The Art and Wisdom of Translation
A word in any language is rich with cultural meaning and the more we read of other lives even in translation the more we enrich our own life and vocabulary.
Hello there! Today, I’m going to let off a bit of steam – so bear with me please! Last weekend a copy of a respected local newspaper came into my hands. I don’t ‘take it’ as my grandfather might have said, because it’s bad for my blood pressure. However, in the interests of keeping up with I’m not sure what exactly I browsed its pages, beginning, as usual, with the book reviews. Big mistake!
Not only did the headlines not fit their designated columns resulting in an alphabet soup but one page out of the ten in the ‘Book Reviews’ section was dedicated to ‘Translated Fiction’. Here, a single reviewer covered six works translated from German, Japanese, Italian, French, Dutch and Icelandic. The novels reviewed had nothing in common. The reviewer praised some of the translations – fair play to him if he is fluent in the six languages represented – but it’s more likely that he was referring to their readability in English. The page was illustrated by a dull photo of a derelict shed in a woodland clearing. An image that suggests nothing to see here.[1]
By coincidence I had just popped up from a research rabbit hole where I had been pursuing the playwright and politician, R. B. Sheridan (1751-1816), an operatic version of whose play The Critic will be staged at the Wexford Festival Opera this year. The libretto by L.Cairns James is in English, the music by Charles Villiers Stanford. English-speaking opera-goers prefer their operas to be sung in the Romance languages, or German so The Critic is a less popular choice. Among the many postures that Sheridan lampoons in his original play is this affection, or affectation.
Act I is set in the home of Lord and Lady Dangle, he an influential theatre critic, she a political observer. (I confess my affinity with Lord D who laments the absence of theatre news in his morning paper.) When a family of Italian singers calls seeking his favour, the dialogue becomes a macaronic interplay of languages as the interpreter renders their words in French, insisting that it is English, leaving the Dangles bamboozled.
The rubric ‘Translated Fiction’ does not of course, apply to popular translated novels such as the Stieg Larsson Millennium series, ‘Scandi noir’ in general, or Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan quartet. It implies instead that the books reviewed belong in the graveyard called ‘literary fiction’. Perhaps the editor who chose the illustration for the combi-review had read Walter Benjamin (1892-1940) on ‘The Task of the Translator’ (1923):
Unlike a work of literature, translation does not find itself in the center of the language forest but on the outside facing the wooded ridge; it calls into it without entering, aiming at that single spot where the echo is able to give, in its own language, the reverberation of the work in the alien one.
(Trans. Harry Zohn)
The question is what do we want from a translation: a story, information or the full experience of the original. The last is impossible, the first two feasible, within certain limits, but don’t we want something more? A certain ‘je ne sais quoi’? When Scott Moncrieff published his translation of Proust’s In Search of Lost Time (the literal translation of the French original) he called it Remembrance of Things Past invoking Shakespeare’s sonnet 30. His choice cast a pall of mournful nostalgia over the book which became a classic in English while seen by some as betraying the original. Conversely that title brought Shakespeare into the ambit of queer literature.
Scott Moncrieff’s approach would fall into Vladimir Nabokov’s (1899-1977) third category of crimes in translation:
The third, and worst, degree of turpitude is reached when a masterpiece is planished and patted into such a shape, vilely beautified in such a fashion as to conform to the notions and prejudices of a given public. This is a crime, to be punished by the stocks as plagiarists were in the shoebuckle days.
(‘The Art of Translation’, 1941)
For Nabokov, who wrote in Russian and English, the perfect translator must possess an equal talent with that of the original author, and be intimately familiar with the first author’s culture and mores, as well as their language. He cites Baudelaire as the perfect match for Poe.
His own prose translation of Pushkin’s (1799-1837) verse novel Eugene Onegin (1833) took almost 15 years to complete, caused a rift with his good friend Edmund Wilson, and continued to preoccupy him into the 1970s. He annotated almost every word, drawing out the full implications of its context and history, until it became a vivid demonstration of the impossibility of literal translation. (Incidentally, one of the novels ‘reviewed’ in the page described above is published by Pushkin Press whose list includes many writers in translation.)
While Nabokov’s Onegin may appear to be a redundant exercise it is also a fascinating one because it opens the door to the patterns of thought imprinted in a language. Close study of a ‘foreign’ language is like discovering new paths on a map that lead to an unexpected horizon. Although I learnt Irish in school, it being compulsory, I speak better French, chiefly because the French books on the curriculum were more interesting than the Irish ones. There was also the question of practical application. Yet I know that the Irish language has left its trace in the way I speak English, and presumably therefore in the way I think.
I have my grandfather’s precious copy of Dinneen’s Irish-English Dictionary, which the Irish language poet, Cathal Ó Searcaigh, describes as a definition of civilisation. The odd time that I consult it I find myself riveted by the richness of the language and the many shades of meaning contained in one word. Take this:
Roithleán: anything round or revolving, a wheel, pulley, or roller, a disk, ring or wheel-band, a spinning-wheel, a spindle-whorl, the knee-pan, a riddle or sieve, a head-pad of cloth etc. used for carrying burdens, a whirl, a megrim, confusion or mêlée; one who rushes or fusses, a voluble talker, a “whirlwind”; a large roaring fire . . .
A whole world is contained in the word and the translation has a lyrical lilt in itself. To be sure context is all when it comes to choosing a correlative in the target language but for the native speaker a host of associations can arrive in one word. While a translation may never reproduce that amplitude even as the translator brings their cultural, and personal, load to bear on the text, he or she enters into a dialogue with the text and brings something new into their own language.
Thus, the works we regard as foundational to our culture, Greek and Roman epics have come to most of us in translation, and they continue to beguile us in recent novels by Pat Barker, Madeline Miller and Ferdia Lennon. The healthy interchange of languages also brings new forms into our libraries, the sonnet was an Italian invention and haiku and haibun originate in Japan.
Without translations our language would be the poorer and our imagination grow dull. In reading a translation we are ourselves translated and translocated, and close the book refreshed by a new perspective. Whether it’s Don Quixote or The Little Prince, Wallander or Werther, the Bhagavad Gita or Les Miserables, let’s give it up for works in translation and their translators, and give each book the attention it deserves, instead of relegating it to a catch-all pigeon hole to languish and gather dust.
[1] All of these arguments can also, and have been, made about the treatment of poetry in the newspaper review columns.
How do you feel about reading translations? And which are your favourites?
My thought exactly. Translations enrich our reading and writing so much they should be right up there with all the other books on our 'bestseller' lists!
Much better Noirin and closer to the original!