And when I attend a live piano recital, I am always pleased as punch when the performer, instead of remaining 100 percent mute for the entirety of their sonic performance (quite an irony, when you think about it), first turns toward the audience, opens their mouth, and actually speaks to us, letting down their guard and telling us about the pieces they are about to perform, unveiling for us some of their humanity, and giving us a very special light in which to consider what we are about to hear. I am always grateful for such a verbal “performance”; in fact, I find it to be disarming. For me, at least, it makes the performer, who as a virtuoso musician is so incredibly skilled that at times they seem to belong to a different species from us mere listeners, seem friendly and approachable rather than alien and remote.
Lang A to Lang B — Big Deal!
AND thus I’d like to think that my writing of this essay is not an act of hubris but merely a modest personal attempt to spur thoughtful people to reflect more deeply than perhaps they have on the subtle art of translation. I chose to make this attempt because in the course of doing this translation, and especially in the act of revising and polishing it, I myself was forced to confront very intimately, almost brutally, the question of what on earth I was doing. I became more and more aware of just how strange, even paradoxical, it was to use my native language — and, more specifically, my own deeply personal style of crafting, manipulating, and savoring phrases in my native language — to rewrite someone else’s book. As translation’s paradoxes started to haunt my thoughts ever more intensely, I felt a growing desire to make them as vivid as I could for other people.
I believe that most well-educated people, perhaps especially in my native land, the United States, have an unconscious image of translation as a quite straightforward, rule-driven act carried out nearly mechanically by individuals who for one reason or another simply happen to be bilingual. Indeed, to be quite frank, I myself had just this impression for shockingly many years. In my teens and twenties, the sight of a book sitting on someone’s shelf with words on its spine that said “The Trial / Franz Kafka” or “Remembrance of Things Past / Marcel Proust” or “Crime and Punishment / Fyodor Dostoevsky” never once struck me as paradoxical, miraculous, or even interesting in the least. It seemed no more surprising that such books could move from one language to another than that I myself could move from the town of Palo Alto to other towns, like Prague or Paris or Petersburg.
Sure, it had taken some drudge a lot of work and time, but that was all. So they took all those sentences in language A and put them into language B… Big deal! I remember that even when I thought about translating wordplay and other tricky linguistic structures, my first reaction was that anybody bilingual could do it, or at least anybody bilingual with a modicum of wit.
Then a couple of decades passed and one day, on a lark, I sent out a challenge to many friends and colleagues to translate a charming and intricate miniature poem by the sixteenth-century French poet Clément Marot. I received many responses, and they ranged incredibly in quality, with perfectly bilingual people often stumbling terribly and coming out with what struck me as atrocious products, and conversely, non-fluent speakers of either the source or target language coming up on occasion with truly brilliant solutions. As I came to see how few people, whether bilingual or not, could carry out such tasks at all well, my respect for translators of literary works in which form and content are intricately fused shot up enormously. And yet, I must once again confess that there remained in my mind a kind of disinterest in the act of translation of “ordinary” literature, a lack of respect for “ordinary” translators. They still felt just like airplanes carrying passengers from one city to another — most impressive but nonetheless perfectly mechanical.
This reminds me of a period in my life when I was filled with admiration for the jazzy kinds of typefaces designed mainly for advertising (“display faces”) but I found so-called “book faces”, such as Baskerville, the typeface that you are now reading, utterly pedestrian. I was totally convinced that the former were rife with creative spark while the latter were devoid of it. But one day, on a friend’s suggestion, I took a more careful look at Baskerville and began to notice the grace of its curves and the unexpected number of subtle decisions that had gone into its design:
Note, for example, the elegant way the loop of the “a” hits the vertical diagonally, or the graceful unclosed lower swirl of the “g”, or the gentle curves of the upper serifs of the “b”, “d”, “i”, “j”, and others, or the cute little “droplet” capping the curves of the “a”, “c”, “f ”, “j”, and others, and on and on.
Needless to say, the scales fell from my eyes shortly thereafter. I came to realize that coming up with an excellent book face takes just as much of an artistic eye and a creative mind as coming up with an excellent display face. The skills in these two forms of design are not the same, but in neither art form are they smaller or less worthy of respect.
At some point in my life, analogous scales fell from my eyes and I came to realize how deeply artistic, even creative, is the act of translating “ordinary” works of literature — “mere” novels, so to speak. The strange thing is, though, that I can still quite easily slip back into the mindless mindset of thinking of the translation of “ordinary prose” as being a mundane, spark-less act, and since I myself am so susceptible to this illusion, I find it easy to imagine that many other people, perhaps most, also have an unconscious presumption that what translators do, especially translators of “mere prose”, is no big deal. To do my bit to combat this widespread but subterranean prejudice, using this particular novel as my main source of examples, is the main reason that I am writing this essay. I hope that is not seen as hubris.
Four Pleasantly Pervasive Paradoxes
IF THE act of translating novels is in fact riddled through and through by paradoxes, then what are these paradoxes? Here I’ll give a short list to get the idea across in broad brushstrokes, and then in what follows, we will see these paradoxes crop up over and over again.
