What's in a Title?

(Warning: the following post discusses the first of Henning Mankell's Kurt Wallander novels, and as such contains spoilers).

The translation of literature from one language to another is a fascinating subject, one that has been extensively discussed throughout the ages. Without getting into the ins and outs right now, the question over whether or not a translator can ever truly capture the original author's intent - or whether or not they can avoid injecting their own authorial voice - is one that may never be satisfactorily answered.

Translation can be tricky and divisive, having an effect on everything from the title on up. Alain-Fournier's superb Le Grand Meaulnes has been translated many times in English, with many different titles, amongst them The Lost Estate, The Lost Domain, The Wanderer, and The Magnificent Meaulnes; due to the difficulties involved in accurately capturing the intent of the original French, some translators have opted to simply retain the original French when publishing English-language versions. More famously, there is Marcel Proust's A la recherche du temps perdu, which has been presented as Remembrance of Things Past and In Search of Lost Time, with neither considered satisfactory by some scholars. And in this country only one of Stieg Larsson's Millenium novels has been published with a title that accurately reflects the original Swedish (which is a shame: the final part of the trilogy would have been called something very close to "The Castle Made Of Air That Was Blown Up," whereas the first part would have been aptly named "Men Who Hate Women").

The latter example is of particular interest, given that it involves the original title being tweaked to suit a different audience/to make more sense in a different language. The English title of Henning Mankell's first Kurt Wallander novel is Faceless Killers or (translated from the original Swedish) "murderers without faces." And in the end, the killers do indeed turn out to be "faceless," in that they were unknown to the victims. Which comes as a major surprise, because a) I didn't imagine for one minute that the title of the book would so comprehensively give away the ending (in crime fiction terms, it's roughly the equivalent of calling your novel The Butler Did It); and b) Wallander spends almost the entirety of the investigation focusing on Swedish nationals, despite the fact that before death, one of the victims repeats the word "foreign" several times.

If we take it as read that narrative convention dictates that you don't give away the ending at the start of the tale, and acknowledge that in no way is Faceless Killers intended to subvert this convention, then it seems a strange move. Throughout the novel, the reader is expecting the clue contained within the title and the last word to become clear, to be explained in a clever or even oblique fashion that ultimately makes perfect sense. But there's no deception, no sleight of hand; the title is accurate, and "foreign" is spoken unambiguously. The upshot of this is that Wallander wastes months of his time chasing red herrings because he was convinced that the level of brutality inflicted on the victims suggested that the murderers knew them, and were exacting some kind of revenge. One could argue that his failure to accept any other hypothesis was irresponsible, and possibly even negligible, seeing as how the killers could have struck again (and indeed, put in the groundwork in an attempt to do so). One could even argue that the author cheats, giving the game away early doors and then spending the bulk of the novel insisting that all is not as it seems, when the opposite turns out to be true.

In many ways, Mankell should be applauded for telling an unconventional tale, one where the guilty party isn't an individual the reader is introduced to who turns out to have something to hide; the effect is that the story seems more grounded in real life. But as a crime fiction fan, I don't want the solution to be staring me in the face from the cover of the book. Faceless Killers would have been much more successful with an evocative title rather than a descriptive one. Sometimes, even faithful translation can be problematic.