[ehib8yPc]

Thomas Warburton was born in 1918, so he is 90 years old this year. I am reading a wonderful small book of his memoirs - about his life as a translator. As you can see from his surname, he has something to do with Britain. Indeed, for the first 33 years of his life he was a British citizen.

But Warburton is no Brit. He is a Swedish-speaking Finn and this has stood him in good stead as a translator when conveying literature written in both English and Finnish to a Swedish readership. He is a bridge between cultures.

He has translated umpteen books from the Finnish, including the two-volume masterpiece by Volter Kilpi (1874-1939) called In the Hall at Alastalo which no doubt ranks with the works of Szentkuthy, as mentioned recently by Stewart, since Kilpi he is regarded as the Finnish Proust-Joyce.

But from English, Warburton has translated a good deal into Swedish - and some important and varied books:

William Faulkner: Intruder in the Dust; Sartoris; A Fable
Henry Green: Loving; Living
Tennessee Williams: The Roman Spring of Mrs Stone
Djuna Barnes: Nightwood
James Joyce: Ulysses; Dubliners
Edgar Lee Masters: The Spoon River Anthology
H.G. Wells: The History of Mr Polly
Arthur Conan Doyle, The Hound of the Baskervilles; The Sign of Four; The Speckled Band
George Orwell: 1984
Laurence Sterne: Tristram Shandy
E.E. Cummings: The Enormous Room

Plus works by a dozen other authors.

His memoirs are actually called Efter 30 000 sidor which means "after 30,000 pages". Warburton has, during his long career as a translator, translated roughly that number of pages. His comments on style, payment and other aspects of literary translation are most illuminating.

[Dfvgthyju]

Wow! What a diverse group to translate! Eric, what draws people to doing translation for a living? Is it the literature or the languages or the paycheck or some combination? It has got to be difficult, and often isolating, work, and I think you mentioned before there's a certain thanklessness to it -- thousands upon thousands of words all translated correctly, capturing the correct tone and cadence of the auther, but it's the typo on page 276 that you get to hear about -- so it must be a strong calling for someone to take their language skills in that direction as opposed to doing corporate or technical translation. I'm amazed, really, and, of course, very appreciative.

[ehib8yPc]

I met Warburton once, almost 30 years ago. He was then a very kind and unassuming man looking forward to his retirement. He worked at the Helsinki Finland-Swedish publishing house Schildts, which did admittedly supplement his income, but how much of a sinecure this job there was I do not know. I get the feeling they let him have long sabbaticals, as they knew he was a key translator.

As for the Page 276 Syndrome, I suffered it once a few years ago, as I think I related somewhere on this website. After translating a 300-page postmodernist novel from Estonian, something which not all that many people in Western Europe do, I showed my translation rather proudly to a Dutchman, himself a very well respected translator into Dutch. He knew little about Estonian literature, which is only to be expected, but after flicking through the book out of politeness for a few minutes, he espied... a Mistake!

This was on Page 43! I had written that the Clouzet film mentioned on that page was called La Salaire de la Peur. But woe is me, I had committed a dreadful error! The film was in fact called Le Salaire de la Peur, as the word "salaire" is a masculine noun.

[Dfvgthyju]

I met Warburton once, almost 30 years ago. He was then a very kind and unassuming man looking forward to his retirement. He worked at the Helsinki Finland-Swedish publishing house Schildts, which did admittedly supplement his income, but how much of a sinecure this job there was I do not know. I get the feeling they let him have long sabbaticals, as they knew he was a key translator.

As for the Page 276 Syndrome, I suffered it once a few years ago, as I think I related somewhere on this website. After translating a 300-page postmodernist novel from Estonian, something which not all that many people in Western Europe do, I showed my translation rather proudly to a Dutchman, himself a very well respected translator into Dutch. He knew little about Estonian literature, which is only to be expected, but after flicking through the book out of politeness for a few minutes, he espied... a Mistake!

This was on Page 43! I had written that the Clouzet film mentioned on that page was called La Salaire de la Peur. But woe is me, I had committed a dreadful error! The film was in fact called Le Salaire de la Peur, as the word "salaire" is a masculine noun.

What a coincidence! I watched that film earlier this week. In American, it is called The Wages of Fear.

