StartseiteGruppenForumMehrZeitgeist
Web-Site durchsuchen
Diese Seite verwendet Cookies für unsere Dienste, zur Verbesserung unserer Leistungen, für Analytik und (falls Sie nicht eingeloggt sind) für Werbung. Indem Sie LibraryThing nutzen, erklären Sie dass Sie unsere Nutzungsbedingungen und Datenschutzrichtlinie gelesen und verstanden haben. Die Nutzung unserer Webseite und Dienste unterliegt diesen Richtlinien und Geschäftsbedingungen.

Ergebnisse von Google Books

Auf ein Miniaturbild klicken, um zu Google Books zu gelangen.

Translated Accounts von James Kelman
Lädt ...

Translated Accounts (2002. Auflage)

von James Kelman

MitgliederRezensionenBeliebtheitDurchschnittliche BewertungDiskussionen
1031261,836 (2.75)3
This novel is set in an unnamed country that appears to be under military rule. The narrators and most of the characters remain anonymous. The language used is an atypical English form, but akin to the basic translation that might appear within a department of an overseas foreign office.
Mitglied:giovannigf
Titel:Translated Accounts
Autoren:James Kelman
Info:Anchor (2002), Paperback, 336 pages
Sammlungen:Deine Bibliothek, Abandoned
Bewertung:*
Tags:Keine

Werk-Informationen

Translated Accounts von James Kelman

Lädt ...

Melde dich bei LibraryThing an um herauszufinden, ob du dieses Buch mögen würdest.

Problems with Inventing New Pidgins, Creoles, Dialects, Idioms

A number of modernist authors have written entire books in invented "languages" -- English, ornamented by neologisms, anachronisms, distorted grammar, and attempts to mimic accents and regional speech. "A Clockwork Orange" is probably the best known. Matthiessen's "Far Tortuga" is one of the best. I read this book as a point of comparison to recent attempts by Mike McCormack, Eimear McBride, and others, to create new forms of English grammar in fiction, and it seems to me that the idea of reworking grammar goes back to modernist experiments by Stein, Joyce, and others, that didn't always have to do with dialects.

The Scottish writer James Kelman was often spoken of as an heir to Kafka (in reviews as far back as 1994, and probably before); he has written a number of books experimenting with Scots and English, as a way of expressing power struggles. "Translated Accounts" may be his most radical attempt to have unconventional English represent colonial and institutional violence and injustice. The book is 54 short chapters of eyewitness accounts, which the reader is meant to take as a dossier of atrocities, each of them translated from unnamed languages. Most of the testimonials are in one of several kinds of nonstandard English:

1. Texts that seem to be translated with the help of a machine (these days that would be Google). As one critic puts it: "... commonly, sentences are ungrammatical, misleading, and feature strange pasted-in pieces of vocabulary, suggesting a misused dictionary or computing resource: ‘Our attention now may be drawn to situations inter as between owner of the vicious dog leaping the garden gate that has bitten the skinny little child.’" (Sally Mapstone, review titled "Common Sense," LRB)

2. Texts that seem to be recovered from corrupted digital files. All the reviews I've read mention one chapter in particular, in which a violent event is recorded in fragments, because the text keeps being interrupted by code fragments: "and its laughingand andto the guest in our country ̌ ̌ ̌ ̌ ̌ ̌ ̌ ̌ ̌ ̌ ̌ ̌ ̌ ̌ ̌ ̌ ̌ ̌ ̌ ̌ ̌ ̌Summaryinformationhatlanguageor@...." and so on (p. 30).

3. Texts where the "translations" "have been modified by someone of a more senior office," as Kelman says in his Preface.

4. Texts translated by persons not "native to the tongue" -- as he also says in the Preface.

I think it might be possible to add to this list, but these are the basic categories. The problem with the novel, I think, isn't its lack of direction or "plot" (as some reviewers said), or its hedging about actual histories, but its management of these "translations."

The fact that modes of "translation" (invented idioms) vary from one chapter to the next, while the number of witnesses also varies (readers cannot be sure how many people's accounts are transcribed in the book) means that readers will pay special attention to style in order to deduce the identities of the narrators. For that reason it matters that the strategies are not consistent, or consistently believable as translations.

Mapstone noted that sometimes Scots (specifically Glaswegian) sneaks in even though Kelman apparently didn't intend it. There are also chapters that fall into a literary style emulating translation, in which Kelman's own (literary) voice can be heard: "Yes she offered herself to me. I never heard her laughter. She was a girl. Her laughter. She would have laughed, who does not laugh. I would have walked with her and our lips could not meet." (p. 157)

Many other passages, however, register Kelman's inconsistent and, I think, inexperienced sense of what a bad translation is.

