The Mookse and the Gripes discussion

TK

Eileen Battersby's take

Norwegian Roy Jacobsen’s The Unseen (translated by Don Bartlett and Don Shaw) will be a popular choice. It is a beautiful work, one of those rare perfect novels. Jacobsen tells the story of a family living on an island off Norway’s coast and its efforts to draw a living from the unforgiving sea. Humour and tragedy shape the life of Ingrid Barroy who comes of age in a traditional world which is beginning to change. This was also one of my books of 2016.

I really liked this book, it's been a while since I read it, but very atmospheric and some great characters

Louise, did they give characters regional accents in the Danish translation?

I've just been reading the Kindle sample and the speech reads like a strange mixture of transliterated Yorkshire and Highland & Island Scots (latter am thinking the accents in old films like Whisky Galore). I assume they're trying to go for the Scots, given that the book is set in northern coastal Norway, but some of it's in spellings I'd usually associate on the page with Yorkshire - plus someone says "by jove" which is very much English not Scottish.

Very impressed with this.

Norwegian literature generally is a favourite of mine - Dag Solstad, Jan Kjærstad, Karl Ove Knausgård, Per Petterson and Lars Saabye Christensen for example - and this is another excellent example.

The speech pattern stuff though was a slightly odd note - the by jove was indeed oddly jarring.

Antonomasia wrote: "Louise, did they give characters regional accents in the Danish translation?

I've just been reading the Kindle sample and the speech reads like a strange mixture of transliterated Yorkshire and Hi..."

I don't think so - I read it a while ago - but I remember it as more or less ordinary language for all of them

I asked another Goodreader who had read the Norwegian original more recently and she said there was a heavy use of regional dialect in the original. Which makes sense as would be odd otherwise for the translators to introduce it just into the English version.

Maybe the Danish translator chose not to - that would be really interesting! I read in in June 2015 - so I really can't remember for sure, but I'm pretty certain I would remember if it was very heavy on the dialect :-)

Louise wrote: "Maybe the Danish translator chose not to - that would be really interesting! I read in in June 2015 - so I really can't remember for sure, but I'm pretty certain I would remember if it was very hea..."

It is an interesting question for a translator how you deal with dialect. Since you either ignore or you render it into a different dialect in the home country - neither of which quite works.

I am just over halfway through this and am having the same issues with the dialect. The book is good - slow moving but not in a dull way - but I don't care for it when one of the characters speaks!

I've finished now. Review here: The Unseen

Apart from the dialect, I really enjoyed reading it. Very understated but engrossing.

Q&A on the Man Booker website with the translators that addresses the dialect issue.

Q: What did you like most about translating The Unseen?

A: The challenge – as Roy is a very demanding writer, even in his own language, and leaves a lot for the reader to do. Among translators he is well-known for the difficulty of his texts. But The Unseen in particular was a challenge, not least because of the frequent dialect, which would have been a great loss if it had been ignored in the English translation. However, giving the characters a Scottish brogue, for example, would have been inappropriate. Consequently we had to invent our own, which should sound like Scandinavian while being comprehensible. In the Norwegian novel, the dialect is at times not straightforward for some Norwegian readers.