A note on reading in translation, after an evening of two versions

01The accident that started it

The plan had been to discuss a short Russian novel, and eight of us had the same well-known edition from the library's reserve stock. The ninth had inherited a hardback from an aunt, printed sometime before the war, and within about twenty minutes we had stopped discussing the book and started discussing the difference between two sentences. One version had a character sitting down heavily; the other had him subsiding. Everything we thought about that character for the next fifty pages had been quietly set by that one verb.

We read the opening two pages aloud in both versions, alternating paragraph by paragraph, and the room went unusually quiet. The older translation was statelier and put more furniture in the room. The newer one was quicker on its feet and let the dialogue run. Neither was wrong. What struck everybody was how confidently we had each been describing the author's voice when what we had actually been describing was a translator's ear.

02What we could and could not judge

None of us reads Russian, and we were careful to keep saying so. We could not tell which version was closer to the original, and nobody in the room was qualified to pretend otherwise. What we could do was notice what each English text was like to read: where it slowed, where it went flat, where a joke landed and where it was explained into the ground. That is a narrower job than comparing with the source, but it is an honest one, and it kept the conversation out of the marshy territory of fidelity.

It also made us more careful about a habit we had not noticed. We had been saying things like the prose is clotted here as though the prose were a fixed object. We now try to say this translation is clotted here, which is both truer and, oddly, more interesting. It moves the question from a complaint about a dead author to a question about a living craft, and there is far more to say about the second.

• Say which translation you are holding before you quote from it.
• Judge the English you have; do not pretend to judge the original.
• Read the translator's note if there is one — there usually is.
• A published year on the title page explains a great deal.

03How we handle translated books now

When a translated book comes out of the jar, whoever proposed it names an edition. Not because the others are forbidden from reading a different one, but so that the person opening the discussion knows what the room is likely to be holding. If two editions are easily available, we sometimes deliberately split the circle, which costs nothing and reliably produces a better evening than everybody agreeing, and it costs nothing but a second library card.

We also started keeping the translator's name in the notebook alongside the author's. It seemed a small courtesy at first. After a year it had turned into something more useful: we noticed that three of our best evenings shared a translator, and one member has since read two further books simply because that name was on the spine. The notebook now has a short list at the back headed translators we seem to get on with.

04The longer argument, still unresolved

Half the room prefers a translation that reads as though written yesterday in English, on the grounds that the original readers were not labouring through something archaic and neither should we. The other half wants the seams left visible, the foreignness audible, the occasional untranslated word sitting there on the page reminding you that you are a guest. We have been over this four times now and nobody has moved an inch.

It is our best standing argument and we have stopped trying to settle it. Both camps agree on the practical matter, which is that the choice ought to be conscious rather than accidental, and that a translator who has thought hard about it will usually say so somewhere in the front matter. Reading that note before the novel has become the one piece of advice we give anyone joining us for a translated month.