cece, the Marie Louise memoir first came out in a Penguin paperback. That's the one I have. If you can't find it, I'd be happy to send it to you, although my copy is tattered, since I got it second-hand. Dyno, I did not discover Hesse's "Demian" until I was well into adulthood. I liked it a lot, but even more, I loved his "Narcisse & Goldmunde." I know these books were cult lit in my youth, but somehow, I read his "Steppenwolf" instead and missed these. I really admire Hesse's writings, in general. The older I get, the more subtle and timeless they seem.

Just last night I finished the new translation of KL, cross referencing it with the old where I thought something might be different. The footnotes and endnotes of the Nunnally translation are nowhere near as complete or thorough as in the Archer translation. Margygren means 'Sea Ogress'. There are other points where I really felt a footnote was lacking in the N. translation that was included in the A. Also, the end notes of the A. translation include many more maps and drawings of the manor layouts. I also had an issue with an aspect of the N. translation earlier in the novel. One of the male characters--I can't remember whom--speaks of feeling as if his heart had been torn out of him through his back. (He may say his heart and lungs through his back and ribs, I can't quite remember). In any case, such an image is a strange one and makes little sense unless the reader is aware that it is an allusion to the method of execution invented by the Vikings and known as "The Blood Eagle." The A. translation calls it such, and explains in a footnote what it entailed.

Carolyn, my favorite is Tara Road followed by The Glass Lake, though Circle of Friends seems to be the favorite of many a Binchy fan. Cindy, now that I re-read the ending so I'd be accurate in my confusion... I no longer am. I thought the "afterward" was an artifice and actually part of the novel. Upon more deliberate inspection, I see the ending of the novel is marked as such and Maupin's father calling him and asking him what Maupin's done to him in this book, etc, truly is an afterward. It's amazing to think that Maupin, along with other sophisticated-sounding folks, was caught up in a similar situation; at least according to web chatter, 20/20 ran a voiceprint on the real life "boy" and his "mom" with the results indicating the voices were the same person. As for the heartbreak, it seemed to pave the path for Noone to be so open to being duped. Same for Noone's musings about growing up being different and feeling isolated--he could identify with this boy and, I believe, really did see himself as a father figure/mentor.

I mostly compare translations with the originals and sometimes find fault, but as I have a degree in translation studies I may be able to shed some light on the subject from that point of view. Translators have to make lots of choices when they start a translation, beginning with how the client - with literary works it's usually a publisher - wants the text translated. Before a translation is made, decisions have to be made about the target audience and what kind of style suits them best. You may want to get the flavour of the grammar and the style across, in which case it will probably feel very foreign and not very fluid, you might want to stress readability over absolute correctness or vice versa, or you might even want to localise it to the extent of making the story happen locally (like children's book translations sometimes do). If you get it wrong, or someone outside the target audience, who has different expectations, then reads the translation, they might not be happy with it, even if the target audience loves it. With the Laclos translation you mention, the publisher might, for instance, have requested that the text be localised so that it would feel more British, or the translator might even have had orders to modernise the language, because I think at least 'dotty' is a fairly new usage. It is interesting that both examples you cite are colloquial usages, because slang and colloquialisms can be extremely hard to get across in translations so that they have the same effect as they did in the original. The age of the translation matters as well. A contemporary translation of a classic will inevitably feel dated in a way that a modern translation will not, even if the modern translator has taken care to use language that reflects the era of the original. And of course it must be said that some translators are better than others at making their translations readable and convincing to the reader. Two translators can, stylistically speaking, produce translations that are adequate to the purpose or equivalent in effect to the original, that yet read like two different authors have rendered the same story. This is no coincidence, because good literary translations are works of art (this applies especially to verse translations, but also to prose). A translator can be technically very good, but unless they also have at least a spark of artistic writing ability, they will not produce translations that satisfy the reader like an original work of literature does. There is an interesting discussion of this sort of thing in chapter 6 of Umberto Eco's Mouse or Rat? Translation as negotiation. He picks up a discussion by another linguist and takes it a bit further in discussing the relative merits of several different translations of Dante's Inferno. Of course, translators of poetry face even bigger challenges than translators of prose, and sometimes the most accurate translation of a poem is the one that abandons the original...