an ethical question I have been pondering

[rushthatspeaks]

Would it be wrong of me to do a translation of William Hope Hodgson's The Night Land into modern English?

It's out of copyright. I checked.

The reasons I would want to translate it are the same reasons one wants to translate anything: it is a text I love, in language many people cannot read. If it were something out of copyright in French, or Latin, I wouldn't hesitate to translate it into English.

I certainly wouldn't try to profit off this, and if anyone for some reason or other threw money at it I'd pass that along to charity. Basically I'd put it up on my website (which, when I get my act together, will also contain all the daily reviews indexed, and a feed to this blog, and so on, but there's nothing there yet).

The thing is, though, Hodgson chose his style and selected the words he wanted to use. Readers can still, with effort, understand it (though the same is true of, say, Chaucer, who gets translated all the time). But Hodgson was a modern writer-- well, modernish, we are talking about a century ago now. He wrote pseudo-archaically on purpose. And the text's unreadability, while it is intimately bound up with the style, is not entirely because the vocabulary and grammar have gone out of usage; a lot of it is because the style is badly done. I mean, it would never occur to me to do a translation of Eddison, because Eddison was grammatically correct.

Which... this gets into a knot about the ethics of translation, which I did take a course in, and my professors there would have debated this for months. You know-- if you're translating something that is terribly written in the original, does it have to be in the translation? Does making it well-written and readable make it not representative of that work anymore? I mean, the reason I am thinking of this as translation in the first place is that outright rewriting the book would be wrong (I found out today that Harold Bloom did that to Voyage to Arcturus (!), a venture which sank out of print, and if I have one major life ambition it is Not To Be Harold Bloom). I would be translating: maintaining as much of the core text, sentence structure, etc. as possible while putting it into a modern/undatable idiom.

So I cannot for the life of me figure out whether this would be an ethical thing to do. I don't know Hodgson well enough to know what he'd have said (if he left essays/letters/diaries I've never found them). Lin Carter chopped like fifteen thousand words out of the thing without asking, but that was his decision, you know? And I can agree with it or not as I like, and as a reader I do but I don't know if I do as a writer.

I would certainly enjoy the work immensely.

I have a long time to think about it, as there is no way in hell I would start something like this while still reading and reviewing a book every day, but I am really so incredibly ambivalent that I thought I'd throw it open to general argument, because I'm sure other people have thoughts that I haven't considered yet.

Comments

[boundbooks]

If you want to, do it. It's out of copyright (and therefore legal), and reworking, coming back to, and bringing new interpretations to creative works is how we make those works immortal.

[esmenet]

Yes, this!

[zeborah]

Would it be wrong of me to do a translation of William Hope Hodgson's The Night Land into modern English?

Nope. Though it kind of sounds like what you're really wanting (but hesitating) to do is to translate it into good English, which I feel is an equally (if not even more) laudatory goal.

[msilverstar]

I think that either of your ideas -- translating or rewriting -- would be a perfect example of a Transformative Work, and as long as you cite the source, completely ethical and legal.

[larryhammer]

Not Being Harold Bloom strikes me as a very worthy life goal. I should consider adding that to mine.

I would consider the question of whether to replicate the quality of the text not in the domain of the ethics of translation but of the craft of translation. While the distinction might sound small, I mention it in case it helps frame thinking about the issue.

---L.

[secritcrush.livejournal.com]

Would it be wrong of me to do a translation of William Hope Hodgson's The Night Land into modern English?

Ok, I am a bit biased because after your review, I would really like to read this, so it is not a surprise that I vote yes.

I don't think this sort of translation takes anything away from his work. Condensing story and modifying language in books takes place quite often in editions of books that are intended for children and while I can see arguments against it, I think it serves as a gateway for someone to appreciate the original.

It's like cutting the whaling chapters of Moby Dick for people who don't appreciate that thing - the bones remain and that's the thing that makes it great.

I'd like to see Hodgson's greatness, but I'm not likely to read the original.

[deliasherman.livejournal.com]

We're not talking Shakespeare or Chaucer--or Dickens or Scott, or even Barrie. We're talking William Hope Hodgson. All of the above-mentioned have been "adapted," "condensed," and "simpified" to a faretheewell in a number of media, including prose meant for adults. If you want to make him more accessible by taking the gingerbread off his language and the padding off his narrative, I see no moral or legal reason why you shouldn't. But I wouldn't call it a "translation" (which it isn't). I'd call it an "adaptation."

