Laura Freeburn Translations LLC

Category: Book reviews

  • Translation wars

    Every so often, people come after Emily Wilson with pitchforks on social media for her translations of Homer’s Odyssey and Iliad. The latest flare-up dominated my “X” feed until I felt like writing the lengthy response you see here.

    Wilson is a professor of classical studies at the University of Pennsylvania. Prominent X users have called her Odyssey “abominable, a crime against the classics,” and “a political manifesto advocating gynocracy” which “can in no serious way even properly be referred to as a translation.” The most concise offering was “wow this translation sucks.”

    The translation does actually have a lot of fans. But why do some people hate it so much? In most cases, it’s a combination of the style (which as you can see in the image above is quite different from previous English versions) and her general perspective, which is typical of a current professor of literature at a prestigious university. “Making visible the cracks in the patriarchal fantasy” is one of her stated goals; her hobbies probably include problematizing things, like bodies and spaces, and sitting with them.

    Had her interviews given off more of an “I just really love Homer” vibe, the pitchforks might be safely in storage. One also wonders how the world would have received this translation with a masculine nom de plume and no interviews. Alas, we can’t know. But according to one tweet, “our gripe with Wilson isn’t about the translation itself, it’s that she has so cynically capitalized on our current political/activist moment.”

    When you put it that way it makes sense. However, many other commentators insist the translation itself is terrible, regardless of whether Wilson is cynically capitalizing on things. How can we judge this? Let’s consider some criteria.

    1. Does it tell the same story as the original?
    That’s a pretty low bar, but long ago — in the Middle Ages, say — you could write a new version of a story in your language and slap on the same title it had in the source language, even if the poetry was all yours and you added new incidents and characters. Wilson clears this bar easily. One might argue that her translation subtly encourages readers to interpret the story a certain way, but it’s the same sequence of events with the same cast of characters. She didn’t rewrite it from a siren’s perspective or anything weird like that.

    2. Is it well-written in English?
    Anyone can weigh in on this criterion. Unfortunately, those who do will never reach a consensus.

    3. Does it give readers an accurate sense of the original?
    This is what matters most to modern scholarly types. The academic standard is that the translation should reflect all the linguistic and narrative elements of the original as closely as possible while still being decent English. A friend of mine once bombed a Classics essay on Euripedes’ Bacchae because all her quotes came from a very free adaptation by Wole Soyinka — so free as to be considered a new work inspired by Euripedes, rather than a translation of Euripedes.

    Wilson’s translation would pass the test that my unfortunate friend’s source failed. She is certainly aiming at modern standards of accuracy, as you can see from her Substack, where she gives detailed accounts of how she made her choices and how they compare to other versions.

    In order to weigh in on this question of accuracy, you do have to have substantial expertise in Homeric Greek. I don’t, so I won’t. But I can say that in her writing I recognize the thought process of a serious translator making the kinds of decisions all translators make. So that one guy on X was definitely wrong to say it “can in no serious way even properly be referred to as a translation.”

    Here is a negative review of Wilson’s Iliad by someone with the necessary expertise and here is a mostly positive one of her Odyssey. Both are interesting and demonstrate the level of knowledge required to evaluate it as a translation.

    Although…there is something to be said for judging a translation entirely by criterion 2. “This is bad English writing” is a fair critique. I would just advise critics to make that clear, since “this is a bad translation” usually implies inaccuracy, and most of us can’t judge that. Sometimes translations are hated because they are hard to read, and that seems legit, with the caveat that the translator may simply be giving you an accurate sense of how hard it is to read the original. (Cyril Edwards’ Parzival springs to mind.)

    Accurate translators are also supposed to “bring over” style and register. This raises several difficulties. For example, ancient poems are archaic from our perspective, but once they were fresh. Whenever we translate something from long ago, we have to choose where in time to locate our language.

