Context N°21
This conversation started informally at a translators’ gathering. We decided to pursue it in more depth and sat down for a few hours with a tape recorder.
Nicholas de Lange: I translate contemporary Hebrew fiction. First of all, it’s important to say that the authors I translate are living, and are accessible if I have problems. In fact I tend to work very closely with them. I’ve actually spent a lot of time with them. The principal author I’ve translated is Amos Oz, and I would say that the whole of our working lives has been fairly interactive. I started working with him when he’d just published his second novel, and a collection of short stories. I translated the two novels and after that I translated his novels almost as soon as they came out in Israel. Generally we started work before they were published in Hebrew, when they were still very fresh in his mind. We spent a great deal of time working together, so that’s quite important. And Hebrew is a very old language with many layers, much older than English, with a lot of allusiveness within itself, but also it’s a language which is a bit exotic, it’s not in the same family of languages as English, which raises linguistic questions. On the other hand Israel is a country where a great deal of the thinking and the daily life is really quite familiar. There isn’t the problem of explaining a lot of things as you might have if you were translating a completely alien language.
Ros Schwartz: I translate from French. Mainly living authors, and a lot of first-time novelists or authors who are not so well known, including north-African writers. Without wanting to sound arrogant, I sometimes have the feeling that these writers haven’t had the benefit of working closely with an editor, and there are the occasional rough edges and even structural weaknesses that could have been improved with sensitive editorial input. These rough edges are magnified in the translation process.
I haven’t worked closely with one author over a long period. Most of the books I’ve done have been one-offs. Sometimes I’ve found authors very reluctant to be contacted—perhaps out of pride, it’s as if you’ve seen them without their clothes on in a way, and that makes them feel rather vulnerable. That is certainly true of one of my authors. They haven’t always been helpful when I’ve sent them queries, because they see it as implicit criticism. One author I’ve translated, under a pen name, is Yasmina Khadra, an Algerian writer who was in hiding at the time, so contact was impossible.
Let’s confine this discussion to fiction, because non-fiction faces a whole different set of problems.
NdL: We’re also not talking about poetry, which raises other questions still. But in my view, the translation of fiction can be much closer to the translation of poetry than to the translation of non-fiction, because if you’re translating non-fiction, whether it’s instructions for a medical or a technical manual, you’ve a responsibility to the reader and the thing has to work in a practical way. That’s quite a heavy responsibility, and translators have to work on accuracy in a particular way. When you’re translating poetry, you have the same kind of problem as you have with fiction, which is to create a mood, to transmit an emotion, to make people feel, rather than act in a particular way. So I believe very strongly that the nature of prose transcends the words on the page. It’s quite an obvious thing to say but it’s very important to us when we work as translators, because we’re aware that our job is not as people sometimes imagine, to produce dictionary definitions of words and put them down in the right order, though I’m afraid that when translation is discussed nowadays, there’s very often the model in people’s minds of the machine. In fact there are translation machines which are being developed, and are getting better all the time, that can translate simple texts. I think they started in the Canadian meteorological service, where you have a limited vocabulary and a limited message you need to put across, and two languages which are fairly closely related, so you can simply translate the weather forecast from French into English or vice versa in a very mechanical way. That is not what we are doing. We’re not trying to create that sort of message. We’re trying to create a mood, and that’s totally different.
And I think that a lot of the problems that we have in discussing what we’re trying to do arise from this, which is very hard to talk about because it is so personal. It’s like authors. I don’t think authors sit around discussing how they make people laugh, either they can do it or they can’t do it. I don’t think you could do a course in how to write humorous prose. Some authors are funny and others aren’t, and it would be very difficult to train people to be funny. It’s the same with translators, I think the translator has to learn to make the reader laugh or cry, and feel a whole range of emotions, and that’s something that prose has in common with poetry. So that when we’re adjusting the text—which we do sometimes, we don’t write exactly what’s on the page in front of us—sometimes it’s with that in mind rather than because we think that the author didn’t understand enough about what they were writing about, or didn’t use the right words, or that their sentences were too short or something like that. I think that the real objective at the back of our minds is, this isn’t beautiful enough, or this is too romantic, and it ought to be a bit tougher, or it’s too harsh and ought to be a little bit smoother. Is that right, is that the sort of thing you have in mind?
RS: Yes. I think it’s interesting to make that connection between prose and poetry. Because I see the translation of poetry as the distillation of the translator’s art, doing exactly what one does in prose, but within a much tighter framework. I think it is useful to emphasize the similarities, because some people separate the two. And I think that in both disciplines, having a vision of what you’re doing is important, you’re not just translating the words on the page.
