Meanwhile, the new year has brought a crop of online excerpts and short stories translated from Arabic to English via the Arabic Literature blog. Works include a short excerpt of Kamel Riahi’s al-Ghurila (The Gorilla), poems from Hussein Habasch and Joyce Mansour and a short story inspired by the Egyptian revolution from Hamdy El-Gazzar. The Arab Spring and its repercussions are also a dominant theme at the Beirut Book Fair.

The European Society of Authors is continuing to promote their annual “Finnegan’s List” in which well-known polyglot writers are asked to recommend titles by other writers deserving of wider translation. London author Adam Thirlwell gets one of the nominations. A PDF of the full list is available for download: Finnegan’s List [pdf].

One European author to obtain wider translation is Spaniard Javier Marías with seven titles from his backlist being translated into English at least, having been signed up by Penguin Modern Classics. The titles, which are all to be published at the beginning of August 2012, are All Souls, A Heart So White, Tomorrow in the Battle Think On Me, Dark Back of Time, When I was Mortal, The Man of Feeling and Written Lives.

The Sun says Aston Villa “refused to give up the ghost”. Wendy Richard calls her EastEnders character Pauline Fowler “the salt of the earth”. The England cricket coach tells reporters, “You can’t put words in my mouth.” Daily Mirror fashion pages call Tilda Swinton “a law unto herself”.

Now today’s Observer is going even further: it carries a full page article proclaiming “This is the age of the translator”. This marks the same anniversary and the recent appetite in the English-speaking world for “foreign fiction”, such as the Millennium trilogy by Steig Larsson, claiming “2011 has been an extraordinary year for the art of translation” But this is more than a paean to translation. The article also attempts to deconstruct what Google Translate does in contrast to what a “proper” human translator does, and quoting David Bellos (author of the excellent Is That A Fish In Your Ear?) saying

“Translation is what you get, but translation isn’t really what Google does. It’s like the difference between engineering and knowledge. An engineering solution is to make something work, but the way you make it work doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with the underlying things. Airplanes do not work the way birds fly.”

These questions are interesting in their right, but are also far from academic considering the recent success of some novels translated into English. After all, Stieg Larsson’s Millennium trilogy are predicted by some to become the three top-selling novels of all time in Britain, overtaking Dan Brown’s paperback, The Da Vinci Code, which sold 4.5 million.

A recent well-writen article on the “Arabic Literature (in English)” tackles these questions:

I don’t, as a rule, object to “foreign” words in English-language texts. Would Beckman call Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart an ethnic glossary? And yet it’s full of untranslated terms, and not just the Big Three: flora/fauna, food, and dress. Many of the italicized terms, in Things Fall Apart, force the reader to try to see Igbo culture on its own terms instead of “in translation”.

On the other hand, italicized foreign terms are often unnecessary, exoticizing, and perhaps even misleading. Ahdaf Souief, in a talk at last year’s Emirates Lit Festival, said she was very careful when using Arabic words, and that “there must be a reason for it”.

Excellent points, I think. You can read further carefully considered pros and cons of “foreign language” words in translation in the full article, “It’s a Shame When a Novel Aspires to be a Glossary”.

Larsson was an interesting character, being both a crusading journalist himself and noted for tackling extreme right and racist groups. He wrote his books in his native Swedish and they have enjoyed great success in Sweden. But sadly he died before the books could be translated, and so could provide no guidance in shaping the English text.

Glancing at the translation credit in the front of the book – to a Reg Keeland – made us wonder about the responsibility involved in this project. The Swedish translation certainly felt professional, maintaining a sense of the Swedish setting while using some elegant English turns of phrase and native colloquialisms. Now it has emerged Reg Keeland is a pseudonym, and as with many a large translation project, there were some twists and turns in the process. You can read more in the interesting interview “Reg” gave his local paper in Seattle…