Context

Czech novelist Milan Kundera was being interviewed on the publication of his latest work to appear in translation. The journalist remarked: “I see you’ve completely changed your style in this latest novel.” Kundera replied: “No, I changed translator.”

This highlights the extent to which a translation is very much one person’s reading of the work. No two translators, like no two readers, are alike. A translation is refracted through the prism of the translator’s subjectivity. Even when translators think they are acting as transparent panes of glass, providing mere conduits for an author’s voice, they are filtering the text through their own particular linguistic and cultural preferences and associations, whether they acknowledge it or not. Words have different resonances and connotations for each of us, and when we translate, we dredge up expressions from subconscious pools of language and experience.

Literary translation is about endless choices, weighing up whether to privilege meaning over music, rhythm over rules of grammar, the spirit rather than the letter of the text. The translator is simultaneously reader and writer.

In my view, it is important to recognise that a translated work is a separate creation, and that to serve our authors well we must produce a translation that reflects the spirit and intentions of the original while having its own distinctive and coherent “voice.” It should evoke a similar response in the reader to that of the reader of the original work, although the means of achieving this may be different. Especially when it comes to poetry.

There’s an incident that has stayed in my mind for twenty-five years and which I feel is deeply connected with what I do as a translator. While living in France I had an argument with an Italian friend. We were both speaking French. He talked about “le rouge de l’oeuf”—literally “the red of the egg,” a direct translation of the colloquial Italian, “il rosso dell’uovo.” I leaped in saying no, it’s “le jaune.” He would not believe me when I said that the French word for egg yolk is literally “the yellow,” for he claimed that it was actually red. We broke open an egg, which had an orangey-coloured yolk, and then spent hours placing pillar-box red and canary yellow objects next to this yolk. But Piero could no more see the yolk as being akin to the yellow than I could see it as being closer to the red. This exchange reveals a lot about how perception is conditioned by language, and this is something that we as translators need to know and convey.

I’d like to give an example of cultural adaptation from a novel I have translated:

In Orlanda, by Belgian author Jacqueline Harpman, one of the characters suddenly switches from the formal “vous” to the informal “tu.” This is a crucial moment in the narrative. The speaker is a prissy, bourgeois woman of thirty-five. She is addressing a young man with whom she entertains a somewhat ambiguous relationship. For the Francophone reader, this unwitting switch from “vous” to “tu” signals an important shift in the woman’s feelings. The problem for the translator is how to convey this to the English-speaking reader with equal subtlety, when we only have the word “you” for both “tu” and “vous.” The characters are already on first-name terms, so that is not an option. I decided to have the woman put her hand on the man’s arm.

As-tu remarqué que depuis tout à l’heure tu me tutoies? Elle ne s’était pas rendu compte et rougit violemment. “Haven’t you noticed how you’ve suddenly become quite familiar with me?” She had put her hand on his arm without realising and blushed deep red.

I think this works in terms of cultural equivalence. And that is what translators need to do—find cultural as well as linguistic parallels. We make choices; some people may agree with those choices, others may disagree, but we need to have a coherent approach and be prepared to defend it.

What do reviewers mean when they talk about a “good” or “bad” translation?

Reviews of translated books rarely mention the translator. There is no discussion of the criteria for evaluating a translation. Few critics are able to read the book in the source language, so how can they judge the translation? Often, what is termed a “good” translation is one that reads like a piece of seamless English. A “bad” translation is somehow bumpy, or difficult. There’s a fine line between making foreign authors accessible to English-speaking readers and making them sound like English writers. Their rhythms and patterns, their “foreignness” is what makes them interesting. Salman Rushdie wrote: “To unlock a culture you need to understand its untranslatable words,” and that is why he uses a lot of Urdu words in his novels. Publishers and copy-editors do not always agree, and sometimes try to pressure the translator into bowing to what they think readers can cope with and ironing out all the “foreignness.” But if we flatten the text to keep the copy-editor happy, we are, in a way, “colonising” the writer. And this is an ethical problem for translators which calls for vigilance.

Interestingly, writers in English sometimes sound more “foreign” than translations. Joyce, for example. Author and translator Tim Parks, who teaches translation in Italy, does the following exercise with his students: he takes a passage in English and the same passage in Italian, without telling the students which is the source text and which is the translation. One is a seamless piece of flowing Italian prose, and the other, a quirky, stilted piece of English. The students are asked to identify which is which. They always assume the Italian is the original and the English a poor translation. But in fact, the English source text is a passage from a novel by D.H. Lawrence, and the Italian is the translation.

I believe translators need to be more explicit about what they do, even writing a foreword or an afterword, to let the reader know how their intervention influences the text. This goes against the grain here in the UK, where one of the great publishing myths is that the public is reluctant to buy foreign authors so it is better not to draw their attention to the fact that a work is a translation.

Nicholas de Lange, the translator of Israeli novelist Amos Oz, compares the translator’s role to that of the performing musician.

People don’t say that there’s a right way or a wrong way to perform a Tchaikovsky symphony. There may be unsuccessful versions of it, but on the whole the good orchestras produce good but totally distinctive renderings. Every soloist performs in a particular, personal way, and that performance is signed by the performer. People will go to a record shop ask for a recording by a specific artist . . . I wonder if there’ll ever be a day when customers go into a bookshop and say they’d like something translated by a particular translator. That responsibility of the performing musician is analogous to the way I see the responsibility of the translator. The translator is giving a personal interpretation, a personal rendition. The text as it exists on the page in the original language is like a musical score, and it’s like the musical score also because it’s locked up, because the English readers don’t have access to it, just as only the few people that can actually read music and hear it in their heads can read the score. It needs to be performed. So it’s there in a potential, and the performance is going to be totally unique and distinctive.

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“Between the Covers” was first published in the Feb-March 2003 issue of The Linguist, the journal of the Institute of Linguists, UK.

CONTEXT is a triquarterly publication intended to create an international and historical context in which to read modern and contemporary literature. Its goal is to encourage the development of a literary community.

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