Let’s talk about the process. When you’re faced with a novel, how do you actually do it? I call the translation process “finding a voice”—there’s a point in the translation where I suddenly feel very confident and I know what the mood should be, I know what the characters should say and I know what the register of language should be. It can take quite a while to reach that point. I usually flounder until well over half way through. And then something clicks, the book begins to inhabit me, everything gels and I know what feels right.
This is the way I work: first of all I read the book and try to absorb it and get an overall sense of what kind of language I’m going to be dealing with, what kind of problems I’m going to need to think about. These concerns lurk at the back of my mind. I mull them over constantly, when I swim my forty lengths at the pool, or when I’m cooking dinner. Once I start work, I need to get the first draft out of the way as quickly as I can. I tend to work fast, I don’t worry about the problems. I don’t make decisive choices at this point. When I hit a tricky patch I type in the French and then put three, four, five alternatives, or a note to remind myself that I’ve got to do some further research. But I crash on. I set myself a daily target, and I need that structure. Once I’ve done my first draft, I print out the translation and revise it. At that point I still have the French close to me, and I double check everything and make sure that the text is all there, and that it actually says what the French says. And for unresolved problems I go back to the French to see if there are clues that I’ve missed, and usually there are. I amend the file, often making further improvements as I type, and print it out again. And then I read the translation through as an English text, knowing it’s all there, that it’s “faithful” in terms of saying as closely as possible what the French says. This is the point that I call “finding a voice”—the translation has to stand on its own as an English text, it has to work, it has to be coherent and cohesive. At this stage I make quite radical, bold changes, because by now I’m much more confident, I “own” the text. Then I print it out again and give it another read through, to make sure the voice is consistent. Then the manuscript goes off for copy-editing and there are suggestions to be incorporated. At proof stage I very often make some minor changes as well, a last-minute solution suddenly occurs for something that had been bothering me.
My overall strategy is governed by the view that as a translator you are first and foremost a reader, and you can only convey your reading of that book. There is no right, objective or single translation; you’re a reader, you are different from any other reader, and your translation is your reading of that author. I think that’s something that translators have to come to terms with. Your choices are inevitably going to be subjective, your vocabulary is a personal vocabulary, you dredge it up from all sorts of hidden depths. It is different from anybody else’s vocabulary. And you do the best job you can, you try to be as sensitive as possible to the author’s idiom, choices, moods, etc., but ultimately it’s one reading of the book. And it’s not necessarily the only one, or the best one, it’s just your reading.
NdL: I work in a very similar way. I was fascinated because I’d never thought about it in quite that way, I’d never analyzed the stages by which I work. When I began to translate, I was very fortunate, I didn’t go to a translation school, my school was working with an author, in this case Amos Oz, who was a young author already beginning a successful career, and without much knowledge of English. He’d just finished writing a story, and we experimented to see if we could work together, in the following way. He read the story to me aloud, and I simply listened to it, I didn’t take notes, and at that time I didn’t have any expertise at all in modern Hebrew. A lot of what he was saying I didn’t understand, but I listened particularly to the sound of the words, the music. Then I went away with the text, looked up the words I didn’t know, consulted some friends, and produced a draft. I then read back to him and he again didn’t understand everything, it was a story set in the Middle Ages so there was a lot of technical vocabulary and the style was borrowed from the Hebrew chronicles. In his case, the Hebrew chronicles, in my case medieval Latin and English . . . late medieval chronicles and other things like Malory. We talked a little bit about what sort of literary references there were. But basically we were both, I think, instinctively listening very attentively to the music. So a great deal happened off the written page, it was entirely in the voice. And I believe, although we didn’t plan it that way, that that first experience was very, very influential on me. Now neither of us has the time to work in that way, that was a long short story, it was a very important step in both of our lives, so we spent a lot of time on it. Now we can’t afford to spend all that much time. But I think that the lesson is still there for me, I still listen very carefully to the sound and, if I can, I try to read things aloud to family, friends, or even just to myself, because the sound of the words is so important. Of course, there are other authors who seem to be completely insensitive to sound. But in this particular case that was important. And in the case of my last translation, which was a book called A Journey to the End of the Millennium, by A. B. Yehoshua, which was also set in the Middle Ages, the sound is incredibly important. This early lesson was very valuable to me. But the basic stages that you described were exactly the same. I don’t know whether all translators work in that way: first you produce a draft which is close to the original language, and at the end you have to produce a text which is emancipated from the original language. What readers notice, when they say: “Oh, I don’t think that was very well translated,” is when the text hasn’t become emancipated from the original language. That doesn’t mean that the translator can’t sometimes deliberately keep a slightly exotic flavor of some of the cadences of a foreign language, that might be