The Wrong-Tongue Paradox: How can Dante Alighieri have written a book in English, a language that didn’t even exist when he was alive, or William Shakespeare a set of sonnets in Russian, when he knew not a word of that language? Or else take these “quotes” by three illustrious names from antiquity:
Euripides: “Onwetendheid van tegenslagen is een duidelijk winstpunt.” Plutarch: “Wind je over de feiten niet op, ze hebben schijt aan de kwaaie kop.” Confucius: “Laat de zon geen tranen drogen die je kunt wegvegen uit het oog van degene die lijdt.”
Here are three famous gents of yore, all speaking impecccable modern Dutch (and Plutarch, that sly old imp, is even rhyming!). I found these “quotes” all on a Web site, quote marks and all. Is this not crazy? Well, maybe or maybe not, but quite obviously the claim of authorship is profoundly muddied up by the act of changing from one language to another.
The Wrong-Style Paradox: Since writing styles are every bit as different as are faces or fingerprints, how can Person B rewrite Author A’s book from top to toe and then not cringe in claiming that the resulting sequence of words is still “by Author A”? This paradox, please note, need not involve language-jumping; just think of Person B paraphrasing an essay by Author A while keeping the language fixed. I certainly know that when essays of mine are given to others to copy-edit or shorten, modified sentences often stand out like a sore thumb, at least to my eye. “I could never have written such a thing in a million years!”, I’ll exclaim indignantly. And yet B, my well-meaning paraphraser, thought it said exactly the same thing as what I’d written (or even said it better!). Replacing one person’s literary style by another’s is clearly a deep violation of authorship, and yet what alternative is there, if translation is to be carried out at all?
The Wrong-Place Paradox: When characters in a story speak, the language they use is informal and colloquial, so their lines are inevitably peppered with colorful words and idioms that come from the street
s of their land and the history of their people. And any other people has a different history, different traditions, and scads of different colorful ways of expressing itself. Therefore, when idioms of culture B are placed in the mouths of individuals from culture A, the result is incoherent. And yet as readers, we are expected to skip right over that — and the curious thing is that we usually do! The incoherence passes invisibly right through our filters, and we often see nothing wrong at all. But behind the scenes, the authenticity of the geographical and temporal setting of a story is constantly being threatened by the most mundane acts of translation — already somewhat in the narrative passages, but especially in the characters’ conversations.
The Don’t-Trust-the-Text Paradox: What an author really means is often not transmitted by their words alone. Indeed, the act of reading is a process of converting words into ideas and then of largely (though not totally) forgetting the words involved. As readers-in-depth, translators particularly have to respect ideas more than words (although I suspect the public generally thinks it is the reverse). Of course it is the words on the page that lead one to the ideas, but paradoxically, keeping one’s trust in the words after one has found the ideas that they stand for amounts to a knee-jerk preference for letter over spirit, and this Literality Trap amounts to a death sentence for high-quality translation.
I hope my paradoxes strike you as plausible, intriguing, and provocative, even if here they’ve been given as blurry generalities sans context. Since I always prefer concrete examples to abstract generalities, in the rest of this essay I will discuss these paradoxes in down-to-earth ways, mostly though not wholly in the context of my translation of La Chamade into my own brand of English.
Authors at the Mercy of Translators
WHEN my son Danny was a senior in high school, he had to write an essay on a short story by Gabriel García Márquez. The story was handed out to his class in a photocopy in English, and on those sheets, no mention was made of the work’s country of origin, let alone its original language, the name of the translator, or the fact that some of the words on some of the pages perhaps had something to do with someone other than the named author. Now I didn’t know his teacher personally, so I have no idea whether she gave any thought to the quality of the translation, or whether she had considered that a different translation might give a radically different impression of the work or the author, but in any case, I suspect that such notions never crossed any of her students’ minds. It certainly wouldn’t have crossed mine at that age, even though I spoke two languages well (English and French) and was passionately fascinated by language in general.
At some point around the year 1970, when I was in graduate school, I heard an interview on the radio with Alexander Solzhenitsyn about his book A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, which takes place in a Siberian work camp, and I was so impressed with Solzhenitsyn’s forceful character and powerful ideas that I went right out to buy it. Of course, “it” was not the original work in Russian, but “its translation” into English (as if there could self-evidently only be one such). So… some drudge had taken all those sentences in language A and had put them into language B — big deal!
I didn’t give this matter a moment’s thought but simply purchased a paperback copy that I found in some random bookstore and went home to read it. Well, it didn’t take long before I started to squirm. To my confusion, the book was filled with down-home American idioms, American swear words, and American slang, so much so that to my ears, it sounded exactly like it was taking place in a California prison! The more I read, the more I was jarred, and pretty soon I could take it no longer. This book was not at all like the book I had hoped to read, and so, extremely disappointed, I shelved it forever.
