They lost me at ‘an icy shiver ran down his neck’.
Scrat recommended Stieg Larsson’s The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo. The plot is riveting, the prose really flat. It has a kind of Eurovision Abba quality to it; imagine hearing Knowing Me, Knowing You without the music. (Noel, Ricky, and I once had an hour-long discussion on the semiotics of Knowing Me, Knowing You. Is it ‘Knowing me, knowing you, a-ha!’ or ‘Knowing me, knowing you, uh-huuuuh’? )
I tried, I really tried. Then I got to this sentence: “The flow of blood was if possible even greater than that from her partner.” I quit.
Scandinavian Crime Wave: Why the most peaceful people on earth write the greatest homicide thrillers, by Nathaniel Rich in Slate.
Having read close to 30 Scandinavian crime novels over the last several months, I can come to only one conclusion: Scandinavia is a bleak, ungodly, extraordinarily violent place to live. The capitals are seething hot pots of murder. In Oslo, a serial killer slips red diamond pentagrams under the eyelids of his victims (Jo Nesbø’s The Devil’s Star), while in Stockholm a stalker terrorizes young girls in public parks (Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö’s The Man on the Balcony). The situation is even worse at the local level. Take, for instance, Ystad, population 17,000, a quaint fishing village on Sweden’s southern shore best known for its high-speed ferry terminal. It has suffered, in the novels of Henning Mankell, the following horrors: the torture and execution of an elderly farmer and his wife (Faceless Killers); the torture and execution of two men who are found floating off the coast in a life boat (The Dogs of Riga); the impalement of a retired bird-watcher on sharpened bamboo poles (The Fifth Woman); and the self-immolation of a teenage girl (Sidetracked). Each of these crimes—and many, many more—is committed by a different killer and all within just three years. In terms of per capita incidence of violent crime, Mankell’s Ystad would rank behind Mosul but well ahead of Johannesburg and Mogadishu. . .
Update. Got a note from ‘Reg Keeland’, the translator of The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo.
“Hi Jessica et al. This is Steve Murray aka Reg Keeland. Now I see yet again why I took a pseudonym for these books. I have searched my original manuscript of TGWTDT (Men Who Hate Women) and could find neither of those phrases, so I must attribute it to the editor, who made thousands of such changes to my original American translation.
“There was no occurrence of “blood” in conjunction with “flow” anywhere. There was no “icy shiver,” but the closest I did find was in chapter 17: “She waved and was gone. Mikael stood on the platform, feeling baffled as he watched the train head north. Not until it vanished around the bend did the meaning of her parting remarks sink into his consciousness, and an icy feeling filled his chest.” A bit better, don’t you think? (if it’s the same passage).
“I couldn’t read any farther than to page 140 out of 721 in the MS and I’m glad I didn’t. Too bad for Stieg, he’s a much better writer than he’s been represented by the “version” that wound up in print. Don’t blame me for the clunky bits, please.”
Answers to questions you might be asking, unless you wandered onto this site purely by accident >>>
July 18th, 2009 at 03:28
truly, it’s Knowing Me, Knowing You, A-ha!!! no question about it
July 18th, 2009 at 19:15
Not that it’s any consolation, but the French translation is at least ten times worse. Larsson’s prose was described by Swedish readers as having a dreary journalistic tone with fits of sensationalism, and it seeps through in translation. Reg Keeland actually did a good job with this one.
July 18th, 2009 at 19:18
(good job = giving readers a great idea of what author would have sounded like had he written in English). And yes, it is a good tale if you can get past the clunky bits.
July 19th, 2009 at 13:51
Hi Jessica et al. This is Steve Murray aka Reg Keeland. Now I see yet again why I took a pseudonym for these books. I have searched my original manuscript of TGWTDT (Men Who Hate Women) and could find neither of those phrases, so I must attribute it to the editor, who made thousands of such changes to my original American translation. There was no occurrence of “blood” in conjunction with “flow” anywhere. There was no “icy shiver,” but the closest I did find was in chapter 17: “She waved and was gone. Mikael stood on the platform, feeling baffled as he watched the train head north. Not until it vanished around the bend did the meaning of her parting remarks sink into his consciousness, and an icy feeling filled his chest.” A bit better, don’t you think? (if it’s the same passage). I couldn’t read any farther than to page 140 out of 721 in the MS and I’m glad I didn’t. Too bad for Stieg, he’s a much better writer than he’s been represented by the “version” that wound up in print. Don’t blame me for the clunky bits, please.
July 19th, 2009 at 19:14
Hi Steve. Good decision, using a pseudonym. Alright, I don’t blame you for the clunky bits. What do you think, triviabuff?
Jessica
July 19th, 2009 at 22:29
That certainly explains the odd bits – I did wonder why phrases kept popping up to jar otherwise flowing prose. Considering how much time and work it takes to translate fiction properly, I still think Steve did a great job – even more so now that he’s explained that the editors fiddled with his text a wee bit too much. The French publishers were in a great hurry to bring out the books, and “slapdash” is too charitable an adjective for the results.
Unfortunately this happens all too often, a situation that sticks in my craw – the well-meaning but unqualified client or editor makes changes without notice, even though the manuscript is in the translator’s name, and then all cock-ups are blamed on the translator.