CONTINUED
“The Terror of Blue John Gap” in Translation
by Peggy MacFarlane
It is not possible to say definitively how many translations of this story have been done, because there is no universal catalog for translations. However, a bit of assiduous digging in national library catalogs and the like reveals that at least a dozen translations exist: one each in Bengali, Finnish, German, Italian, Polish, Russian and Spanish, two in Japanese, and three in French. Tracking down and analyzing all of these texts is beyond the scope of this article and certainly beyond the bounds of my literacy. However, I was able to access a few samples and look at some choices made by translators and how they present the text to their audiences.
Let’s look at titles first. Each of the three French translations has a different title. This alone shows that the art of translation is never just a matter of replacing one word with another. Louis Labat's 1923 version in the periodical Je Sais Tout is called "Le Monstre de la Brèche de Blue John" (The Monster of Blue John Gap). Already we can see that putting the word "monster" in the title changes the meaning somewhat and is actually a bit of a spoiler. In 1926, G. Duriac created the possibility of plural monsters with the translation "La Brèche aux Monstres" (The Gap of Monsters). My favourite of the French titles is another by Labat. His 1925 "La Brèche au Monstre" (The Monster’s Breach) seems to deliberately echo the name of La Brèche au Diable (Devil’s Breach), a well-known place name in Normandy. Without access to the text of the stories, it's not clear whether the title is the only substantive change in this latter translation.
Amina Pandolfi went once more unto the breach with her 1994 Italian title “La Breccia di Blue John” (Blue John Gap,) keeping the original place name but leaving out any mention of monsters or terror. Based on the French and Italian titles, you might expect a Spanish title to use the similar word “brecha,” but the translation I found listed in the National Library of Spain was called “El Terror de la Sima del Blue John” with “sima” being yet another word for a crack or gap in the earth handy for hiding mysterious bear-monsters. There are two German titles that can be found listed online: “Der Schrecken der “Blue-John” (The Terror of Blue-John), a 2013 translation by Heiko Postma, and one anonymous print-on-demand one with the dubious title “Der Terror von Blue Joe Gap.” The latter might be an example of the kind of machine translations that will soon be flooding the market in our AI-beset world. I have not included it in my count of legitimate translations.
Moving on to Japan, a country where Conan Doyle’s non-Sherlockian works have received a good deal of attention, two Japanese versions also offer two different titles. Ken Nobuhara’s 1960 translation calls the story “Aoi no Dōkutsu no Kai” (The Mystery/Monster of the Blue Cave.) There is a nice subtlety in the choice of “kai,” a word that can mean either mystery or monster. “Dōkutsu” (cave) is also a sensible choice. It’s fine to talk about gaps and breaches, but the main business of the story happens within what is best described as a cavern. That cave, however, is not actually blue, and this choice of words could even be called a misreading. By contrast, Kazuko Morita’s 2018 translation is fastidious in rendering even the place name into the Japanese name for the stone in her title “Murasaki Hotaruishi no Dōkutsu no Kai” (The Mystery/Monster of the Purple Fluorite Cave).
As for the contents of the story, I think that the text covered on page 10 of the manuscript—the section being considered for this installment of the Blue John Gap Project—must have been a pleasure to translate. To be a good translator of literature, one must be a writer at heart, and all the cold fear in the darkness that Conan Doyle presents here leaves room for a lot of poetic expression. There’s plenty to consider on this page, but let’s be minimalists and just look at one word. In describing the stench of the monster in this section of text, Sir Arthur used the word “mephitic.” “Mephitic,” now, is an extravagant word if ever there was one. Gentle Readers, I know your vocabulary is formidable, but please raise your hand if you had to look this word up when you first read this story. If you have not, I will save you some trouble and give you the Oxford English Dictionary’s definition:
ADJECTIVE 1623— Esp. of a gas or vapour: offensive to the smell, foul-smelling; noxious, poisonous, pestilential. Also figurative. Now archaic and literary.
Now let’s have a look at what did translators did with a rarefied word like “mephitic.” Only four of the translations I’ve mentioned so far are available to me in full text versions, but we can take them as a sample and consider each in turn. First of all, if you think mephitic is a fancy word in English, you’re going to love it in French: méphitique. This was an obvious choice in Louis Labat’s translation. One can also say mefitico in Italian, but this does not appear in Amina Pandolfi’s Italian version. In fact, neither the line about Dr. Hardcastle fearing that the creature had caught his scent, nor the one about the abominable stench of the creature itself appear in this version at all. There is no telling whether this small portion of text was missed by the translator or cut by an editor, but in either case the omission does change the impact of that paragraph.
Moving on to Japan, Ken Nobuhara’s translation describes the smell of the creature using words that mean “poisonous” and “disgusting,” while Kazuko Morita uses the fairly common term “akushū” (bad smell) and adds the idiom “hana ga magaru” to indicate a smell so bad it causes one’s nose to bend. Neither of the Japanese translators chose to employ any especially exotic words to translate the word “mephitic” but they managed to get across the idea of the creature’s bad odor nonetheless.
On that note, I’ll wrap up this very brief glimpse at how translators have interpreted “The Terror of Blue John Gap” for readers who share their language and culture. It would be helpful to hear from anyone who knows of other translations or can comment further on what has been covered here. For now, even a couple of examples serve to show how the process can lead to a simple, direct translation in some cases, and to some slight or substantial shifts in meaning in others.
WHO IS PEGGY?
Peggy MacFarlane is a full-time librarian, an occasional translator, and a lifelong linguaphile. She first became involved in the world of Arthur Conan Doyle and Sherlock Holmes during a thirteen-year stint working as the curator of Toronto Public Library’s Arthur Conan Doyle Collection.