It took two more decades before I encountered a different translation of A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. The one I had purchased twenty years earlier turned out not to be “the” English translation; rather, there were several such — and they varied enormously in style and feel. The troubling pervasiveness of American slang was a feature only of that first version I had picked up, and the others were free of that flaw. One, however, erred in a different but unfortunately analogous fashion — it came across as extremely British, and to me, that was just as serious a sin as sounding too American. But there were a couple of translations that seemed to come much closer to the mark, and at least from my point of view they preserved and conveyed much of the essential Russianness of this work. Thus, with a sigh of relief, I was able to read Solzhenitsyn’s novel without feeling it had been stripped of much of its Russianness and made less alien in order to be more acceptable to American palates, a bit like Taco Bell’s diluted Mexican fare.
The Localized Nature of Words
WHAT discombobulated me in my first encounter with Ivan Denisovich was that the novel had been more than translated; it had also been transculturated halfway around the world. This was my first exposure to the Wrong-Place Paradox. But had the translators (it was done by two people working together) actually set out to subtract Russianness from the novel? Was their act of transculturation deliberate and conscious? I didn’t ask myself this question at the time. As I think about it now, however, the issue seems very subtle.
Whenever one tries to express anything, whether in speech or in writing, whether in creating an original work of art or “merely” in crafting a fine translation, one’s brain is a boiling cauldron of largely instinctive and unconscious mental processes that are simultaneously seeking appropriate grammatical pathways and appropriate words, as well as longer standard expressions, and as a result of this seething activity, various candidate phrases eventually come bubbling up out of the murk and duke it out, and at the fight’s end the victor gets sent on to the “output channel” (the vocal cords, the typing fingertips, whatever). The degree to which one’s verbal output winds up imbued with the unique flavor of a specific culture is an unplanned, emergent outcome of this frenzied competition. The many facets of who you are, of your current mood, and of the context in which you currently find yourself all constitute conscious or unconscious pressures that collectively determine what will come out of your cauldron. But the target language itself is the landscape in which this battle takes place.
Any language has a very large number of words and phrases that feel essentially timeless and placeless, for what they denote is simply part and parcel of the eternal, universal human condition. For example, here are a few eternal, universal words in English:and, but, with, maybe, food, drink, sun, old, daughter, sand, shut, pith, baby, mood, pink, run, cold, water.
Of course the list of timeless-sounding expressions denoting human universals includes untold thousands of compound words and longish stock phrases, such as these few:sailboat, schoolhouse, lighthearted, bittersweet, remarry, oversleep, notwithstanding, nevertheless, give up, make do, shove off, eat out, up early, bad luck, rotten apple, sweet victory, play favorites, get away with it, never again, all of a sudden, most of the time, out of control, on the other hand, as far as the eye can see, and so forth and so on…
— and so forth and so on, ad infinitum (or nearly infinitum). Every language on earth is filled to the brim with such “culture-free”, “universal”, “unflavored” expressions.
On the other hand, every human language also has just as many deeply “flavored” or “localized” words and phrases that powerfully exude a particular era or cultural setting. English, for example, has these few, among untold myriads of others:gee willikers; yee-haw; shucks; dagnabbit; gonna grab me some grub; buffalo gals; the bee’s knees; take a spin in the flivver; Mom, Dad, Bud, and Sis; before you could say “Jack Robinson”; get off your duff; you betcha; darn right; the real McCoy; and I’m like wow; gag me with a spoon; goy, shmoy; you vant bagels, I got bagels; yo’ motha bad!; all systems go for liftoff; toot my horn; leaner and meaner; smashed to smithereens; knock ’em dead; I kid you not; couch potato; eye candy; that’s a no-no; he’s one cool dude; I’ll just pop off to the loo; blimey; jol
ly good fun; it’s your go!; stiff upper lip, my good man!
I’m sorely tempted (and note that phrase) to try to extend this list forever, but I’ll restrain myself.
Although many of the ideas in this third list are themselves timeless and universal (thus, “gee willikers” simply expresses a kind of naïve surprise, “get off your duff ” expresses impatience or urgency, “that’s a no-no” expresses disapproval or warning, and so on), the expressions are so richly, quaintly flavored that somehow they localize the imagery they evoke, pinning it down to a particular era, place, subculture, or cultural perspective.
Between these two extremes there is a vast spectrum of words and phrases possessing various intermediate degrees of flavor or localization. Needless to say, “degree of flavor” is a very blurry notion, so that given a random phrase, it would be absurd to try to state precisely where it lies along the spectrum, but here are a few sample English phrases that strike me as lying roughly halfway between the ones in the previous two lists:big deal; part and parcel; swan song; smashed to bits; in broad brushstrokes; few and far between; two-timer; make a hit; can’t put my finger on it; the genuine article; frightened to death; a black-and-white matter; what’s up?; you don’t say; duke it out; don’t have the foggiest idea; to my chagrin; hanky-panky; the nitty-gritty; beats me!; the girl next door; have a ball; up in the air; and — last but not least.
It’s self-evident that in any novel, many thousands of “eternal, universal” words and phrases (as in the first two lists above) will appear. Some will occur in the narrator’s descriptions, others in the characters’ dialogues. And then, depending on the subject matter and the author’s style, there may also be hundreds or thousands of mildly or highly localized phrases.