    When I translated an adventure story about Germans seeking their fortune in Papua New Guinea circa 1910, I tried to make the characters sound a bit like Richard Hannay; i.e. I tried to locate the English in their time. That’s the relatively recent past, so it wasn’t that hard to do.

    But there was no English in Homer’s day, not even Old English, so English translations necessarily displace his work in time. What time do you pick, then? Should you give the language a Shakespearean feel? That would be consistent with how the poem seems to us and what kind of status it has in our canon. You could argue that even if Homer’s Greek has a rather stark and simple style (as Wilson claims it does), we should adorn it until it sounds like what we English speakers expect from great epic poetry. “Modern English is not a bardic language,” said one rando, voting to give it an archaic style. He has a point.

    Someone on X compared Wilson’s work to the No Fear Shakespeare series. If you haven’t seen these, they are study aids that suck all the poetry out of Shakespeare’s plays until they lie, mere desiccated husks, on the floors of classrooms where students might as well be reading terms and conditions for downloading software. Quite a diss, in other words. This comparison presupposes that Wilson has “dumbed down” Homer but she claims precisely the opposite – that others have embellished Homer and hers is the more accurate version.

    Wilson’s choice of iambic pentameter is reminiscent of Shakespeare, but her language itself sounds contemporary. I was amused to learn that Wilson’s Odysseus begins his slaughter of the suitors with “Playtime is over!” No good, said some commenters, it sounds like a Hollywood action movie. Well, said others, perhaps this was the equivalent in its day and this line hits you the same way the original line hit the Greeks. Then again, this review asserts that Homeric poetry had a distinctive poetic language that sounded at least vaguely archaic in its time, drawing from “vastly different centuries of Greek language and culture.” We might find an English equivalent of that in Howard Pyle.

    At any rate, these are decisions that must be made and you can’t find a solution everyone will agree with. Religious people will never stop arguing over whether the Bible or the liturgy should be like bright, new copper or have the green patina of age, and we’ll never collectively decide whether Homer’s Odyssey should “sound ancient” when translated into a language that, again, did not exist when it was written.

    If you’ve followed the colorful discourse about whether Wilson is murdering Homer and corrupting our youth, this is a good time to reflect on why there used to be so much anxiety about Bible translations. I’ve written something about that as well.

  • Blog news

    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.

  • Bambi (part III)

    Yet another post about Bambi? I fear so.


    You see, the reader who asked me to compare the old translation by Whittaker Chambers with the new one only knew about one new translation (this one). But there is a another – the New York Review of Books edition by Damion Searls!


    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.

  • Bambi (part II)

    See below for the introductory post about Bambi. This post compares the old translation and the new translation; let’s call them OT and NT.

    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:

    SaltenChambersShould 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 Fürstthe old stagThe old one, the old prince
    Liebeszeit der Königemating seasonthe kings’ time of love
    Kroneantlerscrown
    die anderen gekröntenthe other bucksthe 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.

  • Bambi (part I)

    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.

  • Yet more translations of Parzival

    Translations of Parzival just keep multiplying

    Well, that was fast. After expressing a wish that A. S. Kline would live to complete his new verse translation of Wolfram’s Parzival, (as Chrétien de Troyes failed to do with his own Perceval), I got an email from him with a link to the finished product on April 14th.

    And I’m enjoying it very much. I haven’t been trawling it for minor errors, but I can report that it conveys Wolfram’s tale of Parzival in well-written rhyming couplets. If that sounds good to you, read it here.

    My other post on Parzival only covers prose translations. Those are in a different world from verse translations. They’re more academic, produced for scholars who want to know precisely what Wolfram said and—insofar as this is possible for a translator to convey—how he said it. Certainly you can read them for fun, but…not a lot of people do.

