Forensic TranslationTranslation is not the art of failure but the art of the possible.

Benjamin Paloff April 7, 2015  

Tower of Babel, by Lucas van Valckenborch, 1595

The task of the translator, to borrow the title of what is probably the twentieth century’s

single most influential commentary about the goal of translation, is to create a text that

improves upon the original. In all fairness to Walter Benjamin, this is not what he says in

“The Task of the Translator.” Benjamin proposed that a good translation puts the same kind

of pressure on the target language that the original puts on the source language, and so “to

some degree all great texts contain their potential translation between the lines.” To claim

that a translator aims to improve the original text flies in the face not only of Benjamin’s

idealism but also of conventional wisdom, which holds that translation is impossible from the

outset. As John Ciardi once said, translation is “the art of failure.” That the quote is

frequently misattributed to Umberto Eco seems to back the point.

Yet this clichéd wisdom has little bearing on reality. In his marvelous book Is That a Fish in

Your Ear?: Translation and the Meaning of Everything, David Bellos demonstrates many of

the ways that translation is not only possible but ubiquitous, so thoroughly woven into the

fabric of our daily lives—from classrooms to international financial markets, from instruction

manuals to poems—that if translation were somehow to become impossible, the world

would descend into the zombie apocalypse faster than you can say “je ne sais quoi.” The

European Union, for example, has twenty-four official languages; every legal document

within the EU has to be translated into all of them, and every official translation is legally the

original. There is clearly a tension between the varieties of “translation” happening all

around us—every moment of every day, truly one of the fundamental activities that hold our

world together—and the persistent recycling of platitudes about how this activity, so basic

and ubiquitous, is impossible. If the platitudes are recalled more often than translation’s

pervasiveness, it is only because translators are usually invisible, their work mysterious.

One reason translation is superior to the original is the access it grants. Without translation,

Stieg Larsson would have had no appreciable presence on the beaches of the world these

last few years, and Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu would only have been a

mesmerizing epic novel to those who could read French. For the rest of us, it could only be

a doorstop. We tend to assume that all the best literature in a given language finds its way

into English, and that—making a leap that sounds more sensible than plausible—if it’s worth

reading, it’s probably already available in English. But this is simply not true. What gets

translated and published in English in any given year is such a tiny fraction of literature

available in other languages that we Anglophones can never hope to read all the worthwhile

works of literature in other languages. Anyone who knows a foreign literature well would

have little trouble naming titles, including major works by major writers in that language, that

are unavailable in ours. The odds are strong that you will never be able to read what might

have been your favorite book.

That a translation is superior because you can read it without knowing its source language

seems obvious, yet it is a fact easily overlooked. Without that access, most literature might

as well not exist—and within the range of our own experience, it doesn’t. The tasks of the

translator for the most part are to increase the availability of information and to stage that

information’s effect in the new language. A funny sentence about cats in Japanese cannot

just be about cats in English: it also has to be funny, because a joke that doesn’t make you

laugh is not really a joke. By the same token, the notorious difficulty of translating humor

might be chalked up to the sad fact that so many brilliant translators just aren’t that funny.

Whether on the stage or on the page, the difference between someone who comes up with

a joke and someone who makes people laugh is entirely in the telling.

The same is true of everything that might be termed “style.” There are many examples of a

work’s stylistic features being amplified or augmented by the translator. I once attended a

reading where Joseph Brodsky invited his friend Derek Walcott to read his translation of

Brodsky’s poem “Letters From the Ming Dynasty,” because Walcott’s English had more

effectively drawn out sonorities that Brodsky had wanted to produce in Russian. (For the

record, both versions are superb.) And the popular Japanese author Haruki Murakami says

quite openly that the style of any of his books in English depends upon which of his three

main translators has taken it on. If Edgar Allan Poe sounds more like Charles Baudelaire in

the latter’s renditions of Poe’s writing, it can only be to Poe’s benefit.

How do translators go about their work? A number liken translation to the theater—Jake

Donaghue, the hero of Iris Murdoch’s Under the Net, describes it as “opening one’s mouth

and hearing someone else’s voice emerge,” and this seems apt. Translation can be likened

to forensics, that is, the competitive rhetoric and oratory practiced in our more traditional

high schools and colleges. It, too, is competitive, at least insofar as it produces multiple

versions of the same text, which is itself an invitation to compare. The assumption that an

original is always superior to a translation is just such a comparison, if one that usually has

no basis in actual experience.

