The Art of Translation

[nnyhav]

Originally Posted by Mirabell

I took eric to refer to second hand translation
for example tranlating kadare into english via french
it's a different issue
no?

Fair enough. The farther removed from the source, the more likely the distortion. But there's some relation between these issues I'm trying to explore.

[Eric]

All necessary prerequisites, but literary competency is also needed. That is, beyond style and voice (which may themselves have to be translated into the target language/culture), maintaining the ability to support several readings where such openness to interpretation is present in the source, whether at different levels of the narrative, or as embedded ambiguities intrinsic to the story or its telling (e.g., hingeing on how an early passage is parsed, with the story seemingly developing in one direction but then resolving into a consistent alternate interpretation). It's at this level that translation rises above mere craft.

What Nnyhav says in #13 (and subsequent postings) about literary competency is perfectly true, but it does sound a bit as if comes from some handbook. Please dump Plato and Rousseau, Mason and Thirlwell, dichotomies and literalness, and learn one language properly, then try translating yourself from it. Have you done so? Have you translated five poems or a short-story from, say, French or Spanish? What did other people say about your work?

That will reduce the ivory tower factor. Brits and Yanks love to avoid learning languages like the plague, then come up with fancy translation theories and somewhat risible strategies, such as lecturing us all on the merits of two translations of the same text, without actually being able to read the original!

The above do not sound like the words of someone who actually does translation on a regular basis, but someone who has read up about it at university level (seminars, lectures, rather than workshops). We people who do y'r actual translation have to do all that within a split second several hundred times a day. Sometimes you don't want to "support several readings", but you want to convey, as accurately as you can, the unambiguous, non-Bakhtinian carnivalistic non-postmodernist message that the author is trying to convey.

Nor can you "mistrust" translations at some abstract level. They either convey what the author wanted to say, or they don't. The success in doing so forms a continuum. The more the translator knows about the source culture and the target culture, the better he or she can join up the British or American reader with the foreign original text.

Yes, Mirabell, I was referring to someone who translates, let's say, a Portuguese poem into English via the French (because he or she doesn't actually know Portuguese, but suddenly some Brazilian has just won the Nobel, and this translator from French desperately wants to jump on the bandwagon). As I've said, it can be done for prose. I know of two translators with a Finnish background (Anselm Hollo; Hildi Hawkins) who did perfectly competent translations into English of Estonian novels. But it's more difficult with poetry. There you really do need to know huge fields of connotation in both the source and target language. That comes from learning and experience, not reading abstract theories in a book. The internet can help with factual things, but a feel for the right nuance is built up by experience.

[Mirabell]

They either convey what the author wanted to say, or they don't.

That's not enough. They should translate the text as it is, not as the author thinks it is. But I do agree that some of our (German) abysmal translators do make that mistake and it is part and parcel of the shoddy result.

I translate almost daily, poetry, mostly. My own and other people's. Currently I am translating some short stories of mine into German and English and a book by Randall Jarrell (for my niece (?)), into German. That is difficult (because the poems within it are important in their formal aspects as well as far as content is concerned, because the prose part of the book discusses both aspects of the poems embedded in it) and I don't have time, so it's been taking me awhile.

Nor can you "mistrust" translations at some abstract level.

Oh, well abstract...but to the extent that I was being abstract, believe me, you can. You appear to be missing the point (again). The point is that with languages I don't speak or don't speak well, I have no means to check (not that it makes much sense to buy both editions), how well it has been translated. Given the difficulties of even prose translation (that linguistics paper I linked to may give some indication of where potential pitfalls may lie), I assume that all translations are, in one way or another inadequate and I try, by reading reviews, reading sample pages in two languages etc., to ferret out which is less inadequate than the others.

[Mirabell]

Originally Posted by nnyhav

Fair enough. The farther removed from the source, the more likely the distortion. But there's some relation between these issues I'm trying to explore.

I get your drift. Need to think about this.

[Mirabell]

as an afterthought, may I note the curiosity that someone would disparagingly talk about 'bookish learning' in a discussion on translations of, well, books.

