Another famous original title has been traditionally rendered in English as The Ingenious Gentleman Don Quixote de La Mancha. That’s how my trusty and reliable Modern Library translation, by Samuel Putnam, puts it on the title page. However, in the introduction, Putnam himself points out that the word “ingenious” is actually a mistranslation of the Spanish ingenioso - a word which would be better rendered as “imaginative” or “visionary.” He allows “ingenious” to stand as a nod to tradition, because by now, it has “embedded itself in our consciousness.”
There are some notable examples of this sentiment in translations of Russian literature. The proper title of Ivan Turgenev’s most famous novel, Fathers and Sons, is actually Fathers and Children (Отцы и дети / Ottsy i deti). One can argue that the change is not a very substantive one, as the conflict in the book is mainly one between generations of men. So the change in the title may be defensible on contextual grounds.
Another case from the same place and time is the novel that Fyodor Dostoevsky called Бесы / Besy, which means “devils” or “demons.” The novel’s first English translator, Constance Garnett, called it The Possessed. This shades the meaning in an interesting way: it puts the focus on the characters in the book, who are not themselves demons, but are being influenced and directed by them – or more specifically, by alien ideas that are experienced as demonic. The idea of possession is suggested by the novel’s epigraphs, one from Pushkin and the other from the Gospel of Luke, which deal with demonic forces and possession. Which translation you prefer probably depends on how you view the characters: are they primarily independent actors, or are they mainly being driven by alien forces?
As Putnam implies, early translators have the power to fix a title in the minds of readers thanks to tradition and the force of habit. In the 1990s, Malcolm Pasley published a translation of Kafka’s Die Verwandlung called The Transformation. This alternate title doesn’t seem to have caught on; every time I hear someone refer to the story, it’s by the older title The Metamorphosis, bestowed on it long ago by Edwin and Willa Muir.
Translations can become yet more creative in the elusive quest to capture the essence of a title. A good example is Rolfe Humphries’ translation of the great philosophical poem by Lucretius known in Latin as De Rerum Natura. Most translators have rendered this literally as On the Nature of Things (or something like that), but Humphries called it The Way Things Are. In the introduction, he says his title is “simple, forthright, insistent, peremptory.” He apparently viewed Lucretius as a no-nonsense guy who gave it to you straight, without any fluff or beating around the bush.
More recently, Wim Wenders’ mystical, romantic film about angels watching over humanity in 1980s Berlin, which is known in German as Der Himmel über Berlin, came out in English as Wings of Desire. A literal translation of the title would have lost an essential double meaning in the German, since Himmel means both “sky” and “heaven.” In a film about angels, you need both meanings. In any case, I think the English title better captures the atmosphere of the film.
Which brings me to a film that needed a better translation than it got. Francois Truffaut’s 1959 classic Les Quatre Cents Coups is still called The 400 Blows in English, even though the English title is essentially meaningless. In French, the expression faire les quatre cents coups means to “go wild,” “raise hell,” and other things in that vein. Before seeing the film, early Anglophone viewers apparently thought it was about corporal punishment. Despite the lame translation, the title has “embedded itself in our consciousness,” as Samuel Putnam would have put it.