Hard to handle …

… In the Tumult of Translation by Tim Parks | NYR Daily | The New York Review of Books. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

The fact is that much space is required to say anything even half-way serious about a translation. For example, the three volumes of [Primo] Levi’s Complete Works include fourteen books and involved ten translators. There is the further complication that the three best-known books—If This Is a Man, The Truce, and The Periodic Table—had already been translated, the first two by Stuart Woolf, the third by Raymond Rosenthal. If This Is a Man appears here in a “revised” version of the 1959 translation, Woolf himself having carried out the revision more than a half century after his original. However, The Truceappears in an entirely new translation by Ann Goldstein. One can only imagine what negotiations lay behind this odd arrangement; Levi’s writings are still under copyright, which presumably allowed Woolf or his publisher to dictate terms. Ann Goldstein also offers a new translation of The Periodic Table, and is the translator of Lilith and Other Stories, another book in the Complete Works.