[nnyhav]

Eric, I'm sorry if you didn't have the opportunity to attend university. My college days concentrated on maths and sciences, where the notation really has to mean precisely what it says. The only translation of poetry I did was high school Latin, which was hardly literary; that interest came later, and was extracurricular. I can't say I'm unaffected by the academic perspective as expressed in lit journals and glossies and such, needing some guidance to point me to primary materials, though serendipity plays its part as well. Bakhtin, for instance, I read before I found out he was then hot in lit crit circles, well before philosophers discovered he was one of them; yes, I read him in translation rather than in the original Russian, just as I didn't read Rousseau in 18th century French nor Plato in ancient Greek.

But that's all abstraction. I'm more an empiricist than a theoretician anyway, and I tend to pick it up as I go along (e.g., I excelled as a computer programmer when the only F on my transcript was in Intro to Computer Programming [who needed Algol when there was APL?]; my betterhalf, on the otherhand, fulfilled her college foreign language requirement in Fortran). Empirically, if one can't differentiate between two translations on their facial merits without referring back to the source text, one lacks the discrimination necessary to perform literary translation, where it goes beyond craft and becomes an art. But of course one mustn't presume an insight into the source language, or it becomes high comedy, as when Edmund Wilson attempted to lecture Nabokov on his grasp of Russian.

One of the things about poetry is that it is itself a transformation of language, is in itself both source and target, which makes the task of translation doubly difficult, something akin to going through an intermediary language. It also relates to my interest in constraints and transformations (Oulipo and all that) -- should the French alexandrine be represented by English iambic pentameter? should tonal languages be rendered by metric stresses?

[Eric]

Mirabell #23. Translating your own poetry is cheating. I mean: it's a fine thing to do, but you as a poet-translator can always bend things to make them fit the target language.

Living poets quite legitimately say to translators, when priviliged enough to be able to read the target language (which most British poets can't do), that they can alter things, substitute things, etc. That is sensible. But with Rilke or Trakl, Heine or Medina, their works are set in stone. Dead poets can't employ mediums to signal to living translators. (Not as far as we translators know.)

But having said that, Mirabell, you do translate. That is a big plus. We have a big problem in Britain with the translation especially of poetry, in my opinion. This is because an evidently shrinking number of Brits actually know foreign languages. So there are fewer checks on what could be termed, using sophisticated parlance, crap translations. As poetry is short, anyone with a degree in modern languages is already streets ahead of y'r average British reader of poetry in translation. So the charlatans crawl out of the woodwork and can get away with blue murder.

No translation can be the same as the original. (Different language; different vocabulary; different sounds.) A few translations can even be stylistically better than the original, where things were clumsily expressed. But far too many people get all excited about this aspect, talking far too much about when the translation is better. This will be in only a few cases. But a translation must always be different. It's the degree of different that counts.

*

As for university, Nnyhav, you don't need to worry about university. I have translated five books from Estonian, a language I learnt almost totally from books, plus two terms of a course, from which I dropped out. Later on, a year in Tallinn. I get my translations checked by native-speakers and have got them published by respectable British and American publishers. Estonian is a pretty tough language for Brits, but over the years I've persevered.

But what about my university career? It was by no means impressive. I got a II.2 (lower second class degree) from UEA. This barred me from funding to get an MA or PhD which, to this day, I do not have. Universities teach you the language and give you some practice in translating. But they do not prepare you, if you want to translate real novels for real publishers. And my Latin at school was sheer drudgery, tailored to get you through the exams; there was no real love of Roman culture, thus endless hours with a small part of the Aeneid. Latin gave me insights into grammar when learning other languages. But you could get the same from learning, let's say, German. (I knew something of both when I started on Finnish, which is a real bugger for an Englishman!)

The thing is, you have to learn one foreign language properly. You get a book out of the library and go through it. Not one of these fancy modern ones with lots of pictures, but the more traditional ones. Then you can listen to CDs, tune in to satellite TV, go on holidays - and listen.

With languages, you have to use your strengths. Languages have two aspects: the theatrical gift of the gab aspect to speak them and show off in pubs and chat people up; but also the quiet, solid base, the analytical aspect for the grammar, vocabulary, background knowledge.

Before you start theorising, you have to have something to theorise about. Empirical data. Nowadays, once you have grasped the grammar, you can access loads and loads of material on the internet from online daily newspapers in your chosen language. If you read the news you already know, but then in German, French, Spanish, whatever, you will gradually expand your vocabulary. If you are more of a boffin type, you don't have to go around speaking the language. Reading in itself will open up new worlds (well, countries, at least).

