J.M. Coetzee on his work being translated.
Some such reports come as a jolt. In Russia, I discover, The Master of Petersburg has been renamed Autumn in Petersburg; in the Italian version of Dusklands, a man opens a wooden crate with the help of a bird (what I wrote was that he used a crow, that is, a crowbar).
….
Are my books easy or hard to translate? Sentence by sentence, my prose is generally lucid, in the sense that the syntactic relations among words, and the logical force of constructions, are as clear as I can make them.
On the other hand, I sometimes use words with the full freight of their history behind them, and that freight is not easily carried across to another language. My English does not happen to be embedded in any particular sociolinguistic landscape, which relieves the translator of one vexatious burden; on the other hand, I do tend to be allusive, and not always to signal the presence of allusion.
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