In my opinion the biggest name of Brazilian literature in the 20th century is Guimarães Rosa. Unfortunately his language is very difficult to translate (it is difficult and fascinating even to Brazilians).
Rosa's book "Grande Sertão: Veredas" is the best book I've read in my life. The author almost invents a new language, making it really difficult to read. I've just finished it in my third try. Rosa helped to translate it to German, Italian, French and Spanish, languages that he spoke. For me it is really impossible to translate. I don't know if a English version is worth it.
Scribd has an English translation of Rosa's Grande Sertão: Veredas, titled The Devil to Pay in the Backlands. I'm fluent in Portuguese (though not a native speaker) but couldn't get through the beginning of the original.
I'm native speaker and I'm currently reading Grande Sertão: Veredas.
The beginning of the book (first 100 pages) is really hard, mostly because it use words that are not commonly used nowadays but also because some of the words are written as spoken. Some people like to read it loud because of this. I've tried myself for some paragraphs and it really made sense to me :)
I only understood some words from him after a drama group played at my school. I used to be bored by his style, but after this, I accepted he was a genius.
I'm a native-level (European) Portuguese speaker, and although I can get through the beginning, it is with some effort.
I'd describe the style as being akin to stream of consciousness, but with a somewhat jumbled sentence structure on top. Of course, I use the term 'jumbled', but I'm sure it's intentional, and it does have a striking effect because of that.
There's a graphic novel of it that you may find interesting. You can probably find it in portuguese bookstores. It's available on Amazon in some countries.
As someone who only speaks English... I'm fascinated by the concept of language that is difficult to translate. Can anyone direct me to English-language literature that is difficult to translate into other languages?
Finnegans Wake is probably the classical example. The latter books by William Gaddis also lose a lot (sometimes everything?) because they are so dependent on spoken American English. Cormac McCarthy is also sometimes hard to translate due to orality and some obscure language.
Part of the problem with Grande Sertão: Veredas is that it is has a very inventive, very oral aesthetics that is based on a local dialect and a culture that is unknown (except very superficially) to most of its readers even in Brazil. The burden on a translator to transfer all of that to the foreign reader is immense.
Poetry is language subject to some constraint, and it's generally impossible to translate it faithfully while also obeying the original constraint. If you look at Disney's song translations, they follow the rhythm faithfully, are pretty good about following the meaning, usually follow the choreography badly, and don't even try to preserve rhyme. (Even in languages in which poetry is supposed to rhyme.)
From another perspective -- there is a lyric in the song Shiny, in Moana, going c'est la vie, mon ami. That's not actually English. How do you translate it from English? This line was translated into Russian as c'est la vie, mon ami. Russians can be expected to be familiar with French, at least at this level. Languages at a greater cultural distance -- including Vietnamese -- don't translate it at all. Intriguingly, the line was translated into French as c'est la vie, mon ami. This preserves the meaning perfectly -- it's more accessible to the French audience than it is to the American audience! -- but it completely loses whatever the implication was of saying the line in French as part of otherwise English dialogue.
It's very difficult to translate anything that simultaneously expresses multiple things. You're doing well when you preserve a single aspect of the original.
Most books lose a bit of their magic when translated. However books full of neologisms and regional dialects are nearly impossible to translate without butching it. That's the case of Grande sertão veredas. You can tell the same story, but you'll probably miss the most important part of the book, which is the way it was written, the names of the characters, etc.
> English-language literature that is difficult to translate into other languages?
A few examples come to mind:
Ulysses by James Joyce
Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll
Naked Lunch by William Burroughs
The stream-of-consciousness style of flowing sentences, how the author plays with language, exotic or made-up words, sounds, subconscious associations - all contribute to a very challenging translation, I imagine.
---
Edit: Oh, I'm a couple days late in replying, and others have mentioned similar works of literature.
Look to literature that is "punny" or very culturally specific. An example: The title The Importance of Being Earnest is itself a pun on the character's (eventual) nature and name. Translating that to another language you'd need to change the name of the character to maintain the pun in the new language, which may not be feasible. That's a small example, but it's common in some books or plays to see things like this used frequently, especially in dialog.
To add to this, in Spanish the title is translated so that it loses all sense of being a pun: "La importancia de llamarse Ernesto". "Ernesto" in Spanish has no correlation with "earnestness", it doesn't sound the same as the Spanish concept, and in general, the title doesn't sound like a pun.
