have a large body of prose writing that could inform your style and usage.
In the time it might take you to produce a single vernacular Bible of limited utility, you could teach Latin to a room full of young lads who could then use it to read not just the Bible, but other important books as well. What’s more, since schools all over Europe were teaching Latin, your local boys could go on to communicate easily with scholars in other countries. All that had to be done to make key works accessible to people in different times and places, and enable them to share their own works widely, was to teach them Latin. For a long time, this was the most efficient system available.
It worked so well for so long that when vernaculars began to coalesce into standardized forms and other systems became possible, people were not necessarily in a hurry to change it.
PART TWO: The Problem of Translation
There is no perfect translation and every translation is also an interpretation. This is unavoidable.
A legend is told about the Septuagint, which is an ancient translation of the Hebrew Bible into Greek. The story goes that 72 translators gathered in Alexandria. Each of them worked in isolation on his own version of the text and when they had finished and compared their work, behold, it was found that everyone had written the same words.
That would indeed be a miracle.
The translation of authoritative religious texts is always a cause for concern. The legend of the Septuagint soothed the anxiety of those who relied on it. Vulgate readers could take comfort from Jerome’s status as a saint—one could assume the Holy Spirit was guiding his pen. But the guardians of orthodoxy were not eager to see his translation turned into hundreds of new, experimental translations.
The problem of translation is a problem for everyone, not just medieval Europeans. For example, the customary way to deal with this problem in Islam is for only the Arabic text of the Koran to be truly considered “The Koran”; early translations had titles like The Meaning of the Glorious Koran or An Interpretation of the Koran. I have a copy entitled The Holy Qur’an with English Translation. It contains the Arabic text, and only that part is actually the Holy Qur’an.
Having just checked Amazon, I’m not sure how strict publishers are anymore about the titles they put on translations of the Koran. But I did find interesting comments (on three different versions) that reflect common concerns about the translation of holy books:
It’s a non-sectarian translation. It’s neither Sunni nor Shia. It just translates the Quran. No interpretations and explanations. [mmm-hmmm – Ed.]
I give it four stars only because it was clear to me in reading it that the anonymous translator ensured that sometimes difficult and controversial passages received the kindest, most Islam-supportive interpretations.
I suspect Arberry’s translation of the Holy Koran is not without flaws….again, this is a translation, not the Koran itself as God’s word. For this reason, I assigned 4 stars to the translation, but a perfect score to the Holy Word of God as written in the Koran.
To return to the Bible, it’s important to understand that Catholic theologians of the Vulgate era were leaning hard on the Latin text to support Church teaching. What if the text became unmoored by translation into multiple languages, passing through the interpretive faculties of many people, some of them, perhaps, devious heretics? What might come out on the other end and what problems might it cause? There were concerns.
But here I should say a bit about the translations that were in fact made in the centuries before the Reformation, despite all the above-mentioned reasons not to bother translating the Bible.
PART THREE: Pre-Reformation Bible Translations
You may have finished part one and thought, “That’s fine for the few boys who went to school, but what about everyone else? How did they find out what was in the Bible?”
That’s a big topic, but concisely: sermons, other preaching, storytelling, images, mystery plays, popular devotions, and sometimes, early translations.
As explained in part one, vernacular translations of the entire Bible were doomed to fail a cost/benefit analysis. But there were various translations of important parts of the Bible into local languages.
The Wessex Gospels are a well-known example of a translation into Old English, done in the late tenth century (ca 990).
Here is a sampling of German translations:
a ninth-century translation of a Latin translation of the Diatessaron of Tatian into east Franconian, seen here in a modern edition:
a psalm translation, also from the ninth century, into Alemannic. I put this one next to a modern English translation:
Ps. 114 (116) Ih minnota, pidiu kehorta truhtin stimma des kebetes mines. Danta kineicta ora sinaz mir, inti in tagon minen kinemmu dih. Umbiseliton mih seher des todes, zaala dera hella funtun mih. Arabeit inti seher fand, inti namon truhtines kinamta. Uuolago truhtin, erlosi sela mina. kenadiger truhtin inti recter, inti got unser kenadit. Kehaltanti luzcila truhtin: kediomuoter pim inti arlosta mih. Uuerbi, sela mina, in resti dina, danta truhtin uuolateta dir. Danta erlosta sela mina fona tode, ougon miniu fona zaharim, fuozzi mine fona slippe.
