A useful, readable manual for translators

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	• Literary Translation: A Practical Guide (Topics in Translation, 22) Clifford E. Landers Multilingual Matters Limited, 2001 - 230 pages average customer review:based on 1 review view larger image
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A useful, readable manual for translators

The author's purpose, he says in the preface, is to provide guidelines to "work our way through, to use a Borgesian metaphor, the seemingly infinite labyrinth of forking paths" (read choices) in doing a literary translation. Additionally, his is "a practical, not a theoretical guide. While I have no quarrel with theorists, in theory at least, this is a get-your-hands-dirty, wrestle-with-reality type of book." Its content speaks to Landers's success in achieving his goal. He sets the brisk, colloquial, and often irreverent tone on the opening page, where he reproduces his translation of a "Night Drive," a chilling vignette by the noted Brazilian writer Rubem Fonseca. From there he deals, often episodically, with questions of technique such as: Getting started, stages of translation, fluency and transparency, adaptation vs. translation, tone, register, and other topics beginning and more experienced translators need to know. There are also items not to be found in more conventional texts: A day in the life of a literary translation, the hijacked author, when not to translate cultural cues, fiction and footnotes, pornography or "pornography?", English before there was English, and my favorite, "stalking the treacherous typo." In the book's less exciting but necessary final section, "The Working Translator," Landers deals with more mundane matters-e.g., translator's tools such as dictionaries and reference books, taxes, setting a fee, workspaces, contracts, and copyright. Several typographical errors (one of the most amusing is Stewart Potter for Potter Stewart) will hopefully be corrected in a future edition, and an index would have been useful. Still, this is the most up-to-date and readable of any work aiming at the would-be literary translator.

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