[batwrangler.livejournal.com]

This. Exactly.

[kate_nepveu]

Yeah, I'd say adaptation too.

[batwrangler.livejournal.com]

I would certainly enjoy the work immensely.

I think that's reason enough to do it.

I'm not sure I see a really good ethical objection to editing and annotating an out-of-copyright work for pleasure (or even for profit), especially if it's presented in a format that makes the changes clear (and hypertext links could do this handily).

The copy edit he never had? A critical examination? Fix-it fanfic? Transformative art? All of the above?

[thenetwork.livejournal.com]

I would so read this. And ethically, you are (and it makes the ethical difference, to my mind) thinking of doing this for pure love of the text. Rather like taking your ravishingly beautiful love out of cast-off, mismatched, dirty clothes, to "wash them in milk, and clothe them in silk, and write down their name with a gold pen and ink". The original hurt my head for all the same reasons you cite, and it would be a lovely thing to do. It's rather like... Well.
My first language is French. A very long time ago, I read Alfred Bester's "The Stars My Destination" in the clunky, horrible translation and thought what a pity it was that the book was so bad when it could've been so good. Then I learnt English and lo! It was a wonderful book.And Hodgson was writing in a foreign language, ie pseudo-archaic whatsis, which he did not master. Think of yourself as an editor. Someone, I forget who, said once that the classics should be translated anew for every generation. I don't know that I agree to that as a blanket statement. But it's true for this book.

*cue the noise of two pennies dropping down the wishing-well*

Please do it.

[rachelmanija.livejournal.com]

I think it's ethically acceptable, given that it's out of copyright and people still have access to the original. It strikes me as ethically similar to fanfic.

There's probably no profitable market, though, so it would completely be a labor of love. But I'd read it!

[postrodent.livejournal.com]

I cannot for a minute imagine you doing any of the things that would make it unethical (presenting it as exclusively your own work, etc), and I would love to read such a translation; I've been meaning to read _The Night Land_ for some time, but the language, yeah, wow.

[coraa.livejournal.com]

I would call it ethical, and the primary reason I would say so is that you are not eliding the original in any meaningful way. You aren't erasing the author by claiming that the work is wholly your own, and you aren't erasing the original text, which is still freely available to those who want to seek it out. (It's on Gutenberg, so essentially anyone who could find your version could also find the original; indeed, it wouldn't surprise me if a project of this nature increased curiosity about the original.)

I think it's ethically comparable to adaptation, or to fanfiction, or--for that matter--to extensive annotation and commentary, all of which I find unproblematic. (Well, unproblematic as genres; obviously any given adaptation/fanfic/commentary might be problematic for other reasons. But you know what I mean.)

[nineweaving.livejournal.com]

What about a facing page translation?

I do like the idea very much.

You are Not Harold Bloom, or his enantiomer. Wouldn't Timothy Spall play him wonderfully?

Nine

[sorenlundi.livejournal.com]

It's such a lovely surprise that you're even considering doing this. It's certainly nothing that I would consider unethical. You wouldn't be taking money away from Hodgson or his estate (even if you made money off it, copyright expires for a reason), you wouldn't be misrepresenting yourself or the original work and I think that it's something that would improve Hodgeson's legacy rather than diminish it.

[p-zeitgeist.livejournal.com]

I have no background in the ethics of translation, but it seems to me that the question can't be addressed sensibly without asking a further question. Namely, what's the translation for?

If it intends to recreate the original as far as possible, for an audience that has no meaningful access to that original, the translator will still need to decide what's at the center of the work, and what aspects of the original should have priority when she hits points where it isn't possible to render everything she sees in the original with perfect accuracy. There are going to be problematic aspects no matter what, and as long as the translator's intent is not to do violence to the original work, to hide it or to misrepresent it or to replace it, I'm not sure I'm seeing an ethical dilemma.

Or at least, not one that couldn't be dealt with adequately by full disclosure by the translator. As long as a reader knows what your goals are, and what aspects of the original were necessarily left behind or distorted by the change from one language to another, filtered through a mind from a different place and time from that of the original writer -- well, why not? No translation will ever be perfectly faithful to the original, after all. And if your goal is to make a work of art available to a wider audience, rather than to make a source available to a scholarly community, I'm not sure that issues about whether it's fair to make something badly-written into something less badly written are even relevant. At least, not in the absence of any attempt to mislead a reader.

