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therealvinelle · 2 years ago

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There’s a good possibility u already answer this one, but… i know english is not ur native language, so: when it comes to the twilight saga, what language did you read it in the first time? Have you read it in both your language and English, if so, was there anything you found interesting regarding how a certain phrase or dialogue was translated? When Midnight Sun came out, did you read it in English or the translation?

Same question for Harry Potter books, I suppose Cursed Child being the “book” that came out after you were invested in the series.

I think I'll divide my answer a little bit, since Twilight and Harry Potter were translated a bit differently. Though, the TLDR of it is that yes, I read both in Norwegian.

Harry Potter

The Norwegian translation of Harry Potter is truly remarkable. The translator, Torstein Bugge Høverstad, did an incredible job with it, winning a well-deserved award along the way. Not only did he beautifully translate the prose, but he knocked it out of the park when it came to translating all the names and words. All those wonderful nonsense words JKR came up with? Høverstad has got an equivalent nonsense word in Norwegian, one that may be completely different from the original but that had the same feel and felt so Norwegian that you wouldn't think the books were originally British at all.

Quidditch, for instance, became Rumpeldunk. Hogwarts became Galtvort, Slytherin -> Smygard, and so on. The wizarding names, too, were impeccably translated, sometimes to reflect a pun from the original version (Gaunt, for instance, became Mørch (dark), Ludo Bagman (a bagman being a traveling salesman) became Ludo Humbag (humbug)), other times just to make them easier to pronounce (Ron and Ginevra "Ginny" Weasley become Ronny and Gunilla "Gulla" Wiltersen).

To say nothing of the fact that through dialect and sociolect choice he let age, class, educational background, and how characters wish to appear show in how various characters speak. Hermione's language is more refined than Harry's, who is in turn more refined than the Weasley kids (with the exception of Percy). Tom Riddle has a My Fair Lady-esque ascendancy from speaking very working class in the orphanage, to speaking like Hermione when we see him a few years laters at Hogwarts, to finally using fancier language than Dumbledore when he's become Voldemort. Fleur's French accent and Hagrid's barely comprehensible dialect is still there, just as in the British version, but Høverstad made very conscious decisions in deciding on speech patterns for all characters.

He also chose to have the wizarding world use the T-V distinction, which feels very appropriate for the wizarding world and adds another layer to character relationships. Examples being that Harry uses the formal "De" with most adults in his life, including Arthur and Molly Weasley, as a sign of respect, and that in addition to still calling him Tom, Dumbledore uses the informal "du" when speaking to Voldemort to further stress their former relationship as teacher and student. During the last stand against Harry in the Great Hall, Harry also resorts to Voldemort using "du".

The one downside to all of this, especially the name translation, being that when I started reading Harry Potter fanfiction I had no idea who anybody was. Some, like Lucius Malfoy, were obviously Lucifer Malfang. Others, like Hagrid (Gygrid), Merope and Marvolo Gaunt (Miseria and Dredolo Mørch), or Yaxley (Øxodd) were strangers to me. Or, oh, the spell Stupefy. He turned that into Lammostivosløvus, which was so different it took me some time to figure out what Stupefy was meant to be.

Being eleven when I started reading fanfiction I was rather upset with Høverstad, but I came to appreciate his genius later. As it is, while the English version has largely supplanted the Norwegian by now (years and years of fanfiction), I remain very fond of the Norwegian one and would recommend it.

The same man has translated The Lord of the Rings, which makes them one of the very few works I want to read in a language other than the original.

Twilight

A perfectly decent translation, but next to Høverstad's work it looks very sad and unremarkable. It was well done, the translator did well with the prose, but the prose is all that was translated. Every name stays the same. Though, used to Høverstad as I was I assumed some changes had to be made, hence the whole Renesmee misunderstanding where I naturally assumed there had been an accent over the third "e" in her name (Renesmée) and the translator had merely removed it since accents are so rarely used in Norwegian. Which in turn led to me putting an accent in her name for the longest time, and having to stick to it for consistency in Bleach on the Brain. You can always tell when I'm on phone, because my phone autocorrects to Renesmée.

Back to the translation, it's honestly pretty forgettable, which in many ways is when you know the translator has done a good job. It's just that, well, I read Høverstad's translation of Harry Potter around the same time and you did ask me about both, which makes it natural to compare the two and... well, it's comparing the sun to a lamp.

Midnight Sun I read in English, making it the first and so far only Twilight or Harry Potter book I've read entirely in English. It was a fantastic experience, as I knew each word choice actually was what Meyer had intended, as opposed to the translator's choice (as I've been known to wonder otherwise, and sometimes ask the Muffin).

