Chekhov’s Mistess

Pen World Voices Festival of International Literature: Report from the “Global Quixote”

The Global Quixote: Reinventing Cervantes

This piece, mentioned at Chekhov’s Mistress, is a report on the panel discussion on translating Don Quixote as part of Pen America’s ”World Voices Festival of International Literature,” held throughout the week of April 16-22 in New York City. This particular event took place at the Instituto Cervantes and was almost entirely in Spanish.

Unfortunately I completely missed the introductory speech because it took me a while to understand that no one was going to start speaking English any time soon. Two of the panelists, Edith Grossman and Barber van de Pol spoke in English most of the time while everyone else spoke in the common tongue of all, Spanish. I slipped out for headphones early enough and fortunately didn’t miss much else – The headphones, which picked up an interpreter’s voice from a studio in the back, didn’t work very well, so I spent a lot of time balancing my notes against just being able to hear. Any errors in quoted passages below are mine as they are based on those notes. (and isn’t there an irony of going to a discussion on the translating of a novel that is held in the language that it is being translated out of?)

Each person on the panel brought with her or him a rich background in literature and translation making the conversation just as much about the book as it was about the act of translation. The panel of five women and one man included Jean Canavaggio (French Pléiade), Edith Grossman (English), Susanne Lange (German), Aleksandra Mancic (Serbian), Aline Shulman (French), and Barber van de Pol (Dutch). Their bios are available at the Pen site. Most of us at 400 Windmills are reading the Grossman translation, so it was particulary interesting to hear her insights. The conversation was very compelling and I sat rapt for two and a half hours while the passionate Cervantistas spoke about their craft.

The Most Modern of Novels

It’s impossible to have a conversation about translating Don Quixote without bringing up Jorge Louis Borges. His classic story on reinventing Cervantes, “Pierre Menard, Author of Don Quixote” came up more than once and seems to have never been far from the minds of this group of “re-inventors” as they went about their labyrinthine task.

The German translator, Susan Lange said that translating a book with such a long history was like “climbing a mountain,” which had grown with each successive translation. As if translating and translating-the-Quixote were two separate things, most everyone on the panel spoke of the book with reverence and a fear of sorts. Ms. Grossman said that she was filled with “excitement and terror” at the prospect of stepping into an author’s shoes that lived over 400 years ago. However, her fear was quelled she said, by her friend, the Spanish novelist Julian Rios, who commented: “Don’t be afraid. Translate it the way you translate everybody else because he’s the most modern writer we have.”

As each of the panelists spoke, it was clear that many of them felt that Cervante’s modernity was what made Don Quixote such a great novel but also part of what makes it a challenge to translate. One aspect of the Quixote is its many mistakes. A couple of panelists spoke of Thomas Mann’s and Vladimir Nabokov’s commentary on Cervante’s negligence. Nabokov said that “Cervantes… seems to have had alternate phases of lucidity and vagueness, deliberate planning and sloppy vagueness, much as his hero was mad in patches.”

But this was the game that Cervantes played, said some of the panelists (some mentioning scholarship to that effect). Cervantes, in complaining about the translation of his own book as part of the story, allowed for suspicion at least that his errors were deliberate. Ms. Lange said, in a testimony to what we now think of as Borgesian, that with the presence of translators of the book within the book, she would not be surprised If “I appeared in it, like Hitchcock” making a cameo.

Even allowing that Cervantes had no editor (and didn’t even make any money off the book, according to Ms. Grossman), most felt that the its errors were very much a part of the book. Ms. Grossman said that she did not try to clean up the book in any way and left all of the errors as they were, referring to them as a “post-Borgesian” labyrinth of a faulty text based on a faulty translation. One of the panelists finished by paraphrasing Nietzsche as saying “True Masterpieces have a shade of imperfection, like life.”

If nothing else, the characters and language of Don Quixote are what make it great. One of the panelists praised Cervante’s skill, developed as a playwright, in setting up scenes and creating dialogue. That orality of the text adds even another dimension to be considered because mistakes are inherent in speech and the sound of the words becomes even more meaningful.

On The Sound of Language

There was much talk of the difficulties of translating 17th century language for a modern audience. That doesn’t necessarily mean making it “accesible,” but keeping the language from being archaic. For instance, if you translate Cervante’s language into [Cervante’s] contemporary French, the novel would be rendered absurd. Sancho was illiterate and spoke (in Spanish) in a manner as you would expect. However, the French of the time, according to Ms. Shulman, was very literary. To translate Sancho in [Cervante’s] contemporary French would leave Sancho sounding as though he were a professor instead of an illiterate.

This touches on what was perhaps the day’s most insightful comment on the art of translation. Ms. Shulman pointed out that rendering the Quixote into modern language was not so much a problem of lexicon as of rhythm, a translation not into modern language, but into a modern fashion. She didn’t use any words that came into use after 1650, but found herself trying to find a new melody of words. Interestingly, she said Cervantes used very long sentences, which she shortened. Proust comes to mind, of course, and that she addressed right away, saying that Proust and Joyce “introduced themselves in the nooks and crannies of thought” while Cervantes wanted to make sure his readers understood, so he repeated himself, “and, and, and,” leading to sentences stretching for five or more lines. She sought to achieve the same effect, but in the rhythm and time of today.

