And that exam I mentioned last time? Well, I passed. Out. No, the other one, barely. Thank FSM it's over. No reason to celebrate, but at least I should have felt relieved, shouldn't I? Instead, I only felt bla-wtf?-so now what? I've been living on a diet of paper for too long. Couldn't bring myself to write anything, no e-mails, no postcards, no diaries. Heck, I wasn't even motivated to do the one thing that reliably helps my mood, i.e. cycling, even though the weather's been perfect for most of November. High time to crawl out of this hole, though. There's so much to do, so much to read.

Do you know the feeling, too, that tedious stuff suddenly becomes much more interesting if you get to tell somebody else about it? I guess this is a good place for me to do that; other than in so-called real life, here nobody should feel compelled to feign interest.

There's a heap of books on the desk in front of me right now from which I hope to find something to use in a paper on translating children's literature (reading suggestions are always welcome, btw). Right now, I'm in what I tentatively call the Maigret mode of "research" - sifting through a lot of literature that might or might not provide me with a sense of direction to take from here. Books on children's literature, overviews of translation theories, textbooks on translation in general, on literary translation in particular, sort-of canonical texts in the field. One of the latter might be familiar to the theologically inclined, "Toward a science of translating" by American Bible translator Eugene A. Nida. Haven't gotten to reading it yet, so I'll refrain from giving my two cents on it.

Or my mustard, as ve zay in Cherman.

Fortunately for me, quite a few Finnish authors have written about the subject of translations of children's books. There's even a dissertation about the translation of proper names in children's literature. If there's enough material for an entire dissertation, I should be able to cobble together a measly paper. *sigh*

Now to something not quite entirely different.

While browsing journals I came across a really interesting article about "pseudotranslation".* Andreï Makine is best known for his novel "Le testament français", I suppose. It won him the Prix Goncourt in 1995. The first novel the Russian-born author, who emigrated to France in the 1980s, published in his new home country, is "La fille d'un héros de l'Union soviétique" (engl. "A Hero's Daughter"). It has lots of characteristics that mark it as a translation from Russian - overly literally translated idioms, barbarisms (2nd paragraph), and, above all, translator's footnotes. The article says the reader is constantly being reminded that he is reading a translation. Except that he isn't, really. The whole translator and her constant interferences are fake. Makine wrote the novel in French, but nobody was willing to print it:

In an article in Le Monde published shortly after Makine won the Goncourt prize, it is related how he sent his manuscript to numerous publishers and that it was returned unread. The reason given is that "un Russe qui écrit en français, cela fait mauvais genre. Comment pourrait-on être un 'écrivain français' avec un nom pareil?"

All things Russian, however, were à la mode during the perestroika era, so catering to that interest might have helped selling a hitherto unknown author's first novel, McCall argues. Later on in the article, he comments on the English and German translations of Makine's pseudotranslation. The German translation keeps the footnotes and the translationese, the English one doesn't. McCall ultimately disapproves, but still gives a possible defense for this case of "policing rather than polishing". By the time "A hero's daughter" was published in English, Makine had already acquired an international standing and therefore appeal to a potential audience extending beyond a "cultural elite" that would put up with the breach of its expectations regarding literary conventions:

If Strachan has been unfaithful to Makine by straying significantly from his original text, he has done him a great service by enhancing his status abroad and his sales [...] And for translations to be well received by Anglo-Saxon reviewers, they have to be fluent and not bear the mark of translation at all.

"How can you be a French writer with a name like that?" I cannot judge if the newspaper's take on the matter truthfully reflects the situation in France; it certainly made me wonder what it's like here in Germany.

On the one hand Wladimir Kaminer comes to mind as a Russian-born writer who made his career in another language and another country. He emigrated to East Berlin just in time to get a permit of residence for the GDR before reunification and quickly became a household name in the cultural scene of Berlin and a pretty successful writer. I both envy him a bit for having acquired an impressive command of a foreign language in no time and like the still unconventional sound and occasional (rare) Russian interferences. Easter eggs for the Slavicist, yumm.

On the other hand, until recently - or maybe between the end of the use of German as a lingua franca of Central/Eastern Europe and recently - writers of non-German speaking origin (especially with non-European names, I suspect) were very rare. Not that surprising, since mass immigration began only in the 50s/60s. Still, the last decade or so seems to be the time it's no sensation of national proportions anymore if a "Person mit Migrationshintergrund" ("person with migration background", the currently pc term) writes anything else but "Gastarbeiterliteratur". Relevant article in English. Mentions another memorable (novel) title:

It's So Lonely in the Saddle Since the Horse Died.

Quit the verschlimmbessering, Bart, just post this.

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McCall, Ian 2006: Translating the Pseudotranslated: Andreï Makine's La fille d'un héros de l'Union soviétique. In: Forum for modern language studies. Vol.42; Nr. 3; July 2006. Published for the University of St. Andrews. Oxford University Press. 286-297.