I recently read Sholem Aleichem’s Tevye the Dairyman not in the Yiddish original predating the Russian revolution, but Hillel Halkin’s 1987 English translation. To be blunt, though marginally exposed and even intrigued by the world of the tragic Tevye, the voice projected upon me felt more of the contemporary New York Jew than a Russian, Pale of Settlement Jew.
Similar I hold the translation practice concerning mostly all period or poetic literature. Blasting this class of translation pursuit might fall among my top twenty favourite conversation topics, however pitiful.
Now what I prefer is an adaptation whose author takes main credit but cites the source as an inspiration, all the while, free of constraints, fashions the work to her world, her voice, her whimsicalities.
Find a way to transmit the target story in your modern character in a way that feels earnest, contrasting the farce which makes the typical translation paradigm, the two feet stomping on both sides of the door. In case of Tevye der Milchiker, I offer a few suggestions:
The more liberal but probably the less pleasing: adapt the story structure to your contemporary society, merely borrowing original elements. This might have already been tackled (with Tevye), and if not in book form, then theatre. (Theatrical adaptations have not been unpopular.)
But I get your desire to be more directly exposed to the original.
Open the stage in a contemporary society. Introduce a proxy of an appropriately modern mien. The more distant from the nineteenth century Yiddish culture, perhaps even the better, so there’s no misunderstanding or misconceived falsetto.
The character, having intimate familiarity with the Tevye story cycle, comes to retell the tale to his grandchild, liaison or even a random Raskolnikov for all I care, by whatever chain of events. He does so, approximately, in his biased voice, incumbent the clarifications, misconceptions, critique, omissions, interjections, diversions and plenty of detail fudging: nothing that hasn’t already been employed in other stories.
Look towards Don Quixote or Malory’s La Morte d'Arthur. The author plain confesses to be translating another source (or motley of sources) mid-course, explicitly, inline with the story. In the former case, there’s an invented translator who the author follows, the backstory of their acquaintance integrated into the meta-plot.
All these approaches put the aspiring translator into the author’s hat, no ‘translated by’ inscription, full creative liberty manifest, credit to the source acknowledged.
With the older works of particularly poetic byproduct, many have adapted them stylishly to their own voice in a way which at least reconciles: Ezra Pound Sextus Propertius and numerous Cantos, the aforetold Malory’s chef d'oeuvre, Pushkin’s Песни Западных Славян, or his Quaran Motives being a few examples.
Now excepting the translator dilemma I find Richard Burton’s Arabian Nights, that mishmash of different period English dialects eloquently weaved together, a product of its own unique voice not entirely congruent with the medieval Arabic, the antiquity imparted rather through Burton’s linguistic madness, as some consider it. Although not universal, I love to read those stories, or at least ninety percent of everything read so far in that particular rendition whenever I chance upon a library copy.
Questions, comments? Connect.