Which US classic appeared in Swedish as A Man Without Scruples? Who described translation as ‘the art of failure’? Interpret these questions to mark International Translation Day
One multilingual writer’s very disparaging opinion of the art of translation declared it: 'A parrot’s screech, a monkey’s chatter,/And profanation of the dead'. Who?
Anthony Burgess
Julian Barnes
Rainer Maria Rilke
Vladimir Nabokov
What the the original title of Stieg Larsson’s The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo in Swedish?
Men Who Hate Women
Men Who Love Women
Women Who Hate Men
Women Who Love Men
Printed fiction in translation amounted to what percentage of UK book sales in 2015?
15%
10%
5%
1%
Which writer said: 'Translation is the art of failure'?
Umberto Eco
George Eliot
TS Eliot
Günter Grass
In Kafka’s Metamorphosis, Gregor Samsa is transformed into an ungeheures Ungeziefer. What insect has it NOT been translated as?
A monstrous vermin
A septic stagbeetle
A giant cockroach
A verminous bug
Which of these translations is the ONLY one by a writer who began the project as an expert in the source's original language?
Ezra Pound's collection of classical Chinese poetry, Cathay
José Saramago's version of Leo Tolstoy's Anna Karenina
Charles Baudelaire's collection of Edgar Allen Poe's short stories, Histoires extraordinaires
Seamus Heaney's Beowulf
Which classic American novel was translated into Swedish as A Man Without Scruples (En man utan skrupler)?
The Talented Mr Ripley
Moby-Dick
The Great Gatsby
American Psycho
Author Han Kang won the 2016 International Man Booker prize for her novel The Vegetarian. What language was it originally written in?
Japanese
Chinese
French
Korean
In one poem, an English poet recalls reading a classic translation: 'Then felt I like some watcher of the skies/When a new planet swims into his ken'. Which poem is this from?
On First Looking Into Chapman’s Homer by John Keats
Tales from Ovid by Ted Hughes
Imitations by Robert Lowell
Orpheus by Don Paterson
William Beckford's Vathek was composed in French, but first published in Samuel Henley's English translation. But what did Jorge Luis Borges make of Henley's translation?
"Henley's translation surpasses the original in both texture and mood."
"The flinty clarity of English fails to capture the 'indefinable horrors' of the original."
"The original is unfaithful to the translation."
"A cracking read, surely a strong contender for this year's Booker."
Despite having practised the art, this writer is still baffled by the mystery of translation: 'How is it possible that a text that has been stripped of the language in which it was conceived could still be the same text? ... You think you are reading Dickens in Spanish or Cervantes in English and not one word of what you are reading was written or chosen by the author.' Who said this?
Michael Frayn
Javier Marías
Lydia Davis
Marie Darrieussecq
According to which literary lion is a translation 'a different book', 'a book by the person who translated it' and having 'nothing to do with the original at all'?
Thomas Hardy
Thomas Bernhard
Thomas Clancy
Thomas Pynchon
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