important for a particular purpose. But that’s part of the tricks—the tools—of producing a translation that is actually free from the original, because you have to do it consciously or deliberately. I read a translation the other day and it shocked me rather, because it had been published by a reputable publisher, and it was a very, very successful book, it’s a bestseller, and yet in places it seemed to me to be too close to the German, in terms of word order and choice of words, and I thought: this person has been working under pressure, perhaps there was a deadline that hadn’t been properly negotiated, because it is important to have the right deadline, or it’s just too rushed. And so that stage when you leave the original aside and move into your own language, and just forget about the sound of the other language, that’s vitally important. But as you rightly say, you can’t afford to sever the link between the meaning of the words and the text as a whole. I work in sentences rather than words. If someone says to me look how you’ve translated that word, I always say well I didn’t translate that word, a word only has meaning in a context, there are plenty of words that could mean almost anything, depending on how they’re used in a sentence, and the sentence is in a paragraph and the paragraph is in a chapter and chapter is in a book, so nothing is quite on its own. I’m not translating words, but what you say has got to be the same as what the original said, even if it’s not expressed in exactly the same words in the same order. It’s got to be the same, which means that the story’s got to be the same story, the mood has to be the same sort of mood, the basic human issues have to be the same in the two cases. Now it may be that somebody, I don’t know, a woman in Algeria, for example, has moments in her life which are completely untranslatable into the experience of a woman reader or a male reader in England or America. There may just be a complete gap of experience. You have to get over that, and I think that’s one of the hardest things. I hate footnotes, I don’t use footnotes unless they’re in the original. Everything for me is in the text, and if the text talks about something that is unfamiliar to my kind of ideal reader, the one I have in mind, then I slip in an explanation. I remember talking about this very early on with Amos Oz, because you may have personalities, for example, you may refer to Hayyim Nahman Bialik, the great poet of the Hebrew national revival. Every schoolchild in Israel knows who Bialik was, he’s like Wordsworth. Whereas no English reader knows who Bialik is, so we need something in the text which will help the reader. And Amos said: Why don’t you write “our great national poet Bialik says . . . ?” and I thought that looked quite good actually. It was somebody quoting him and it was the slightly pompous remark that that character might make, it fitted in well, and it helped the reader over that difficulty. So that after that they knew who Bialik was, and it made sense. That’s just one example. But I think you can do this in all sorts of ways: a word here or there can be quite useful.
RS: I also read the text aloud, especially when there are awkward patches. It’s time-consuming to read a whole novel aloud, but I always read at least the opening chapters to somebody else, usually a non-translator, and that’s when I find out whether the translation works or not. Music, voice . . . it’s interesting, we’re using a lot of “audio” terms . . . Actually, what we’re talking about is being faithful to the spirit rather than to the letter of the text. You don’t translate every single word by its dictionary definition, but you’re conveying what you perceive is the author’s intention. And that might mean translating a word by a gesture or using some other device.
NdL: Yes, because we’re talking about faithfulness. And I think that we agree that faithfulness isn’t just faithfulness to the words. You used the word “faithful” when describing the point where you read your text as an English text, you said you have to check that it’s faithful to what’s in the French, and somebody hearing you might have misunderstood and thought you meant just checking that all the words were there. Real fidelity is where you’re faithful to the author’s intention, and you’re bold enough not to be faithful to the words on the page.
RS: And you have to use a range of solutions when dealing with cultural differences. You can’t have footnotes in novels. I sometimes compile a glossary. For example, in a couple of Algerian novels I’ve translated, the authors have used a number of Arabic words. Some of them would be reasonably familiar to a French reader because of the historic ties between France and Algeria, but they are wholly unfamiliar to an English reader. Using these words— quite everyday words meaning the mayor, the president, a river, food, items of clothing or references to political groups—was a deliberate choice on the part of the authors, they give the novel a particular texture. To have just left in the Arabic words knowing that the English-speaking reader would be unlikely to understand them would have hindered the narrative flow, but on the other hand to have translated them into English would have detracted from the richness of the language. I decided to keep the words in Arabic (transliterated) and to add a glossary plus some background historical notes. The glossary was not intrusive, but it was there if the reader wanted it. I had a bit of a battle with the editor over this, because it’s quite a difficult book stylistically, and the publisher wanted to make it more accessible by translating the Arabic words, but I stood my ground and managed to convince him. I think there’s an ethical issue too, in translating, making a work accessible, we need to be careful about not colonizing it.
NdL: Do you think that these are expressions that any French reader would understand, I don’t mean would they use them, but would they understand what they meant?
RS: I checked them out with French native speakers, and although there were some words they didn’t understand, they were fairly easy to grasp in the context. I don’t think the readers really stumbled. Most of them I think were familiar to a French person, one or two were more obscure.
