Quote on Translation

The process of translating comprises in its essence the whole secret of human understanding of the world and of social communication.

--Hans Georg Gadamer

Quote from Proust

Translators unfortunately get used to people looking down on us and thinking that what we do is less important or creative than what writers do. So that’s one reason why I like this quote from Proust, because it equates writing with translating. And of course I always say that translators have to be great writers themselves, which many people seem to forget.

To write that essential book, a great writer does not need to invent it but merely to translate it, since it already exists in each one of us. The duty and task of a writer are those of translator. -Marcel Proust

Translation as Possibility

I saw the following quote in one of my favorite e-newsletters, A Word a Day:

Poetry, indeed, cannot be translated; and, therefore, it is the poets that preserve the languages; for we would not be at the trouble to learn a language if we could have all that is written in it just as well in a translation. But as the beauties of poetry cannot be preserved in any language except that in which it was originally written, we learn the language. -Samuel Johnson, lexicographer (1709-1784)

People are always claiming that poetry cannot be translated. But of course it regularly is translated and often quite well, too. So I think it’s time we moved on from this idea that translation is impossible, especially of poetry. No one can ever learn all the languages in the world, no one can be able to read all the literatures in the world, no one can converse with all the people in the world in their own native tongues – thus translation is necessary and by necessity, it must be possible.

How Language Works

My summer reading included David Crystal’s book How Language Works. It’s an easy-to-understand explanation of many aspects of language, including how we physically are able to speak and to understand language, how and when children learn languages, different writing systems, sign language, what dialects are, pidgins and creoles, and teaching languages. In short, this book is a good introduction to what language is and does.

There’s even a brief section on translation and interpretation. This section includes the following paragraph that defines what translators do and are:

“Translators aim to produce a text that is as faithful to the original as circumstances require or permit, and yet that reads as if it were written originally in the target language. They aim to be ‘invisible people’ – transferring content without drawing attention to the considerable artistic and technical skills involved in the process. The complexity of the task is apparent, but its importance is often underestimated, and its practitioners’ social status and legal rights undervalued. Some countries view translation as a menial, clerical task, and pay their translators accordingly. Others (such as the Japanese) regard it as a major intellectual discipline in its own right. The question of status is currently much debated.”

Encyclopedia of Translators

This encyclopedia of translators is a very interesting and useful resource. As it points out, translators are often forgotten. But the main page quotes Birgitta Trotzig, who said that translators are "half of our national literature." What a true statement.

At the moment, this encyclopedia is only in Swedish and only focuses on Swedish translators. I don't know if there are any plans to translate it. But I do wonder if other countries have similar encyclopedias of translators or if they are developing such things.

Translating Poetry

I find this quote interesting:

Poetry, indeed, cannot be translated; and, therefore, it is the poets that preserve the languages; for we would not be at the trouble to learn a language if we could have all that is written in it just as well in a translation. But as the beauties of poetry cannot be preserved in any language except that in which it was originally written, we learn the language. -Samuel Johnson, lexicographer

I think Samuel Johnson was a bit off here. Who in the world could realistically learn all the languages she or he wants to, all in order to read poetry in its original tongue? It sounds like an idealistic viewpoint and this is simply not possible.

Poetry can be translated and is translated. There's no way around the fact that if we want to read foreign texts (and we do and we should), we must have translation. Nevertheless, it is also obviously a good thing to learn other languages.

Håkan Nesser on Translation

At the SELTA meeting in London last month, the Swedish writer Håkan Nesser gave a guest talk. Mr. Nesser is best known for his crime novels (he mentioned that “life is reflected in death,” which is one reason why he writes such works), but he has also written literary fiction as well.

He was very entertaining and, as befits the setting, he spoke in part about translation. Mr. Nesser’s works have been translated to many languages and he said he’s received questions or comments from about half his translators. He said that he once offered some comments on an English translation and got the following response, “Håkan, I thought you knew English!” After that, he’s avoided critiquing translations. The way he thinks about the translated target texts is that they are “written by the translators with [his] books as the basis.”

Astonishing!

A few weeks ago, I was reading Voltaire’s Candide (in translation) and I came across the following lines in Chapter 18:

Cacambo translated the King’s witticisms for Candide, to whom they seemed witty even in translation. Of all the things that astonished Candide, this was by no means the least astonishing.