"Authoritys and other powers show ignorance of a crucial tautology that may be formulated if roughly, having sense as follows, we have been selected be virtue of our merits, these merits are worthy selection criteria. Further, that these merits, being specific, are of universal application. Upon selection power is/was taken from them [democratically-elected governments, dutiful-appointed]." (p. 154)

If I read this slowly and attentively, I have problems. Why is "authorities" misspelled? It is presumably a translator's error, or a transcriber's, and so I am on the alert for similar misspellings. If the translator is partly illiterate, that will have certain predictable consequences. The main portion of this paragraph is eloquent in an institutional mode, but under what circumstances could a long, well-formed sentence of this kind be interrupted by an ungrammatical phrase ("having sense as follows")? If the original text was competent institutional speech in its original language, and it was translated by a person who knew enough of about administrative speech to capture phrases such as "ignorance of a crucial tautology," then how could a phrase like "having sense as follows" end up in the transcript? The square-bracketed interpolation raises a similar question: it clarifies the antecedent ("them") in an elaborate and technical fashion, but it has a mistake ("dutiful-appointed"). What kind of speaker could have the competence to insert that bracketed correction but make a mistake as simple -- and as unusual -- as "dutiful-appointed"?

This is the problem with "Translated Accounts" and by extension any invented pidgin, creole, dialect, or idiom: it draws attention to itself, and so it needs to sustain very close reading. Kelman's writing here is not up to this: he's better when he mimics Glaswegian, Scottish English, and administrative or legal English. I can imagine a version of this book done exclusively by repeated use of Google Translate: it would be consistent and often much stranger than this book's voices. Or a version produced by actual translators, presumably partly incompetent ones, hired by the author.

Without strategies like those it is difficult to write with the precision and attention necessary to create, from nothing, an entirely new way of writing.
2 abstimmen JimElkins | Feb 16, 2018 |
keine Rezensionen | Rezension hinzufügen

Auszeichnungen

Du musst dich einloggen, um "Wissenswertes" zu bearbeiten.
Weitere Hilfe gibt es auf der "Wissenswertes"-Hilfe-Seite.
Gebräuchlichster Titel
Originaltitel
Alternative Titel
Ursprüngliches Erscheinungsdatum
Figuren/Charaktere
Wichtige Schauplätze
Wichtige Ereignisse
Zugehörige Filme
Epigraph (Motto/Zitat)
Widmung
Die Informationen stammen von der englischen "Wissenswertes"-Seite. Ändern, um den Eintrag der eigenen Sprache anzupassen.
I ackwoledge the comments and suggestions of Geoff Mulligan, Gill Coleridge, Marie Connors, Jeff Torrington, Tom Leonard and Peter Ward; and also Alasdair Gray whose honest opinion, expressed some twenty years ago, allowed me to stop work on a project that was going nowhere.
Erste Worte
Die Informationen stammen von der englischen "Wissenswertes"-Seite. Ändern, um den Eintrag der eigenen Sprache anzupassen.
These "translated accounts" are by three, four or more individuals domiciled in an occupied territory or land where a form of martial law appears in operation.
Zitate
Letzte Worte
Hinweis zur Identitätsklärung
Verlagslektoren
Werbezitate von
Die Informationen stammen von der englischen "Wissenswertes"-Seite. Ändern, um den Eintrag der eigenen Sprache anzupassen.
Originalsprache
Anerkannter DDC/MDS
Anerkannter LCC

Literaturhinweise zu diesem Werk aus externen Quellen.

Wikipedia auf Englisch

Keine

This novel is set in an unnamed country that appears to be under military rule. The narrators and most of the characters remain anonymous. The language used is an atypical English form, but akin to the basic translation that might appear within a department of an overseas foreign office.

Keine Bibliotheksbeschreibungen gefunden.

Buchbeschreibung
Zusammenfassung in Haiku-Form

Aktuelle Diskussionen

Keine

Beliebte Umschlagbilder

Gespeicherte Links

Bewertung

Durchschnitt: (2.75)
0.5
1 2
1.5
2 1
2.5
3 3
3.5
4 1
4.5
5 1

Bist das du?

Werde ein LibraryThing-Autor.

 

Über uns | Kontakt/Impressum | LibraryThing.com | Datenschutz/Nutzungsbedingungen | Hilfe/FAQs | Blog | LT-Shop | APIs | TinyCat | Nachlassbibliotheken | Vorab-Rezensenten | Wissenswertes | 202,662,114 Bücher! | Menüleiste: Immer sichtbar