Tag: translations

Red on Red

The recent translator of The Odyssey takes the director of The Odyssey to task despite his claiming, apparently falsely, to have based his revisionist, anti-Homeric film on her revisionist post-Homeric translation.

Christopher Nolan built his entire Odyssey around Emily Wilson’s 2017 translation, crediting her famous opening line, “Tell me about a complicated man,” as one of his biggest points of inspiration going into the project. Wilson has now seen the finished film. Her review, a 4,000-word essay published this week in the London Review of Books under the title “An Uncomplicated Man,” is one of the harshest takedowns Nolan has received in his entire career, and it comes from the one scholar whose own work he explicitly built this movie on top of.

Wilson opens with something close to a compliment before the knife goes in. “I was humbled to learn that Nolan has read at least the first line of my translation,” she writes. “But I would be ashamed to have written any part of this script.” That single sentence has already become the pull quote defining coverage of the piece, and it earns that status. It’s not a critic taking a shot from a distance. It’s the translator whose language Nolan quoted in press interviews telling him, in print, that she wants no association with what he built from it.

She spends the next several thousand words explaining exactly why. Wilson describes the overall experience of watching the film as “family-friendly audiovisual spectacle, like an elaborate Fourth of July fireworks display, and with about the same level of narrative and emotional depth.” She connects it to a pattern she sees across Nolan’s career: “As in his previous films, Nolan is interested in the discontinuities of space and time, in magic, tricks, craft, technology, rivalry, substitution, masks, miscommunication, what we remember and what we choose to forget.” That’s not dismissive on its face, but the verdict that follows is blunt: “It lacks psychological, emotional, political and ethical depth. Its narrative structure is gimmicky. The writing is abysmal. None of the characters has convincing motivation for their actions or words. There are no sex scenes, and all the food looks horrible.”

She’s absolutely not wrong. And yet, as one of the most prolific translators of 2026, I don’t have to read Ms Wilson’s translation to have a pretty good idea about the nature of its flaws from that one single line alone. Translators have to make a lot of choices, and most translators tend to make what I believe to be distinctly suboptimal ones. Ironically, the current taste for revisionism to suit current preferences is very much in keeping with the translations of the late 19th century; the very accomplished and highly prolific Clara Bell, who translated Balzac, Casanova, Huysmans, Ibsen, and Maupassant, as well as by Louis Couperus, Georg Ebers, Benito Pérez Galdós, Ernst Haeckel, Pierre Loti, and Helmuth von Moltke, among others, became notorious in translation circles for making all of their books sound as if they were written by a late 19th Century Englishwoman.

In the 1950s, the academic craze for accuracy and literalism resulted in nearly all of the post-Waley translations being dry renditions that leave the English reader wondering how the foreign language novel ever became popular in the first place. The 1980s hit a high point with William Weaver’s translations of Umberto Eco’s novels, but since then, we’ve generally reverted to the older, more revisionist Bell-style standard.

My preference is to focus first on readability for the modern reader followed by non-literal accuracy. Which may explain why blind comparisons have regularly indicated that Castalia’s translations are preferred to the existing ones.

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TRANSLATION: Gerona

GERONA by Benito Pérez Galdós is this week’s new translation. It is the seventh of the first series of the Episodios Nacionales and was translated from the original Spanish by Vox Day. The ebooks have already gone out to the subscribers. It’s now available on Amazon for Kindle, KU, and audiobook.

A DESPERATE AND GLORIOUS DEFIANCE

In May of 1809 the French army arrived before Gerona: a Catalan city of narrow streets and stacked houses, held by a garrison far too small to hold it, under a governor who did not regard that as a reason to give it up. Seven months later, after eleven thousand nine hundred bombs were exploded, eighty thousand rounds were shot, and twenty thousand men lost in the assaults, the French were still outside the walls.

Andrés Marijuán was inside. An Aragonese private billeted with a locksmith’s family, he watched the city eat its horses, then its cats, then its rats, and at last nothing whatever. He watched the children of the house go out hunting through the rubble for anything with meat on it. He watched a physician, unhinged by grief, forge newspapers full of relief columns that were never coming, so that his daughter should not learn what had become of the world. And he watched Mariano Álvarez de Castro, dying on his feet, return the same answer to every summons to surrender that the greatest generals of the age sent him.