I love the Lord, for he heard my voice; he heard my cry for mercy. Because he turned his ear to me, I will call on him as long as I live. The cords of death entangled me, the anguish of the grave came over me; I was overcome by distress and sorrow. Then I called on the name of the Lord: “Lord, save me!” The Lord is gracious and righteous; our God is full of compassion. The Lord protects the unwary; when I was brought low, he saved me. Return to your rest, my soul, for the Lord has been good to you. For you, Lord, have delivered me from death, my eyes from tears, my feet from stumbling.
a translation of the Gospel of Matthew into old Bavarian in the early ninth century, now included in the “Mondseer Fragmente.” It is the earliest translation of part of the Bible into a dialect of Old High German. Here’s a photo of the original manuscript:
There were also loose translations, such as poetic retellings of Bible stories. The best-known is Otfrid’s Evangelienbuch, written, once again, in the ninth century. You can read the whole thing, and even click on each word for more info, here. It’s a charming work with poetic details. Of the angel Gabriel, Oftrid says, “Tho quam boto fona gote, engil ir himile. / braht er therera uuorolti diuri arunti. / Fluog er sunnun pad, sterrono straza, / uuega uuolkono zi deru itis frono.” (There came a messenger from God, an angel from heaven. / He brought the world good news. / He flew the sun’s path, the street of stars, / the way of clouds, to the holy woman.)
Interlinear glosses were another way of translating the Bible. A “gloss” can mean commentary in the margins of a text, but in this case it means a simple, word-for-word translation written in between the lines. These were especially for people who could read but didn’t have excellent Latin skills, such as nuns, well-to-do laypeople, and poorly educated priests. They helped people understand the text of the Bible, but did not constitute good translations on their own, rather like the song translations I discussed in my post “When bad translations are good.”
PART FOUR: The Crackdown
Bible translations were never completely forbidden, but by the late Middle Ages, they had become fraught and risky projects. As the tumultuous world of the ninth and tenth centuries gave way to a more settled world where no one had pagan grandparents, the Vikings weren’t coming and the Saracens were pretty quiet, and the Latin education system was exploding into a giant systematic-theology debate-fest, the spirit of evangelization gave way to the spirit of bickering about what the Bible really means.
The Mediterranean world in late antiquity had seen a long dance of heresies and councils, but western Europe was relatively placid in terms of heresy in the early Middle Ages. Until King Robert the Pious of France ordered the burning of alleged heretics in Orleans in 1022, no one had been put to death for heresy in the western Church since 383.
The controversies of the High-to-Late Middle Ages awakened the concerns mentioned at the end of Part Two: Who is doing these translations? Are they heretics? ARE THEY???
Medieval heresy and its impact on scripture is such a vast topic that I can’t provide anything like a comprehensive account. Instead, I’ll provide a snapshot of how these issues played out in one case. Here’s what happened when the Bishop of Metz got in touch with Pope Innocent III about a group of Waldensians in his diocese, as recounted in Medieval Heresy by Malcolm Lambert:
“Their [the Waldensians’] knowledge of the Bible was often remarkable. Children began to learn the gospels and the epistles. It was not unknown for an illiterate supporter to know forty Sunday gospels by heart, and in Austria in the thirteenth century a relatively objective Catholic observer recorded the case of a member who knew all the book of Job by heart.
“Attitudes of churchmen towards vernacular translations (in so far as they were to be used by the common people) tended to be hostile partly because of the use made of them in practice by heretical preachers. When the bishop of Metz wrote to Innocent III in 1199 denouncing laymen and women who had commissioned vernacular translations of Scripture and relied on them for debating about their contents in secret gatherings and for preaching, the pope was slow to authorize repression.
“His chief concern lay with the unauthorized preaching. He asked the bishop to find out about the author of the translation, his intention and the quality of faith of those who used it—and about their attitude to the papacy and the Church. His reply to the bishop’s renewed complaint that some of them had been disobedient to Innocent’s requirements, alleging that they owed obedience only to God, was to commission three Cistercian abbots to go to Metz to investigate further and correct the laity where necessary. It is not known what happened, though a later Cistercian chronicle speaks of abbots burning translations in Metz. It was a likely outcome.