NdL: Anyway, nowadays a lot of dictionaries contain many of these words, not all, but many of them. Lots of words that if you take the trouble to look up, are there. I think that the editors—we must talk about editors, because they’re a bit of a nuisance—sometimes assume a reader isn’t prepared to go to the dictionary. I had this problem recently when I used in this medieval translation the word “palmer,” which means someone who’s been on a pilgrimage to the Holy Land. The editor crossed out “palmer” and put “crusader.” I explained that it wasn’t right, that palmer was a pilgrim, somebody, an ordinary person, who went for religious reasons, not aggressively, but to accomplish a religious duty, and to be spiritually fulfilled. Whereas crusaders although they may have had a religious aim, and they may have wanted to be spiritually fulfilled, the way they did it—we think of them as being violent. That was completely the wrong image, apart from the fact that this book was set before the crusades began, so it was historically unfaithful. I found that point very difficult to put across. They said that nobody knows the word palmer, and I insisted that if you don’t know a word you can look it up in the dictionary, and the word palmer is in any dictionary. I think that vocabulary influences the way you read a book, even if you don’t understand the words. There are words that I don’t understand, I know that I’m not very clear about what patchouli or frangipani are really like. But you see those words on a page and it gives a flavor. I’m not sure what color puce is quite honestly, but I see the word puce and it gives me a certain feeling. And it doesn’t really matter that I don’t understand what it means. I think it’s helpful to know what these things are, but I do think also that editors are much too fussy about their reader having to know immediately what everything is about.
I wanted to ask you about editors. Because you said when you were talking about one of your authors, that this author perhaps hadn’t had much experience of an editor in the original language. You obviously feel that the editor has an important role to play, because if that author had had a good editor, she might not have ended up publishing what she did on the page. So the role of the editor is important, the editor is an important intermediary between the author and the text and the reader. And that is the same as a translator, isn’t it? Do we regard editors as villains or as saints?
RS: I think a good editor is a saint, they are very few and far between. I think that everything that I’ve learned as a translator is from having worked with good editors, at one stage or another. Actually an editor who only intervenes when it’s important, who doesn’t just change things arbitrarily but who points out bumpy bits, asks questions, points out inconsistencies, and who is really with you, is invaluable. But it’s something that’s becoming rarer and rarer, partly because of pressure of time. I think a lot of manuscripts just don’t get read properly at the publishing house. I’ve been quite astonished when proofs have come back to me and I’ve found mistakes that really should not have got past an editor. The villains are the ones who make arbitrary changes.
NdL: And who don’t even consult you.
RS: Let me give you an example of something that I think would have benefited from better editing in the original. In this same Algerian novel, one chapter opens with a short paragraph in which there are seven metaphors piled one on top of the other. My feeling was that this didn’t work very well in French, and in English it was just hopeless. This author has a tendency to convey a very concrete effect with a highly abstract image, pushing prose into the realm of poetry. Seven such images in seven sentences, one on top of the other to describe evening falling sounds wonderful if you read it aloud in French—the music, the poetry—but as soon as you start asking what on earth it means, it all falls apart. I asked a number of French colleagues whether they felt it worked in French and whether they felt my response was conditioned by my non-French sensibility. Most of them agreed that the French didn’t really work, there were too many mixed metaphors. And that’s the sort of thing where I think it would have been useful to have an editor go back to the author to say: do you want to have another look at this, do you think you might have just overdone the imagery here? I didn’t feel it would work if I just translated it into English as it was.
NdL: You’ve plunged into the heart of a real philosophical issue: when you translate, are you translating a kind of ideal text, which doesn’t exist on the page? But what you’re saying at that point is, I looked at the words on the page, and they are not the words that I want to put on my nice clean page and to hand to my English reader. I didn’t want my English reader to have to struggle with these clumsy sentences. And so I decided that I would treat them to something better.
That’s the nub of the question, isn’t it? You’ve given a very concrete example. You have said—let me see if I can unpack some of this. A part of it is a bit mechanical: you say that the French editor would have warned the author that she was doing something that didn’t work in French, so that’s the first thing. And you consulted a French reader who felt it didn’t work. That was one person’s judgement. You did not want someone picking up your book in English and saying this is utter rubbish. You wanted your readers to say: this is absolutely wonderful.
