The Genre Explorers discussion

It can be a nightmare to find a good translation, so let's help each other out and post our best (and worst!) finds.

The Flowers of Evil I'll set the ball rolling with my own translation of Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du Mal. Six months in the making, it follows the metre and rhyme schemes of the original poems. Despite the fact that there are already many translations of this seminal work, I felt the need for a new approach. I have written what I felt Baudelaire himself might have written had he been an English poet. However I make no claims as to the quality of my translation - that is for others to decide.

Hi John and Welcome to the group!
As per the rules here there is no self-promotion allowed.

It does have to do with this thread though, so I'll let it be this time :) Translating poetry must be a tough job! In my eyes it will always be untranslatable as all the different stylistic traits of a piece never can be translated completely as they should while still retaining the meaning of it.

Hi Aleta. If I were you I'd allow self-promotion so long as it is relevant to the topic. Just my opinion of course!

What many people do not understand is that translation, especially of poetry, is an art, or at least it can be. It is my view that works of translation should be judged on their artistic merit, and not simply as someone else's work rendered into another language.

I don't make any kind of decisions for this group lightly, but rather put a lot of thought into them. This rule included.

The bottom line of self-promotion is that it doesn't really say anything about a book when the author/publisher/translator/etc of it mentions it. One of the things I want for this group is having easy resources for readers to pull from and it says a lot more about a book when a reader liked it, despite difference in tastes and so on.
Every parent think their kid the cutest and all that...

It also makes it more likely that people start joining the group simply to promote their books and then everything goes to pieces. The moderator group I am a part of have so many threads about spamming and self-promotion problems. It's simply just a pandora's box I do not wish to open.

That's fine, I respect your decision. I shall abide by the rules in future. I look forward to some interesting contributions here on the subject of translation. Have a great Christmas!

Thank you :) So do I, it can be a nightmare sometimes, to find a good translation. In fact, I often prefer a good English one to one in my own language, as there are often so many different to choose from.
Merry Christmas to you too!

This reminds me. Here's a link for finding good Jules Verne translations:

http://19thlevel.blogspot.dk/2012/08/...

French authors can be quite tricky to find good translations of! Russian authors are easier, I think. At least in Denmark, as there's only a few able to translate them and so they have to be good :)

And this one I found when I browsed another group to see if it was for me. It's about Brothers Grimm translations:

http://www.theguardian.com/books/2014...

In general fairy tales aren't the happy stories we know today. They were often meant to scare you into doing the right/proper thing and weren't always written for kids!