“Clearly Innocent was suspicious of an over-hasty bishop and anxious not to extinguish enthusiasm. He said that the ‘desire for understanding the Holy Scriptures and a zeal for preaching what is in the Scriptures is something not to be reprimanded but rather to be encouraged’, and it is significant that at the end of his pontificate, when he drew up constitutions for the fourth Lateran Council of 1215, he did not include in them any blanket prohibition of translations of Scripture. Nevertheless he also explained that ‘the secret mysteries of the faith ought not…to be explained to all men in all places…For such is the depth of divine Scripture, that not only the simple and illiterate but even the prudent and learned are not fully sufficient to try to understand it.’ Here lay the nub of the matter. The study of Scripture demanded training and skill; the use of it formed a part of the Church’s teaching and could not be divorced from it. If the use of translations came to be associated with teaching hostile to, or contemptuous of the priesthood, as was the case in Metz, then the translations were likely to be casualties. Repression of translations as well as of heretical preachers was the simple disciplinary solution, especially when local prelates had narrow horizons.” [- Lambert, Medieval Heresy, third edition, pp. 81-82]
Here Lambert gives us a good sense of the many factors involved in the Catholic hierarchy’s growing hostility to vernacular Bibles during the period. However, they couldn’t keep that cat in the bag forever.
PART FIVE: The Cat gets out of the Bag
By the early 1500s, the state of vernacular languages in western Europe and the advances in printing technology made Bible translations for popular consumption inevitable. It was around 1500 that a supraregional German “Schriftsprache” (written language) emerged, and it lay there waiting for someone to pick it up, put it in the Bible, and put that Bible on the presses. That someone was, of course, Martin Luther, who escaped the stake thanks to powerful friends who protected and promoted his translation of the Bible into German (New Testament 1522, entire Bible 1534). Luther’s open letter on translation deserves its own post. Perhaps I’ll do that next.
For now, I’ll briefly cover a few more factors that contributed to the liberalization of Bible translation, because goodness, this post is getting long.
Renaissance Humanists and their emphasis on original sources (“Ad fontes!”) drove progress in Biblical research. Important projects of the Reformation era included Erasmus’ Latin-and-Greek edition of the New Testament (first edition in 1516), and the Complutensian Polyglot Bible, a massive undertaking by scholars in Spain that began in 1502 and was completed around the time Luther wrote his 95 theses. This video is an ad for a facsimile of it; it’s worth watching for a thorough tour of its contents.
One result of that new scholarship was that it became harder to convince everyone to just chill and be content with the Vulgate—in part because people were gaining new insights from studying Greek, Hebrew and Aramaic, but also because their studies revealed errors in the Vulgate. For example, when Moses came back from talking with God, he had to wear a veil because his face was so luminous. But for some reason St. Jerome translated that passage as saying that Moses had horns. I mean I get it, Jerome, I’ve made mistakes too, but at least I didn’t make Michelangelo do this:
Between the exciting state of scholarship, German princes feeling fed up with Rome, and the magic of the printing press, it became impossible for the hierarchy to control and limit Bible translation and use as they had been wont to do.
The only option left was for Catholics to get in on the act and make their own vernacular translations for popular use. In Germany, Dominican friar Johann Dietenberger published a German Bible (Biblia beider Allt und Newen Testamenten, new verdeutscht) in 1534.
And to cut a long story short, that’s how you eventually get to the array of Bible translations, Protestant, Catholic, “Amplified,” Non-denominational, scholarly, popular, groovy or otherwise that you can now purchase wherever books are sold.
Searls’ translation came out in 2022, the same year as the other new translation, but didn’t get as much attention. That’s a shame because it’s good – better than the other one, frankly.
The first thing I did when this book arrived in the mail was turn to page 109 to see how Bambi’s line “Der Arme…” was translated and I’m very pleased to report that it’s correctly rendered as “Poor thing…” Props to Damion Searls, the first person to get that right in a published English translation!
He also correctly translates “Eisvogel” as “Kingfisher” in the same chapter. And he adds many options to the already complicated issue of how to translate all the different species of animals. For example, Salten’s “Rohrhuhn” is a “sedge-hen” in Chambers, a “coot” in the other new translation, and a “moorhen” in Searls. If you love taxonomy, get all three translations and have fun deciding which is best.
