Bricolage and the Tangled Bank: Happy Mistranslations of Evolution

I got back home last night to a pleasant surprise: a copy of the new French translation of The Tangled Bank: An Introduction to Evolution. One of the most interesting parts of writing a book is seeing what emerges from the mind of your translator. I've usually had good luck with translators. We'll exchange emails to find a way to capture the spirit of sentences in my books that would make no sense in another language, thanks to the odd figures of speech we use in English. When the book actually arrives, I usually can do little more than hope that it makes sense in Korean or Japanese or Dutch. Once in a while, however, things don't go well, though. I once got a disturbing email from a German reader, who had read the original edition of Parasite Rex and then picked up the German translation. "Believe me, I have never seen something like this before. It is a sin. If you could read it, you would get tears in your eyes." (Fortunately, my American publisher was able to use his email as a cudgel, and got that edition pulped and a new translation published in its place.) This time around, my translator changed some of the wording--of the title no less. But this time, I was very happy with it. It traded one metaphor of evolution for one that's just as profound. For the English title of my book, I adapted a phrase from one of the famous passages in all scientific writing: the end of The Origin of Species.