Dag ut och dag in med en dag i Dublin

When Joyce's Ulysses was given a new translation to Swedish last year, the translator Erik Andersson also put out this short book about the translation process, which is pure translation porn. He starts out with a sigh of relief that he's finally done with his translation of Lord of the Rings, which ate his brain for a long time; now he can relax and translate a book he's read lots of times, knows inside out, let's get this party started: "Stately plump Buck Mulligan - "

Uh, is that "Stately" the adjective or the adverb? "Plump" as in chubby or rude? ...Damnit, it's both. And both are specific to English. Fuck. He's stuck on the opening sentence for two weeks. And it doesn't get any easier, the puns and the double meanings the least of his problems. How do you translate the difference between Irish and British English to another language? What about all the untranslated Latin that made sense to early 20th century catholic Irishmen, but is all Greek to 21st century Swedes?

At one point, he takes up this question: 1) Why do we do re-translations, apart from the vague clichés of the old translation not feeling "fresh" ("Finally we have a Dostoevsky for our times!" Excellent. But what's he doing in our time? Aren't we supposed to be visiting his?) and 2) if we regularly put out new translations of foreign works to keep them up to date, why don't we do the same thing for books written in our own language that have become... if not unreadable, then at least reader-unfriendly with age? If the life expectancy of a translation is roughly 50 years, why shouldn't the same hold true for original works?

Note the "why"

He argues, hesitantly, that the best argument for a re-translation is to be true to the author's original intention (so much for the author being dead). So then the question becomes, did the author really intend to come across as archaic and confusing? Probably not.

In Swedish, this gets complicated since Swedish was "modernised" fairly recently. "Classic" Swedish literature begins in the early 19th century, but we had our latest major spelling and grammar reforms in the early-to-mid 20th century, which means that a lot of the older works that were still popular then were edited to "correct" archaic spelling and verb forms that no longer existed. You can think what you want about that, but the fact remains that almost every printing those books have gone through since are not the original text but a modernised one. (Part of the reason why August Strindberg and Selma Lagerlöf are still very popular in Sweden was that they were among the first authors to embrace this, so they automatically feel more "modern" than other writers working at the same time.) Still, for the most part, they only changed spelling and verb endings - word choices, social situations and forms of address that have gone out of style, etc remain and, much like Shakespeare for the English, occasionally make the text confusing without extensive footnotes.

This isn't to say that I necessarily think old texts should be modernised, but it's an interesting question... for the moment, I'll stick with Erik Andersson's conclusion:

But as with all translations, you can take comfort in the fact that the original isn't annihilated but remains for those who prefer it. There's nothing to stop us from adding another category to the translators' workload; once they've finished translating and retranslating all foreign literature ever written, they can deal with the Swedish one, from 1962 and backwards.

And for what it's worth, the translation itself is brilliant.