If you want a bit of Plato, what about that anecdote with the cave about seeing the reality outside as shadows reflected onto the wall of the cave by the bonfire. Comparing two translations is like comparing the reality outside the cave by means of two bonfires, and two sets of shadows. But my point is: take a stroll outside and have a look at the text in the original language.

Whether literary translation is an art or a craft is open to dispute. But isn't it laughable that Brits start discussions about these abstruse points when they can't even order a cup of coffee in any foreign language, let alone read a novel. That strikes me as material for Pseuds Corner in Private Eye. There is no European of influence that doesn't know English (even Karadzic can speak English passably, from what I've heard on TV!) But Brits think that English will suffice, at all levels. Something wrong there.

[Eric]

Nnyhav says about Bakhtin:

I read him in translation rather than in the original Russian, just as I didn't read Rousseau in 18th century French nor Plato in ancient Greek.

Doesn't that lend credence to the theory that our translators have to be good, honest and accurate, not just charlatans lining their own pockets?

I cannot either read enough Russian to check up on whether, for instance, Michael Holquist is an honourable man or pulling a fast one. (I personally assume he is a hard-working scholar of many years' standing.)

That is why it is incredibly important that what we read of, and about, all those innovative Russian and Czech structuralists is what they actually said, not a vague and inaccurate approximation of their work. Bakhtin has become a cult, while Jakobson, Lotman, Tomashevsky, Tynyanov, Propp, Zhirmunsky, Todorov, Shklovsky, Veselovsky and goodness knows how many other people in the same field seem to have been relatively ignored or sidelined by British university departments.

It's a fad, lasting a decade or two, then Bakhtin will be out, and one of the above list will be trendy. How many Bakhtin scholars send e-mails to one another and, in their total lack of knowledge of the Russian language, keep desperately asking one another: "Have you read Bakhtin's XYZ? What does it say? I desperately need some information to write my second year essay! Course I can't read Russian! Who do you think I am?"

Bakhtin was supposed to have written in a fairly opaque style. But that doesn't stop scholars with no knowledge of Russian asking one another a myriad of questions that should really be solved by textual scholars who can read the language Bakhtin wrote in - or are prepared to translate his thoughts into comprehensible English for the rest of us. Imagine if there were no Bible scholars that knew Hebrew or Ancient Greek!

My ultimate question regarding translation and scholarship is:

How can you be a convincing scholar of works by an author, or arising within a movement, material written in a particular language, if you don't trust the translators, but can't read the language in question, either?

Doesn't this result in scholarship where you make wild guesses and make it up as you go along?

[Mirabell]

Originally Posted by Eric

How can you be a convincing scholar of works by an author, or arising within a movement, material written in a particular language, if you don't trust the translators, but can't read the language in question, either?

you can't. well observed.
bakhtin is a special case, as, academically, he's not just been re-discovered by the strange, wonderful, horrible Ms. Kristeva, the Bakhtin that is used today is mostly the "french" Bakhtin. As the influence proceeds from there, I think it's fine to just use that. You shouldn't pretend you're doing Balhtin hermeneutics, of course, and you should always be aware that what you use is the "french bakhtin" and not "the real" bakhtin, but apart from that...
it#s like shakespeare in most late 19th century, early 20th century German lit. Not much to do with the english shakespeare, apart from the plot and basic elements. the influence is not shakespeare, but the romantic translation of him.

and in my academic environment, tynyanov, propp, jacobson, hell, todorov, they are as common as bakhtin. if you do a blog search on my blog I suspect some of them will be referenced, at least as often as bakhtin, if not more often.

[nnyhav]

Actually, USA has some strong Slavic Studies programs. And scholarship unquestionably requires the language proficiency, and so too does the academy before they will confer credentials.

Bakhtin is a special case in other respects -- IIRC he was hot almost from Anglo rediscovery in the late 70s and stayed that way. Jakobsen had a pretty long run too, and didn't entirely cool off before returning to notice. Todorov strikes me as persistently lukewarmish, and I just don't get what the big deal with Shklovsky is. Walter Benjamin is probably the hottest and cultiest currently (not that he's not worthy, just not to that degree). But as for the imposters, you might enjoy this.

