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I well understand the impatience of your 7/16/99 cover story’s subjects with less than brilliant translations. In my 20s I was introduced to the French The Song of Roland and the Norwegian novel Pan by Knut Hamsun. The latter translation (by James W. McFarlane) I have read three times and have memorized his first paragraph along with chapter eight. As for Frederick Luquiens’s translation of The Song of Roland, I once had 300 lines between my teeth. I have trotted out portions in bars and coffeehouses, blurted them over the airwaves (Milt Rosenberg’s talk show) and announced their music to women I wished to impress. Once I recited them to my sixth-grade class and after 20 lines asked if they understood everything. “No,” they answered, “but keep reading, it sounds great.”
A month later, pulling a copy of Pan from Barbara’s shelves, I found the wording changed. Sverre Lyngstad was the new translator. I checked familiar passages. The magical words of McFarlane had been replaced by the ordinary ones of Lyngstad (albeit a more politically correct Scandinavian name). Yet everything that had drawn me to the original now left me cold in its successor.
Incidently, some 30 years ago I saw a movie titled The Good Soldier Schweik based on the novel. I thought it quite funny, even more so on second viewing, and believed it to be one of the top dozen movies ever made. It apparently has disappeared from sight, unlisted in either Facets’ catalog or Ebert’s guide.