The way Galdós describes the siege of Gerona is the bleakest book in the first series of the Episodios Nacionales, and the most unsparing: an account of civilian endurance carried well past the point where endurance means anything, told by a survivor who cannot understand how he survived.

About the author. Benito Pérez Galdós (1843–1920) is widely regarded as the greatest Spanish novelist since Cervantes. Over four decades, he produced the Episodios Nacionales, one of the most incredible accomplishments of world literature ever written. He was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature five times.

There is an excerpt available to read on Castalia Library. Tune in to the Darkstream tonight to learn more about this, see the new Byronics video, and hear some exciting news about the Byron AI project.

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SANS BEAUTY

In beginning this account, I need hardly warn the reader that I am plain; the title of this book alone has told him as much. What he does not know is that I always have been.

Gabrielle Perceval has never been pretty, and the world has never let her forget it. Her mother dies before she is five. Her father, a handsome and weak-willed man, remarries a beautiful woman who takes one look at her stepdaughter and laughs. At the convent school she is christened Laidronette — the ugly sister of the fairy tale — and the name follows her home. At eighteen, at her first ball, she learns exactly what a plain girl is worth in a drawing room.

What she has instead is a clear eye, a steady heart, and a green-covered journal.

Written in the first person by one of nineteenth-century France’s most widely read novelists, Sans Beauty follows Gabrielle from a country childhood through betrayal by the man she was promised to, the ruin of the household that raised her, and a long test of whether a woman the world has dismissed can build a life worth having on her own terms. It is a sharp, unsentimental book about vanity, endurance, and the difference between being admired and being loved — and its judgment on the first is merciless.

Zénaïde Fleuriot (1829–1890) published nearly a hundred volumes in her lifetime and was among the most popular French authors of her generation. This is the first English translation of Sans Beauté, by Summer Charrette.

SANS BEAUTY is available on Amazon for Kindle, KU, and audiobook, and has already been sent out to the subscribers. An excerpt is available to read at Castalia Library.

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TRANSLATION: Zaragoza

Castalia House’s epic quest to translate the entirety of the historic Spanish Episodios Nacionales into the English language continues with the publication of the sixth book, Zaragoza, about the French siege of the Spanish city during the Peninsular War.

The sixth volume of the Episodios Nacionales — the great historical novel cycle of Spain — Zaragoza takes Gabriel Araceli into the most terrible siege in modern European history: the second French assault on the Aragonese capital, where sixty thousand civilians and soldiers held the ruins of their city against Napoleon’s marshals through two months of bombardment, starvation, plague, and hand-to-hand fighting in the cellars.

Gabriel arrives in Zaragoza half-starved and in rags, having escaped a French prisoner column in the company of Don Roque. They sleep among beggars in the shattered monastery of Santa Engracia and are taken in by Don José de Montoria, a proud Aragonese labrador of iron convictions and volcanic patriotism, who has given both his sons to the defence. The elder is already dead. The younger, Agustín, is a theology student whom the siege has transformed into a soldier and who is carrying on a desperate love affair with Mariquilla Candiola, the beautiful daughter of the most hated man in the city: el tío Candiola, a miser of Dickensian proportions whose house stands at the very edge of the French advance.

As the French tighten the noose, the novel compresses with the siege itself, from the open streets to the barricaded quarters, from the quarters to single houses defended room by room, from the houses to the tunnels where Spanish and French sappers dig toward each other in the dark. The city burns. The plague spreads. The dead lie unburied in the streets. Women carry ammunition under fire and friars take up muskets. And through it all, Gabriel watches the collision between Agustín’s love and his father’s honour, between the miser’s gold and the patriot’s sacrifice, between the claims of private tenderness and the needs of a city that will not surrender.

The book has already been delivered to the paid subscribers supporting Castalia’s translation efforts. You can read an excerpt from Zaragoza at Castalia Library.

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The Zero Literature Campaign

We know about Clown World’s Zero History campaign. We can see signs of it everywhere from Fructidor to the Khmer Rouge. But it was also accompanied by a Zero Literature campaign. This is not just our imagination at work. You can still see it in action. But the campaign to disappear traditional literature with historical Western values began at least a century before the ALA was cancelling Laura Ingalls Wilder.