Now we’re at the heart of the process. And I think it’s quite complex. It’s to do with your self-respect, your conception of your responsibility to your reader, and the integrity of the original. Because you said to me, just now, that editors sometimes don’t understand what they’re reading. I presume it’s true that readers, including translators, also sometimes don’t understand. I’m not criticising your reading of that particular passage, that’s not the issue. But it’s possible sometimes that we as the translators reading a text don’t realize why the sentences are so long, or why a particular vocabulary is being used, or why the events are being presented in what looks like the wrong order. There may be a reason which we don’t grasp and we look at them and we say, if I was doing it I wouldn’t do it like that. I would do it in a more concrete way, I would use shorter words, shorter sentences, I’d do it differently, I think that’s the wrong word in that context. So we’re putting ourselves in the position of the editor. And that’s the issue we need to talk about, isn’t it: what’s happening when we do that, and is it legitimate, and is it serving a beneficial purpose, and who does it benefit. Is it for the benefit of the reader, the benefit of the translator or the benefit of the author? Now, I think that all at some point are important to us. I translate established authors. And because Amos Oz was already quite well known as a young author in his own country, I’ve never translated really a beginning author, someone who didn’t have a certain recognition, though I think you do. At any rate, we translate people who aren’t necessarily very well known in English. So we want them to look good, we want people to say Oh, I like that, I’d like to try another book by that author. So we have our own reputation as translators to think about. Is there a part of us that wants readers to go to a library and they’d say I’d like another book translated by Ros Schwartz, because they liked the last one? I don’t think we imagine that readers are as well informed as that, although they ought to be.
RS: It happens in Russia.
NdL: Emlyn Williams was talking on the radio many years ago, describing a childhood in Wales and beginning to read, and how somebody gave him a book which he liked, and not knowing very much about books and publishing, he went to a bookshop and said have you got another book published by Faber & Faber. And innocently, suddenly a whole world of wonderful poetry was opened to him, simply because he’d asked for another book by the publisher rather than the poet. We would like people to think about us as translators, at the same time we don’t want to be too obtrusive. Not to be obtrusive, but we want to be recognized as really skilful and wonderful translators. So that’s our responsibility to ourselves, and then we have a responsibility to the reader, because we want the reader to have a good time with this book. And so we say, if this is too clumsy, they’re going to have a bumpy ride, as you put it. We want them to have a smooth ride. And I’m afraid that very often the editors in English, and also very often the reviewers, think more about the bumpy ride than about anything else. How often have we read a review written by someone who doesn’t know the original language, and who’s never seen the original book, yet who says that the translation reads very smoothly. I’m always very suspicious when I see that, because I suspect that translators often succumb to a conscious or unconscious urge to make something smoother. And the editors certainly do. I think you’ve implied that: the editors want to smooth things out, they don’t like books to be difficult.
RS: Dumbing down is the word.
NdL: Dumbing down is one thing, because that’s maybe at an intellectual level. They may be removing allusions and things like that, but also they don’t want the book to seem strange. Now if it’s an English author, I don’t know if anything happens with the publisher, I’ve never really experienced that, but I think we do accept that authors sometimes have rather unusual ways of saying things. They don’t use the expression that we would expect them to use, sometimes the prose is a bit jerky, whether it’s dialogue or description, we tolerate that. When it’s a translation, I think there’s much less tolerance, and people think it ought to be much smoother, it ought to say what you’d expect it to say, and that’s a danger. That’s where unfaithfulness can creep in, perhaps through good intentions, busybody interference, but I think it’s completely unjustified, and that’s one of the worst sorts of example of where I think interference is not legitimate. Very little of the literature published in this country is translated. We have the lowest level of translated literature of any European country. It’s a matter of two or three percent, whereas in some countries it’s twenty or thirty, or even forty, and in the Scandinavian countries, most of what they read probably is translated. In the UK we have a sort of guarded attitude towards translation, and so there’s this desire to make sure that it doesn’t offend people or make them have a bad trip, because they won’t want to do it again. So we’re all on our guard, and that is so dangerous. So to come back again to your example, where there are too many metaphors, clumsy metaphors perhaps . . . ?
RS: No they’re not clumsy metaphors, they are rather difficult, abstract and obscure. One of them on its own is quite challenging.
NdL: Let’s think about the issues that are involved. You said that the music was probably quite good.
RS: Yes, I think you made an interesting comment about the translator being pulled in different ways in terms of responsibility to the author, to the reader, to our own self-respect. And I think that’s something I’m very aware of, particularly translating a language like French. Everybody thinks they know French, so the critics are going to jump on us. Not many people know Hebrew, so they don’t feel qualified to criticize.
NdL: But they do, they say the translation reads very well . . .
