Björn recenserade The Sellout av Paul Beatty
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4 stjärnor
For the most part, Swedish translators do a good job with lauded anglophone writers. This time, though, not so much. What I imagine is a tour de force of using language, from Dickens to Kanye, to turn over every rock of American race relations, ends up sounding like a European culture major trying to do a "faithful" examination of What Black Americans Think, never sure of when to use what little Swedish ghetto slang he knows and when to just do literal translations of US terms, and killing the novel in the process. There's still obviously a very good, possibly great, novel in there, but it's exactly the thing that makes it great that makes it hard, almost impossible, to translate into another language.
I keep referencing Against The Day recently, can't imagine why, but you know that bit in there where archduke Franz Ferdinand tries to engage in a …
For the most part, Swedish translators do a good job with lauded anglophone writers. This time, though, not so much. What I imagine is a tour de force of using language, from Dickens to Kanye, to turn over every rock of American race relations, ends up sounding like a European culture major trying to do a "faithful" examination of What Black Americans Think, never sure of when to use what little Swedish ghetto slang he knows and when to just do literal translations of US terms, and killing the novel in the process. There's still obviously a very good, possibly great, novel in there, but it's exactly the thing that makes it great that makes it hard, almost impossible, to translate into another language.
I keep referencing Against The Day recently, can't imagine why, but you know that bit in there where archduke Franz Ferdinand tries to engage in a game of The Dozens with black Chicagoans ca 1900? The whole novel sounds like that in translation.
