Chekhov’s Mistess

Op Vertaling

How Not to Be Lost in Translation

In the second volume of Proust’s In Search of Lost Time there is a phrase that goes:

“Life is strewn with these miracles for which people who love can only hope.”

That quote is Scott Moncrief’s English translation (as subsequently revised by a host of others). The same phrase in the James Grieve 2002 translation is:

“Such miracles lie in wait for the lover, who may expect one at any time.”

As a reader, I’m torn. I imagine you’ll agree that the first is a prettier phrase and the second a bit stilted, yet the Grieve translation is supposedly more true to the original. Although that assertion may be arguable, I would take veracity over beauty when it comes to translation.

Moncrief famously translated the title of the famous novel as “Remembrance of Things Past” from Shakespeare’s sonnet number 30 – When to the sessions of sweet silent thought / I summon up remembrance of things past.. – certainly beautiful, but not Proust’s words which are widely accepted to be translated as “In Search of Lost Time.” I think this is telling as to what a reader of the vast body of non-English literature is up against.

Translation is a recurrent presence in the life of an avid reader and even the accomplished polyglot probably has to put himself into the hands of a translator at some point. Although you could spend a lifetime without exhausting yourself of great literature in English (pardon the centricism for my readers in Katmandu), you would thus eliminate the works of Dante, Eco and Calvino in Italian, Stendhal, Proust and Flaubert in French, Goethe, Mann and Kafka in German, Cervantes, Borges and Garcia Marquez in Spanish, Murakami in Japanese, Tolstoy and Bulgakov in Russian, the Bible in Hebrew, Aramaic and Greek (even those that read the Latin were reading a translation), but to name a few examples.

I first confronted my linguistic limitations before delving into Homer, when I read an essay to the effect that for such a work, one really should read it in Greek. I was naively daunted by this opinion, but the thought of taking a decade to learn Greek well enough to do my “own” translation led me to override my fears and accept another’s interpretation for the sake of not missing out on the works that in many ways began the conversation we call literature.

From there I became aware that many translators have weighed in over the years with their own interpretations. For Homer that list includes such illustrious names as Chapman, Pope, Dryden, and Fitzgerald, all bringing their own style and contemporary concerns to the text, just as the King James bible was a product of its time and place (some say that Shakespeare had a hand in it). In the introduction to The Oxford Book of Classical Verse (which offers a fascinating compendium of translation efforts), a translator of Virgil likens his work to that of an “alchemist” and says it is like “a transfusion in which two spirits had to meet and mingle, if the old was to survive.”

This is true mostly for older works, particularly because Greek and Latin are no longer part of America’s mainstream education, but I think that we have to be aware of the alchemy that goes into a translation of even a modern text where we are only offered one interpretation. In an excellent essay on the site Words Without Borders, Lawrence Venuti, the author of The Translator’s Invisibility writes

The foreign language is the first thing to go, the very sound and order of the words, and along with them all the resonance and allusiveness that they carry for the native reader. Simultaneously, merely by choosing words from another language, the translator adds an entirely new set of resonances and allusions designed to imitate the foreign text while making it comprehensible to a culturally different reader. These additional meanings may occasionally result from an actual insertion for clarity. But they in fact inhere in every choice that the translator makes, even when the translation sticks closely to the foreign words and conforms to current dictionary definitions. The translator must somehow control the unavoidable release of meanings that work only in the translating language. Apart from threatening to derail the project of imitation, these meanings always risk transforming what is foreign into something too familiar or simply irrelevant. The loss in translation remains invisible to any reader who doesn’t undertake a careful comparison to the foreign text—i.e., most of us. The gain is everywhere apparent, although only if the reader looks.

Outside of comparing the original to the interpretation, Venuti recommends, as a starting point, reading the translator’s introduction and a host of other rules that will not only make reading translation wothwhile, but increase the pleasures of reading through perceiving the differences in language and culture.

One approach to enhancing your appreciation of translation is to try it yourself. Perhaps the most illuminative book in this regard is Le Ton beau de Marot: In Praise of the Music of Language by Douglas Hofstadtler.