    In a sense, verse translations are less accurate than prose translations because of all the juggling and refashioning that must be done to make them rhyme and scan. However, in another sense they are more accurate because, as poems, they give you an experience that is closer to that of the original audience. The prose translations are interesting and informative, but because they’ve changed both the language and the literary genre, the poetic experience is quite disrupted. Compare a prose version of this passage from Parzival to a rhyming one:

    This flying image is far too fleet for fools. They can’t think it through, for it knows how to dart from side to side before them, just like a startled hare. Tin coated with glass on the other side, and the blind man’s dream—these yield a countenance’s shimmer, but that dull light’s sheen cannot keep company with constancy. It makes for brief joy, in all truth. [Cyril Edwards]

    Or

    Now, such a winged metaphor,

    Flies all too fast for the unsure,

    Slower minds will grasp it not.

    It will speed past, and be forgot,

    Gone flying like a startled hare.

    Thus with a dark mirror we fare,

    Or a blind’s man’s dream, all dim

    Do features seem, to us and him;

    They shine not with a steady light,

    Grant but a momentary delight. [A. S. Kline]

    Feel the difference? Edwards gets points for precision, Kline for sensibility.

    You might wonder whether a poem can ever really be translated. According to the venerable linguist Roman Jakobson, “The pun, or to use a more erudite, and perhaps more precise term—paronomasia, reigns over poetic art, and whether its rule is absolute or limited, poetry by definition is untranslatable. Only creative transposition is possible: either intralingual transposition—from one poetic shape into another, or interlingual transposition—from one language into another, or finally intersemiotic transposition—from one system of signs into another, e.g., from verbal art into music, dance, cinema, or painting.” That may be so, but a good interlingual transposition is worth something, right?

    Market forces have decreed that Jessie Weston’s transposition from 1894 is worth $0.99 as a digital download, so I got it to compare with Kline’s. Here are their versions of the two passages presented as samples in my post on prose translations:

    Kline Weston
    For I shall now retell a story,
    That doth speak of great loyalty,
    Womanly womanhood, anew,
    And a manly manhood, so true,
    In every trial, his steel prevailed,
    His heart within him never failed,
    While his hand, in battle, likewise
    Seized on many a glorious prize;
    Honour-seeking, in nature slow,
    (For thus do I hail my hero)
    A sweet sight to woman’s eye,
    Yet a bane to the heart, thereby;
    Yet one, indeed, that shunned all wrong.
    Is yet unborn to this fine tale,
    Yet shall be born here, without fail,
    The lad of whom this story’s told,  
    With all its wonders that I unfold.     		A tale I anew will tell ye,
    That speaks of a mighty love;
    Of the womanhood of true women;
    How a man did his manhood prove;
    Of one that endured all hardness,
    Whose heart never failed in fight,
    Steel he in the face of conflict:
    With victorious hand of might
    Did he win him fair meed of honour;
    A brave man yet slowly wise
    Is he whom I hail my hero!
    The delight he of woman’s eyes.
    Yet of woman’s heart the sorrow!
    ‘Gainst all evil his face he set;
    Yet he whom I thus have chosen
    my song knoweth not as yet,
    For not yet is he born
    of whom this wondrous tale shall tell,
    And many and great the marvels that unto this knight befell.  
    ‘OPEN!’
    To whom? Who goes there?         
    ‘To enter your heart thus, I would dare.’
    ‘Then you try too narrow a space.’
    ‘How so? Can I not seek a place?
    I promise not to jostle and press,
    I would tell you wonders, no less.’
    ‘Is’t you, Lady Adventure? Pray
    How does he fare, your knight, this day?       		‘Ope the portal!’
    ‘To whom? Who art thou?
    ‘In thine heart would I find a place!’
    ‘Nay! If such be thy prayer, methinketh, too narrow shall I be the space!’
    ‘What of that? If it do but hold me, none too close shall my presence be,
    Nor shalt thou bewail my coming, such marvels I’ll tell to thee!’
    Is it thou, then, O Dame Adventure?
    Ah! Tell me of Parzival, What doeth he now my hero?

