Tag: archipelago books

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Famous Last Lines, as Told by Online Translators

We all know that the robot takeover is imminent. As a test of our future job security under the cold rule of machine, we here at Archipelago Books decided to test the abilities of our robot counterpart: the online translator. Using the programs, we translated from language to language and eventually back to English. The results, we must say, look promising. HAL 9000, I want a corner office and benefits.

We start with Gatsby. (All terrible translations facilitated by the endlessly amusing Bad Translator!)

The Great Gatsby, by F. Scott Fitzgerald

Original text:

“So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”

…8 translations later, Bing gives us

“Thus we have won against current around the back of the private ship. Responsibility.”

From poignant meditation on the impossibility of recreating the past to syntactically vague military report, with an unadorned, “Responsibility” tacked on the end, like a reminder from a stern father. Bing Translator, ya nailed it.

We thought this one would be a layup.

1984, by George Orwell

Original text:

“He loved Big Brother.”

…35 translations later, Bing gives us

“The love brothers.”

We admit that 35 may have been a bit much, but has there ever been a more straightforward sentence? Pronoun, verb, proper noun. Easy. Instead, we get the name of a Canadian Wrestling Hall of Fame Tag Team? Tisk, tisk.

With Nabokov, it almost felt like cheating. This time, courtesy of freetranslation.com.

Lolita, by Vladimir Nabokov

Original text:

“I am thinking of aurochs and angels, the secret of durable pigments, prophetic sonnets, the refuge of art. And this is the only immortality you and I may share, my Lolita. ”

…18 translations later, freetranslation.com gives us

“Long-term overseas art asylum of angels, prophets and calm. If you want to share your Lolita.”

Nope, nope, pretty sure Humbert was not interested in sharing Lolita.

Hey. We see you over there in the corner, TransPerfect translator. You think it’s so funny, why don’t you show us what you can do with Mr. Dickens?

A Tale of Two Cities, by Charles Dickens

Original text:

“It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done; it is a far, far better rest that I go to than I have ever known. ”

…9 translations later, TransPerfect gives us:

“ Odlega holanr fao I j robiem Naprawd odlege Wute iin mn. ”

That’s what I thought. “Odlege Wute iin mn,” indeed.

Fellow translators and publishers thereof, I’m happy to say that the state of our union is strong.

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A translator is…

A translator is a professional schizophrenic, continuously wandering on the edge, risking his sanity in the crashing zone of two languages and two cultures. He is operating in an elevated state of mind, as if in trance––indeed, it is a creative trance, a state of bipolarity, of being at two places simultaneously, moving parallel in two worlds. In this sense, he is an exotic stranger, an itinerant of the ever-growing literary world. Invisibly, condemned to solitude, he enters this atypical state of awareness, becomes a trance-later.

Zoltán Pék
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Least Appropriate Summer Reads from Archipelago

For those who hate gossip and sex and crime and intrigue and dogs as central characters…

For those who can’t stand page-turning plots and to-the-point sentences…

For those who’d rather appreciate a well-bound hardcover than sop up tipsy spills of pre-noon drinks with their airport paperback-cum-cocktail napkin…

We, the ARCH INTERNS, have compiled a list of Archipelago Books titles that will keep your summer full of literary brilliance, along with a wildly inappropriate amount of misery for this fine weather.


1. Chukchi Bible by Yuri Rythkeu

In our least imaginative effort, Chukchi Bible is set somewhere cold. Very cold. Lucky for us, Rythkeu picks up the slack in the imagination department (it’s a day of limited mental productivity from your Arch Interns). Shamans, half-whales, and mothers of the human race included.

2. A Dream in Polar Fog by Yuri Rythkeu

Also Rytkheu. Also cold. Less mysticism, more Dances with Wolves/Pocahontas/Avatar, but better, because we here at Archipelago do not support the essentialization of native cultures. Noble savage, no sir. 

3. Georg Letham: Physician and Murderer by Ernst Weiss

Treatise from a sociopathic murderer-physician, and we decided to put a rat on the cover. 

4. Tranquility by Attila Bartis

Some snippets from the inside cover: “Oedipal nightmare”; “suffocating totalitarian embrace”; “maniacal tyranny”; “a Sartrian hell of hatred, lies and appeasement”; “unrepentantly neurotic.” Best read with multiple umbrella-garnished cocktails whilst lolling on some equatorial beach, a metaphorical counterweight to the 292 pages of misery held between your newly tanned hands. (Michael, Intern 2 of 2, can’t in good conscience actually recommend you read this book this summer). Also, incest.

5. Yalo by Elias Khoury

Decidedly different in themes, tone, and featured artists than that annoying Drake song, “YOLO,” (cringe) Yalo is one tragedy after another until you get to the end, where another tragedy happens, but in a sort of sad-yet-uplifting way, so at least there’s that.

6. My Struggle by Karl Ove Knausgaard

Masculinity and self-loathing and alcoholism in the classic John Cheever/Raymond Carver style, except with a writer who isn’t too insecure to actually use a metaphor. And he’s pretty good at it, too. And did we mention he’s handsome? 

7. Lenz by Georg Buchner

The author died at 23,  and the subject matter is a playwright’s tragic descent into madness. Any questions?

8. Poems (1945-1971) by Miltos Sachtouris

Emma (Arch Intern 1 of 2) likes these poems a lot, which means they are probably well-written but also grotesque and sad and meander along with no semblance of narrative, because these are the sorts of things she reads.

So there you have it. Did I mention we sell these books? And a few others. Buy them here.