Instead of tackling the topic with erudite essays, which I am sure he is capable of, Hofstadter affectionately tells his own story of translating a French poem by Clement Marot. Then, after arming you the reader with the requisite knowledge, challenges you to translate the poem on your own and only afterwards read the interpretations that others have thrown into this veritable orgy of French-English decoding of rhythm and meaning. After reading this book you will be conscious of the challenges a translator faces and carry that insight with you into everything you read.

Similarly, William H. Gass shines light on Rilke’s Duino Elegies in his homage to both Rilke and the art of translation in Reading Rilke: Reflections on the Problems of Translation

Gass says, in what could be applied to translation:

As the Elegies argue; the beauty of perfection, when we are granted the doubtful good fortune to grasp it, announces the reappearance of our fearful conviction that we are, in both the soul and the body of our being, so much less.

But beyond trying to capture the essence of translation or appreciating its difficulties, we can also arm ourselves with information. Peter France, Professor Emeritus at the University of Edinburgh has edited the prodigious Oxford Guide to Literature in English Translation:

This book has several dimensions. It begins by addressing the theory of translation with a series of 17 scholarly essays on, for example, “The Limits of Translation,” “Translation in North America” or various text types such as poetry and sacred texts. If this is too much depth, you can gain quite a bit just by reading the translation history of anything from 20th century Russian poetry to ancient Mesopotamian literature. For example, the entry on the Egyptian writer Naguib Mahfouz (1988 Nobel Prize) follows this line from a broad discussion of the author to idiosyncrasies of individual words:

…Though his early works are characterized by realism and attention to detail with Cairo urban life as the focus, more recently Mahfouz’s prose style has looked back to the traditional narrative modes of Arabic and its classical literary tradition, rather than to the European models which he had previously used and adapted…

…Mahfouz’s use of standard Arabic in his dialogues is a characteristic feature of his style, and this facilitates the task of the translator, the handling of dialect being notoriously complex in translation…

…The English translations of Mahfouz’s work vary not so much in terms of ‘quality’ as in the degree of ‘foreignization’ or ‘domestication’…

…In the following passage, Catherine Cobham uses both neutralization and foreignization. A generic term, cart is given as the equivalent of the more colloquial Arabic Karu whilst in another instance ta’ miya is kept in the English text…

Before I found this book I spent a lot of time flipping through texts trying to figure out which I liked best. While the Guide won’t completely replace that task, its a great start and interesting as well. It puts various translations into context of their time and place and offers a concise publication history that is fascinating in its own right.

The suggestions above are only a beginning, for the topic is broad, but I think we are better off for trying to engage our translations instead of having them merely handed to us. Intuitively, we can guess that there are a great number of books out there that we don’t get to see because they go untranslated. Venuti points out that only 2-4% of the annual book output in the US and UK is translated. That may not seem to be a problem with all the books that are published here, but imagine a world without some of the great pieces of literature from other languages and cultures. Robert Kelly says in a Pen America essay, “Take the poetry away from Dante and you have a quaint Fodor’s Guide to Purgatory…” I say, take the Dante from the English speaking world and you have a literature stuck in Purgatory.

p.s. Everyone knows, of course, that “Op Vertaling” is Dutch for “On Translation.” At least that’s what my fairly inept Systran (web-based) translator says.

Read widely, think well, and write often.

comments

That Oxford book on Translations sounds interesting, thanks for the rec, Bud. You may find Harry Mathews’ essays on translation worth a read, I posted on them here: http://www.madinkbeard.com/mt/archives/000059.html

    – derik (08/11  at  09:01 AM)

Very interesting post. In non-Systran Dutch, though, “On translation” is usually translated as “Over de vertaling” or “Over vertalingen"…

    – wolf maertens (08/13  at  03:01 AM)

Ah, reminds me of James Merrill’s poem Lost In Translation:

But nothing’s lost. Or else: all is translation

And every bit of us is lost in it

(Or found - I wonder through the ruin of S

Now and then, wondering at the peacefulness)

And in that loss a self-effacing tree,

Color of context, imperceptibly

Rustling with its angel, turns the waste

To shade and fiber, milk and memory.

    – Ll (08/14  at  10:04 AM)

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About this Post

• Posted by: Bud Parr
• Date: August 09, 2004
• Filed Under:
  Wise Men Fish Here: Literature

Tags: William H. Gass

• Comments:3
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