Cursed Child @theoriginalcarnivorousmuffin and I are making our way through slowly one Saturday at a time, and it is... a book. I'm glad Høverstad hasn't touched it, is what I think I'll say.

#translation #harry potter #twilight #twilight renaissance #twilight books #harry potter books #harry potter meta #the carnivorous muffin #madam-melon-meow #about me #twilight meta #torstein bugge høverstad

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therealvinelle · 3 years ago

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Hey,

Can you do tell us what you like about JK Rowling’s writing like you did with S Meyer? And what are the parts you don’t enjoy?

(Anon is referring to this post.)

See, the thing is, I like Stephenie Meyer's writing, I think she's good. Rowling... Rowling has things she is good at, but she just doesn't tick my boxes. I prefer Meyer by a long shot.

The good

To take a few things that I do like about Rowling:

Banter The kids' petty squabble is delightful.

Character creation She's very good at coming up with these quirky, original, charming characters. They're colorful. Note that I'm not saying she's good at characters, as I find the vast majority of them are not compelling.

Charm She's good at charm, period. She's very good at atmosphere.

Mysteries The Philosopher's Stone, Snape, and Quirrel in The Philosopher's Stone, Diary, Ginny, the heir of Slytherin in Chamber of Secrets, Sirius Black and the Marauders in Prisoner of Azkaban, the Crouch family in Goblet of Fire... she's very good at having these mysteries that keep you hooked and you're given just enough hints that by the time the twist is revealed you feel you've been given a satisfying answer. I can see why she turned her head towards crime novels after Harry Potter.

Quidditch! Rufus Scrimgeour! She excels at made-up words and weird names. (Gonna give a shoutout to the Norwegian translator of the series, Torstein Bugge Høverstad. He saw JKR's word magumble, and said "I can do that." The result was rumpeldunk, lammostivosløvus, tenketank, and many more.)

JKR created this enchanting world that millions of people worldwide fell in love with, that is no small accomplishment, in fact it's unparalleled. Full kudos for that and many people love her books.

It so happens that I don't, though, and this post is my reasons why.

Let's begin with a big issue.

What is Harry Potter about?

Harry Potter and the fight against Voldemort, you might say - but is it, really?

Let's look at the books.

Book: Harry is introduced to the Wizarding World, and about the evil wizard he vanquished. He enrolls in school. Evil wizard tries to return, Harry foils him.

Book: Harry goes to school. A memory of the evil wizard tries to take physical form, fails.

Book: Harry goes to school. Family drama ensues.

Book: Harry goes to school. Evil wizard successfully returns.

Book: Harry goes to school. Evil wizard grows as a threat, but the Wizarding World at large ignores this.

Book: Harry goes to school. Evil wizard grows as a threat, this time the Wizarding World is acknowledging the fact.

Book: Harry does not go to school. Evil wizard grows as a threat. Harry takes action to defeat the wizard, the wizard is at last defeated.

Notably, each of the confrontations with Voldemort happen at the very end of the books, and are unrelated to large chunks of the story. the classes, Harry's detentions, the Quidditch matches - that's all filler, yet it's given just as much if not more space than Voldemort. Voldemort only pops up at the very end to do things that ultimately won't affect Harry all that much.

What I'm trying to get at with this very reductive summary, is that if these books were actually about Harry's fight against Voldemort, there would be less of them. There is no reason for Chamber of Secrets and Prisoner of Azkaban to exist, for instance, nothing happens in them other than giving Harry something to do in his extracurriculars.

There is no reason for books four, five, six, and seven to be four separate books, either. Tom has all he needs to resurrect in the prologue of book four, yet he spends almost a year on a very convoluted, time-consuming, and wholly unnecessary scheme. He then spends another year trying to get his hands on a prophecy, and yet another year doing... well he doesn't actually do anything, he puts Draco in charge of a thing and then politely waits another year before taking over the Wizarding World. No reason is given for this extreme patience of his, or why he couldn't do two things at once.

If defeating Voldemort was the point of these books, there is no reason why there should be seven of them. Chamber of Secrets and Goblet of Fire, Philosopher's Stone and Prisoner of Azkaban, and Order of the Phoenix, Half-Blood Prince, and Deathly Hallows, stand out to me in particular as plots that could have been meshed together. Harry and Dumbledore are busy with the Chamber of Secrets and fail to prevent the real Voldemort resurrecting, Harry learns about the Wizarding World, his noble parents, and the man who betrayed them, and the Wizarding World turns into a hostile place while Harry learns that he is destined to kill Voldemort, and is sent out to do just that before it's too late.

