Teaching and reading translations

[Eric]

When I translate a book, I would prefer "ordinary" readers, although the term is hard to define, to read my translation. I would like it to lie alongside other books in an ordinary bookshop, and have a page on Amazon, and so on, so people can buy or borrow it.

Although sales of the translation would be enhanced if a class of eight students all bought the novel (now a set book), this does imply that the book is now going to be analysed. Eager students are going to fold over the corners of key pages, underline masses of "good bits" adding exclmation marks here and there, write term papers on it, and maybe even answer a question on the book in a key exam.

But hold on! Why should the universities be the only ones to take note of my translation? Weren't books originally written to be read, even, God forbid, for enjoyment? Once the pressure of essays and exams falls upon the reader, he or she always has at the back of their mind "I've got to write something about this book". So they scour the internet for other people's essays they can semi-plagiarise. And they focus on things such as narrative point of view, pianic foregrounding, pleonasms, fictitionalised phrase midwifery, and other things you find in all the lit crit textbooks.

I'm still thinking: wouldn't it be nice if an ordinary reader wrote me (or the author if still alive) an e-mail simply expressing appreciation, rather than offering analysis?

[Wolfgirl]

The flip side of your argument is that as a student, I began to feel like I should always be doing something more with what I had read. Reading for pleasure seemed a waste to the merit of the book. Foolish I know, but it was a struggle when I first left school to start reading just for fun again. Thank you for validating my assumption that authors and translators write and translate to be read; not to be analysed.

[Loki]

Has anyone ever written to you expressing appreciation of your translation? I get the feeling that "ordinary" readers (as you call them) don't care if the book is translated or not (I remember Eco saying that once some students thought that his books were originally written in English, or in another language, not in Italian, which implies that they didn't even know they were reading a translation). They start to care (if they do at all!) only if the book is badly translated: at that point, maybe, they go back to the front page and they see who is the translator, so that they can criticise better. So a good translation may pass unobserved, let's say.


Anyway, I don't think it's always easy to find the e-mail address of a translator. Are you to be found on the Internet?

[Eric]

Wolfgirl, is that Hamilton, New Zealand, or Hamilton, Canada?

Having said that, I am very much a proponent of translating to be read. The huge irony is that it is in the English-speaking countries people endlessly dissect languages as if they were dead bodies. And yet I wonder how many of these super-analytical super-linguists can actually speak or read any of the languages they pore over. These super-experts gravitate towards endangered languages, adding a further dimension to their lectures, and yet appear to ignore the big ones that tens of millions of people speak. Could they read a work in German, French, or Spanish, I wonder? Linguistics becomes a kind of fetishism, a closed society for obsessive analysts, all paid for by universities, while we people who actually translate books and can sometimes even speak the languages are left out in the cold by the paid academics. We are regarded as quick-fix merchants who help the glory of publisher and author but are expected to skulk in the shadows.

Students are another problem. They are told by their tutors to analyse some aspect of some novel or other, which is then not read for pleasure, but to find instances of whatever the tutor has told them to look for (e.g. metaphors, character description, narrative narraticity, or full-stops). So the text itself (novel, poem, story, play) becomes a quarry from which to bring up useful chunks of granite to pad out the essay that the student has already nicked off the internet.

As for Eco, he is probably so steeped in the Anglo-American model, that he has begun to write like an American.

[Loki]

I see, so it's his fault.

[Eric]

Obviously it is Eco's fault if he allows himself to be Americanised to the extent that his cultural osmosis has caused him to start imitation (which is said to be the best form of flattery).

[Loki]

I would also blame the young readers anyway, as they should at the least know what nationality the author is. Moreover, the notice “translated by" is there for a reason (although unfortunately it is not on the front cover, at least here in Italy).
I can't remember where I've read this, but I'm almost certain that they were not American students.

[Eric]

Students can't be blamed for the reading lists they are obliged to follow. But when "off duty" they could do a bit more adventurous reading, instead of sticking to the usual mainstream. But at the age of 18 or 20, you haven't yet oriented well in the world at large, and don't realise that there are types of books that their literature tutors probably never discuss.

And for a tutor or lecturer, it is a lot of work to keep changing the set books every year, as that means more reading and drawing up new lists. And lecturers tend, from what I've heard, have enough routine and administrative tasks to perform as it is. Plus the constant pressure to write unreadable papers and books so that they can be one ahead of their rivals and keep their jobs and salaries.

[Flint]

You've put it very well, Eric.
This reminds me of what English writer Keith Waterhouse once wrote about literature in the A-level syllabus:

The other day I was chatting to a young man who is swotting away for his ‘A’-level in English literature. Part of the syllabus is George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four ‑an enviable assignment, I might say, to one who wasted three terms on Julius Caesar, which is probably the most boring play that Shakespeare or anyone else produced.
Assuming a mutual interest in the author of Nineteen Eighty-Four, I mentioned a couple of other of Orwell's books and wondered if my young friend had read them. Not only had he never heard of them, he had no wish to even take them down from my shelves, and flip through them. They were not, he explained, in the syllabus. Therefore they would be of no use to him in his exam. I wondered if he knew anything about Orwell's life, which was a fairly interesting one, and proceeded to give him a potted biography. I detected that expression, half desperate, half pitying, which you only see on the faces of young people who are being bored rigid by their elders. Orwell's life was not in the syllabus. There was no need to learn it. There was no time to learn it. It wasn't the first time I'd encountered this lack of curiosity in teenagers. I've known grammar‑school girls who could recite T.S.Eliot backwards, forwards and sideways, but who would have been hard put to identify, let alone quote, any other poet in the English language. They will sail through their 'A' levels with as much knowledge of the subject they're being examined in as a Derby winner has of the world outside a racecourse. And the fault isn't theirs. It's the fault of the system that teaches them, if teaching is the word. Originally, the purpose of an examination was to determine how much of the year's work the student had comprehended and retained. Now that notion has been neatly turned on its head. The purpose of the year’s work is to determine how many exam questions the student may successfully answer.