In other words, Voltaire seems to be suggesting that the idea that humor could be translated is astonishing. Many things on Candide’s adventures are indeed astonishing, but good translations, in my opinion, should be viewed as achievable in the hands of good translators, not shocking.

Mission: Possible?

I have mentioned Clifford E. Landers’ book Literary Translation: A Practical Guide several times on this blog before. He includes the well-known quote from writer Kurt Vonnegut: “All I require of a translator is that he or she be a more gifted writer than I am, and in at least two languages, one of them mine.”

I know the comment is partly tongue-in-cheek, but it does reveal how high the demands are on translators. Of course, based on some books I have read, this goal is not only possible to reach, but almost impossible not to!

Learning to Sail Our Own Ships

This is the 200th post on this blog!

While working on writing abstracts on the essays in The Translation of Children’s Literature (edited by Gillian Lathey), I noticed this quote in an essay by Birgit Stolt: “Jakob Grimm compared the task of the translator with that of a sailor: the latter mans a ship, directs it with full sails to the opposing shore, but then has to land ‘where there is different earth and where different air plays.’” (67)

Reading that reminded me of this quote from Louisa May Alcott: “I don’t worry about the storms, for I am learning to sail my own ship.”

So, fellow translators, let’s continue sailing our own ships, managing the different earth and the different air, and not minding all the storms we meet on our way.

An Erotic Relationship

In today’s Writer’s Almanac, the following information was included about the prolific translator Richard Howard. I like his quote about the eroticism of translation:

It’s the birthday of the poet and translator Richard Howard, born in Cleveland, Ohio (1929), who started out as a poet and won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry for his book Untitled Subjects (1969). His collection Inner Voices: Selected Poems, 1963–2003 came out in 2004. But he’s also known for his translations — more than 150 books, most of them from the French, including The Flowers of Evil by Charles Baudelaire, which won Howard a National Book Award for translation in 1984. He said, “The relationship of the translator to the writer is an erotic relationship always, and you learn something about the person that you’re working with in an almost plastic, physical way that you can almost never learn about your friends.”

Flowers and Translation

I always think that quotes about translation and metaphors for translation are interesting. The following one from A Defense of Poetry by Percy Bysshe Shelley is pretty well known.

"It were as wise to cast a violet into a crucible that you might discover the formal principle of its color and odor, as seek to transfuse from one language into another the creations of a poet. The plant must spring again from its seed, or it will bear no flower – and this is the burthen of the curse of Babel."

Of course, seeds from one part of the world can be planted and successfully nurtured in other parts.

Noble Translation

Some of you may be familiar with the Earl of Roscommon’s poem on translation. Wentworth Dillon (1633-85) was the fourth Earl of Roscommon and he was a poet and translator. Here is his poem:

‘Tis True, Composing is the nobler Part,
But good Translation is no Easie Art,
For the materials have long since been found,
Yet both your Fancy and your Hands are bound,
And by improving what was writ before,
Invention labours less, but Judgement more.

Each poet with a different talent writes,
One praises, one instructions, another bites.
Horace did ne’er aspire to Epick Bays,
Nor lofty Maro stoop to Lyrick Lays.
Examine how your Humour is inclin’d,
And which the Ruling Passion of your Mind;

Then seek a Poet who your ways does bend,
And choose an Author as you choose a Friend;
United by this sympathetick Bond,
Your grow familiar, intimate and fond.
Your Thoughts, your Words, your Stiles, your Souls agree,
Nor longer his Interpreter, but He.

As with many other translation theorists and critics, he thinks writing is the more original and noble art, which implies that translation is reductive. However, the Earl differs from other critics in that he does seem to believe in the need for the translator to have a certain bond with his or her author in order to do the best job possible, which implies that he recognizes and respects the translator’s role in making a successful translation and the limitations the translator faces. Still, both translation and writing are “no Easie” arts and they are both noble.

Translation as Anthropology

As someone who likes to read anthropology texts for fun but who unfortunately only took one anthropology course in school (typically for me, it was a class on the anthropology of food!), I really appreciated this quote from Dr. Rajendra Singh, a linguist at the University of Montreal:

“[T]ranslation is best defined as that branch of anthropology in which the field comes to the investigator’s office.”