RS: What the critics say is another issue. I am aware that I need to guard against being more worried about Ros Schwartz and what people might say. I do however feel a responsibility for the English text, and I know that critics are likely to seize on anything that’s a bit odd and assume it’s the translator’s clumsiness. I think this state of affairs is partly the fault of translators because we don’t talk about what we do, we don’t talk about our approach, our ethos, we hope that the finished translation will be transparent and people will see from it that we’ve taken a particular stance. Some of the translations that are criticized for being difficult or whatever, are perhaps just a translator who’s adopted a particular approach. Who knows, the original might have been extremely weird, exotic, bumpy, but nobody asks that question. It is something I’m very conscious of and I try to be very careful not to give in to the urge to edit. So in the instance of the multiple metaphors, I asked myself what the author was trying to do. He was obviously trying to create a lyrical, musical effect, a magical atmosphere at the opening of that particular chapter. It’s a habit of his, often using poetic description in contrast to the brutal events about to take place. So in the end, I privileged the sound and the music, I kept the images, but I paid great attention to the flow, so the reader wouldn’t be brought up short by something that was clumsy and awkward. I turned things around a little bit, the English doesn’t quite say what the French says, but I hope it achieves the same effect.
NdL: You could put these points to the author, saying that French readers would react differently, but I can tell you that an English reader isn’t going to stand for this, if I put it straight into English in this way it’s not going to achieve the effect that I want. Do you mind if I make a suggestion . . . would it be all right to cut it up a little bit, or to drop three of the images or something like that? Translation is a process of negotiation, with an author, which I find very helpful, because the translator is in some ways an intermediary between the original author and the new public in the new country. If you can help that along by actually consulting the author and explaining the issues, that’s quite good. Normally, though, that’s a luxury we just can’t afford.
RS: Yes, working closely with an author is ideal if you can. I haven’t often been in that position. Sometimes editors resolve problems by just deleting things. I translated one novel where the author tended to “show off” by throwing in gratuitous literary references which hindered the narrative. The references were pretty obscure for a French reader and beyond the reach of most English readers. I kept them and sent explanatory notes to the publisher. And the editor just took some of them out, saying “this is not going to work in English.”
NdL: That is the editor being an editor, and that’s fine, it does involve the translator in a way, and I think an editor who’s doing his or her job properly should consult the translator. But as I gain more experience of publishers and more confidence, I don’t do editors’ jobs for them any more. Editors sometimes address a whole sheaf of queries to the translator, and some of these are translation queries, but a lot of them are editorial. They might say, for example, you’ve used the same word three times in this paragraph. Now I’m very attentive to repetition, partly because of the question of language and the way I listen to the music, as I was saying earlier, and I think repetition’s very important. So if there’s repetition in the original, I keep it. If the editor says to me, you’ve used the same word three times, I say that’s an editorial matter and you have to ask the author, not the translator. Just because it’s a translation, there’s no reason why the editor shouldn’t go back to the author. The author may say “I don’t speak English and I can’t understand this letter you’ve written.” Or they may say “I just don’t know, do whatever you think is best.” Or they may say “no I meant it to be . . . ,” or “oh thank you very much I didn’t notice.” But that is their responsibility, it’s not your responsibility to decide whether the author meant to repeat himself. But I think it’s very easy for the translator, getting a letter like that from the publisher, to answer all the questions. Now I just go through it and star queries and say these are editorial questions and not the translator’s, and I’m not competent to answer them. I don’t see why I should decide. I would, if I were translating Lucretius and he repeated a word, have to decide whether that was a deliberate repetition or whether it was something he hadn’t noticed. So I would be doing the editor’s job for him. But that’s because of the attitude we have towards a text by dead authors. Why should it be different with a living author? I suppose because you can consult them.
I think editors ought to be a little bit clearer about what they’re doing in that respect. In the example you gave you were balancing the demands of the music against the demands of the meaning, and that’s quite an interesting choice. That is a translator’s choice, because sometimes you can’t get both. It’s nice when you can, if the music and the meaning go together, and in a lot of good writing it does. Whether it’s fiction or non-fiction, in my view, in good writing the style and the subject matter are in harmony, and if they’re in conflict, there has to be a reason. It happens quite often that people’s writing is not in harmony, the words chosen are not the right words for the meaning that’s being conveyed. Good writing is when they are in harmony, and it’s a great pleasure to be able to maintain that in the translation, and I think we’re quite right to worry about this. I think that’s what you were, partly, nervous about.
RS: Yes, and I think in the romance languages, you can get away with writing something that sounds absolutely wonderful, but when you start unpacking it, there’s not actually much content there. Then when you translate into English, if you privilege meaning, you sometimes lose the music, you end up with something rather prosaic and turgid.
NdL: It’s not true that English writing can’t sound good.
