A reviewer who does not know the original language may be hesitant to comment on a translation, but if the work is this powerful, clearly an excellent translator is at work.
"He's an excellent translator," Mr. Wilbur said.
But the New Millennium Ensemble was an excellent translator, playing sometimes difficult music (for both performer and listener) with conviction, polish and understanding.
Among poets associated with Nyugat were Mihály Babits, an excellent translator of foreign poetry who became editor in 1929; Dezső Kosztolányi, who wrote with empathy on childhood and death and whose novels and short stories established high standards in narrative prose; and Árpád Tóth and Gyula Juhász, who voiced the distress of the poor and the oppressed in society.
Serge, one of Marc's two best and oldest friends, bought this piece of "art," by a trendy painter at a tony gallery, for $200,000 -- and that's a mid-1990's price, by the estimation of Christopher Hampton, the play's excellent translator.
From page to page, in passages of dialogue, Ferrante tells us (and then so does the excellent translator, Ann Goldstein, who is also the head of the copy department at The New Yorker) if someone is speaking standard Italian and the other is speaking dialect, so that we can understand what is going on between them, and then, if anyone switches, as they may do, what that means.
Asked if a pope needed to be linguistically nimble, the cardinal smiled slyly and said, "There are excellent translators around".
For example, I found an excellent Chinese translator recently through the MBA network.
These poems have a strongly contemporary feel, no matter what their date of origin, and a wide range of excellent poet-translators appear, including Seamus Heaney, Anne Carson, Fleur Adcock, Tony Harrison, James Merrill and WS Merwin.
Knowing the history of this work--which is detailed in an excellent eight-page Translator's Introduction--is by no means a prerequisite to recognizing its excellence, but it definitely augments one's wonder at Perednik's achievement.