[tirerim.livejournal.com]

The only way I could see such a thing being unethical is if you presented the entire thing as your own ideas, or the words as being entirely Hodgson's. I agree with others that I would call it an adaptation rather than a translation, but that is a perfectly good thing to do. The entire point of having good stories is that they can be retold, and sometimes the retellings are better, and sometimes they're just different. (And sometimes they're worse, too, but even then there's nothing wrong with creating the new version.) Stories have always been retold, we've just reached a point now where it's very easy to keep track of the original words and attributions. That doesn't mean we should stop retelling, just that now the original versions can stick around along with the new ones. And one of the main points of copyright expiring (as it used to do) is to allow people to do new things with old works.

[radiotelescope.livejournal.com]

My answer to your question is "Sure, go for it" but I have a possibly-interesting wrinkle:

I haven't read _The Night Land_. I *have* read a volume called _The Dream of X_, which is _The Night Land_ literally decimated: Hodgson (himself, his own hand) condensed the thing down to 20k words. According to the liner notes, he did this for copyright reasons -- printed a tiny number of copies (perhaps none beyond proofs), sent one proof to the Library of Congress, and let it vanish out of mind.

My edition is a 1977 reprint by Sam Moskovitz (Donald M. Grant, Publisher) (with illustrations by Stephen Fabian).

It's... well, it's still hard to read, but at novella-length it's not a strain to put up with. (I cannot imagine trying to do this for ten times as long.) And it's pretty smooth. It's presented as "charred fragments discovered in an iron box", and occasionally there's an in-character footnote of the "here six thousand pages were obscured by inky cat tracks" sort, but it is in fact a novella-sized story.

I don't know where that puts you. But your translation idea would be the *second*-most severe change the text had ever seen.

[teenybuffalo.livejournal.com]

This is a thought-provoking question. I do have opinions on this. On one hand, I think a lot of people would thank you for it, and you'd do a good job. On the other hand, I don't like the concept behind your fixing the style.

Not that I'd try to stop you, like an author trying to suppress fanfic. More that... well, the book is already the way the author wanted it to be, style and all. There are plenty of people who can't stand its bogus archaic style (I like it, which is why I'm joining this discussion) but when you get down to it, you wouldn't be translating something which no one can understand. You would be rewriting something readers can understand if they want to, but which they think sucks.

This becomes a slippery slope when you look at how many other genre writers get criticized for style. You must have heard people assert, "Oh, Lovecraft couldn't write," or talk about how they'd like to cut out all his adjectives. (Maybe you dislike his style that much, in which case this is a bad example.) Or look at Mervyn Peake or William Morris. One reader's "individualistic" is another's "phony and clunky."

Or why stop there? Wouldn't you love to go through Titus Groan and cut out all the bits with Keda in them? I would, and I think it would be a better book for it, but I wouldn't do it, if by some fluke I had the power. For my money, if it's a book instead of oral tradition and if we know what the author wanted to put into print, we should deal with the book as the author told it. (Yes, this is a generalization and I realize there can be huge issues with editing, etc., in discerning the author's intent. This is still how I almost always feel.)

Ah, well, there are enough people urging you to try the project that I feel OK about voicing a contrary opinion. I'm kinda hoping now that you do try it, so I can read your work. If you do it, though, I don't think it will be a translation--rather a posthumous collaboration or an adaptation.

[zxhrue.livejournal.com]

as was pointed out upthread, it would be more of an adaptation than a translation per se, but in either case I don't think there is an ethical bar if done while maintaining respect for the original text.

[papersky.livejournal.com]

John Scalzi just rewrote Little Fuzzy, which is out of copyright but much more recent, and got permission from the holders of the copyright of the other Fuzzy books to publish it. He calls it a "reboot".

There's a wide ethical space out there.

Copyright exists to encourage people to create -- I think that's the legality and the ethics of it. I wouldn't see anything unethical about you taking an OOC text with a dead author and translating it or rebooting it, and I wouldn't see anything unethical about your making money from it either -- your time is worth something, translators get paid. And the original would still be there.

I may be influenced by my desire for somebody to translate Burns. I had a German friend who kept saying how wonderful Burns was in Rilke's German translation. "This is supposed to be kind of English" shouldn't be enough to prevent translation into comprehensibility.

[(Anonymous)]

Are you aware the SF writer James Stoddard has already done something quite similar to what you are contemplating?

see

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Night-Land-Story-Retold-ebook/dp/B004GKNM3W


Also see

http://www.thenightland.co.uk