There are other places where Chambers’ version has been criticized for imprecision, where the other guy’s 2022 version is just as imprecise but in different ways, while Searls nails it. One example is where Bambi sees insects crawling in the grass and asks his mother what they are; only Searls accurately translates her response (“Das sind die Kleinen”) as “Those are the little ones.”
So in conclusion, if you want to buy a new translation of Bambi that is accurate and well-written, go for the NYRB edition by Damion Searls.
No, not unless you decide translation is impossible and every language is actually untranslatable.
But William Shirer mentions in his Berlin Diary that one Major Atkinson of the BBC did an English translation of Spengler’s Decline of the West that was “even better than the original — one of the few great translations from the German, an almost untranslatable language.”
What on earth would make German more untranslatable than any other language? Shirer doesn’t specify.
However, he does seem to have trouble with it himself. At one point in the book, he translates “Größenwahn” as “arch-madness” when it’s actually “megalomania.” And since I’m lucky enough to own a German-English dictionary printed in 1936, I double-checked and found “megalomania” there as well. Mr. Shirer probably mistook the noun “Größe” for the adjective “groß” and concluded the word meant a madness that is itself large, rather than a madness focused on enlargement.
So maybe “German is almost untranslatable” actually means “translating German is hard for me.”
Anyway, I guess I shouldn’t be too hard on him; after all, he had to spend years in Nazi Germany when he could have been assigned to some country with sunnier weather and less totalitarianism. He was probably just peeved. Which would explain entries like this:
“Struck by the ugliness of the German women on the streets and in restaurants and cafés. As a race they are certainly the least attractive in Europe. They have no ankles. They walk badly. They dress worse than English women used to. Off to Danzig tonight.”
My edition of the OT was kindly purchased for me by my traumatized reader (see intro post) from a used book shop in Tennessee. It had previously been given as a Christmas gift to one Alma Kathryn in 1942, the year the Disney movie came out. Although recent articles have emphasized the extent to which the film eclipsed the book, it seems at least some people were inspired to buy the book after seeing the film.
According to the New Yorker article, it has been claimed that the OT “mistranslated Salten, flattening both the political and the metaphysical dimensions of the work.” However, the author of that article goes on to say, “that claim is borne out neither by examples in the introduction [to the NT] nor by a comparison of the two English versions, which differ mainly on aesthetic grounds.”
One sentence might suffice to give you a sense of their aesthetic differences (part of a description of Bambi as a disoriented newborn):
German original: Es nahm auch noch keinen einzigen von all den Gerüchen wahr, die der Wald atmete.
OT: Nor did he heed any of the odors which blew through the woods.
NT: Nor did he perceive a single one of the smells that the forest exuded.
Moving on, is there any evidence that the OT contains significant errors, and do they “flatten the political and metaphysical dimensions of the work”?
The OT is often accused of sloppy taxonomy, e.g. “Eisvogel” (“kingfisher”) is translated as “hummingbird.” Was that an error or just an adaptation for American readers who wouldn’t be familiar with kingfishers? To add to the confusion, the NT translates “Eisvogel” as “warbler.” Why? It’s not an option in any of my reference books, so it seems like another error or adaptation. This is a recurring problem—titmouse or chickadee? Ferret or polecat?—but frankly not very interesting to most readers.
The error that most jumped out at me from the OT was as follows: the kingfisher from the paragraph above is quite anti-social. Another bird (sedge-hen or coot?) tells Bambi that the kingfisher has never said a word to anyone. Bambi replies, “Poor thing…” with the ellipsis indicating a pensive, sorrowful tone (rather than an incomplete sentence). (In German: “Der Arme…” with “Arme” capitalized because it is an adjectival noun.) Presumably thrown off his game by the ellipsis and a failure to notice the capital A, Chambers (author of the OT), has:
“The poor…” said Bambi.
Then I checked the NT and was surprised to see the exact same error, only ramped up:
“The poor…” Bambi began to say.
(The new translator has added the idea that he “began” to say it.)
Seeing this in both books made me doubt my judgement so I consulted two native speakers with excellent writing skills and they both confirmed it could only be “poor thing” and the ellipsis was there to signal his tone.
So, as we can see, both books contain errors (as do most long translations, including mine). But do the errors in the OT really give readers a highly distorted experience of Bambi, as some have claimed?