This is such a succinct way of describing the translator’s job and the necessity of understanding the cultures behind the languages involved in a translation. Too many people believe translation is simply a matter of finding a replacement in the target language for each word in the source language and they forget how much more is required of the translator. Let’s be anthrotranslators, researching every aspect of the languages and cultures we work with.

Fits Like a Glove

Writer Alma Guillermoprieto said: "The best translators slip into the glove of a text and then turn it inside out into another language, and the whole thing comes out looking like a brand-new glove again."

Virginia Woolf on Translating Humor

In "The Common Reader," Virginia Woolf wrote that "humour is the first of the gifts to perish in a foreign tongue."

As I said in the last post, translating humor is difficult, but apparently Ms. Woolf was not hopeful about a translator's ability to accomplish this hard task.

The Clockmaker

The well-known comment by Robert Frost that “(p)oetry is what gets lost in translation” reflects the general idea that if translation as a whole is nearly impossible, then translation of poetry is truly so.

In 2004 at Poesidagarna, an annual poetry festival mentioned in the last post, the Dutch poet Michel Kuijpers, who publishes poetry under the pseudonym K. Michel, compared translation to taking apart a clock. If one wants to understand how a clock works, one takes it apart and studies the pieces before putting it back together. Similarly, if one wants to understand a poem, one takes it apart, studies it, and then puts it back together – in another language. The Lithuanian poet Tomas Venclova, who teaches Russian and Lithuanian at Yale, seems to serve as both poet and clockmaker, since he mentioned that when someone is going to translate his work, he writes a detailed explanation of what he meant and what the implications of his word choices are and, if he knows the target language, he also writes a first draft of the potential translation. It’s true that many writers answer their translators’ questions when possible, but what is it about translating poetry that drives a poet to help his translator to such an extent as Mr. Venclova does?

Arguably more so than in prose, both the words and the form matter in poetry. Meter and rhythm are two features of poetry that some translators mention when discussing the difficulty of translating poetry. Prose also has meter and rhythm, of course, although they are often more obvious in poetry. Poetry may also have rhymes, which are quite difficult to translate well. Then there is the language. Poetic language is frequently imaginative and words are used economically, so the preciseness of the translation is especially noticeable and important. There is rarely plot in poetry, at least not in the same way as there is in a novel or a short story, and this makes the emphasis on each word even stronger.

So a translator has many decisions to make. Can the rhymes, the meter, the rhythm be retained? What must be left out or changed if any one of those is retained? And for the words, what images and feelings do they represent in the original language and is it possible to transfer those images and feelings to the target language? Or must replacement images and feelings that work better in the new language be chosen? After all, since languages and cultures don’t work the same way, if a poem is translated too literally, a poet’s whole meaning could be lost in translation.

The elements that make a poem are the same elements that make a poem challenging to translate. But what’s a translator to do? Our job is to find a way to say what seems impossible to say and we serve the writers and the readers by making texts available to a larger audience. We are, as Alexander Pushkin was quoted as saying, “the post-horses of enlightenment.” Although perhaps now we should say that we are the clockmakers of enlightenment.

Kissing Through a Veil

A couple of years ago at Poesidagarna, an annual poetry festival in Malmö, Sweden, the theme was translation, and the event featured poets and their Swedish translators. The poets read from their works in the original language and then the translators read their Swedish translations, and there were also discussions about the translation of these poems. The American poet Donald Hall, who has also published children’s books, plays, and nonfiction, and was the poet laureate of New Hampshire for five years, said that though he didn’t understand most of the languages spoken at the festival, he nevertheless enjoyed hearing the poems read in the original languages and felt that he got something from them despite the language barrier. It was as though the feelings and meanings in the poems were clear simply through the sound of the words; no translation was needed.

In a recent post, I discussed the idea that not all writing can be, or should be, translated. Many readers seem to feel especially strongly about this when it comes to poetry.

In her novel Fugitive Pieces, Anne Michaels, who is also an award-winning poet, writes, “‘Reading a poem in translation…is like kissing a woman through a veil.’…Translation is a kind of transubstantiation; one poem becomes another. You can choose your philosophy of translation just as you choose how to live: the free adaptation that sacrifices detail to meaning, the strict crib that sacrifices meaning to exactitude. The poet moves from life to language, the translator moves from language to life; both, like the immigrant, try to identify the invisible, what’s between the lines, the mysterious implications.” This quote suggests that a poem in translation is not as authentic as one in the original language; as though reading and understanding a poem were not considered challenging enough, in translation, the meaning of the poem is veiled, hidden behind a layer. The veil’s thickness and material depend on the translators’ skills, but there is always a veil nonetheless.