Of course, this would have been a very different book series, but that is kind of the point. I don't like the book series JKR wound up writing.

This brings us to another point of mine, which overlaps with the above complaints, and that's the filler in these books.

The filler

(Yes, I'm going through this monster of a text to put awkward headlines in. If it makes the text more digestible...)

We get Harry's Quidditch career in explicit detail. For six out of seven books, there is a large focus on Quidditch, with the Quidditch battles lovingly typed out. We get Harry's academic career in explicit detail. We know which essays he's dreading, the homework he likes, the various classes he takes and what's happening in them. We get his outings to Hogsmeade and the time he was at a Quidditch Tournament, we get his shopping trips to Diagon Alley, we get his fling with Cho that goes nowhere. We get the life and times.

I'm left reading a book series about Hogwarts and Harry's wonderful times there, with the daring adventure our plucky hero has every now and then fighting evil as added flavor. It feels more like a video game, or one of those PR campaign stories where our heroes have an adventure in Disneyland that conveniently features all the attractions.

And I'm not done.

Was anyone editing these books? Anyone?!

Large parts of these books, as I hinted at above with Cho, are seemingly important to the story, but then it turns out to make no difference whatsoever to the overall plot, and you realize it was just there to kill time, and make you think something was happening.

Take Cho. We have Harry noticing the cute Ravenclaw Quidditch player (I forget the position she played) in Prisoner of Azkaban, then in Goblet of Fire he's nursing a crush and asks her out. Then, in Order of the Phoenix, they finally start dating. Then, the relationship fizzles out and Cho ceases to be a remotely important character while Harry is the same as ever.

What was the point of Cho Chang?

Take the Crouch family, one of my favorite mysteries from these books.

Throughout Goblet of Fire, there are all these hints strewn out, hints about old Barty Sr. and the lengths he would go to, his tragically dead son, Barty Sr.'s increasingly erratic behavior until one day he disappears altogether, and Madeye Moody's seemingly unrelated insistence on helping Harry through the Triwizard Tournament. Turns out, he'd been keeping his son imprisoned in his house all the years, which only fed into Barty Jr.'s madness. Finally, Barty kills his father, brings Voldemort back to life, and reveals that he'd been impersonating Moody all this time so he could be close to Harry. Barty is then given the dementor's kiss, and never spoken of again.

All very good, a very nice mystery.

But... could the story have survived without the Crouches?

Is there a particular reason why it couldn't have just been Wormtail polyjuicing into one of Harry's teachers, and given him a portkey when he got him alone? Was there ever actually a need for any of the things Barty did as Moody? He put Harry's name in the goblet of fire, made him pass his trials, and turned the prize cup into a portkey, yes, but it was hardly requisite to Voldemort's resurrection that Harry participate in the tournament in the first place.

And then Barty dies an unceremonious off-screen death, so we don't even have a Death Eater that Harry once trusted and might still have complex feelings about after all this. No lessons of any kind are learned either, as they're never mentioned again.

There comes a point where you realize that they were just there to give the book padding.

It goes on and on, the more you look the more characters and storylines who don't actually matter you find. That's my big problem with JK Rowling.

She has things she's good at, and she's very good at putting on a show, so to say, you have to look closer to see that the figures on stage are just that, figures, with no deeper meaning or reason behind them, only there to dazzle you with colorful outfits and funny made-up words.

This is some people's cup of tea, a lot of people love this. It's very fanfiction friendly, as you have a world just shallow enough that you can insert whatever you want into it. It's not my cup of tea, though.

And I'm not done.

It's very obvious she did not plan ahead with these books. At all.

Winging it: a seven-book demonstration by Joanne K. Rowling

Not only is there too little plot (as explained above) for me to believe she was ever coherently building up to something on a grander scale than from book to book. There are no mysteries that expand across multiple books, for one thing. Oh, there's Snape, but him doing ambiguous things is not cleverly planting clues, it's him doing ambiguous things while JKR winks at the audience.

More damningly, there's the magic introduced from one book to another, that may or may not be brought up again, that you may wonder why it didn't come up earlier. Why doesn't Hogwarts have a problem of students using time turners to find out the NEWT exam questions and selling them to students who haven't taken them yet? Why is felix felicis addiction not a problem in wizarding society? Why are portkeys not in use more? Or apparition, especially in earlier books?

(The time turners, in particular, are a problem for me. Blowing them up in Order of the Phoenix isn't enough, because the technology for time travel still exists. Am I to believe there were no other time turners in the whole world than the ones in that cabinet? That no one would abuse their effects? Why did Godric's Hollow on 31st of October 1981 not turn into a battleground of time travelling Death Eaters trying to prevent Voldemort from falling, and time travelling aurors trying to prevent the Death Eaters?)

