Translating Style

Tim Parks

It's rare to discover a book whose potential audience is as tiny as this one. Translating Style requires its reader to be a fan of literary analysis as well as deeply interested in the science of translation. Furthermore, while it's possible to imagine reading this without knowing Italian, it's hard to see why anyone would want to try. All of which sounds for a discouraging start to any review and I don't mean it to be. If you can tick all the boxes it's an interesting read.

As a teacher, a fiction writer and a professional translator Parks should know his stuff. The idea for the book came when he gave his class an extract from a D. H. Lawrence novel together with its Italian translation and asked his students to identify the original. Misled by the non-standard English in the Lawrence passage (together with the smoothed out Italian translation) every member of the class said it was an Italian text poorly translated into English.

In Translating Style Parks suggests that thinking about the mechanics of translation can itself illuminate the author's intention and this is especially the case in the extraordinary literary styles of writers like Joyce and Beckett (who incidentally translated his own work). But his parallel theme is the usefulness of literary analysis as a tool for sharpening and improving a translation. Similarly he argues it's important the translator truly understands the author's themes and coded wordplay in order to get the best out of his translation. Which gives us the works-both-ways title.