Fortunata and Jacinta

GRANDIOSO QUE LOS EXTRANJEROS CONOZCAN UNA OBRA MAESTRA

This easily stands comparison with Dickens, Balzac, or Tolstoy. I am ashamed I had never heard of the author until very recently. There are two particularly difficult problems facing the translator: how to render the very varied narrative register of characters from a wide social range, and how to deal with the subtleties of tu/usted. In the first case, some of the more plebeian voices speak with American vulgarisms which some may find odd or grating (although they serve the purpose). In the second case, we just get footnotes pointing out when the original Spanish changes. This is useful - and probably the only way to render it in English - but it also has the effect of making me regret that modern English, with only one word for "you", must miss out on a great deal of subtlety - which the author uses here, to great effect. (The Portuguese are even luckier - they have eight different ways to say "you"... how monochrome our language seems in comparison....)

Helps very much with my graduate class

Such a good yarn. Really enjoyed this. If you like Zola and Hardy then you will probably like this too.

I agree whole-heartedly with the reviewer who said that the American translation was too modern. Unfortunately, I didn't realise that translation was the Penguin one. The dialogue is truly awful, with horrible grating Americanisms like 'I don't want to talk about it. Period', 'you guys', 'Oh boy, was I hungry' etc. I do understand the difficulty translators have in trying to recreate the tone of colloquialisms and slang in another language, and it's possible that these wouldn't jar so much on an American reader, but for me it was like finding myself in an episode of Friends rather than nineteenth century Madrid. Elsewhere the translation is good, in the descriptive passages for example, but the dialogue was so hard to stomach for me that I actually had to put the book on one side, something I rarely do. It's a shame, because Penguin's translations are usually excellent. It's difficult to know what rating to give it, as I didn't finish it, but I can't give it a high rating due to the translation. I suppose I'll just have to work on my Spanish!