A few weeks back we had a discussion here about B. Traven
during which I disagreed with a dismissal of Traven by
Etienne Borgers and sang the praises of the Traven novel THE
TREASURE OF THE SIERRA MADRE. Etienne said he would seek out
a copy of the novel, read it and report back. He is having
problems posting to the list so he asked me to send along his
post on the novel, which I do below.
Richard
A few weeks ago, during a discussion about B. Traven and his
novel THE TREASURE OF THE SIERRA MADRE, Richard Moore
explained his admiration for it since his young age, and
encouraged me to read it. As I announced it I found a French
translation of the novel, "revised" in 1987 by another
translator. The original translation for this publisher was
done FROM THE ENGLISH text, during the fifties. So I finally
read it. It's indeed a very interesting novel mixing
adventure, some dark humor and a kind of noir look on certain
backgrounds, a look found also in certain episodes of the
story. There is a real search for reality by the author (and
also a kind of social realism exposed to low key social
criticism- especially found in the whole first part, before
the characters go for mining). This first part of the novel
makes you feel the misery, the sweating and the struggle for
survival of the central character, the hostility of the
surroundings, of the fellow humans… The second part, the
expedition, the mining period and the return, illustrates
clearly the quest for hope and for a treasure, but will bend
it to make it as being the knowing of oneself, the real
treasure. And then the ironic, dark ends happening to the
earthly treasure… we all remember- at least from the film,
very close to the original story. The novel then closes with
a kind of applied utopia carrying moralizing undertones (
plausible at the time of the novel when the earth was not
totally known and was not yet overpopulated). A good novel,
that still grips you, and I can understand why it had such a
success in the Anglo-Saxon world since its publication in
English, mid of the thirties. Further, it must be a real
solid construction and story to survive all the abuses the
hacks, translators and publishers applied to it since its
writing… in German. Speaking of this, I do not think that the
"revised" French translation I read did come back totally to
the original text or even tried to sweep the "d鳵et"
(out-moded) side it carries from time to time in the French
translation by using too precious verb forms and tenses, not
fitted for that kind of story. Anyway I'm still convinced
that translations are a big problem with Traven's novels. In
TREASURE… there is even a gross error. One of common
knowledge, if it comes not from a wrong translation. The
story takes place in Mexico and in the early pages of the
novel a local character fears to sleep in the open nature
because of … tigers. And this is repeated many times. I found
it in the English version as well (see Amazon where you can
browse the first chapters). Tigers, that's Asia. It's a
detail of course but it signals the care that was given to
the text… and IMO Traven, well travelled and having lived in
Mexico, could normally not do such an error. But even if so,
what about the rest of the chain: publishers, translators,
revisers…? Also: you must know that in German, Tiger is only
used for …tiger, and does not combined to other German words
to name other animals… So far for zoology (see note hereunder
giving further comment).
But I admit that even under those conditions, I enjoyed the
novel.
*Tiger*: a very good explanation of what is a mistake in
French
(=tigre- and it names only one feline), is given by Richard
Moore, after he read my comment on it. In Mexican Spanish the
colloquial word "tigre" can be used to name the North
American big cats: jaguar, under others. Then the use of the
word in a Spanish text makes sense, and as I've already
mentioned it, a lot of translations of Traven's texts were
done from Spanish versions… On the other side, the big cat
explanation was what I suspected when I searched for German
words which could derive from tiger
(combination words -and there was none), hence my above
remark about German words. German was the mother language of
Traven. But the conclusion remains that a lot of Traven's
texts were often mistreated during translation.
E.Borgers POLAR NOIR http://www.geocities.com/polarnoir
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