What, if it isn't terribly off-topic, made you want to go into translating literature for a living? It's such an unusual vocation. I used to work with a technical translator at a previous job, English-to-Spanish, what a headache for her! We would write the narrative and produce the graphics in English, but Spanish sometimes takes several more words to say the same thing, yet they expected her document to look the same as mine and fill the same space. And then there would be the e-mails from her asking me to describe what some of the technical jargon meant because the cute little name for it in English was pretty meaningless in Spanish. Then we hired a second translator and the great translation wars began and both argued their cases for what they felt was the best translation for the same information. A simple example -- boys and girls. Ninos and ninas, or muchachos and muchachas? I can't imagine the difficulties encountered when you move from the simple documents we produced to something like a post-modernist novel.

[ehib8yPc]

Irene, if I'd have known that, I'd have translated it like that. But as I've never seen the film, I stuck to the French. If an Estonian author (who spoke no French) didn't translate it - and French is more exotic for Estonians than for Brits - I thought I'd leave it in French. But I didn't check it up, and that was fatal, hence Page 43.

Your question is not off-topic. I'm sure Warburton would have been pleased to be asked too. If someone pays me to translate Warburton's book, there are enough things there said about matters that don't involve specific languages, to make it interesting.

The banal answer to your question is that I find translating business & technical reports by the semi-educated boring (I've done it) and I'm crap at legal translation (I've done it), as you have to be extremely exact, using terms that must be precise and leave no room for imagination, or any gift you may have fostered and developed in an artistic direction. I have, however, found that I am not only reasonably good at translating literature, but I like doing it.

Whereas I was more or less thrown out of my legal translation job in Estonia (translating Estonian laws into English before EU accession) in 1998, though I was glad to go, I have won two literary prizes for translating novels from that very same language. As long as I can survive financially, I will stick to literature. But it is a precarious career money-wise.

As regards layout, I want the publisher to worry about that. Yes, spelling, paragraphing, spacing, punctuation and many other things have to be kept under control, but I want the publisher's editor there as a safety net, not to be getting frantic about these matters at the expense of the translation work itself. And if it's parallel text, and the text has to be squeezed in, as you say, you've got problems.

Another pertinent point you make is when you work with others, or share a job. You have to be on the same wavelength and agree on common terminology right from the start. Otherwise you get into fights.

Actually, a postmodernist novel isn't that bad, as long as there aren't endless layers of puns and allusions, which are essential for the translation. I wouldn't like to tackle the foreign equivalent of Finnegans Wake!

[Dfvgthyju]

Please try to see the film sometime, it's wonderful.

I think it's marvelous that you have a job you enjoy. How familiar do you have to be with the material before you translate it? Do you read the work several times before translating, or read it once and just start on page one? Do you get notes from authors and publishers with specific requests about how something's to be translated or does all that come after? Am I asking too many questions?

[ehib8yPc]

The questions are all pertinent. I wish I could convey this dialogue to Thomas Warburton, as he has vastly more experience than I have.

If you know the author's works you can start from Page 1 without having read the novel. But it can be very risky, as his or her last three can be brilliant, and this one can be the dud he wrote over a hung-over weekend. So even if you don't read every word, you should have done a thorough flick-through and read selected passages.

But reading it several times is overkill. It may in fact make you grow bored with the book as you know it too well. And you begin to vacillate, find all sorts of relatively trivial translation problems, and start agonising. This is not good for progress.

I'll deal with the requests or own ideas question tomorrow; it's rather late on this side of the pond. But suffice it to say, that a translator works much better when they have chosen the text themselves, but nevertheless get good cooperation from the author, when they need things explained.

Jaan Kross was kind enough to explain how the bunks were folded up and down in a small prison cell he shared with three or four others during the German occupation of Estonia (1941-44). I couldn't work it out from the description in the story, but he drew a simple diagram, which explained it. I have had detailed help from both Estonian and Swedish authors in this respect. I prefer a hands-on author. Then the translator doesn't get blamed later on, which is the knee-jerk reaction of enraged reviewers, who can't even read one foreign language but lecture you on alternatives, when it's already too late.

[ehib8yPc]

I'm now translating the Warburton book. More information here:

http://nordicvoices.blogspot.com/sea...as%20Warburton

And here:

http://nordicvoices.blogspot.com/200...warburton.html