Spanish translators often add a footnote saying something like "this is an untranslatable play on words in the original English".
Side point... one rare exception I can think of: The Asterix comic books in English maintained and even in some cases enhanced the humor of the original French. The puns were completely reinvented, and fit the context so well that one often forgets they were translations (well, on the other hand, I guess they weren't faithful translations so much as they were paraphrases).
On this topic, Douglas Hofstadter's book Le ton beau de Marot is organized around this and related topics: poertry, translation, language and literary play, and the challenges and freedoms offered translators, all woven in typical Hofstadterian fashion with a breathtaking array of topics and observations. One of my favorite books, and it may interest anyone who, as you say, is fascinated by translation and its difficulties!
Fair warning: the book gets a bit dark in parts (he wrote it after his wife's death, and covers that a bit), but not overwhelmingly or throughout.
ETA: To address your original question, Hofstadter's book is organized around the challenge of translating "Ma mignonne", a very tight little French poem by Clément Marot (hence the book title), and goes into great detail about the challenges it presents, with lots of different approaches and translations. He talks about many other significant challenges to the translator -- the one that comes to mind is La disparition by Georges Perec[1] -- a novel famously written without appearance of the letter e. It was translated into English by Gilbert Adair as A Void -- also lacking that most common of glyphs. Other unpublished e-less translations exist, as well.
Any work that involves a lot of puns and dialect will be hard to translate, as will anything that uses a lot of rhetorical flair. Puns are often impossible because they involve a "collision" of meaning between two words. If this collision isn't possible in the translated language, the best thing the translator can do is try to come up with their pun. Dialect and slang also will be hard, because slang is kind of a capsule of the culture it comes from. So the translator is going to have to choose a more normal world, losing the original flavor, or pick some slang from the L2, thus bringing an "import" into the world of the work. Rhythm and prosody depend on the harmony between the sounds of the words in the original language. Of course, the words of the translation language will have an entirely different set of sounds, and perhaps the grammar won't even permit similar acts of parallelism. As a stupid example look at
>Vini, Vidi, vici
>I came, I saw, I conquered.
Notice Latin doesn't require the pronoun I. But literally translating "Came,saw, conquered" sounds like it was written by a petulant 14 year old. Secondly, Caesar's clauses are a nice triplet of two syllables. The English version does pretty well there, until it reaches "conquered," which throws the rhythm off. I said it was a stupid example, because the English translates pretty well IMO, but hopefully I demonstrated the difficult work of the translator.
Off the top of my head, I think these would be tough to translate.
-Shakespeare. Too many puns, and the meter is tied to a rhythm natural to English. All poetry is difficult really.
-Huckleberry Finn. Heavy dialect, which often involves the racial prejudices of the time. How can you translate that part? Nothing will be as disrespectful as the word is in English. Furthermore, how do you translate something like:
>It must a been close on to one o’clock
Do you preserve the grammar error? What's the difference between "close" and "close on"?
-Faulkner. Same as Twain, plus some very heavy rhetoric.
-Joyce. Same as Faulkner, but more puns, heavier rhetoric. If there's anything harder to translate than Finnegans Wake, let me know.
-Gadsby. This book does not contain the letter E! E is the most common vowel in English, but it's not in many other languages. Is the translator "cheating" if constrains the same letter? Amazingly this problem has been tackled in the translation of a different book, La Disparation, a French novel also without any e's either. The English translation, A Void, avoids the character too. However, omitting the E would be too easy in Russian, so that version doesn't contain any O's.
Jabberwocky by Lewis Carroll has to be the definitive example I feel. Half of it is in a made up language but every English person instinctively knows what it means.
I've been reading Peregrinacao by Fernao Mendes Pinto (in English, as it was written in the 1500s); a weird sort of Portuguese Marco Polo. As my language skills improve, Aquilino Ribeiro is on my list.
I never thought I would see this on HN! I also highly recommend reading (an abridged version of) this, maybe in tandem with a well annotated version of The Lusiads by Camoes. From our modern, connected multicultural world, I find there's nothing more engrossing than witnessing this "discovery" through the eyes of those comparatively monocultural generations. In a similar vein, I have also been meaning to read some of Ibn Battuta's travels which strike me as a Berber angle on a similar journey.
