 |
 |
There are two ‘fundamental quarrels’ over translation, Marina Warner suggests in a 2018 piece for the LRB.
One
concerns ‘claims about fidelity and felicity’, the other ‘cultural
appropriation and consequent monolingualism’. Should a translator
‘respond like an Aeolian harp, vibrating in harmony with the original
text to transmit the original music, or should the translation read as
if it were written in the new language?’ A translator’s interest in a
particular writer is often integral to their appearance in another
language, and ‘like a shrub moved to a sunnier position, writers may
thrive when transplanted’. But being too concerned with translatability
may lead to what Warner calls ‘the continued expansion of the
Anglosphere’, which risks diluting the cultural specificity of smaller
languages and ‘smooth[ing] out diversity’.
‘Much
is indeed lost in translation,’ Warner writes. ‘But much has been
gained and more can be, if the process is seen as intrinsic to the
development of languages – the source language and the target.’ Writers
have understood that the process of translation can be generative rather
than reductive: Borges, ‘who so loved doubles, impersonations,
counterfeits, paradoxes and mirrors’ was an enthusiastic advocate of the
translator’s freedom to transform the source (he asked his English
translator to ‘make me macho and gaucho and skinny’); Goethe asserted
that ‘every literature grows bored if it is not refreshed by foreign
participation.’
Translation
isn’t a ‘movement to and fro’ that forfeits literary integrity, Warner
argues, but a process of ‘mutual cross-pollination and transformation’.
The analogy given for translation shouldn’t be currency conversion
(‘never fair’), but more ‘everyday transformations’: ‘think
leaves/compost, steam/snow, insects/coral, sand/glass, clay/porcelain’.
At the end of the day, ‘the translator is simply another writer of the
same book, for better or worse.’
Read Marina Warner’s piece and more pieces about translation from the LRB archive, including Adam Phillips on overseeing new translations of Freud, Michael Hofmann on translations of Paul Celan, A.W. Moore on versions of Wittgenstein, Peter E. Gordon on translating Marx, Toril Moi on versions of The Second Sex and Christopher Prendergast on the untranslatable. |
|
|
Further reading from the LRB archive: |
|
|
‘Translators
agree that their art demands something more elusive than a grasp of
syntax and “thesaurus grubbing”, emphasising qualities that lie beyond
the lexicon or the primer: “It sometimes seems not to matter what the
words are,” Michael Hofmann once wrote of Kafka, “so much as the way
they move, to and fro, from side to side, back and forth.”’ |
|
|
Adam Phillips on translating Freud |
‘Just
as the risk of psychoanalytic training is that it might make people
more interested in psychoanalysis than in other people, the risk of the
Freudian texts is that they might make readers more interested in Freud
than in other writers. That all writing might become, one way or
another, Freudian. I wanted to find out if there was a Freud useable for
something other than – for something as well as – more psychoanalysis.’ |
|
|
Michael Hofmann on translations of Paul Celan |
‘A translation
should be able to do more than just slide the words and punctuation
across the page, losing practically everything en route and still
leaving the reader utterly baffled as most Celan translations inevitably
and unapologetically do. Celan provides the terrain – we are talking
about his words – but the authority, the creativity, the freedom and the
space all belong to the exegetes: they are the ones who are giving him
to us.’ |
|
|
A.W. Moore on versions of Wittgenstein |
‘To whatever extent it is correct to say that what we are dealing with in the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus
is nonsense, it is very carefully crafted nonsense that does whatever
philosophical work it does by appearing, initially at least, to make
sense. And it is that appearance of sense that is critical for the
translator. However illusory any appearance of sense in the book may be,
it is that which the translator must try, first and foremost, to
capture.’ |
|
|
Peter E. Gordon on translating Marx |
‘Marx meant Capital
to read as if it were a pedagogical exercise in dispelling illusion,
penetrating the veil that bourgeois economists had draped over a system
that depends on the exploitation of labour for the generation of profit.
If the words in his book become overly familiar they lose their
revelatory power and become yet another veil that purports,
paradoxically, not to be a veil.’ |
|
|
Toril Moi on versions of The Second Sex |
‘In
French, Simone de Beauvoir’s long, loosely connected sentences convey
speed, passion, and sheer delight in piling up her discoveries. If
English sentences are strung together in the same way, however, the
impression won’t be the same. French and English differ significantly in
their tolerance of relatively vague connections between sentence
elements.’ |
|
|
Christopher Prendergast on the untranslatable |
‘On the face of it a Dictionary of Untranslatables
looks like a contradiction in terms, either self-imploding from the
word go, or, if pursued, headed fast down a cul-de-sac in which it is
doomed to end by putting itself out of the business of
dictionary-making. Strictly speaking, all the definitions of the listed
terms would have to be blanks, a new version of Flaubert’s dream of the
“book about nothing”, a Dictionnaire des riens, replacing the Dictionnaire des idées reçues.’ |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
