I'm sure I must have seen this thread before but never got round to posting on it. Thanks for the reminder,
Guinevere!
I, too, first read LotR, and the Silmarillion and The Hobbit, in German translation (the Carroux version). I read it in the original for the first time shortly thereafter, but for most of the 30 years since, my Tolkien experience was filtered through the translations, and although I read the Prof's works mostly in the original nowadays, somewhere in the back recesses of my mind Frodo's surname will always be
Beutlin, and Elrond will always reside in
Bruchtal (which is a fairly close translation of
Rivendell, and never mind its hilarious similarity to the real town of Bruchsal in the region of Germany where I long lived).
Of course no translation can ever hope to capture every nuance of the original, but I still feel that Ms Carroux (and Ms von Freymann, who translated the poems!) has done an outstanding job, and I think her use of dated or archaic German words like
bühl (for 'hill') or
tobel (for 'dingle', as in Derndingle) would have pleased the Prof. The different stylistic registers in different parts of the book (like e.g. the colloquial hobbit-talk early in The Fellowship vs the more lofty heroic mode in parts of TT and RotK) come through quite clearly in her version, even if she didn't exactly mirror every occurrence of
thou vs
you in the original.
As for the Krege re-translation, don't get me started on that! He's proved himself to be a competent and indeed sensitive translator with his version of the Silmarillion, so it's a marvel to me how he ever could have screwed up so completely. (IIRC he even discussed in his afterword whether he shouldn't have rendered the Rohirric names with their Old High German cognates, to mirror the relation between Rohirric=Anglo-Saxon and Westron=ModernEnglish in the original, which clearly shows he did give some profound thought to his business.) I'm willing to acknowledge he probably was under some pressure from the editors to make his translation as different from the old one as possible, but still... anybody who can seriously think of using "na klar", "kichern" on the one hand and "hohe Frau" on the other hand (belonging to
totally different stylistic registers in German) in the same sentence deserves to be hung by his thumbs.
(For native English readers who may not know what I'm talking about, this is like
Quote:
|
'Yeah, sure', said the High Lady, giggling softly
|
vs Tolkien's
Quote:
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'Like as not', said the Lady with a gentle laugh.
|
)
One more thing I'd like to address is the translation of Hobbitish sur- and place names. I'm for translating them, if done well, and I think Ms Carroux handled that part very well indeed*, using some old German place name endings like -
ingen, -
binge, -
büttel to match Tolkien's -
ton, -
delving, -
bottle. It does away with the Englishness of the Shire, of course, but it does preserve the
homeliness, which I think is just as important. Meaning that if I read Tolkien correctly, he meant the audience at which his books were first and foremost aimed (English, of course) to feel
at home in the Shire - like it was, as someone (I think
Lalwende?) said on I don't know which other thread, a familiar place not far away; after all, the Hobbits are the characters from whose perspective we experience most of the story, so we're supposed to identify with them, aren't we? Now for English readers, homeliness and Englishness are of course one and the same, but translators have to make a choice here - and personally, as a reader, I prefer for the Shire to feel like home to me.
*One thing where I disagree with her is her choice of rendering
Shire itself as
Auenland (literally 'meadow-land', which I suppose describes the landscape well enough but hasn't the same historical connotations). In a footnote to the Appendix on translation, she says that a better German equivalent to the English
shire would have been
Gau, but that she chose not to use that because of its perverted use by the Nazis (as in
Gauleiter). There would have been, however, a perfect dialectal alternative in
Gäu (basically the same word pronounced a little differently, and with no Nazi connotations whatsoever). Its usage is rather limited to the south-west of Germany, but seeing that she borrowed a lot from SW German for the rest of her nomenclature, that shouldn't have deterred her.
Now this post has got a lot longer and more rambling than I ever intended... blame the hour (close to 4am) and some bottles of good Czech beer!