    As you can see, Weston’s style is solidly Victorian, which is fine for people who like that kind of thing. But I’m happy to have a fresh version.

    Regarding the bold lines above, it’s always interesting to see how translators handle the key description of Parzival, “er küene, traecliche wis.”  Members of the prose gang render it variously as “A brave man slowly wise” (Mustard & Passage), “Dauntless man, though laggard in discretion!” (Hatto), and “Bold was he, laggardly wise” (Edwards), while the modern German prose side of the Reclam edition says “Kühn war er, und nur langsam gewann er die rechte Lebenserfahrung” (“He was bold, and only slowly did he gain the right life experience”).

    Reclam edition, 1997

    Kline’s “Honour-seeking, in nature slow” may seem an outlier, but how do knights seek honor in chivalric tales? Through deeds of valor, of course, i.e. by being brave and bold, so I’m cool with that. Wolfram doesn’t say anything about “nature,” but “in nature slow” gives me the same impression as “he’s a slow boy,” which feels right for Parzival, although it does raise the question of whether it was his own nature or his isolated upbringing that made him “slow”—a question that would require its own blog post, essay, or tome.

    Edwards’ “laggardly” is a good reflection of Wolfram’s eccentric diction (and the same goes for his “storywise, yet unborn” – see the other bold lines above about being “unborn to this fine tale”); this is an aspect of Wolfram’s style that doesn’t come through very strongly in either Kline or Weston.

    In the intro to his prose edition, Edwards specifies aspects of Wolfram’s Parzival he wished to preserve in his translation: richness of imagery, neologisms and nonce words, personification, the “frequent grammatical leaps and bounds” of its syntax, a sense of “playful arrogance,” and unusual constructions such as double or triple genitives (e.g. “woman’s eyes’ sweetness”). Some of these considerations will inevitably fall by the wayside if you set out to translate the work as rhyming couplets—you can’t do everything.

    This is why I said in my previous post that “no one in our time has been insane enough publish a rhyming-couplets version. Jessie Weston did it in 1894, but translation standards were looser then.” What I meant was that with our current standards for literary translation, anyone who puts a rhyming version out there and dares to call it a “translation of Wolfram’s Parzival” will be swarmed by nitpickers with endless quibbles about the lack of double genitive constructions or whatever.

    In contrast to Edwards’ warning that his translation imitates Wolfram by giving the reader “a rough ride,” Kline says he decided to “tidy Wolfram up” so the text could be “one to enjoy for the general reader.” Weston described her verse translation as both “faithful to the original text and easy to read,” which is kind of hilarious considering that the original text is notoriously hard to read. But by “faithful,” she probably meant “tells the same story.” Pan out a bit and you’ll see this approach is in tune with medieval literature. Someone handed Wolfram an incomplete and rather basic French tale of Perceval and the Grail and asked him for a German translation, and he responded by producing this unbelievably elaborate shroom trip. If he could see how many pains scholarly translators are taking with his work today, I think he’d be perplexed. He’d punch them in the arm and say, “Bro, just make up your own version! And make it rhyme!” Then he’d gallop off after a startled hare.

  • Krabat

    “There’s a kind of magic that must be learned with toil and difficulty, line by line, spell by spell, the magic of the Book of Necromancy; and then there’s another kind that springs from the depths of the heart, from caring for someone and loving him. It’s hard to understand, I know, but you had better trust that magic, Krabat.”

    Just in time for Halloween, here’s a spooky book that’s been a favorite of German-speaking children since 1971.

    Entitled simply Krabat, it first appeared in English as The Satanic Mill – an accurate title but not one that screams “stocking stuffer.” So some shrewd editor has given it a new English title remarkably similar to the US title of the first Harry Potter book, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone: namely, Krabat and the Sorcerer’s Mill.

