Re-reading A Clockwork Orange

 

I am resuming my re-reading challenge after a long break as I was reading Hilary Mantel's The Mirror and the Light – slow read of many, many pages that took me over two months. Goodreads points out to me that I am behind schedule.

I included A Clockwork Orange in my list because it seemed an obvious choice, and now I cannot remember whether I read it before I saw the movie or after. I saw the movie in 1975 at the very earliest (a pirate black-and-white copy), and I haven't watched it since so I have just glimpses of episodes and no memory of whether the movie follows the novel. Not unexpectedly, what I remember is the worst scenes of violence and the worst scenes of Alex's therapy. I don't remember how the film ends, actually don't remember the rest of the plot after therapy. Likewise, my memory of the novel was extremely vague.

My current copy has a foreword, from which I learned that the novel was published in the USA without the final chapter and that the film was based on the American version.

Since I was prepared for the violence, it didn't shock me, and it is possibly less shocking because it is narrated by Alex matter-of-factly in his idiosyncratic language. I was much more disturbed by the moral and political messages which I find far two explicit and therefore less effective. Maybe it is the spirit of the early 1960s.

The most fascinating aspect of the novel is the language, much of which is obviously missing in the film. I haven't counted, but I would guess at 5 to 10 slang words per sentence, and I wonder how many make sense unless you know Russian. You can always figure out the meaning, but for me part of the joy of reading was recognising the Russian words cleverly disguised by English spelling and grammar. I am not referring to “gulliver” and “horrowshow”, but to much more subtle and imaginative usage. In some cases it took a few instances before I got it - “oddy knocky” was one, not straightforward to get from the context.

What Burgess and his critics perhaps didn't know is that at the time the novel was written, Russian nadsats, or teens, were actively using a similar kind of jargon where you not only needed the knowledge of English, but also a good deal of creativity. So you could hear phrases such as: “Я митингую с герлой в восемь клоков” (I am meeting a girl at 8 o'clock), ”У меня трузера штатские” (My trousers are from the USA) or ”Чилдренята, напутонивайте шузы” (Children, put on your shoes”), which is exactly the way Alex uses language. I have tested these examples on some Slavic scholars, and they didn't pass the test. I wonder whether Burgess would have passed it.

I got curious about how the novel was translated into Russian, and the translator used this very same kind of slang, spelling – and misspelling – English words in Cyrillic and inflecting them by Russian grammar. So Alex's droogy becomes his frendy, mesto becomes pleis, litso becomes feis, and deng becomes mani. No Russian reader today would have problems with this language, it is common currency.

In terms of language, A Clockwork Orange is compared to Finnegans Wake and Ridley Walker. I never got past the first page of Ridley Walker because I am not a native speaker, but in Finnegans Wake it helps to be multilingual.

ABC blog: bonus post Ö

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Ö is for översättning, which means translation and which I have totally missed in my T post. But I was a translator before I became a children's literature scholar, and it was translation that brought me to children's literature. I started translating short texts for children from Swedish, and interestingly enough, children's radio wanted fairy tales, while a children's magazine I translated for wanted anything but fairy tales (one of those weird pedagogical twists). And large children's publishers didn't want anything from a beginning translator. I always wanted to translate Astrid Lindgren, but there was already a big fight over her when I joined the club. So my only published book-length translations were not children's literature. And yet my translation practice proved helpful when I did translation studies, because if you don't know how translators work you may sometimes pose very stupid questions about why translators make seemingly inexplicable changes, and why two translations of the same work look so different, and why a poor translation is always longer than the original. By the way, there is no such thing as ”untranslatable”. There are just lazy or less talented translators. Try to translate my ABC blog into your language or a language you know and see what you might need to change. Warning: don't trust Google.

If you want a thing done, do it yourself

Some of my books and articles are translated into a variety of languages: Danish, Norwegain, Finnish, German, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Lithuanian, Slovenian, Chinese, Japanese, Korean and Farsi. I may have forgotten some.

I have translated myself from English to Swedish and back. It is not really translating because it is my own text, and I know what I want to say and can say it slightly differently in the other language.

With Danish and Norwegian, I can check that the translation is correct. With other languages I can at least ask how they have managed some things that can be problematic in translation. Most translators are grateful if the author is willing to help.

I have also translated myself into Russian. The problem with Russian is that it is not my working language, unlike Swedish and English. I used to do guest lectures in Russian, but not for a long while now. Still I typically prefer to translate myself for the reasons given above. As an author, I can allow myself liberties that a translator woudn't be comfortable with. Yet some time ago I was approached by a professional journal in Russia that wanted to translate one of my articles, and I didn't have time to do it myself so I said go ahead, but I want to see the translation. Well, yesterday they sent it. They had three minor quiries. I thought I'd read through it quickly, just to see that all my metadiegeses and crossfocalisations were in place. £&!^$%£"&%*;!!! It took me all day yesterday and all morning today to get it somewhat right. Surely it would have been quicker if I had translated it myself.

There are many things that can go wrong in a translation. Occasionally, a small error makes the meaning the opposite. All translators have done this. I have done this. Usually you yourself or the editor picks it up because something feels wrong and does not make sense. But if I say in my article that something is invaluable, and the translator says it's impossible, a very important argument goes profoundly wrong.

If a scholarly article uses, all the way through, a particular term, I would expect the translator to find out what it is called in the target language rather than use long and clumsy circumscriptions. It took me five seconds to find it on Russian Wikipedia.

However, I would be prepared to forgive this. It is actually easy to correct.

I am very proud of writing simple, comprehensible academic prose. My motto comes from Kurt Vonnegut: "A scholar who cannot explain to a five-year-old what he is doing is a charlatan". I frequently receive compliments for the clarity of my writing, and therefore I am not scared of writing about complicated subjects. If I can explain them clearly, I have understood them myself. Therefore I was thoroughly upset when I started reading the translation. If I for some reason picked up this article as it was published, I'd say: This author writes gibberish. I don't want to read gibberish. I cannot get through to what the author is trying to say.

Russian is a rich language with a huge vocabulary. A translator doesn't have to invent new words the meaning of which readers would not know. Russian is also a remarkably flexible language. It uses gerunds and participles where English uses embedded subordinate clauses, which allows for a variety of sentence structures. I used to assess translations into Russian for various publishing houses and grant-awarding bodies. My first check was always for gerunds. Russian also has free word order that can be used for rhythm and emphasis. My second assessment would therefore be for word order. Russian has instrumental case that comes handy. Translators who ignore these options produce bland, dull prose. Academic prose does not have to be bland. It has to be particularly enjoyable if it is to convey complex argument.

Shall I go on? Or do you believe me that I spent at least twelve hours editing twenty pages of horrendously bad academic writing? And mind, it's not like reading a student essay with deficient argument and poor structure. If you could only get through to them, the structure and the argument were perfect (the article had gone through a rigorous peer-review procedure and a fierce editor before it was published).

You may ask why I did it. It isn't a prestigious publication. I could have asked them to go to Hampshire and Hereford where hurricans hardly happen. But it is a matter of honour. My name is on it, and I am proud of being able to write simply about difficult subjects... see above. If there is a handful of colleagues in Russia who might be interested in my work, I don't want to scare them off with slovenly language.