Tim Griggs in other tongues

 

A friend's consolation to Tim Griggs for his first novel's huge success in the rest of Europe and its only very moderate sales in the UK continues to be quoted back at me.

'Your book  must have lost something in the original', said the friend - in words which have inspired many a translator whose work has so long seemed unappreciated.

Did Griggs's Redemption Blues have a unique 'European sensibility' which the Brits sadly missed? Or did the translations make it somehow a better book in German?

Who knows?

We will see what happens to his gripping new thriller, The Warning Bell, which, as a result of the strange experience of the old one, is published under the translated name of Tom Macaulay.

Meanwhile the translator of Dante's Rime, which I wrote about nine weeks ago around Valentine's day, has sent me his own Epitaph for a Translator.

"The poor translator here interred

Awaits his own translation

To Heaven by the Eternal Word,

Or some approximation."

Anthony Mortimer is professor emeritus at the University of Fribourg, Switzerland, and has published verse translations of Petrarch (2002) and  Michelangelo (2007) with Penguin Classics. The "Rime" of Dante (with J. G. Nichols) is published by Oneworld Classics.

If the successful translator of Tim Griggs is out there, perhaps he or she could send a poem too.

Comments

[Andrew Kenneally]

My guess is that Tim Griggs' work is itself a translation. It was originally published in Flemish, or might have been- it's a language like any other, and as good as any; that is if Flemish is indeed a language, which I presume it is. Tom Macaulay is the Flemish author. However I could be quite wrong in all this.