Even translator Gregory Rabassa admits, in his memoir If This Be Treason, “I do find that with a language in which I am rather weak, like Russian, I do know just enough to enable me to read poetry along over so many unknown words and yet get to understand it in some ways better than in an English translation that is loud and clear.” So if someone who makes a living as a literary translator would rather read poetry in the original language even if he is not completely fluent in that language, does that mean that translating poetry is so demanding that it is best not attempted?

What, if anything, makes translating poetry different from translating other literature?

More on that in the next post.

A Creative Act

Today I read a short inteview from 1985 with the author Paul Auster. The interview is titled “Translation” and is in The Art of Hunger, Mr. Auster’s 1992 collection of essays, prefaces, and interviews. I actually read the book in Swedish translation, since that was what was available at my local library, so anything I quote from the interview I’ve translated back to English and thus is probably not the way Mr. Auster really said it.

Mr. Auster mentions how the poet Ezra Pound recommended that young poets translate. I definitely agree that translation is an excellent activity for anyone who is fascinated by and wants to work with words, since translation helps you look at language from so many angles. As Mr. Auster says in the interview, “When you translate, you work with the purely practical aspects of the craft, learn to engage intimately with words, and more clearly understand what you are really doing. That’s the benefit, but there is a disadvantage, too. When you translate, you have no sense of creating something of your own. There is no need to be brilliant or original, no need to attempt things you actually can’t manage.”

In other words, he seems to think that translation is a good way for writers to get more comfortable with writing, but is not a creative act in and of itself. I definitely disagree with this. I believe that it is creative work to have to try to understand what another writer wanted to say and then to find the best possible way to say that in another language, given the constraints of the target language’s vocabulary, grammar, melody, cultural aspects, and so forth. I understand that some poets (among other creative artists) like using specific forms, such as the sonnet or the haiku, precisely because the restrictions imposed by the form force them to be creative in a new way. That was what Oulipo was about. It is true that translators can not give voice to their own thoughts and feelings when they are translating and that they can not work on someone else’s text as though it is their own, but I at least feel that there is a creative challenge in translating and that I often am attempting something I can’t quite manage when I translate.

Where the Dictionary Ends

Well, starting a blog about translation leads to two obvious questions: What exactly is translation? And what does a translator do? There are no short answers here and analyzing what translation is and what a translator does or should be is precisely what I plan to look at in the course of this blog.

Basically, translation is the act of recreating a text in a different language. Etymologically speaking, it is the “carrying across” of words from one language to another. This does not mean, however, that to translate is merely to look up each word in a given text (each word, that is, in the so-called “source language”) in the dictionary and then write down its equivalent in another language (the “target language”).

To illustrate how this technique can lead a translator terribly off-course, we can look at something some of my students do. I teach English to adults and a few of them are either resistant to the idea of learning a new language or else they simply feel “too old” or too discouraged to do so. A sneaky way they attempt to get out of actually putting in effort is to use the dictionary trick. If I assign some writing for homework, these resistant students might, instead of writing directly in English, write in their native language and then use the dictionary to translate their sentences word by word into English. It’s always pretty clear when someone has done this because many of the mistakes are obvious. One student, for example, repeatedly wrote the word “sheep” instead of “get” because the same Swedish word (“får”) covers both English words and he just picked the first word he saw in the dictionary and wrote it down without thinking about whether it was correct. He wrote, “I sheep food at a restaurant.”

You might think that someone who claims to be a translator would know better than to do this, but remembering some of the funny or odd mistranslations I’ve seen leads me to believe otherwise. Besides, translation is not just about the meaning of the words. A translator must carefully consider the culture behind the original text and how that influenced the author, and why an author made the choices s/he did, and how all this can be expressed in a new language in a natural way that does not lose or change anything. As Mikhail Ivanov wrote in an article entitled “Bulgakov’s Post Horses,” translation “begins where the dictionary ends.”

This topic will be continued in the next post.