To put translation into musical terms is, I believe, to capture its essence. Burton Raffel said in the introduction to his English Quixote, “…the very music of Spanish, its syntactical structures, and the thrust and flavour of words, are literally untransportable into any other language.” Rising to that challenge, Ms. Grossman said of her translating work, that she reads it out loud, listening for the effect on her ear rather relying on what her eyes tell her.

The sound of some language is more important than others. The German translator Lange pointed out the difficulties of retaining the “oral nature of proverbs.” Nabokov, in his Lectures on Don Quixote, refuses to even deal with the proverbs scattered throughout the book, saying that “to readers of translations of this Breughelian side of the book is as dead as cold mutton.” Ms. Lange acknowledged that it is impossible to translate them literally, and it is often a very gradual process of creating meaning and retaining other elements, such as rhyme that may exist in proverbs.

Although I didn’t get the exact context of what she was saying, I noted that Ms. Shulman drew upon an Edith Piaf song while translating one particular passage and she used the Orson Welles’ film of Don Quixote for his vision.

Concluding with our valiant litblogger speaking to the translator

The panel as a whole was exemplary and everyone seemed to be quite interested in what the others were saying. There were many differences in the way each accomplished their work, but the issues each faced were largely the same. One translator was still at work on her Quixote and managed to get an idea on one point from another participant. The genuine camaraderie enhanced the discussion and I felt toward the end that the conversation was only beginning.

A question and answer session brought out some interesting points, and one participant brought up what he felt was a point of error in a particular word discussed. Such is the nature of translation.

I managed to slip in a question myself toward the end. After telling her about 400 Windmills and how much we are all enjoying her translation, I asked Ms. Grossman if she felt consciously complicit in carrying on Cervantes’ game while translating his words. This may sound a bit odd, but I couched the complete question in terms of the day’s discussion on the book within the book, and the post I made earlier (Don Quixote Breaks the Fourth Wall) where Don Quixote says “And if it were not because I imagine…did I say imagine?” I felt that she gave extra emphasis to that aside whereas an 18th century translator did not, and while not expecting an answer specifically on that point, I was using that as an example of how she might herself be a part of the game. Ms. Grossman gave a long and thoughtful answer (and because I asked the question, I didn’t take notes on what she said, so her answer is floating around, trapped in my head instead of in my notebook and thus in this post) which captured, as I remember the complexity of her task as a translator. Her last words as I remember them were, “400 Windmills, that’s beautiful.”

comments

Bravo to you Bud for such an informative account of the panel discussion on translation. I’m only getting back into the flow of discussion and finding all the postings and comments insightful and thought-provoking: a truly invigorating virtual reading group.

I was intrigued by your mentioning the German translator’s reference to the difficulties of retaining the oral nature of proverbs in the novel. My fascination with storytelling, and my recent experience of listening to and seeing a dazzling spectrum of gifted storytellers, has led me to thinking a lot about the differences between oral traditions and the act of reading. The ballads and stories recounted within Don Quixote—most recently in the episode concerning the ill-fated love of Grisostomo for Marcela—seem to have a profound effect on our Knight, and perhaps an entirely different effect than his solitary reading of chivalric romances. It’s a gross oversimplification to say that “listening” to a story engages more than the ears, because not only is the listener fully present in a physical way, but there is also an immediate, direct, one might also say intimate connection to the teller. The language might be different, and the teller’s expression as well as the dynamics of presentation may subtly affect the listener. And while imagination and language are of course just as much a component of both listening and reading, there seems to be a more profound effect on the way the memory—and even the bodily incorporation—of the story affects the recipient of the story when given by a teller. The notion of “gift” is also essential, as is the eye contact, empathic response, and more.

So I’d be curious to discover from a translator, or from someone comfortable in Spanish, if the language of the ballads, proverbs, and tales in Don Quixote strikes them as markedly different (apart from being more overtly “poetic” in some instances) in nature, viz. the “difficulty of retaining their oral nature” and what that might be, as well as how these oral transmissions might have differently affected the book-addicted Quixote.

    – Norma (04/21  at  09:20 AM)

I am grateful to Bud Parr for his summary of the panel discussion at the PEN festival.  Since his memory is better than mine, I wonder if he could relate the gist of Aleksandra Mancic’s comments.  They struck me as being the most different.  Did she say something about how we can’t make the text modern?

    – alexandra maeck (04/25  at  11:19 AM)

Hello Alexandra,

I’m afraid I won’t be too helpful. I didn’t manage a lot of notes from her portion of the talk.

I recall Ms. Mancic saying that she was still working on her translation, but I seem to recall her saying that there were interesting problems relating some of the 17th Century Spanish/Catholic rituals into something that would be understandable to her audience - but that is a vague memory. She did speak of the misunderstandings in the book and I am left with a short phrase from her that I love:

The imagination of misunderstanding.

    – Bud Parr (04/25  at  09:06 PM)

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About this Post

• Posted by: Bud Parr
• Date: April 18, 2005
• Filed Under:
  Translation

Tags: Pen World Voices Festival

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