Even in stagecraft, though, one has a choice of approaches. Some translators, like some

actors, project the source material through their own indelible style and personality, so that

even in a bravura performance we never lose sight of the person on stage, as it were. We

might call this the Jack Nicholson School of translation. Charles Simic, an excellent poet

and prolific translator, is a member. When he calls translation “an actor’s medium,” he is

less interested in transforming himself or imitating someone else than in making himself

believe that he’s the one writing the poem in the first place. Translation becomes a way of

taking over the material. While the rare bird with access to both versions may be

disappointed—Brodsky objected to what happened to the Russian poet Osip Mandelshtam

at the hands of W.S. Merwin, “from whom more should have been expected than a

translation of Mandelstam into Merwin”—Merwin’s Mandelstam becomes a performance all

its own. Just because you enjoy reading Shakespeare doesn’t mean you can’t appreciate

Derek Jacobi as Lear.

Some actors, however, prefer to disappear into the role, and here, too, there is a clear

analogy to translation, which can become its own vanishing act. A translator may spend

hours laboring over a word choice or the placement of a comma, pondering whether an

exclamation point means the same in German (where it appears frequently) that it does in

English, all to create a text that sounds as if it were written by someone else. This kind of

translation is similar to Method acting. Even “off-set,” long after the work of translation is

finished and the translator has moved on to another project, another role, he or she will

forever remain in character in the printed book, hidden behind the author’s name. In the

early 1960s, Jiri Levý, a Czech theorist whose work has attracted increasing attention in

recent years, developed a practical approach to literary translation based in part on Method

acting. He called his approach “Illusionist,” by which he meant that the translator would do

everything he could to make the reader forget that he was reading a translation. He likened

it to a totally immersive experience of the theater.

Yet, as we often find when we try to “translate” theory into practice, principles can be

compromised by reality. How, after all, are we supposed to get into character when that

“character” is another human being whom we know only through certain movements of

mind, through the traces he or she has left in language—and a non-native language at that,

since there is a strong bias in Anglo-American literary culture that translators be native

speakers of English?

Jorge Luis Borges parodied this predicament brilliantly in his story “Pierre Menard, Author of

the Quixote,” which just about every student of literary translation encounters early and

refers to frequently thereafter. The title character, a French translator devoted to creating a

new version of Cervantes’s masterpiece, decides that the only way he can truly come to

inhabit the text is to relive the life of its author, so that his production of the text will mimic

Cervantes’s. “Initially,” Borges writes, “Menard’s method was to be relatively simple: Learn

Spanish, return to Catholicism, fight against the Moor or Turk, forget the history of Europe

from 1602 to 1918—be Miguel de Cervantes.” These kinds of mimetic absurdities are

common in Borges, for whom the artist’s ambition to fill his work with more and more detail

creates not merely an imitation of life, but a carbon copy of it, a “map of the Empire whose

size was that of the Empire,” as he once wrote. But Menard’s ambition comes crashing

against the reality of his time and place. He is a Frenchman of the twentieth century, not a

Spaniard of the seventeenth. No matter what he does to re-enact the life of Cervantes, the

world where this bizarre performance occurs will have long since moved on.

Still, behind Borges’s very serious silliness is the idea that an effective approach to

translation is one that reconstructs the composition of the original text. The notion’s germ is

already contained in the truism that one has to be a poet to translate poetry, which

nevertheless can’t account for why some of our best translators of poetry—John Felstiner

from German, for example, or Allen Mandelbaum from Latin—are poets primarily when they

are translating. They create their greatest works as poets when they are collaborating with

the poets (living or dead) whose work they translate. But the idea that translation benefits

from some technical expertise in the material being translated still holds, not least because

the translator would then presumably have a better grasp of the meaning of the original.

This principle of specialization underwrites much of the translation that affects us directly on

a daily basis. Legal or medical or diplomatic translators, to name just three fields where the

absence of translators would be felt most immediately, may not themselves be lawyers,

doctors or diplomats, but they know the jargon specific to those professions, as well as how

members of those professions communicate with one another, in the source language as

well as in English. This is especially evident in technical fields, where most professional

translators happen to be employed. If the person translating the manual to your new

computer has never brought a computer online, you’re likely to know. Ikea, the Swedish

housewares firm that has elevated production efficiency to a core part of its corporate ethos,

has almost entirely eliminated the need to retranslate its manuals by rendering most

assembly instructions as illustrations. But as anyone who has assembled Ikea furniture is

aware, even this form of translation is not without ambiguity, confusion and smashed

particleboard.

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With literary translation, this degree of specialization is often developed through the

painstaking, case-by-case process of becoming an expert on an individual text. This is why

several writers have referred to translation as, above all else, an act of interpretation, albeit

one in which the translator’s act of reading is recorded and reproduced, word by word and

thought by thought, for a new audience. This involves not only having a strong command of

the history and literary traditions of the source culture, which most translators acquire as

part of their language training, but also being at least as proficient in the history and literary

traditions of the target culture. Not only does one have to catch idiomatic expressions and

sly allusions; corresponding idioms and references must leap to mind in English.

