Whats the best translation of Against Nature by Huysmans (who's also one of Houellebecq's influences btw), Yea Forums?

This. The fact that each subsequent translation looks dumbed down more and more doesn't say anything good.

wtf is ransacking bros sounds like something a pirate would do

maulden gets it all right, even the punctuation (the ; which baldick ignored).

Margaret Maulden’s translation of Huysmans’s "bible of the Decadents", A rebours, is clearly intended to compete with the only other major currently version, that by Robert Baldick, published in the Penguin Classics series. Baldick may have been the doyen of English-speaking Huysmans scholars, and his ground-breaking translation may have set new standards for an author who is probably the least translated — and the least well translated — of the major writers of the period, but there are many reasons for preferring Maulden’s attractively produced edition, not least among them being the critical apparatus that surrounds the text itself. Along with Nicholas White’s introduction and thirty pages of notes, the book also includes Huysmans’s own preface, written twenty years after the novel’s appearance in 1884, and a useful bibliography. By contrast, the unannotated Penguin edition, which has not been revised since its first publication in 1959, is beginning to look a little threadbare.

But it is not just the critical apparatus that gives Maulden the edge, her translation is better, too. As White points out in his introduction, A rebours "offers very particular challenges" to the translator, not only is the text littered with neologisms, archaisms and specialised words, its "highly mannered prose", in which clauses and sub-clauses are often piled up one after the other, is difficult to render into coherent English. Even Baldick, who tried at least to retain Huysmans’s broad vocabulary, tended to smooth out his sentence constructions. The result was something that was easier to read, but which did not truly reflect Huysmans’s style. Maulden reverts back to Huysmans’s idiosyncratic sentence constructions, giving her text a flavour of the intricacies and circumlocutions of the original. Maulden also successfully captures Huysmans’s ironic tone: for all its having been taken up so enthusiastically by the Decadents, A rebours is a very funny book, which at times seems to parody the decadence it so memorably portrays.

This is an advertisement for Maulden's translation. Baldick's vocabulary remains truer to the original, and while he does "smooth out his sentence constructions" so too does Maulden. That said, Maulden is definitely the second best choice.

>Baldick's vocabulary remains truer to the original

>snobby words
This. Phonosemantic approximation matters; each of those translations limits itself needlessly on the grammar side -- shuffling a card deck doesn't transform it into tarot.

>is difficult to render into coherent English. Even Baldick, who tried at least to retain Huysmans’s broad vocabulary, tended to smooth out his sentence constructions.
It is difficult to find solutions beyond the horizon of your creative competency, absolutely. Notice how all of them clone "de sa maison de Fontenay." This is recapitulated again and again over the entire passage. The accumulation of these quickly narrows the window of what you're able to render (good for the nonentity translator, bad inabsolute terms.) We are paraplegics on the shoulders of giants drinking our own piss in the rain.

The Penguin Classics edition does contain notes, though not a whole lot, and Huysmans' preface as well (and also some contemporary responses to and reviews of the book)

>Phonosemantic approximation matters
Except English is different to French. Perambulating is nowhere near as common as déambuler in French. Translation is more than just larping. In fact I'm an ESL and I never heard of it until today

>reading translations made by women

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You wouldn't have noticed had I not included the "Margaret" in her name there. Not every woman translator is fucking Emily Wilson. This was done in the 90s.