    To be fair, that’s also accurate, though if you pick up this book hoping for something in the HP vein, you’ll notice a distinct lack of quaint school uniforms, lovable professors, and zany spells. The HP series does engage with darkness and death, but its overall mood is fun and sparkly (and merchandisable). In Krabat there’s not much sparkle to balance out the murder, suicide, nightmares, and heavy bags that no one wants to know the contents of. There’s a guy called Big Hat with – wait for it – a big hat, but it doesn’t tell people whether they’re Hufflepuffs or whatever. There’s a school for magic, but you wouldn’t want to enroll. Its only real plus is that there’s always plenty of oatmeal.

    Krabat is a Wendish, aka Sorbian, boy living during the Thirty Years’ War. Like HP, he’s an orphan who receives a call (in this case, through a voice in his dreams) to join the apprentices at a mill that doubles as a school for magic. Although there’s camaraderie among the boys and a few traditions that brighten up the year, the prevailing atmosphere is one of dread. You never get the feeling that Krabat is any better off for having joined the mill and learned what there is to learn from the Book of Necromancy – by following the sorcerer’s call, he becomes ensnared in a trap from which spells cannot free him. If you’d like to know what does free him, buy it from the NYRB here.

    The NYRB translation is by Anthea Bell, one of the superstars of the translation world, whose work you’ll be familiar with if you’ve ever read an Asterix book in English. She also translated the Inkworld trilogy by Cornelia Funke, who loved Krabat as a child…another turn of the literary mill wheel.

    I gave Krabat and the Sorcerer’s Mill to a fourteen-year-old American girl and she devoured it in a couple days. Her only complaint was that the dénouement is very rapid, which is true. Anyway, consider buying it for a young person you know…especially now that you don’t have to explain to their parents why The Satanic Mill is a great children’s book.

  • The Black Spider

    And why not do evil that good may come? – as some people slanderously charge us with saying. Their condemnation is just. (Romans 3:8)

    Die schwarze Spinne is an unsettling tale that dramatizes the terrible consequences of moral cowardice. The author, Swiss pastor Albert Bitzius (1797-1854), wrote under the pious pen name of Jeremias Gotthelf.

    I’d been meaning to read it for a while – to be honest, ever since I bought it at a bookstore in Bern 15 years ago – and finally got around to it thanks to the New York Review of Books sale, which was offering Susan Bernofsky’s English translation. I read it side-by-side with the original, which means that I let her do the heavy lifting where nineteenth-century Swiss peasant vocab was concerned, but also that I can assure you her translation is both accurate and well-written. English-speaking readers will have no trouble getting caught up in the action – it doesn’t have that stilted, “translated” feel.

    Read this book with a furry animal so you don’t get too scared.

    It gets off to a slow start, with a framing story about some hardy Emmental folk celebrating a baptism. This portrait of a well-ordered society provides an essential foil to the central tale of horror, in which medieval peasants, desperate to fulfill their brutal landlord’s impossible demands, make a deal with the devil – hoping, as always, to avoid paying the price, which in this case is an unbaptized baby.

    But the payment comes due and most of them resign themselves, callously calculating the value of one life compared to the whole community, or the insignificance of their individual contribution to the crime.

    What they end up with after a few turns of the plot is a plague of spiders from Hell. The arachnid host eventually conglomerates into one giant, glowering embodiment of evil that terrorizes the villagers, killing more of them each day with its fiery bite. It might just be possible to capture the spider and trap it somewhere, but anyone brave enough to do so is certain to die in the process.

    The mood and details of this part of the story feel more like a channeled nightmare than a consciously planned novel. Sometimes it also has the wild exuberance of a scary story invented by a child: like the part where a knight is riding around looking for the spider, people are screaming and running from him in all directions because in fact the spider is on his head; in the chaos he and his horse tumble over a cliff and finally the spider’s feet burn through his helmet and into his brain.