A division of the American Library Association has voted to remove Laura Ingalls Wilder’s name from a major children’s book award over concerns with how the early-to-mid 20th century author portrayed blacks and Native Americans.

The Association for Library Service to Children’s board made the unanimous decision Saturday at a meeting in New Orleans. The name has been changed to the Children’s Literature Legacy Award.

The association says the work of Wilder — best known for her Little House on the Prairie novels — “includes expressions of stereotypical attitudes inconsistent with ALSC’s core values.”

The first award was given to Wilder in 1954

I have no doubt that if Laura Ingalls Wilder had published a century before she did in a language other than English, we would never have heard of her. Both Benito Perez Galdos and Zenaide Fleuriot were much more significant in their native languages than Wilder was in English, and yet somehow, the English publishing world never saw fit to translate them despite producing dozens of editions of far less popular, far less marketable, and far less significant works.

This is why it is absolutely vital to stop blindly supporting those things that the mainstream feeds you, and go out of your way to find those things and support those things that are in line with your values, and not the “core values” of things like the ALSC.

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Translation: THE LITTLE DUCHESS

When twelve-year-old Alberte de la Rochefaucon is pulled from her convent boarding school by her fashionable older sister, she tumbles headlong into a world she is entirely unprepared for: the drawing rooms, dinner parties, and dressmakers of Faubourg Saint-Germain society. Her sister Madeleine, the young Marquise de Valroux, means well but lives for pleasure, and her formidable great-aunt the duchess inhabits a crumbling mansion where the clocks seem to have stopped sometime before the Revolution.

Alberte is bright, proud, restless, and bored. She is bored at the convent, bored in society, bored with the professors hired to continue her education. Her companions have nicknamed her “the little duchess” for her haughty ways. But when a journey south to Cannes brings her into the orbit of a dying young soldier and a neglected Anglo-Indian boy, Alberte begins to discover what none of her tutors could teach her: that purpose is not given but chosen, and that the hardest freedom is the freedom to discipline yourself.

First published in Paris by Hachette in 1876, La Petite Duchesse was one of the most beloved novels by Zénaïde Fleuriot, the Breton author whose works shaped a generation of young French readers. Translated from the French by Summer Charrette, this is its first appearance in the English language.

A story of sisterhood, stubbornness, and the slow education of a strong will, The Little Duchess is a lovely story for readers who appreciate the works of Louisa May Alcott, Frances Hodgson Burnett, and Charlotte Yonge. The ebook has already been delivered to the subscribers. Now available for Kindle, KU, and audiobook.

I was wondering how such a bestselling author’s works could have vanished into history, untranslated, when La Petite Duchesse alone had 14 editions. Then I read her biography, and like Perez Galdos, Fleuriot was not only a devout Christian, but a Catholic and a Royalist. So I think we’re beginning to see a pattern here with regards to socialist academics on both sides of the linguistic divide having attempted to bury a significant percentage of some of the best and most popular works of the Christian nations.

But, as we know, Jesus Christ never stays buried.

Zénaïde-Marie-Anne Fleuriot (28 October 1829 – 19 December 1890), was a French novelist. She wrote eighty three novels, all aimed at young women. She was born in Saint-Brieuc, Brittany to a devoutly Catholic and Royalist family, faithful to the Bourbons. Her parents had sixteen children of which only five survived. Her father, Jean-Marie, having lost his mother as a child, was brought up by his uncle, a priest, who was shot by the Revolutionaries in Brest in 1794 for refusing to sign the Civil Constitution of the Clergy. Her background gave her a deep respect for traditional Christian and family values, which infused her work. This helped to make her work very popular among the Catholic middle class.

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The Cat Commotion

The second volume of The Casebook of Hanshichi takes the Japanese Sherlock Holmes deeper into the shadowed streets and darkened households of old Edo, where nothing is ever quite what it seems. A cat lady’s twenty pets are drowned in the bay and she dies within the week, but only her son knows what really happened. A beautiful young woman born on the Day of the Snake is worshipped as a child of the goddess Benten until the waters of Shinobazu Pond reclaim her. A desperate samurai faces ritual suicide in a Hakone inn while his detective races down the Tōkaidō road to save him. And when a random spear-killer terrorizes the city at night, the investigation falls not to Hanshichi but to the old detective who came before him, a man who solves crimes by touch and instinct rather than observation.