I'm no scholar, it's just my hobby, but Bakhtin strikes me as more important and lasting because of the philosophy crossover. (Perhaps Holquist primed me for that, but I got there before the trend. I haven't read Kristeva on Bakhtin, other than in passing, embedded in the general deconstructive construct. I'm sure others will find other uses for him.) I also find that his ideas dovetail well with those of Charles Sanders Peirce, and I've read what's generally available of both of them (mostly university presses).

[nnyhav]

BlogSpy picked it up, but since I brought it up yesterday, Wyatt Mason interviews Adam Thirlwell on translation.

Addendum: complete-review's review page of The Delighted States has opinions all over the map. The interview apparently mirrors some of the discussion within the book on the craft of translating Mlle. O.

[Eric]

I refer my honourable friend to the remarks I made a few moments ago:

Thirlwell interview

[nnyhav]

I thank my esteemed colleague for bringing attention to these remarks

Thirlwell wasn't on my radar at all until he popped up in Zadie Smith's article on oops not Pessoa I meant Kafka with a couple epigrammatic things to say. Piqued my interest then, but it seems as if he's more the master of the literary soundbite, as far as I can make out. The bit about transposing locations in translation might make for an interesting exercise, but one far removed from what I've been calling 'the art of translation', and on its face sounds kinda kitschy, dissing the material. What one has to do to get noticed these days ...

[Eric]

There is a lot of pseudo-mystical rubbish talked about translation. Usually by people who've never done any, or by "gurus" like Thirlwell who are re-inventing the wheel.

Looking at the Japanese-Romanian spat between Emmerich and Hurezanu, I side with the latter, although she does not know Japanese, which I have said previously is a prerequisite for comparing translations.

This is because she clearly points to the editors as the culprits. Emmerich is rather cringing, in that he appears to defend them, when they have altered his text. He needs them for his next job.

There is no mystical "national norm" or "language norm" when it comes to literature. Compare 19th century English novels (Eliot, Dickens, Thackeray, Trollope) with "Ulysses", "The Waves", "White Teeth" and Coe, Ishiguro, Barnes, etc., and you will see an enormous difference. Styles change over decades. As a translator, you don't alter things unless you need to. And that need doesn't come along very often.

Punctuation and paragraphing may be done in a particular national way, but syntax, vocabulary and so on are often peculiar to the author.

Translation should become normal in Britain and America so it can shed this tiresome aura of mystery. The art of translation, to pick up on the title of this thread, is to retain as many of the idiosyncrasies of any author without making the work stick out so much that it looks funny, foreign, odd at sentence level. But if the work doesn't look foreign as a book, you might as well not be translating it.

Transposing locations is an exercise for workshops, for the university classroom. If the novel I am translating is set in Soviet Estonia, it is set in Soviet Estonia, not in Burundi or Batley. Changing the location is as daft as re-setting a Dickens novel in Berlin, or one by Gide in Bucharest instead of North Africa. You don't do it. So I agree with Nnyhav: kinda kitschy.

I hope that both the banality and the skill of literary translation will be understood better over the next few decades. It is a dead ordinary activity in so many European countries, why not in Britain and the USA?

[Mirabell]

Originally Posted by Eric

It is a dead ordinary activity in so many European countries, why not in Britain and the USA?

I'd pay for it to be a less "dead ordinary activity" in germany. the ordinariness leads to the unspeakably horrible mean quality of our translations. Nothing to aspire to. I cannot stand second-hand translations, but these days, even our review sections are taking it in stride.


really, really bad. as I said somewhere else, you have to search, hard, sometimes, to find out who did the translation of a book.

[Eric]

I'm copying the text referred to here so I don't keep having to looking for it:

Die deutsche Ausgabe allerdings basiert auf der englischen Übertragung und ist also das Resultat einer doppelten Übersetzung. Beide Male habe der Text etwas verloren, beim ersten Mal das "Düstere" und die "existenzielle Angst" des indischen Originals, beim zweiten Mal ein paar "kulturspezifische Nuancen", die in der englischen Übertragung wohl noch mitschwangen. Wenner stört das alles nicht sehr, da sich die Übersetzung von Ursula Gräfe "wunderbarer" als die englische Grundlage lese, und die Rezensentin fühlt sich bei den geglätteten Sätzen und dem "gehobenen" Ton an Novalis und seinen Heinrich von Ofterdingen erinnert.