It's very clear to me that the worldbuilding was not done in advance. She did not know all these things existed when she set out to write the books, which is fine with the first one since it wasn't supposed to be the start of the franchise, but not for the remaining six.

Then there's the wand lore, which completely retconned the preceding six books. According to the whole new lore introduced in that book no one's wand should belong to anybody, you just use whatever wand you won last week. Frankly, I don't know how she got away with that.

The obscurials in the films are another example of retconning, because if muggleborns could turn into bombs the Wizarding World would look very different.

Even more damningly, there's the prophecy.

The prophecy: it gets its own headline

Read this, and ask yourself: does this strike you as the prophecy written by someone who has Deathly Hallows all planned out?

"The one with the power to vanquish the Dark Lord approaches... born to those who have thrice defied him, born as the seventh month dies... and the Dark Lord will mark him as his equal, but he will have power the Dark Lord knows not... and either must die at the hand of the other for neither can live while the other survives... the one with the power to vanquish the Dark Lord will be born as the seventh month dies...."

JKR devotes this entire book to Voldemort trying to get the never mentioned before prophecy. It's not like she wrote herself into a corner in preceding books and had no choice but to come up with something: she set out to have this book be centered on this prophecy. And yet, what she comes up with is a prophecy that can be divided into two parts: part one, establishing the obvious. There is a destined hero who will destroy Voldemort, and here's how to pick him out of the crowd. This conveniently fits the bill ofr Harry Potter.

Part two, vague nonsense.

No, really.

I'm not going to get into my controversial conspiracy theorist corner of explaining how Harry never actually uses any power that Voldemort doesn't know, at least not in the form of love, because pointing out that the power of love isn't anything Harry ever actually wields is very controversial in this fandom and it'll take away from my point. (As you can see I'm saying it anyway in this paragraph, because it has to be said. If Harry's got a power Voldemort doesn't know, it's something other than love.)

I am, however, going to point out that the rest of the prophecy is made up, it's lies, it's nonsense. They both live just fine for years while the other survives, you could interpret this as "they won't stop trying to kill each other" but that's extremely generous and not what the prophecy is saying.

Nothing dictates either must die at the hand of the other. Anyone could have killed either of them. Harry only destroys one of Tom's horcruxes, and the others are destroyed by different people. When Tom has no horcruxes left, he is killed by his own rebounding curse, which is very much not "at the hand of the other".

To say nothing of the "mark him as his equal" line, that one is also vague and likely didn't have anything to do with anybody's blood status. Tom was set to kill both Harry and Neville, when the Potters' location fell into his lap he went to the Potters first. This line, like the others, carries that sweet sweet smell of "nonsense JKR thought sounded good".

Last but not least criticism of the prophecy, who's to say it wasn't fulfilled in 1981? There was a prophecy saying some kid that vaguely fit Harry's descriotion would vanquish Voldemort, and lo and behold Harry vanquished Voldemort. The prophecy says nothing about "and then the Dark Lord returns, and Harry defeats him again". Why is everyone so convinced it's still relevant?

My point with all of this is that it proves JKR didn't plan her books. At all. She had a big bad, and a hero set to defeat him, and she hadn't decided how, or that prophecy would have been a lot more specific, or at the very least made sense.

Take the other prophecy she wrote for proof:

"It will happen tonight... The Dark Lord lies alone and friendless, abandoned by his followers. His servant has been chained these twelve years. Tonight, before midnight... the servant will break free and set out to rejoin his master. The Dark Lord will rise again with his servant's aid, greater and more terrible than ever he was. Tonight... before midnight... the servant... will set out... to rejoin... his master..."

This makes perfect sense. So any "JKR just made the first one vague nonsense because that's how prophecies are in the Harry Potter universe! It's a mystical art!" defense is pretty thin.

And I don't think she came up with horcruxes prior to Half-Blood Prince, sorry, I just don't. The prophecy would have been different, for one thing.

This post has gone on long enough, so I'll try to cut it short. Believe it or not, but I have more complaints about these books, mainly in how she fails to make her characters be people and not just quirky and colorful concepts, and how the power of love is... well there's a lot of talk and a distinct lack of show.

JKR has some things she's very good at, as a children's books author she's very good. On its own the first book is great. However, she has deep flaws, and so I can't really write a post explaining why I think she's a good writer like I could for Stephenie Meyer, and that because I don't think she's a good writer. At least, she doesn't tick my boxes the way Meyer does.

#jk rowling #writing #harry potter #harry potter meta

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