Now available on Kindle, KU, and audiobook.

EXCERPT

Old Hanshichi kept a small calico kitten at his house. One warm day in February, I dropped by unannounced and found him on the south-facing veranda, stroking the soft back of the small creature curled on his lap.

“What a charming cat,” I said.

“Still just a baby.” The old man smiled. “Hasn’t learned how to catch a mouse yet.”

Bright midday sun lit the old roof tiles next door. From somewhere nearby came the clamor of cats squabbling. Hanshichi looked up toward the noise and laughed.

“This one will be doing the same before long, yowling in love, giving you writers material for your opening verses. Cats are really only lovable when they’re small like this. Once they grow large enough to look as though they might transform, they pass right through hateful into something that makes your skin crawl. People have always said that cats can turn into monsters. Do you suppose there’s any truth in it?”

“Well, there are plenty of old stories about monster cats,” I answered vaguely. “But whether they’re true or not, who can say?” This was old Hanshichi, after all. There was no telling what kind of living proof he might have tucked away. To dismiss the matter carelessly and then have it turned against me would have been mortifying.

Yet even the old man seemed not to possess a proven case of feline transformation. He set the calico down from his lap and spoke.

“I suppose you’re right. The stories have come down through the ages, but nobody can claim to have actually witnessed such a thing. Still, I did run into one strange business myself. Not that I saw it with my own eyes, mind you, but it didn’t seem to be a lie. Two people died on account of that cat commotion. When you think about it, it’s a frightening thing.”

“Did a cat devour them?”

“No, not devoured exactly. It’s a most peculiar story. Just listen.”

He shooed away the kitten, which had been clinging stubbornly to his lap, and began quietly to speak.

⁂

It happened on the evening of September the twenty-second, when the autumn of Bunkyū 2 was already waning and the ginger fair at Shiba Shinmei Shrine had ended the day before. In a back-alley tenement not far from the shrine grounds, an old woman named Omaki died suddenly. Omaki was sixty-six that year, born in the monkey year of Kansei, and she had a filial son called Shichinosuke. She had lost her husband in her forties and raised five children single-handed, but the eldest daughter had taken a lover at her place of service and run off to parts unknown. The eldest son had drowned while swimming at Shibaura. The second son had been carried off by measles. The third she had driven out herself for his thieving.

“I truly have no luck with children.”

Omaki was forever lamenting, but her youngest, Shichinosuke, had stayed safely at home. As if shouldering the filial duty of all his brothers and sisters combined, the boy had worked since childhood to support his aging mother.

“With such a filial son, Omaki is a lucky woman.”

The woman who had always bemoaned her fortune with children now found herself envied by the neighborhood. Shichinosuke was a fish-seller who hauled his board through the streets each day, making the rounds of his regular customers. A young man of twenty, working without vanity or pretension, burned dark by the sun. His was a peddler’s small trade, but it kept them from real hardship, and the two of them lived together contentedly, just the two of them. Beyond his devotion to his mother, Shichinosuke had a quiet, gentle disposition quite at odds with his rough trade. The neighbors were fond of him.

His mother’s reputation, by contrast, was in steady decline. Omaki had done nothing to earn anyone’s hatred, but she possessed one habit that drew their dislike. She had loved cats since she was young, and the passion had only intensified with age. By now she kept fifteen or sixteen, adults and kittens together. Keeping cats was her prerogative, of course, and strictly speaking no one had grounds for complaint. That so many animals crammed into a tiny house gave visitors a faintly unsettling, disagreeable impression, but that alone did not constitute legitimate cause to confront the owner. The animals, however, would not stay quietly indoors. They crept out and into the neighboring kitchens and raided them. No matter how well Omaki fed them, the thieving did not stop.

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The Lady-in-Waiting

If you are a fan of Sherlock Holmes or detective stories in general, you really don’t want to miss The Casebook of Hanshichi by Okamoto Kido, the first volume of which is now available in an original translation from Castalia House. I regretfully note that a small Japanese press has beaten us to the first complete translation of all 69 stories by about a month, but while I cannot attest to the quality of those, I think you will find that the quality of Castalia’s translations are excellent.

