Forked tongues

[nnyhav]

Aviya Kushner in Wilson Quarterly: McCulture (http://www.wilsoncenter.org/index.cfm?fuseaction=wq.essay&essay_id=502808) (via 3%)
?So many writers nowadays come from different cultures, and I wonder if that compensates for the lack of interest in other cultures,? says ­Moscow-­born novelist Olga Grushin, author of The Dream Life of Sukhanov (2006), who writes in English and now lives near Washington, D.C. ?In a way, if Americans will not go to other cultures, then other cultures will have to come here and speak about themselves.?
But from the first translation of the Bible onward, what Grushin describes was always the translator?s role: to go to another culture and bring back what matters. It was sort of like immigration with a ­built-­in return trip. A good translator must create and inhabit a place that does not fully exist?a land between languages?because it is impossible to reproduce another language exactly. A translator must bring over what is most important, as accurately as possible.
A bilingual writer, on the other hand, might omit the dirty laundry, inside jokes, or other intimate markers of a culture, such as a scandalous reference to a prime minister?s ­sexual ­harassment travails that matter only to the small number of residents of his country, or a joke on, say, Chairman Mao?s appearance. A novelist is more interested in story than in accuracy, but most translators think about exactness, and try to honor it, in their way.
Now, sadly, we have forgotten what it is to live between languages, to have translators who inhabit the space between tongues. We prefer to read of a Bosnian immigrant in New York instead of a Bosnian man in Sarajevo, written by a Bosnian. This way, at least we can recognize New York.

[Eric]

Thanks for that quote, Nnyhav. I'm not quite sure how much of the argument there is what Ol'ga Grushin (originally a Russian native-speaker) writes and how much is added by Aviya Kushner (originally a Hebrew native-speaker). But the things said are very valuable and pertinent to translation.

Quotes from the quote:


A good translator must create and inhabit a place that does not fully exist—a land between languages—because it is impossible to reproduce another language exactly. A translator must bring over what is most important, as accurately as possible.

A translator is certainly someone who salvages what he can from someone else's culture. Only in the Borges story about an exact reproduction of the Quixote, can you reproduce a work of literature exactly. There is a whole network of associations and connotations built into any novel. So a native-speaker of the source language inevitably reads the book differently to how a foreigner does. So by notes, introductions, etc., we translators have to compensate, somehow. But puns and inside jokes are a big problem. Explaining a joke rather ruins it as a joke, but may help the reader to immerse themself better in the source culture.



Now, sadly, we have forgotten what it is to live between languages, to have translators who inhabit the space between tongues. We prefer to read of a Bosnian immigrant in New York instead of a Bosnian man in Sarajevo, written by a Bosnian. This way, at least we can recognize New York.

I get this feeling too when reading travel literature. Instead of allowing a man from Sarajevo to explain the city to the rest of us, by way of translation, i.e. what it's like to live there, breathe the air, meet the people, know the history, we get far too many Brits & Yanks going over for a month and writing journalistic bla-bla-bla books about pavement caf?s and shrapnel-studded fa?ades, plus meetings with "famous" authors whose works these Brits & Yanks haven't read - because they're not translated into English.

[Beth]

I also thought it was a good article. I've only very recently begun to think about the role of the translator, namely in the past two weeks when reading two novels translated from the Italian by the same person, Archibald Colquhoun (1912-1964). The first I found leaden and the next sparkling and marvelous. So, the translator had done his job, allowing the authors to speak for themselves. But, in the context of the original post, could this be only because the translator moved to Italy? (http://jestinfiction.blogspot.com/2008/06/archibald-colquhoun-biographical.html) Is that the only way? Pardon the beggaring simplicity of the question; I know it's been a huge topic here and I'm in over my head for sure.

[Eric]

Where you live as a translator is a whole discussion in itself. It's a matter of weighing up choices. I, being a translator myself, would say the following:

Ideally, you should live in the country where they speak the language you are translating into (the "target language" in the jargon). Because this is the language you are going to use when you translate the book.

You can make many trips to the country where they speak the language the book is written in (the "source language" in the jargon). But if you live there a very long time, you may lose your knowledge of the subtleties of the target language. And, ultimately, it's the target language that counts.

I am in the unenviable position of living in a country whose language is neither my source language (Estonian, mostly) nor target language (British English, always), as I live in Holland. Can't be helped. However, I watch some British TV every evening, so I'm not hopelessly out of touch with Blightyspeak and its modern evolution.

British English is my target language, i.e. my bread & butter language. So I need to be able to develop various styles and registers in that language. I can always ask, e-mail, or otherwise contact a native-speaker of Estonian. But if I can only translate into one type of British English, I can only translate one type of book.

So another important part of my job is to read English books similar to those I'm going to translate. Mostly novels, in my case. But from different epochs. Reading Anthony Powell would hardly help if your were translating books by the equivalent of, say, Charlotte Roche or Irvine Welsh (not that I'd want to translate either!). But reading Anthony Powell (or Evelyn Waugh, Charles Morgan, Aldous Huxley, D.H. Lawrence, etc.) does help when you're going to be translating something from, say, the 1930s, into English. Just to get the feel of the way things were written in those days.

*

As for wooden and sparkling things by the same translator, even a translator can learn, improve, become better at his game. Or he may have to do a rushed job, as all those poor translators do when someone wins the Nobel. If your deadline is breathing down your neck, so to speak, you won't do a good job. Also, we all have our preferences, even among books by the same author. The translator may "get on" with one book, and not do so with another.