translations of Hasek

[James Partridge]

I reviewed Sadlon's translation (i.e. the paperback edition of the first
book of Svejk) this summer for SEEJ, although I'm not sure if the review has
been published yet, and I can't check it at the moment. Sadly, I really
can't recommend this new version, or at least I can't recommend it any more
than I would one of the others. An opportunity missed, in other words. If
you're interested in the detail then please check the review (if it's out).

I also did some work reviewing and analysing Parrott's and Selver's
translations for a recent encyclopaedia of translation (again, if you want
the details then feel free to contact me off list). I rather agree with
David Cooper's comments about reading Parrott for the story and Selver for
the flavour. Parrott's biggest problem is that he pretty clearly didn't have
much of a sense of humour, which is a bit of a prerequisite for a good
translator of Svejk. Also, as David says, he didn't have any real feel for
the different registers of Czech, so the whole thing is rather flat and
dull. Parrott's version is complete and unabridged, but whether you (or your
students) will feel that to be an advantage is another matter. Hasek gets
very wearying after a while, and there are plenty of passages in the
original that you can happily miss out without damaging the book. In fact,
judicious editing probably improves it. Parrott's book on Hasek, by the way,
is quite good. He's a better biographer than he is translator.

It's not often that you can call Paul Selver a good translator, but I think
that in this case he really did pretty well, especially considering the
period when he did it. His version is definitely sanitised, and Selver was
always pretty relaxed about what he included in his translations and what he
left out, but if you read it with a bit of consideration for these factors
then you'll probably get more out of it than you will out of Parrott's,
although I can see that Selver's 1930s english may put some people off. I
quite like it though, for all its faults.

I feel that Sadlon's version is almost the weakest of the three, although
that's only based on what I've read so far - his translation is far from
complete, so it may pick up as he goes along. For all of his claims to have
produced the definitive Svejk (and he claims this a lot on his deeply
irritating website), I personally don't think that his book comes close to
Hasek at all. But I don't want to repeat everything I've already said in my
review, so I'll stop at that, except to say that in my opinion Hasek is
still waiting for his translator. But as I say, feel free to contact me off
list if you'd like to discuss this further.

James


***************************************
James Partridge
St Edmund Hall
Oxford University
***************************************




----- Original Message -----
From: "David L. Cooper" <dc247 at COLUMBIA.EDU>
To: <SEELANGS at LISTSERV.CUNY.EDU>
Sent: Monday, November 26, 2001 5:59 PM
Subject: Re: translations of Hasek


> Here's information from the translator on the new Svejk translation:
>
> "The Book One was published in June 2000 as a Print on Demand book
> (POD). (The 'raw' translation of Book Two was finished 3 weeks ago. I'm
> working on Book Four now.) All information, including where and how to
> buy the book, is at www.zenny.com."
>
> David Cooper
>
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>

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