I'm saving Camoes; gonna read Gaspar Correa "The three voyages of Vasco da Gama: and his viceroyalty" with that one (it looked good, but Fernao Mentes Minto is more of its own standalone thing). Most crazy thing I've yet read from Iberia is Captain Alonso Contreras Life; obviously not in Portuguese, and not too much about exploration, but it's just insane.
Ibn Battuta looks pretty cool; thanks for mentioning.
> Most crazy thing I've yet read from Iberia is Captain Alonso Contreras Life; obviously not in Portuguese, and not too much about exploration, but it's just insane.
The most insane and extreme adventure I have ever read is Cabeza de Vaca's Naufragios. Marooned in Florida with a few companions and one slave, and then himself enslaved by native americans (he famously quipped that his poor slave became a slave's slave), they ended up being the first europeans known to walk the US coast to coast, as a chaman with his entourage. A very resourceful man. His observations of the many american tribes he came across were a first, he had an anthropologist's outlook. A short but intense book.
I love doing that, not only with Portuguese but also with other languages that I speak.
Something that plays a role is how the book looks like, there are some copies closer to our days that kind of preserve the form, but update the orthography, while others are just as they were written originally.
Some of my personal favourites in Brazil: Hilda Hilst and Manoel de Barros, mostly for poetry. In Portugal: Valter Hugo Mãe (vhm). He got a lot of exposure in Brazil recently. His books are widely available.
José Rodrigo dos Santos in the same list as Eça de Queirós is offensive. Rodrigo dos Santos is the Portuguese-version of Dan Brown, not a literary giant.
Eça, is in my opinion, wrote the best novel available in the Portuguese language, "The Maias". I am not sure how good the English translation is, but he Portuguese original is sublime, especially if you are familiar with Portuguese society. Many of the peculiarities he wrote about are still recognizable 100 years later.
To your wife's excellent list I would add Fernando Pessoa a prolific genius and also Jose Regio, who wrote, Cantigo Negro, my favorite Portuguese poem:
"come this way" — some say with sweet eyes
opening their arms, and certain
that it would be good if I would listen
when they say: "come this way"!
I look at them with languidly,
(my eyes filled with irony and tiredness)
and I cross my arms,
and I never go that way...
this is my glory:
to create inhumanity!
to accompany no one.
— for I live with the same unwillingness
with which i tore my mother's womb
no, I won't go that way! I only go where
my own steps take me...
if to what I seek to know no one can answer
why do you repeat: "come this way"?
I rather crawl thru muddy alleys,
to whirl in the wind,
like rags, to drag my bleeding feet,
than to go that way...
if I came to this world, it was
only to deflower virgin forests,
and to draw my own footsteps in the unexplored sand!
all else I do is worth nothing.
how can you be the ones
that give me impulses, tools and courage
to overcome my own obstacles?
the blood of our ancestors runs thru your veins,
And you love what is easy!
I love the Far and the Mirage,
I loves the abysses, the torrents, the deserts...
go! you have roads,
you have gardens, you have flower-beds,
you have a nation, you have roofs,
and you have rules, and treaties, and philosophers, and wise men.
I have my Madness!
I hold it high like a torch burning in the dark night,
and I feel foam, and blood, and chants on my lips...
God and the Devil guide me, no one else!
everyone's had a father, everyone's had a mother;
but I, who never begin or end,
was born of the love between God and the Devil.
ah! don't give me sympathetic intentions!
don't asks me for definitions!
don't tells me: "come this way"!
my life is a whirlwind that broke loose,
it's a wave that rose.
it's one more atom that ignited...
I don’t know which way I’ll go,
I don't know where I'm going to,
- I know I'm not going that way!
+1 for Eça de Queiroz. With the exception of O Crime do Padre Amaro which can in places be a bit blunt, he tends to have a a kind admiration for his characters as he quietly makes fun of them and the decadent society around them.
The big names in Brazil are of course Machado de Assis, Jorge Amado and Clarice Lispector (very abstract). Paulo Coelho does not count.
In Portugal, there's Fernando Pessoa and José Saramago.
Who else would folks recommend?
[1] https://www.newyorker.com/books/second-read/rediscovering-on...