Here, another form of forensics comes into play, the kind that is most familiar to us from

television crime procedurals. Think of it this way: the translator breaks down the original

text, then reverse-engineers it—in effect figuring out how it happened by relying on

evidence at the scene (the book), questioning witnesses (the author, when available, or the

author’s editors and acquaintances) and consulting the various, sometimes conflicting

postmortems produced by scholars. The translation then becomes the reconstruction of an

event.

If you really want to get into the author’s head, short of reliving his or her life, you find

yourself reading everything he or she was reading while thinking about and writing the book

you are translating. I sometimes think of this as reading over the author’s shoulder. It

became a particularly big part of my life in 2010, when I was working on two books that are

thick with quotations: Krzysztof Michalski’s The Flame of Eternity: An Interpretation of

Nietzsche’s Thought (Princeton; paper $22.95) and Marek

Bienczyk’s Transparency (Dalkey Archive; paper $14.95), a book-length essay. Bienczyk is

a novelist and a specialist in Romanticism at the Polish Academy of Sciences in Warsaw,

as well as a translator of fiction and philosophy from French. His book, a discursive,

novelistic meditation on the theme of transparency, quotes liberally—nearly two hundred

instances over the course of the book—from Polish Romantic literature and French

philosophy, not to mention just about every major European text on transparency itself.

Michalski, who died of cancer about a year after his book on Nietzsche appeared in English,

was a philosopher based in Vienna. His book contains over 500 references, many of them

to Nietzsche, as well as to ancient and medieval theology.

The number of quotations in each book has stuck in my head because it fell to me to track

them down. After all, if we were going to be quoting Nietzsche and Roland Barthes, I

wanted to use translations by those people who, for me as a reader, have best captured

what the originals should sound like in English (Walter Kaufmann and Richard Howard,

respectively). Where the text being quoted had never before appeared in English translation

—as I’ve mentioned, you might be surprised at how much work by major authors remains

invisible to us—I wanted to find the original source and render it in a style consistent with

the translations that are available.

Bienczyk’s and Michalski’s books were not very helpful in this endeavor. Both had been

released by Znak, one of Poland’s most venerable literary publishers, and, despite their

rarefied subject matter, both were presented as literary prose for the general reader, without

any notes. In fact, both authors were somewhat resistant to my intention to include citations

in my translation, preferring instead that I simply work from their prose, despite the

possibility that there would be long passages consisting of translations of translations of

translations. I insisted on weighing their sources with my own ear.

When the stars were properly aligned, this meant reading a quotation in Polish and finding

its corresponding passage in the English translations I was using. In practice, it was rarely

that easy. Michalski and Bienczyk frequently quoted from memory, and there were more

than a few instances where their memories had produced paraphrases instead of quotes.

Sometimes they were working from a translated text that had made troublesome

modifications to the original. Very often they would quote an author without any indication of

their source; having read the quotation in Polish, I would back-translate it into several

versions of what the English, French or German might be. Once I had tracked down the

source, I would either find the best available translation of the passage or produce one

myself.

As in television detective work, one relies on a combination of old-fashioned sleuthing,

technological aids and dumb luck. Witnesses help, but they can be unreliable; never

intending to fact-check or source their literary prose, both authors had forgotten precisely

where several quotations had come from. My own familiarity with some of the sources

helped—literary translation is almost always served by elective affinities between author

and translator, which in this case meant that we had already been reading a lot of the same

stuff—but I still had to become conversant with authors and texts that had never meant

much to me before. Digital searches, which cover millions of texts in a fraction of a second,

help a lot. A typical day’s work brings all these resources into play and still ends with a note

to one’s tomorrow-morning self about where to pick up the thread. After all, most CSI-type

crime dramas mark their entr’acte with a scene of frustration, that moment when the

investigators hit a wall (literally or figuratively, depending on the quality of the direction

and/or set design), so that after the commercial break (or, for the translator, a good night’s

sleep), we can backtrack and re-evaluate. That was my daily life for about a year.

What could possibly motivate someone to perform this kind of labor? Not money. The per-

hour wage for literary translation in the United States usually works out to cents. The

appeal, what sustains the translator from one jaw-clenching moment to the next, is the

purely poetic activity of matching a word or phrase, of reorchestrating the tonal shifts from

one language to another. But in the end, all you really want to do is to climb inside this text

in order to understand how it works, what it was that sparked the enthusiasm bordering on

obsession that is the sine qua non of labor so generous in its demands and poor in its pay.

Sometimes it’s only by reconstructing the machine from the inside out, switching it on, and

watching it work that you can move on to something else. If you can outfit it with a new

bibliography or index along the way, more’s the better.

 

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Benjamin Paloff April 7, 2015