The Hair-Carpet Weavers Q3: Translation
The author, Andreas Eschbach, is German. Could you tell? Did any 'German' character come through (so far as you might imagine it)? If you didn't know this was a translation, could you have guessed?
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Home › Monthly Book Selections › 161. (September 2026) The Carpet Makers by Andreas Eschbach (also called The Hair Carpet Weavers )
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I have to admit that I couldn't tell and wouldn't have guessed it was in translation without having been told right at the start.
Same here. It didn't read as a translated book.
I had no idea. The translation was seamless for me.
I curious what would have been a tell for those of you who said it didn't seem translated. I've read many translated books and generally speaking I can't really tell them apart from native English books. But I don find that Russian books have a different kind of tone to them. I don't think it's a language issue, more about how they're written. But I don't really detect a tone here. There is a sparsity to the text, but I couldn't say that was a German trait.
THat's a good question.
I find Soviet SF has a very distinct style, and the 3 Body Problem books also were very distinct. However, had I NOT know before reading those books that they were translated, would I have noticed then? Perhaps not.
We have read a few books in translation in the local book club including some Far Eastern, and especially with the latter there has always been some very distinctive social context which made it clearly different. And dialogue especially seems hard - lots of translated dialogue seems to turn out quite stilted. Maybe this is because it's intrinsically more difficult, or maybe the translator is struggling to convert some idioms and conventions that are natural in the original and weird in the target language.
With books where the author uses more poetic or ornate language, heavy with allusion or word-play I can imagine it being particularly hard to try to craft something good. Looking in the other direction, I wonder how it must be for translators to take say Terry Pratchett or Douglas Adams from English to another language, where the use of humour and pun is so prevalent?
Anyway, Carpetmakers was, I thought, a particularly good translation in the sense that it read fluently and easily rather than clumsily.