{"id":269076,"date":"2009-03-05T14:53:32","date_gmt":"2009-03-05T14:53:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.wdev.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent-dev\/2009\/03\/05\/tim-wilkinson-interview\/"},"modified":"2018-04-16T17:24:17","modified_gmt":"2018-04-16T17:24:17","slug":"tim-wilkinson-interview","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/2009\/03\/05\/tim-wilkinson-interview\/","title":{"rendered":"Tim Wilkinson Interview"},"content":{"rendered":"

Hungarian Literature Online<\/a> has a really nice interview with Tim Wilkinson, who is probably best known as Imre Kertesz’s new translator. <\/p>\n

But for all publishers out there, Tim’s translated a lot more than Kertesz. In fact, he has a whole host of translations sitting in his desk waiting for a publisher . . . <\/p>\n

\n

Which authors would you like to translate and why, if you had the time?<\/i><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\n

I often translate just for my own pleasure, independent of whether I\u2019ve been commissioned or not by a publisher. If I manage to \u201csell\u201d one of these translations later on, then all the merrier, but there\u2019s usually no guarantee that this will ever happen. Consequently, I\u2019ve done translations of works\u2014usually one or two\u2014written by ten to twelve different authors, but these manuscripts are still slumbering in the depths of my desk drawer. There is also a list of authors I haven\u2019t translated yet, but would if I only had the time. Among them are Istv\u00e1n Szil\u00e1gyi, L\u00e1szl\u00f3 V\u00e9gel, Gy\u00f6rgy Spir\u00f3 and Dezs\u0151 Tandori, whom I\u2019ve lately included. \u00c1d\u00e1m Bodor and P\u00e9ter Lengyel are also on this list, but I know others are already translating them.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

And speaking of Kertesz:<\/p>\n

\n

In your opinion, what results in a bad translation? And what, do you think, really makes a translation come alive?<\/i><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\n

When reading a translation or any other piece of writing, it\u2019s extremely obvious if a solid knowledge or understanding of the language just isn\u2019t there. I wrote about this when Imre Kert\u00e9sz received the Nobel Prize. The first English translation of Kaddish for an Unborn Child<\/em> was painfully bad and fully deserved my criticism that the child, in this case, was actually stillborn. There was hardly a decent sentence in the entire translation\u2014true, Kert\u00e9sz does use rather lengthy sentences in this novel, but that is no excuse. The translation of Fatelessness<\/em> was barely any better. (In this translation, for example, nine chapters were made into eleven, and I\u2019m talking about the most basic level!) Last year there was an obviously young, American critic writing for an Internet journal who accused me of committing sacrilege, as if I had sent the Rosenberg couple to the electric chair. But if some person (or persons) does not possess a sufficient knowledge of either Hungarian or English, is this something that should remain unmentioned in a critique of the translation? <\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\n

Unfortunately, there is a long list of English \u201ctranslators\u201d who really aren\u2019t a great help to Hungarian literature. What makes a translation good? That\u2019s obvious: exactly the opposite of everything I\u2019ve already mentioned. Knowledge, understanding, the right kind of style\u2026 these are all very important. In a nutshell, if someone has never learned to write in good, polished English\u2014his or her native language\u2014then this someone will never be a good translator. It\u2019s as simple as that. <\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\n<\/a>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Hungarian Literature Online has a really nice interview with Tim Wilkinson, who is probably best known as Imre Kertesz’s new translator. But for all publishers out there, Tim’s translated a lot more than Kertesz. In fact, he has a whole host of translations sitting in his desk waiting for a publisher . . . Which […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":292,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[67486],"tags":[1836,13576,9126],"class_list":["post-269076","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","tag-cwp","tag-hungarian-literature-online","tag-tim-wilkinson"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/269076","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/292"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=269076"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/269076\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":354056,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/269076\/revisions\/354056"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=269076"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=269076"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=269076"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}