    The spider is a perfect metaphor. It starts out as millions of tiny things and turns into one big thing. It seems to be everywhere and nowhere. You never know when it will jump on your face or run across your foot. You’re not safe in your home, and certainly not safe while sleeping. It’s the Black Death. It’s the evil lurking in everyone’s heart. It’s the knowledge that your neighbors might rat you out to the secret police and tomorrow you could be in Room 101.

    This is why the part I found most unsettling was the coda to the horror story: the spider has been sealed up for generations (and it’s noteworthy that the spider can’t be eliminated – only confined). Everyone knows where it is, but it can’t be seen…and reckless young people start fooling around with it, flinging food at the door of its prison, prying around it with knives, joking about letting it out.

    At this moment in history, which feels like a pivotal time where anything could happen, how many of us are taunting the spider? Prying at that door “ironically”? Wondering if it’s really that bad or if it’s even there at all? The spider hears you. It’s purring. Walk away. 

  • Clara Wieck Schumann (book review)

    Clara Schumann: the Artist and the Woman by Nancy B. Reich

    If you’ve ever read The Gulag Archipelago, you probably remember the story where nobody wanted to be the first to stop clapping for Comrade Stalin:

    The applause went on—six, seven, eight minutes! They were done for! […] They couldn’t stop now till they collapsed with heart attacks! […] Nine minutes! Ten!…Insanity! To the last man! With make-believe enthusiasm on their faces, looking at each other with faint hope, the district leaders were just going to go on and on applauding till they fell where they stood, till they were carried out of the hall on stretchers.

    The one who finally had the nerve to sit down first after 11 minutes was sent to the Gulag, of course. But what interests me about this passage right now is that 11 minutes seemed like an insane amount of applause to all involved.

    Think about that, and then consider: at a concert she gave on February 27, 1837 in Berlin, Clara Wieck got an hour and half of thunderous applause.

    An hour and a half! That’s the time it takes to watch a full-length film, and Clara Wieck made people want to spend it banging their hands together. That’s how good she was.

    In Clara Schumann, The Artist and the Woman, Nancy B. Reich explains how she became one of the greatest pianists of the 19th century. Her father, the piano teacher Friedrich Wieck, zeroed in on her as the most talented of his children and dedicated his life to making her a great musician and a star.

    Here are the things Clara Wieck was allowed to do as a child:

    • Play the piano
    • Take long walks
    • Eat
    • Sleep

    I guess we can also include “write in her diary,” although often it was her father who did so – in her voice. “Father arrived by express coach at seven in the evening,” he wrote in one entry, “I flew into his arms and took him right to the Hotel Stadt Frankfurt.” Wieck was so possessive about his daughter’s childhood diaries that she was forty years old by the time he agreed to relinquish them to her.

    Wieck was not only possessive and controlling but also fierce – Robert Schumann once visited his home to find him dragging one of Clara’s younger brothers around by the hair as a punishment for substandard violin playing. “Am I among humans?” wondered Robert in his own diary.

    At home with the Wiecks

    So, given a range of options, most of us wouldn’t choose Friedrich Wieck as a dad. To be fair, though, by applying his merciless training to her natural aptitude, he did succeed in making Clara a musician of the highest order. Hence the hour and a half of applause.

    Unsurprisingly, Wieck was loath to allow any other man to take his Clara away and hated Robert Schumann with a passion (he also ended up hating the guy he invited over to distract her from Robert Schumann). Clara and Robert had to sue him for permission to marry; Wieck submitted a statement to the court to the effect that Robert “could not help Clara with her career since he was socially inept […]; that he crippled his finger through his own stupidity; that he lied about his income; that he had been badly brought up and displayed an indescribable egotism and unlimited vanity; that he was a solitary drinker and drank to excess, and that he did not really love Clara – he wanted to use her for his own purposes and live off the money she earned as an artist.”