This is an excerpt from the seventh story from The Ghost Master, which is now available on Kindle, KU, and audiobook. Paid subscribers to Castalia Library receive a new translated ebook every week; next week’s book will be the second volume, after which we’ll start alternating with additional releases from the excellent Spanish Episodios Nacionales of Benito Perez Galdos. Both series will eventually be published in print editions; Trafalgar from the latter is already in print and available at both Amazon and NDM Express.

I returned to Tokyo at the height of August, the heat still fierce, after a summer holiday of about a fortnight. Bringing a few small gifts, I called on old Hanshichi and found him just back from the bathhouse, sitting cross-legged on a rush mat on the veranda, fanning himself in great sweeps with a round fan. A cool evening breeze was blowing through the narrow garden, and from the neighbor’s window came the chirping of crickets.

“Of all the insects, the cricket is the most truly Edo,” the old man declared. “I grant you they’re cheap, and they may well be the humblest of singing insects, but somehow they feel more like Edo than the pine cricket or the bell cricket ever could. You can be walking along any street, and when you hear a cricket singing from some window or eave, the summers of old Edo come flooding back. The insect sellers would hate me for saying so, but your pine crickets and grass larks are nothing but expensive. They’re not Edo at all. To use the modern phrase: the most plebeian, and for that very reason the most Edo, is the common cricket, and nothing else.”

The old man held forth at length on the subject, lavishing praise on a creature that nowadays is barely more than a child’s plaything, worth perhaps three sen apiece. If I was going to keep insects at all, he urged, I should keep crickets. From insects we moved on to wind chimes, and from wind chimes to the observation that tonight was the fifteenth of August by the new calendar.

“The calendars don’t match, you see, so August by the new reckoning is still as hot as this,” the old man said. “Under the old calendar, mornings and evenings would have turned properly cool by now.”

He began reminiscing about moon-viewing in the old days. In the course of this, the following story emerged, adding one more entry to my notebook.

It was the evening of August the fourteenth, in the second year of Bunkyū. Hanshichi had come home earlier than usual and was thinking of finishing his supper and stopping by a neighborhood mujin gathering, when a woman of about forty appeared at his door. She wore her hair in a small round chignon, and her face was heavy with care.

“I do apologize for the long silence, sir. I trust you’ve been keeping well.”

“Why, Okame. It’s been quite a while. Young Ochō must be turning into a fine girl by now. She’s a good, steady worker from what I hear, so her mother can rest easy.”

“It’s Ochō I’ve come about, actually, sir. I’m at my wits’ end, and I hardly know what to do.”

Looking at the lines on the woman’s forehead, Hanshichi had a fairly good idea what this was about. Okame ran a tea shop near Eitai Bridge with her daughter Ochō, who was seventeen this year. The girl was refined and beautiful, and if her one fault was a tendency to be too quiet, she had more than enough charm to draw the young men in. Okame was proud of having borne such a beautiful daughter. If she had come here troubled about the girl, even a man less shrewd than Hanshichi could guess the nature of it: dutiful Ochō had found someone who mattered to her more than her own mother. Given the trade they were in, making a fuss about it would only be boorish.

“So that’s it, is it. Young Ochō’s got herself into something and now she’s giving her mother grief. Well, I’d say you’d do better to let it pass. She’s young. If there isn’t a little fun in her life, she won’t have much heart for the work, will she? You must remember what that was like yourself. Best not to make too much of it.” Hanshichi was laughing as he spoke.

Okame did not so much as smile. She fixed him with a steady gaze.

“No, sir. It’s nothing of that sort at all. If she’d taken up with some man, some frivolous little affair, I’d do exactly as you say and let it pass. But this is something else entirely. The girl shakes, and she weeps…”

“That is odd. What exactly has happened?”

“My daughter sometimes disappears.”

Hanshichi went on laughing. A young tea-shop girl who vanished from time to time: his expression said this was scarcely worth troubling over. Seeing it, Okame pressed forward with greater urgency.

