an ethical question I have been pondering
May. 12th, 2011 04:02 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rushthatspeaksWould 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.
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.
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Date: 2011-05-13 05:17 am (UTC)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.