Some examples to back up that claim can be found in an article by Sabine Strümper-Krobb in the journal Austrian Studies. Strümper-Krobb closely compared the German original to Chambers’ translation and found that Chambers often translated anthropomorphic language into language that is more conventionally about animals. See this table for examples:
Salten
Chambers
Should be
Das waren die Tage, in denen Bambi seine erste Kindheit verlebte.
These were the earliest days of Bambi’s life.
childhood
Überall gab es solche Straßen, sie liefen kreuz und quer durch den ganzen Wald.
There were tracks like this everywhere, running criss-cross through the whole woods.
streets (referring to deer trails)
Er kam mitten im Dickicht zur Welt, in einer jener kleinen, verborgenen Stuben des Waldes…
He came into the world in the middle of the thicket, in one of those little, hidden forest glades…
rooms
Hier in dieser Kammer war Bambi zur Welt gekommen.
Bambi had come into the world in this glade.
chamber
Dann küsste sie wieder ihr Kind….
Then she kissed her fawn again…
child
“Das sind die Kleinen.”
“Those are ants.”
the little ones
“Weil wir niemanden töten.”
“Because we never kill anything.”
anyone/anybody (this is Bambi’s mother saying deer don’t kill other animals)
Ganz langsam schritten sie durch einen Saal himmelhoher Buchen.
They walked very slowly through a grove of lofty beeches.
hall
der Alte, der alte Fürst
the old stag
The old one, the old prince
Liebeszeit der Könige
mating season
the kings’ time of love
Krone
antlers
crown
die anderen gekrönten
the other bucks
the other crowned ones
In other words, unconventional words and phrases that make the animal world seem more human are translated as conventional terms relating to animals and the forest.
I think (though it’s pure speculation) that the reason for this is as follows: One thing translators do all the time is adjust phrases to make them sound more “normal” in the target language. You read the source text and understand it but you also think, “That’s not how we say that,” and you adjust it to bring it into line with customary English usage. So, for example, you have a German phrase that translates to “Issuing threats against the world community” and you change it to something like “Threatening the global community.” I suspect Chambers was going through this book thinking “we don’t call antlers ‘crowns’ in English” and “no one would call a forest glade a ‘room’” and just making it all sound more normal. What he didn’t realize was that Salten’s word choices weren’t normal in German either and of course, unusual diction in the source should be translated as something equally unusual in the target. Chambers had learned German fairly recently and therefore hadn’t read widely enough to make judgements about which word choices are unusual in that language. That’s what I suppose, anyway.
How much did Chambers’ less-anthropomorphic diction affect English readers’ experience of the story? I’d say a little bit but not that much. When we read of Bambi and his mother walking on “streets” in the forest, we’re likely to picture streets in a town and consider that deer feel the same way about their trails as we feel about our streets. Chambers’ “tracks” and “trails” don’t call forth the same thoughts. However, the book as translated by Chambers is still deeply anthropomorphic. It couldn’t be otherwise, with passages like this, where Bambi considers striking up a conversation with the intimidating old stag:
Bambi did not know what to do. He had come with the firm intention of speaking to the stag. He wanted to say, “Good day, I am Bambi. May I ask to know your honorable name also?”
Yes, it had all seemed very easy, but now it appeared that the affair was not so simple. What good were the best of intentions now? Bambi did not want to seem ill-bred as he would be if he went off without saying a word. But he did not want to seem forward either, and he would be if he began the conversation.
The stag was wonderfully majestic. It delighted Bambi and made him feel humble. He tried in vain to arouse his courage and kept asking himself, “Why do I let him frighten me? Am I not just as good as he is?” But it was no use. Bambi continued to be frightened and felt in his heart of hearts that he really was not as good as the old stag. Far from it. He felt wretched and had to use all his strength to keep himself steady.
The old stag looked at him and thought, “He’s handsome, he’s really charming, so delicate, so poised, so elegant in his whole bearing. I must not stare at him, though. It really isn’t the thing to do. Besides, it might embarrass him.” So he stared over Bambi’s head into the empty air again.
“What a haughty look,” thought Bambi. “It’s unbearable, the opinion such people have of themselves.”
Did you read that and think, “I don’t get these deer, they don’t seem very human to me”? They might as well be eyeing each other up during intermission at the Vienna Court Opera.