“No, it’s nothing to do with men or anything of that sort. Please hear me out, sir. It was just before the river-opening in May. A fine-looking samurai, with one attendant, happened to pass in front of my shop and caught sight of my daughter inside. He came wandering in, drank his tea, rested a while, and left a full isshū for the tea. A very generous customer indeed. About three days later, the same samurai came again, but this time he had a woman with him, thirty-five or thirty-six, very refined, with the bearing of someone in service at a great house. They didn’t seem to be husband and wife. The woman asked Ochō’s name, asked her age, and again left an isshū for the tea. Then, about three days after that, Ochō was gone.”

“I see,” said Hanshichi, nodding.

They were a type of kidnapping ring, he judged, people who disguised themselves as persons of rank to carry off a good-looking girl.

“And the girl never came back?”

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THE GHOST MASTER

Castalia House has spent the last several months quietly doing something no English publisher has bothered to do in a century: translating the great works of Japanese popular literature that built the entire modern adventure and detective fiction tradition in that country. Now they’re announcing their next project, and it is worth your attention.

The new series is the Hanshichi Casebook, written by Okamoto Kidō beginning in 1917. Hanshichi is Japan’s answer to Sherlock Holmes — a street detective working in historical Edo, solving murders, hauntings, and conspiracies in the shadow world beneath the Tokugawa shogunate. The stories ran for decades and spawned stage productions, radio adaptations, films, and television series. In Japan, Okamoto is to detective fiction what Conan Doyle is to English readers. In English, almost nobody has heard of him.

One previous academic translation covered 14 of the 69 stories. The other 55 have never been translated. Castalia House is publishing all of them across seven volumes. Volume 1, The Ghost Master, goes to paid subscribers this week and will be available on Kindle and Kindle Unlimited next week.

The first volume of the translated Casebook, The Ghost Master, has already gone out to the subscribers and is now available on Amazon via Kindle, KU, and audiobook. An excerpt from the first story is now available at the Library site if you’d like to get a taste of the flavor of Japan’s greatest detective. I’ve already translated the first twenty stories, and I have to say that they are up there with the best detective fiction I’ve ever read.

It’s really a must-read if you’re a Sherlock Holmes fan, because while the stories are every bit as detailed and interesting, the atmosphere, the plots, the crimes, and most definitely the punishments are entirely different. When the guilty party isn’t just turned over to the inept policemen of Scotland Yard, but is instead paraded through the streets prior to being crucified, the solution of the case tends to hit just a little bit differently.

The Casebook of Hanshichi Vol. I: The Ghost Master consists of the following:

Preface by Okamoto Kidō

1. The Spirit of Ofumi

2. The Stone Lantern

3. The Death of Kanpei

4. Upstairs at the Bathhouse

5. The Ghost Master

6. The Mystery of the Fire Bell

7. The Lady-in-Waiting

8. The Sash-Snatching Pond

9. Spring Thaw

10. Hiroshige and the Otter

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An Intriguing Discovery

It was around April of 1916, as I recall, that I first conceived the idea of writing the Hanshichi Casebook. I had been reading Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories here and there for some time but had never read them straight through from beginning to end. One day, having occasion to visit the Maruzen bookshop, I bought three volumes — the Adventures, the Memoirs, and the Return — and read all three at a single sitting. A keen interest in detective fiction welled up in me at once, and I found myself seized by the desire to try my hand at the form. I had read Hume and others before, of course, but it was Doyle who truly struck the spark.

I was not yet free to begin, however. I went on hunting down more of Doyle’s writings and set about reading The Last Galley, The Green Flag, The Captain of the Polestar, the Round the Fire Stories, and various other collections of his short fiction, one after another. But I had my own work to attend to: I was preparing a serial novel for the Jiji Shinpō at the time, and my reading did not progress as quickly as I would have liked. From when I had started it took roughly a month, and it was late May before I finished the lot.

When at last I sat down to write, what struck me was this: no one had ever written detective fiction set in the Edo period. The tales of Ōoka and Itakura were fundamentally adjudication records, concerned with trials and judgments rather than with investigation, and it seemed to me that a story built around detection itself would make for something fresh. There was a further consideration. Writing detective fiction set in the present day carried the constant risk of lapsing into imitation of Western models, whereas committing to a purely Edo-period mode might yield something with a flavor all its own. I was fortunate in possessing a reasonable working knowledge of Edo customs, manners, and statutes, as well as the world of the city magistrates, their constables and inspectors, and the network of private thief-takers.

Read the rest at Castalia Library…

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