Three voices or one?
On reviews of the Scandinavian translations of Nadine Gordimer’s Get a Life
Translations are often treated as if they were identical to the source text – as if the translated text was written not by a translator but by the original author. This phenomenon, recently dubbed “the translation pact,” also informs the way literary reviewers talk about the works they review, as if such works provided access to the original author’s voice. In this chapter, I study the ways in which reviewers in Denmark, Norway, and Sweden, respectively, talk about the Danish, Norwegian, and Swedish translations of Nadine Gordimer’s 2005 novel Get a Life as if they were talking about the original book, when they are in fact talking about three different books in closely related languages.
Article outline
- 1.Introduction
- 2.General theoretical considerations
- 3.
Get a Life in an English-language context
- 3.1Nadine Gordimer: Get a Life
- 3.2Responses to Get a Life in English
- 4.
Get a Life in the Scandinavian context
- 4.1On the reviewing of literature in Scandinavia
- 4.2Responses to Get a Life in Danish, Norwegian, and Swedish
- 5.The Scandinavian translators’ readings of Get a Life
- 5.1The translator as a reader
- 5.2Three readings of the beginning of Get a Life
- 6.Concluding remarks
-
Notes