Interestingly, Chambers uses “people” in that last line, whereas the German says “Es ist unerträglich, was so einer sich einbildet” – “so einer” meaning “such a one.” So in this case Chambers has added an explicitly human word where there wasn’t one in the German original! Which makes me fairly certain he didn’t have a policy of de-anthropomorphizing Salten’s forest dwellers and his word choices in the table above are just examples of overly cautious handling of unusual phrases.
In summary, there’s room for improvement in the OT but on the whole, it’s well-written, true to the spirit of the book, and accurate enough that little Alma Kathryn didn’t have a radically different reading experience from her counterparts in the German-speaking world.
As for the NT, it corrects some but not all of the discrepancies noted in the table above. Where Salten has “Straße” for a deer trail, this version has “path,” which is unsatisfactory in the same way as the old translation. But it does correctly say “We never kill anybody” (instead of “anything”) and “chamber” for “Kammer.” The writing style is quite different from the OT and readers can decide for themselves which one they prefer. The OT has the advantage of having been written in the same decade as Salten’s book, so its style has a natural compatibility with the original that is hard to achieve almost 100 years later. I would recommend the OT to most readers based on the quality of its prose.
I could go on and on about little details in these books, but I suspect most of my readers will be satisfied with the few examples cited so far. Don’t hesitate to leave a comment if you would like to know more.
I have a reader who maintains that Disney’s Bambi practically ruined what good disposition he had, if he had any. He’s also been haunted by the cold war since listening to the Army-McCarthy hearings in his crib, and one of the cold-war specters haunting him is Whittaker Chambers, who first translated Felix Salten’s Bambi into English. After reading a New Yorker article that triggered his bad cervine/political memories, he kindly bought me the original German Bambi, Chambers’ translation, and a new translation that just came out, and asked me to write about them. So here’s an introductory post about the book, and the next one will get into the details of the translations.
Felix Salten was a Viennese writer of the Café Griensteidl’s “Young Vienna” school. He produced a wide variety of journalistic pieces, art and theater reviews, plays, short stories, essays and novels. Bambi was one of many stories he wrote about animals, whom he observed closely and regarded with deep affection and solemn awe. As a careful hunter (in contrast to careless Yosemite Sams like Archduke Franz Ferdinand), he appreciated the terrible grandeur of the circle of life.
People who’ve seen the film are often surprised by how much pain, sorrow and death are in the book, although of course Disney’s version also has its dark moments. Recent articles have described it as “sugary” or “a syrupy love fest” and that’s partly true, but the sight of Bambi helplessly calling for his slain mother as the forest fades to black, white and blue is what robbed my reader of his good disposition (if he had any). I also asked my mom about it – she was born in 1938 and saw it at age 4 – and she said this:
It was the first movie I was ever taken to. We went to Grandma Berry’s in Neponset and the good movie theater was in Kewanee. I think I may have been with other cousins, don’t remember, as there were 3 of us girls. I was so stunned by the death of Bambi’s mother that I couldn’t figure out why they took me to see it. It created a fear that I could lose my mother, which I never had considered at that age.
By the time I saw it at the same age in 1982, I was too jaded by TV to be seriously upset by it. But I did remember the two distressing parts. My young mind conflated them so that I recalled Bambi’s mother as having been shot while trying to flee the forest fire. I can still replay the relevant scene in my head (a scene that doesn’t actually exist because the fire and the shooting are separate incidents). The movie also shows us the hardship of forest life in winter, a violent clash between bucks during mating season, and a fight with hunting dogs, so the book’s harsh elements weren’t eliminated. However, it’s certainly true that the movie is much cuter and less profound than the book.