    Also interesting is his assertion that Clara, “having been trained as an artist, was unfit to run a home.” This reminds me of Piero Melograni’s biography of Mozart, where he argues that the popular conception of Mozart as practically incapable of functioning in society (cf. Amadeus) comes from his family’s attempt to convince themselves and anyone who would listen that he couldn’t get along without them. Perhaps it’s always that way with child prodigies.

    This book gives a thorough account of Clara as a musician, teacher, and composer. It also includes juicy gossip, like what a dead weight of a husband Robert eventually became with his mercurial (literally?) moods and inability to handle….anything, really, before he finally broke with reality altogether (Wieck wasn’t entirely wrong about him); or everything you ever wanted to know about Clara and Brahms. Peter Schickele’s Interear Telecommuniculture Phone ™ sketch, where the dial-up request for a Schumann symphony includes the option, “If you would like to hear this piece as the composer would have written it if he had known that Brahms had the hots for his wife, press 3,” left teenage me with the impression that this was a long-simmering love triangle. But Brahms only met Robert and Clara about 6 months before Robert attempted suicide and went to live in a padded room.

    Brahms was there with Clara when Robert died two years later.  They had a deep and fruitful relationship and he probably was in love with her, although he was probably also in love with her daughter Julie. Life is complicated.

    Anyway, this book is well researched and well written, and it’s still in print, so there’s no excuse for you not to read it. You can also listen to this:

     

  • Three translations of Parzival

    Translating Wolfram’s Parzival has got to be a total nightmare, though it’s probably also fun.

    His style is, by his own admission, comparable to a startled hare darting this way and that. This applies to individual sentences but also to the entire narrative. Some questions you may ask yourself when reading Parzival include: Did we already meet Plihopliheri in a previous chapter or was that Plippalinot? Is everyone in this book related? How much cousin marriage is going on here? Where did those guys come from and why are they attacking that castle? Why are we talking about the neutral angels again? How many times will I have to read this sentence before I understand it? And many more.

    There are three published prose translations of Parzival: a joint effort from 1961 by Helen Mustard and Charles Passage (who aren’t characters from Toast of London but probably should be), a 1980 Penguin Classics edition by A.T. Hatto, and a fairly recent effort by Cyril Edwards for Oxford World’s Classics (2004). No one in our time has been insane enough publish a rhyming-couplets version. [Update: in fact, there is a new verse translation. See here.] Jessie Weston did it in 1894, but translation standards were looser then.

    I have a soft spot for Cyril Edwards’ translation because when he was working on it, he came to St. Andrews to speak to the German medievalists. He gave us a very informative presentation about his own choices and how they compared to previous editions. I particularly remember how proud he was to have found the most accurate possible translation for “ramschoup” in Book IX. Apparently after laborious research he determined it was “purple moorgrass.” Our professors thought this would sound oddly specific in context – other translators were content to call it “straw” and it’s hard to imagine one character telling another, “I don’t have furniture but you can sit on that pile of purple moorgrass over there…” – but he couldn’t bear for his research to have been in vain and insisted on keeping purple moorgrass because that’s what ramschoup is! And indeed, there it is on p. 204 of the book: “Then they went back to lie on their purple moorgrass, by their coals.”

    Purple moorgrass.

    Having recently skimmed all three translations, I suspect Mustard & Passage is the most readable. However, research into medieval literature and culture is always uncovering new things and solving little mysteries, so the fact that it came out in 1961 probably means it has more errors than the other two. These are unlikely to matter if you’re reading it for fun but if you’re a grad student, watch out.

    Hatto’s has the most prosaic feel – he tends to collapse sentences or shift their parts around to avoid some of Wolfram’s twists and turns.

    Both Hatto and Mustard/Passage tried to calm the startled hare of Wolfram’s style to make the reading experience less confusing. Edwards, on the other hand, says in his introduction that “this translation, in the interest of trying to convey something of Wolfram’s stylistic originality, will give the reader a rougher ride than its predecessors.”