RS: No, I didn’t say that. But sometimes you translate the meaning—and I tend to go for sense first—then you reread what you’ve done, and you think it’s nonsense, it’s not saying very much, so then you go back to the French and think well, actually, it’s not saying a lot in French either but it sounds wonderful. You can get away with more in French, as long as it sounds good. That’s what I’m saying, you can’t do it so easily in English. I’m thinking about certain types of writing, art criticism, travel brochures, etc. If you decide to prioritize the music, you can sometimes move quite far away from what’s being said.
NdL: Well I’ve just started translating a novel which is written in a kind of verse, where the demands of the sound are obviously going to be bound up quite a lot with the needs of the story and the meaning. I don’t know yet how that’s going to work out, so I can’t really comment on it, though. But inherently neither the music nor the meaning has a prior claim.
RS: No, but sometimes we’re forced to make a choice. What you’re saying is that ideally they should go together, but sometimes they don’t.
NdL:That means that the music always has to give way to the meaning?
RS: Well I think every book or poem or whatever it is, is an individual case, I don’t think you can apply a universal principle. Every translation is different and requires a different strategy, and that goes for non-fiction as well.
NdL: I’ve been reading The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony by Roberto Calasso, translated by Tim Parks. This book, which was written in Italian, read extraordinarily well, I thought, in English. I would love to go back to the Italian and see what are the tricks of the trade that this translator uses, because so often I think it’s an experience that books that are intended for a general readership are not particularly well translated, not up to the very highest standards.
RS: I think a lot of it is to do with pressure of deadlines, and just ridiculous working conditions. We were saying before that you need time to put a translation away and come back to it, and over the last few years, publishers have started making the most ludicrous demands on translators, it’s like a production line.
NdL: This is a great mistake. Translation’s not unlike wine in that respect, if you try and rush it, it doesn’t necessarily get better.
RS: Yes, there are a number of authors who’ve actually been killed at birth with bad translations, when the publisher’s not used the best translator but the cheapest or the fastest.
NdL: To get back to intervention . . . we were talking about how far it’s your role to adapt what’s written on the page for the reader and we were beginning to think about some issues, like for example, your estimation of the author’s intention. You may think the author hasn’t been faithful to himself at some point, because he has said something which gives the wrong impression. This sentence is unnecessary, it gets in the way. It would be much better to remove it. And I said that was like putting yourself in the position of an editor. Are there other reasons which are more to do with your role as a translator? You might say: well, that’s fine. You gave an example where an older woman put her hand on a young man’s arm, where you were intervening as the translator, you had no problem with the original text, your intervention was purely in your role as translator, as the intermediary between the two languages, saying that the English reader needs a bit more help. Rather than give them a footnote on tu and vous, I’m going to just subtly change the text. So there you’re intervening, in a slightly different role, not as an editor.
RS: Well, as a mediator then. You’re conveying something that is language- and culture-bound into another culture, to achieve an equivalent effect. If you didn’t intervene there, all you would have is the word you, so you would have actually lost something enormously significant. So that’s really the translator having an understanding of the two cultures, and mediating between them. I’ll give you another example of something where I think I would say it was intervention at the level of the whole book. This novel is a first-person narrative, and the character speaking is a woman who has no formal education. It’s a sort of sci-fi book set in a futuristic scenario, in a kind of prison. The narrator has no access to education apart from the women around her who teach her the rudiments of language. The French reads wonderfully and the book is a real page-turner. When I translated it, I was very much influenced by the register of the French language, the author uses some very sophisticated, literary language and I did the same. I got to the fourth draft and started reading the translation out loud, and it just didn’t work. The novel didn’t stand up in English. And the reason it didn’t work was because the language coming out of the narrator’s mouth was all wrong for somebody who had no formal education. The character wasn’t credible, there was too great a discrepancy between her language and her life. I had to create a language that would make this character believable. I went through the entire book with a highlighter and excised all the Latinate words, substituting Anglo-Saxon equivalents. Regardless of the French, I used much more everyday language. This simple, mechanical process produced a credible, coherent voice for the character. I did actually discuss this with the author at one point, and I could see that she was taken aback because I’d put my finger on something that she hadn’t thought about in the French. Although I put it to her in terms of the differences between English and French, she realized that it just hadn’t occurred to her that she was writing as very erudite herself, not as the protagonist. So I suppose that’s a form of intervention.
NdL: It is. You produce a text that is quite different from what perhaps another translator might have produced. You mentioned earlier that translation is your reading, and there could be other readings, and with the great classics there are of course, with Dostoevsky or Proust you can actually go to the bookshop and buy several different versions of the same book, and they could be very different from each other.
RS: Have you any examples of where you feel you’ve intervened, or do you feel that you really don’t?