[Hamlet]

I can't quite understand his issue and being bent out of shape over Julius Caesar, but that aside, I recall reading at 18 years of age, all of Orwell's books, I began with Keep the Aspi' Flying and stopped just short of Homage to Cat' which I picked up a copy of in a charity shop very recently, a fly to swat, to kind of complete the cycle begun years ago. Still haven't read it.

I bought GIRL IN WINTER, because at A level, I was studying Larkin, and read a few of Grahame Green's novles, because HEART OF THE MATTER was a set -text.
Bizarrely, this was encouraged at the time, read around, unfortunately, we were not referred to some of the more useful critical essays, and I can recall reading a ridiculously punishing and complex text on Joseph Conrad, another author who at the time I was attempting to read cover to cover: why I did this, I can't say other than the fact that it was internally generated, I just had to know, and that's it.

I think I was pretty much alone in this respect.

[Flint]

Bizarrely, this was encouraged at the time, read around

A very good thing.
Talking about Orwell, I love all his non-fiction but I don't find his early fiction - Aspidistra, Coming Up, etc - very convincing. What's your view?

[Hamlet]

Hi Flint,
I've read all of his fiction books, but not the letters, you've reminded me about that aspect, in fact there's a backlog of letters/corresp/critical essays by authors building up. I'm a big fan of Steinbeck, but have tended to stick to around 5 of his novels, but came across "WORKING DAYS" - his journal of the writing of the GRAPES OF WRATH, and T.S. Eliot is always mentioned in essays regarding his criticism, I believe that a second volume of his collected letters was published by Faber recently, and then there's JOHN KEATS, letters, keeping up this digression a little longer, I'm finally getting around to being interested in authors corresp, I've looked into such things as MMS, the manuscripts of authors, for Shakespeare, mostly lost except for the play of Sir Thomas More, but there are other manuscripts left behind, and I was looking into Steinbeck, there's a copy of GRAPES, the original MS on the web on a fan's website, a few pages, very small writing, few mistakes, and I was thinking of looking up MELVILLE, Moby Dick, another big favourite: it's sometimes interesting to see the MS and letters/corresp as it brings you closer in to the writer, if you have the inclination/time of course. I struggle on this.

But Orwell, it's been years since I read those two novels, so the memory is filtered through early impressions when I wouldn't have been so alive to style and political themes, but I do recall the main character in Aspidistra, and his little bookshop job, and a line about getting published which ran something like this, "you weren't at Oxford with us, we don't know you so we're certainly not going to publish you..." I presume this was written as an internal monologue, Gordon Comstock's -- if that was his name? -- sneering at various writer/dandy types who visit his shop, and at the time thought it was very funny, and probably an accurate take on the literary scene.

The final lines with the by now -- sinister metaphor -- of the Aspidistra plant included as a detail, a recurring feature of the book which can't be escaped and is in every damn household and strategically placed throughout the novel, was quite funny and clever too; but since then, I've heard a lot of criticism of Orwell! How he got a lot wrong, that his character ( I like the '... he only needed his tea and marmalade to be happy) was not anywhere near as decent as he might appear, and the miserable predictions of society coming to woe, to put it very simply, that's had me curious to reread him, but at the same time, I feel that it would be a difficult undertaking to actually sift out the good from bad, I'm sure his critics have spent years doing it and opinion is split.

I understand, as with Samuel Johnson, his style is one that's a go-to for would be writers, plain and accomplished, worthy of imitation. Although I read recently in Cultural Amnesia by Clive James, that Evelyn Waugh was the high point of English prose, and we've been in decline, and fall, ever since!

[Eric]

What the fuck has all this got to do with teaching and reading translations?

[Flint]

(...) I understand, as with Samuel Johnson, his style is one that's a go-to for would be writers, plain and accomplished, worthy of imitation. Although I read recently in Cultural Amnesia by Clive James, that Evelyn Waugh was the high point of English prose, and we've been in decline, and fall, ever since!

I've been meaning to revisit Evelyn Waugh for some time. Yes, that's what I like about Orwell, the style.

[Bubba]

What the fuck has all this got to do with teaching and reading translations?

My post won't have anything to do with teaching and reading translations, either, but it's a nice bit from Ribeyro on his experience of the Paris métro, and it strikes me as highly appropriate here:

To me the crippled, the cretins, the beggars, and the pariahs. They come naturally to me without my having to summon them. All I have to do is get on a métro car for them to get on at each station and begin surrounding me one by one until they change me into something like the sinister monarch of a Cour des Miracles. Youth, beauty, on the opposite platform, in the next car, in the train that left.

[Flint]

If you would explain why this quotation is "highly appropriate here" I would be most grateful.

[Hamlet]

What the fuck has all this got to do with teaching and reading translations?

What's your problem Eric? If people want to digress and talk as they do freely and in real life, they will.

[Eric]

My problem is simple: we have hundreds of threads here catering for many subjects. If we started digressing in all of them, discussion would cease to take place. We'd end up with a miasma of opinions about everything, like some Borgesian Babel story and would never be able to find our way back to discussions about specific items.

If you went into an exam about, let's say, George Eliot's "Middlemarch" and you preferred to write about Céline and fascism, because you read a book about that the night before instead of revising, you'd get no marks. Life involves a certain degree of self-discipline. Uncurbed narcissism leads to ostracism.