Whereas the forest in Disney’s Bambi is a carefree playground when Man’s away, Salten’s Bambi opens with his mother’s harsh and solitary labor and quickly moves on to young Bambi witnessing a mouse’s death by ferret and absorbing his mother’s fear of danger. The danger she fears is Man (and let me just note here that as an American and a Midwesterner, I think this book would have been quite different had the author lived in a country with wolves and coyotes). Other, smaller animals also live in fear of forest predators. The book disabuses readers of the same naive ideas about nature that inspired this meme:
But Salten’s work is first and foremost a meditation on the joys and sorrows of all living things, their beauty, prowess and dignity, their vulnerability – which Man, despite his devious arts, ultimately shares – and the transcendent sublimity of nature, created and watched over by a mysterious supreme being. Salten focused on “simple and eternal things” as Beverley Driver Eddy writes in her excellent biography, Felix Salten, Man of Many Faces. Many threads are woven into Bambi: Salten’s own love for nature and animals, the Bildungsroman genre, Aesop’s fable of the dog and the wolf, real-life anecdotes, a vision of prelapsarian harmony between man and beast, a yearning for justice, and a delight in imagining animal equivalents of human manners and morals. Like any mature work of art, it can be appreciated by all kinds of people with different perspectives, who may draw insights from it that are so deep they are hard to articulate.
With that in mind, I’ll have to address the fashionable notion that Bambi is a simple allegory about persecution of the Jews in Europe or of ethnic minorities in general. The New Yorker article states: “[…] authors do not necessarily get the last word on the meaning of their works, and plenty of other people believe that Bambi is no more about animals than Animal Farm is. Instead, they see in it what the Nazis did: a reflection of the anti-Semitism that was on the rise all across Europe when Salten wrote it.”
Salten himself was a Jew living through the cycle described by Theodor Herzl, “We are naturally drawn into those places where we are not persecuted, and our appearance there gives rise to persecution.” Like the rest of Vienna’s Jewish literati, he had a complex identity and a sharp awareness of man’s inhumanity to man. This aspect of his personal perspective would certainly have influenced his work to some extent. For example, the deer community’s discussion in Chapter 9, where eschatological hopes of the lion lying down with the lamb alternate with an old doe’s wry one-liners, has a Jewish vibe.
But to interpret the book as an allegory of human affairs along the lines of Animal Farm is a disservice to the author. I hope I managed to emphasize sufficiently above that Salten was fascinated by and devoted to animals per se in a way Orwell, or indeed Aesop, was not. (The first “farm book” that springs to mind when I think of Bambi is not Animal Farm but Charlotte’s Web.) And as a writer with good artistic sense, he aimed much higher than connect-the-dots social allegory.
Note that the New Yorker quote above claims that the Nazis saw Bambi as an allegory. That article goes on to say “Does all this make Bambi a parable about Jewish persecution? The fact that the Nazis thought so is hardly dispositive – fascist regimes are not known for their sophisticated literary criticism […]” I searched the internet for evidence of that claim, and found no Nazi denunciations of Bambi quoted anywhere. Then I combed through Eddy’s biography of Salten, which discusses the banning of his books by the regime in the mid-thirties, and found no evidence there either. So then I wrote Eddy an email to ask if any Nazis had ever made statements about Bambi being a parable about Jewish persecution, and she said she never found any evidence for that in her research. She added that if they had viewed it that way they probably would have burned it in 1933 – instead, it was banned in 1935 and never burned – and that if she remembered correctly, it was the last of Salten’s books to be removed from libraries and bookstores. I’m not sure where the author of the New Yorker piece got this idea, but I’m pretty sure it’s mistaken.
That said, I thought the New Yorker article was very good on the whole. My specter-haunted reader thought so, too. It’s interesting to see the original Bambi getting renewed attention. See my next post for more attention from me, about the nitty-gritty of the German-to-English translations.
Here’s an interesting article about how to translate “Pork Pie Plot” into other languages, especially in the context of headlines. The PPP is an attempt to unseat Prime Minister Boris Johnson (who, incidentally, is descended from one of the best-known and most controversial German-to-English translators, Helen Lowe-Porter).
a pork pie
With regard to headlines, two questions come up here: 1. Should you use these kinds of quirky foreign phrases in headlines? And 2. If you do, should you translate them or leave them in the original language?
My answer to (1) would usually be yes, because it’s an attention grabber. The answer to (2) largely depends on what the two languages are and whether the speakers of the target language tend to be familiar with the source language. You might include Spanish in a US newspaper headline but you wouldn’t do the same with Mongolian. It also depends on whether the target language has a clear equivalent. I googled “torta di maiale” and found that Italy seems to have pork pies that look a lot like the British ones, so sure, go ahead and translate “the Pork Pie Plot” as “il complotto della torta di maiale.” Google Translate is a little confused about this food item, though:
