Raff String Quartets 1 & 2 study score/Breitkopf

[eschiss1]

Breitkopf apparently has recently published a new study score of Raff's first two string quartets (perusable here.) Don't know if it's a critical edition or just a modern reprint of material that is available (IMSLP only has the parts of No.2, fwiw), but may be useful.

[Alan Howe]

Unfortunately they haven't commissioned a decent English translation of the German. Why do these companies think that German nationals can come up with idiomatic English? An opportunity missed.

Yours truly is available. Might even do it free of charge...

[Mark Thomas]

They're modern, critical editions and Breitkopf plan a whole lot more apparently. It's a pity that they're partially duplicating Edition Nordstern, though.

[Alan Howe]

Kein Kommentar...

[Gareth Vaughan]

Well done, John. Very amusing.  It gave me laugh.

[Alan Howe]

It has to me also a laugh given...

[Mark Thomas]

  As someone here once explained to me: you get a native English speaker to translate German into English, a native German speaker to translate English into German - not the other way around (as is the case here, I suspect). Mind you, not too long ago I stopped a translation from German into English courtesy of Google Translate being used in CD booklet notes!

[eschiss1]

A native English speaker whose German is painfully inadequate to the task (of translating German to English, if this is unclear) is also sometimes the problem. Often, even.

[Alan Howe]

Genau, Herr Boyer!

[Double-A]

Looking at the original German (using the link above) I can state with conviction that the German original "Vorwort" is badly written (except for "Vorwort").  Very badly.  Using the kind of convoluted syntax that Mark Twain was poking fun at in his famous evisceration of the German language.  Don't you agree, Alan?

This makes the task of a translator harder than it needs to be.  This translator however--and I'd swear it was a native German speaker--left this syntax intact as much as possible or rather much more than possible.  You might almost say that the result is a German text in bad style using English words rather than German words.

Given the fact that there are plenty of Germans who indeed can write proper English^{1), 2)} this is really quite embarrassing for B&H.  And there are even a few in Germany who can write proper German...

1)  More than the other way round I'd bet.
2)  You can be far inferior to Nabokov and still far better than this translator--or indeed than the writer of the German original.

[Alan Howe]

As I said, I'm available....

[eschiss1]

... where did Nabokov enter, out of curiosity- was he as much known for his translations as for his "original work" (as some well-known authors really were, e.g. Tolkien's work with Gawain and the Green Knight etc.)?

[eschiss1]

ah, ok. Thanks!
(And that reminds me of a really interesting essay on translating Don Quixote and issues in translating Renaissance Spanish- just for example, but it really was unexpectedly fascinating- anyway, thanks again.)

[eschiss1]

At a guess, the new MDG recording uses the new critical edition which was probably written for this purpose

[Mark Thomas]

It's a coincidence, Eric. B&H are planning a whole series of Raff critical editions.