Lydia Davis on Retranslation

For the next two weeks, Lydia Davis is blogging over at The Paris Review on translation. She starts out by talking about why someone should re-translate a work like Madame Bovary. She should know, as she's done just that--and we've got an excerpt of it in our next anthology of literaty translation, Some Kind of Beautiful Signal, publishing next month. (Pre-order yours at Amazon!)

Here's what Davis has to say about re-translation

But in the case of a book that appeared more than 150 years ago, like Madame Bovary, and that is an important landmark in the history of the novel, there is room for plenty of different English versions. For example, 1) the first editions of the original text may have been faulty, and over the years one or more corrected editions have been published, so that the earliest English translations no longer match the most accurate original; 2) the earliest translators (as was the case with the Muirs rendering Kafka) may have felt they needed to inflict subtle or not so subtle alterations on the style and even the content of the original so as to make it more acceptable to the Anglophone audience; with the passing of time, we come to deem this something of a betrayal and ask for a more faithful version. 3) Earlier versions may simply not be as good in other respects as they could be—let another translator have a try.

For more on that topic have a listen to Breon Mitchell talking about just that--in this audio from last November's Lit&Lunch event, he discusses his retranslation of Gunter Grass's The Tin Drum.