But still.
I am annoyed by fake translator's notes at the start of novels. Memoirs of a Geisha has one, this other book that Oz picked up at the bookstore has one. Whenever I see them, I start hunting for a translator's credit on the title page. Then I google a little. ("This is so not a translation.") Then I get progressively annoyed. Being annoyed Lies in Fiction is kind of silly, but still.
I am a translator. My profession is not a literary conceit. Don't make up fictional stuff about fictional documents and pretend you've translated them when you made them up out of whole cloth. And if your work is published in another language, how is that fake translator's note going to be translated? Huh? Did you think of that? Of course not! What if your translator wants to write a translator's note?
No one ever thinks of the translators. Just ask the translators of The Satanic Verses who didn't get any protection after the fatwa against Salman Rushdie.
Oh, you can't. They're dead.
And try to avoid puns too, because those don't translate.
In contrast, fake editor's notes at the start of novels like the Amelia Peabody mysteries, for example, don't bother me at all. Possibly because I'm not an editor, but more likely because the notes are so over-the-top silly that there's no question that they're fiction. However, a friend of mine once admitted to being taken in by the fake editor's note at the start of a Jane Austen mystery, so maybe I should revise my irritation for her sake.
270 words | January 29, 2006 10:22 PM | Lost in translationSome literary "conceits" are really very effective ways of playing with texts and stories -- I'm thinking of the footnotes in Susanna Clarke's Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norell as a really good example of literary "history" that works really well, or the segmented structure of Harlan Ellison's "Deathbird" (and the warning to the reader at the beginning of the book is entirely justified, at least if you're not an atheist to begin with) -- but often they are just attempts to excuse the author's failure to actually do a good job at taking on a voice, a persona, a plot, etc.
Just because it's irritating doesn't mean that it doesn't serve a purpose.
The point about Rusdie's translators, though, that hurts.
Posted by: Jonathan Dresner at January 30, 2006 12:01 AMWell, the device of the fake translator's note just doesn't work for translators. I know it bothers other translators too, because they bring it up occasionally in online discussions. Usually with lots of "But! But! It's not a translation!"
One reason may be because it was formerly the case that translators did not get credit on the cover or title page (they still rarely get a credit on the cover). A translator's note without a translator's credit does not automatically mean that the fake translator's note is fake. And then we translators feel compelled to ask, "Who is this translator and why is s/he forced to labor in anonymity?"
Posted by: Nee-chama at January 30, 2006 12:21 PM