    Here are some excerpts to give you a sense of the different translations. First, from the prologue:

    Mustard and Passage: I mean to tell you once again a story that speaks of great faithfulness, of the ways of womanly women and of a man’s manhood so forthright that never against hardness was it broken. Never did his heart betray him, he all steel, when he came to combat, for there his victorious hand took many a prize of praise. A brave man slowly wise – thus I hail my hero – sweetness to women’s eyes and yet to women’s hearts a sorrow, from wrongdoing a man in flight! The one whom I have thus chosen is, story-wise, as yet unborn, he of whom this adventure tells and to whom many marvels there befall.

    Hatto: I will renew a tale that tells of great fidelity, of inborn womanhood and manly virtue so straight as never was bent in any test of hardness. Steel that he was, his courage never failed him, his conquering hand seized many a glorious prize when he came to battle. Dauntless man, though laggard in discretion! – Thus I salute the hero. – Sweet balm to woman’s eyes, yet woman’s heart’s disease! Shunner of all wrongdoing! As yet he is unborn to this story whom I have chosen for the part, the man of whom this tale is told and all the marvels in it.

    Edwards: A story I will now renew for you, which tells of great loyalty, womanly woman’s ways, and man’s manliness so steadfast that it never bent before hardship. His heart never betrayed him there – steel he was, whenever he entered battle. His hand seized victoriously full many a praiseworthy prize. Bold was he, laggardly wise – it is the hero I so greet, woman’s eyes’ sweetness alongside woman’s heart’s desire, a true refuge from misdeed. He whom I have chosen for this purpose is, storywise, yet unborn – he of whom this adventure tells, in which many marvels will befall him.

    There’s plenty to comment on here but I’ll just point out one thing: both M/P and Edwards have “storywise” where Hatto has opted for the more ordinary “to this story.” Wolfram’s word is “maereshalp” which is almost certainly his own neologism. “Storywise” is a solid translation and makes your ears perk up in the same way as the original.

    Here’s what it sounds like when Lady Adventure knocks on the narrator’s heart:

    Mustard and Passage:

    “Open up!” – To whom? Who are you? – “I want to come into your heart to you.” – Then it is a small space you wish. – “What does that matter? Though I scarcely find room, you will have no need to complain of crowding. I will tell you now of wondrous things.” – Oh, is it you, Lady Adventure?

    Hatto:

    “Open!” – “To whom? Who is there?” – “I wish to enter your heart.” – “Then you want too narrow a space.” – “How is that? Can’t I just squeeze in? I promise not to jostle you. I want to tell you marvels.” – “Can it be you, Lady Adventure?”

    Edwards:

    “Open up!” – To whom? Who are you? – “I want to go into your heart.” – That’s a narrow space you want to enter! – “What of it, even if I barely survive! You’ll seldom have cause to complain of my jostling! I want to tell you of wonders now!” – Oh, it’s you, is it, Lady Adventure?

    Big differences here in how Lady Adventure’s long response is translated. Edwards’ version might be closest to the original (“waz denne, belibe ich kume?* min dringen soltu selten clagen: ich wil dir nu von wunder sagen“) but Hatto’s sounds the most like something you might actually want to read aloud.

    Which reminds me – the ideal way to experience this story is to sit with some friends and hear it recited. After all, according to Wolfram, it isn’t even a book and reading is for losers.

    Forget reading – ladies like a man who rides around with axes on his head

    But however you experience it, a long engagement with this story will feel like an exhaustive tour of a Gothic cathedral that leaves you spent but filled with admiration.

    Photo credits: baby hares by Jang Woo Lee, purple moorgrass by Elke Freese, Wolfram von Eschenbach in the Codex Manesse at: http://digi.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/diglit/cpg848/0294

    You can access a verse translation by A. S. Kline for free here!

    *(And btw I’ll admit to not being sure what “belibe ich kume” means – anyone want to enlighten me there?)

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