NdL: That’s a very difficult question to answer, because all translation is intervention. You talk about finding a voice. The moment you find a voice, and my first translation, the first book that I translated, My Michael by Amos Oz, has a female narrator living in Jerusalem in the 1950s and speaking Hebrew in her real life, insofar as an imaginary character has a real life. I remember working very hard on trying to find a voice for this young married woman in the 1950s, in Jerusalem. To pick up a character, a narrator from another book, from another language, and put them into your book in your language, is very difficult isn’t it? I remember thinking about words, what sort of words does she use, does she say wireless or radio, does she say frock or dress, you know, little things like that which make an enormous difference to the way it reads.
RS: And they’re class things as well, I mean whether you say supper or dinner, so you have to be very careful not bringing in English class.
NdL: Yes, absolutely. And that is terribly difficult. So that’s a kind of intervention, but a necessary one. I think people make a great mistake in thinking about translation, they imagine that there is a right way and a wrong way to translate, they imagine that a text in a foreign language could have a right translation. Now there may be an obvious way of translating. I sometimes look at texts with students and we talk about translation, they sometimes say “Why didn’t you use this word, the obvious word to translate that would have been this,” and I have to try and intimate that there isn’t a right way or a wrong way, or an obvious way. There may be an obvious way if you’ve been trained in a certain way, you may think that the dictionary translation of so and so is such and such. But there isn’t really one way of translating, it depends entirely who you are, and what you’re trying to do.
RS: But that’s something that I think that we as translators need to articulate in a much wider way, because I think there is an assumption somehow that there is one right translation, there is one official translation. It’s quite interesting that once a translation exists in print, it’s assumed that this is the official translation. I often find if I come across a quote from a classic author, that when I hunt down the published translation, I find that it’s really not quite how I would want to translate it. Maybe what we have to do as translators is claim our work more and say yes, this is my translation, my reading, my understanding, my interpretation, it’s not the only one, it’s not necessarily the best one. But this is what I did and I stand by it.
NdL: I was asked some time ago if I could define what the role of the translator is. I thought the best way to do this would be to take an example from another artistic milieu, which people would understand, and I took the role of the performing musician. You see, you don’t say that there’s a right way to perform and a wrong way to perform a Tchaikovsky symphony. There may be wrong ways, there may be unsuccessful versions, but on the whole good orchestras produce good but totally distinctive renderings. Every performer, take the soloist, because we’re talking about solo work, every soloist is performing in a distinctive personal way, and that performance is signed by the performer. You might go to a record shop and you say I would like to have this sonata played by B, or A, and that’s what I mean, you might want to go to a bookshop and say I’d like something translated by Ros Schwartz. Unfortunately you won’t have the choice of one book translated by three or four different people, but then you don’t have that for contemporary music either. But as things become more established, you might. That responsibility of the performing musician is analogous to the way I see the responsibility of the translator. The translator is giving you, as you said very well, their reading. You give your reading, you give 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 a musical score also because it’s locked up, because 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 a score. It needs to be performed. So it’s there in potential, and the performance is going to be totally unique and distinctive.
RS: I think that’s a very good analogy. In fact it was brought home to me just how personal translation is when I collaborated with a colleague, Steve Cox, on a book. Although it was a novel, we felt it was a book that lent itself to collaboration because stylistically it wasn’t hugely challenging, and it had to be done quickly. We thought we could split the work very efficiently, taking half the book each. We agreed to re-read each other’s chapters, and, to harmonize the style, just scribble in the margin where we would have said things slightly differently. We would then take each other’s comments, to make the joins invisible. We’d agreed on the general tone, it was a mass market book. I don’t think it’s something you can do with a major literary figure. What astounded both of us, was how differently we wrote, when we’d thought we were going to be able to mesh fairly easily.
NdL: Like playing a duet.
RS: Yes. It was an enormously instructive experience. It’s fascinating where one’s language comes from. We both draw on very different linguistic sources, no doubt as a result of our different social backgrounds, educations and the age gap between us. It was apparent in little things, For example one of us had a tendency to say “start” and the other “begin.” Just little things like that. Or one of us says “a dog’s dinner” and the other “a dog’s breakfast.” It was enriching for both of us, and the book certainly benefited. I feel the experience expanded my vocabulary. Steve uses words that are just not part of my vocabulary, I use words that are just not part of his vocabulary—not that we don’t know these words, but they’re just not part of our active pool of language.
NdL: That’s what you were saying earlier on. You said that you had your vocabulary which would be different from someone else’s vocabulary, but also your approach to writing and your approach to translating must also be distinct and personal.
RS: But it was still quite a shock to me, because I’m constantly questioning myself and trying to extend my range. And it brought home to me just how unique the limitations of one’s own vocabulary are, and confirmed just how subjective translation is.