There is, of course, a famous German who translates Bengali into German directly called Martin Kämpchen, if I remember rightly. If more Germans would stop thinking that English is the only language in the world, maybe things would improve.

I would imagine that the problem in Germany is the opposite to the one in Britain. In Britain there is a disdain for translation, and you have to be pretty brave to start translating literature in the first place. There will be a few phoneys, but because the threshold is high, those that persevere tend to be good.

In Germany, I imagine that everybody and their mothers try translation at some stage in their critic's / bookseller's / author's / academic career. So the chances of being taken on by a publishing house must be much higher. Which will inevitably lead to a surfeit of bad translators.

[Eric]

I wonder why the dalies don't have more reviews of translation. Midsummer is not the best time to expect this, but it rather amused me that on Friday 25th June, the books page of the Independent only has Boyd Tonkin, who runs the page, waxing lyrical about, among other things, Rowan Williams' version of Russian poet:

Translation seems to give Williams a licence to stray from his Anglican via media in poetry: a moderate modernist who embraces tradition. His versions of the Russian poet Inna Lisnianskaya have a special bounce and bite.

Source: A song of praise for the poet in peril - Features, Books - The Independent

I wonder whether he does them from the originals.

Another article on this books page, remembering the Independent is a left-wing newspaper, was an article about Rowling-in-Dosh:

JK Rowling tops list of billionaires - News, Books - The Independent

And another one about the profits to be made out of books:

Online shoppers boost Amazon profit - Business News, Business - The Independent

Couldn't see any more about translations of foreign books, though.

[nnyhav]

Greta Aart interviews Charlotte Mandell (via)

GA: You’ve also mentioned having "no need to write" —would you think that your loyalty to translation may hinder your own will to write, if you would also contemplate writing, starting from a blank page, without an original text or language as a cross-reference or interpretation? Creation versus re-creation, would you also like to write?

CM: But my point is that translation is also a form of creation. It’s not just recreating what’s already been written—it’s creating the text anew, in my language. That’s why I don’t feel the need to write my own work; I feel fulfilled writing in many different voices, the voices of the authors I translate. It's interesting that classical musicians aren't usually asked if they also compose, but they're a lot like translators, in that they play many different styles of music, and the interpretations can vary hugely from one performer to the next.

I think all writing starts from a blank page, originals and translations alike. For me, all writing is creative. A poet writing about the sunset and the trees is translating his/her thoughts and impressions into words. All writing is translation, in a way.
__________________________

(seemed to fit in best here, Aart of translation? )

[Eric]

Greta Aart asks that same oft-asked question about translation getting in the way of one's own writing. It may do, but I too feel that the translator performs an incredibly important function, opening the eyes of his or her fellow-native-speakers of whatever language that there is literary life out there.

You almost get the feeling that Aart is sort-of saying: "Yes, yes, Charlotte, but translating's not really writing. Come on, admit it, you're a frustrated writer really."

Anyway, Charlotte Mandell appears to have made available to English-speakers several key works of French literature. The Emprise Review is a little vague about contemporary writing, as people like Genet (1986) and Blanchot (2003) died years ago. For me, contemporary also includes things being written now. So the Bayard and the Littell are more what I consider as contemporary.

Greta Aart (greater art?) is herself a poet.

[Liam]

Here's a stupid question: do you need to have perfect knowledge of the foreign language you're working with to produce faithful and (dare I say it?) lasting translations of other people's works? Ted Hughes was rumored to speak only one foreign language--French--and yet this did not stop him from translating poetry from Russian, Hebrew, Hungarian and Spanish.

I've recently read his translation of Ferenc Juhasz's long poem "The Boy Changed into a Stag Cries Out at the Gate of Secrets" and it was beautiful, beautiful, beautiful. Now, Hughes has NO knowledge of Hungarian, has never read the poem in the original, has asked someone else to provide him with a literal translation of the original text, and yet has managed to produce a lovely version in its own right.

Should great poets perhaps be excluded from this hypothetical category of literary translators for whom (as you claim) a long acquaintance and knowledge of the foreign language(s) they're working with is essential??? Just a thought...