Literary translation is an odd art. It consists of a person sitting at a desk, writing fiction or poetry that has already been written, that has someone else's name on it. The translator's work appears to define derivativeness. Would anyone write a book about people who sit in a museum copying paintings? Copiers aren't artists, they're students or forgers, wannabes or crooks.
Yet literary translation is an art. What makes it so odd an art is that physically a translator does exactly the same thing as a writer. If an actor did the same thing as a playwright, a dancer did the same thing as a composer, or a singer did the same thing as a songwriter, no one would think much of what they do either. The translator's problem is that he is a performer without a stage, an artist whose performance looks just like the original, just like a play or a song or a composition, nothing but ink on a page.
Like a musician, a literary translator takes someone else's composition and performs it in his own special way. Just as a musician embodies someone else's notes by moving his body or throat, a translator embodies someone else's thoughts and images by writing in another language. The biggest difference isn't really that the musician produces air movements while the translator produces yet more words; it is that a musical composition is intended to be translated into body and throat movements, while a work of literature is not intended to be translated into another language. Thus, although it is practically invisible, the translator's art is the more problematic one. And it is also the more responsible one, because while every musician knows that his performance is simply one of many, often one of thousands, by that musician and by others, the translator knows that his performance may be the only one, at least the only one of his generation, and that he will not have the opportunity either to improve on it or to try a different approach.
And while the translator is shouldering this responsibility and forcing literary works into forms they were never intended to take, no one can see his difficult performance. Except where he slips up. In fact, he is praised primarily for not being seen. Even when we listen to an album, we can imagine the musician blowing or bowing, but nothing comes to mind when we think of a translator translating, nothing more than what we imagine an author doing. Which isn't much. The Czech writer Karel Čapek wrote of what he did when he wrote: "even if I were to sit on the porch with my work, I don't think a single boy would come and watch my fingers to see how a writer's business is done. I don't say that it is a bad or useless profession, but it is not one of the superlatively fine and striking ones, and the material used is of a strange sort --you don't even see it." But we don't expect any more of writers. We expect to be excited by what a creator creates, not by the way in which he creates it. Unless he is also a performer, like a jazz musician.
With a performing artist, we do expect the doing to be exciting, because the creation has already been done. The performing artist doesn't create, he interprets. But the translator's interpretation not only takes the form of the original--ink--but it doesn't even depart from the content, the way a literary critic's interpretation does. The only thing that changes is that now we can read the ink. The foreign writer's work looks like gibberish, or would if we ever saw it. Just like a musical score to someone who can't read music. But the musician's performance doesn't look anything like a score; the two couldn't be any more different. The translation is so similar, the result is a palimpsest, two works, one on top of the other, an original and a performance, difficult to tell apart.
Due to the literary translator's odd situation, he is not very well respected. He is expected to submit to his authors and always be faithful to them, never make mistakes, work on a piecemeal basis, and accept bottom billing at best. He is not considered an artist at all, neither a creator nor a performer, but rather a craftsman. And he is generally considered a poor and unimportant one. His work is scarcely mentioned in reviews, and almost never critiqued. His art is rarely taught inside or outside universities, his interpretations are rarely given credence in academia, and his thoughts and life story are not considered worthy of publication. He performs not with hopes of fame, fortune, or applause, but rather out of love, out of a sense of sharing what he loves and loving what he does.We tend to think that the literary translator's talent lies in being good with languages. Which is like saying musicians are good with notes. Of course they are, but being good with notes won't make you a good musician; it's just one of the requirements. In fact, some of the great jazz musicians never learned to read music; and there are great translations by poets who didn't know the original language. To play music, you have to be able to play an instrument, and you have to be sensitive to nuances and understand what combinations of notes mean and are. Similarly, a translator has to be able to read as well as a critic and write as well as a writer. John Dryden said it best back in the seventeenth century: "the true reason why we have so few versions which are tolerable [is that] there are so few who have all the talents which are requisite for translation, and that there is so little praise and so small encouragement for so considerable a part of learning." Not much has changed.
Yet Pushkin called the translator a "courier of the human spirit," and Goethe called literary translation "one of the most important and dignified enterprises in the general commerce of the world." Borges wrote, "Perhaps . . . the translator's work is more subtle, more civilized than that of the writer: the translator clearly comes after the writer. Translation is a more advanced stage of civilization." Well, this isn't really what they said, but this is how their words have been translated into English. On the other hand, translators have been called plagiarizers, looters of other cultures, collaborators to colonialism, traitors, betrayers. They betray their people, their language, the original work, themselves. And all for seven cents a word, if they're lucky.
Whether dignified or traitorous, translators are at least considered modest, especially for artists. What could be more modest than submitting yourself to someone else's vision, characters, style, imagery, even sense of humor? Translators bring something to art that in many other times and cultures has been its core, its central aspect: devotion, service. Yet what could be more boastful than saying that you are capable of writing a work as great as what you so admire, say, a French (or Japanese or Nguni) play the equal of King Lear? Odd indeed.
The invisible performance of translation is hard to describe. So translators have come up with all sorts of metaphors and similes for it. The translator is "like a sculptor who tries to recreate the work of a painter," Anne Dacier wrote in the introduction to her 1699 French translation of the Iliad. In translating poetry, wrote Petrus Danielus Huetius, a seventeenth-century French bishop and educator, "the most important rule is to preserve the meter and the syntax, so that the poet can be shown to his new audience like a tree whose leaves have been removed by the rigors of winter, while the branches, the roots, and the trunk can still be seen." Translators have for centuries used the metaphor of pouring wine from one bottle into another. Rosemarie Waldrop, an American translator from French, has taken this image one step further: "Translation is more like wrenching a soul from its body and luring it into a different one."
More recently and scientifically, the American translator from Spanish Margaret Sayers Peden constructed a complex metaphor out of an ice cube: "I like to think of the original work as an ice cube. During the process of translation the cube is melted. While in its liquid state, every molecule changes place; none remains in its original relationship to the others. Then begins the process of forming the work in a second langauge. Molecules escape, new molecules are poured in to fill the spaces, but the lines of molding and mending are virtually invisible. The work exists in the second language as a new ice cube--different, but to all appearances the same." And then there is the metaphor metaphor of Gregory Rabassa, an American translator from Spanish and Portuguese: "all languages are metaphor, and translation, instead of a vertical metaphor, is a horizontal metaphor."
Here is how the translators of the King James Version of the Bible described translation:
Translation it is that openeth the window, to let in the light; that breaketh the shell, that we may eat the kernel; that putteth aside the curtain, that we may look into the most holy place; that removeth the cover of the well, that we may come by the water.
Translation gives us access to the literature of the world. It allows us to enter the minds of people from other times and places. It is a celebration of otherness, a truly multicultural event without all the balloons and noisemakers. And it enriches not only our personal knowledge and artistic sense, but also our culture's literature, language, and thought. All it takes to bring a particular variety of Latin American music to North America is a group of Latin American musicians, or just an album. But to bring a particular Latin American author to America, to those who don't read Spanish or Portuguese, it takes another artist, a translator. Without translations of the early novels of Gabriel García Márquez, contemporary American literature would be a very different thing.
Light, food, water, religion. These are what the King James translators said translation gives us access to: the necessities of life, at least for a puritanical people. Think where we would be if we were not only unable to read the Bible or the ancient classics or Cervantes, Voltaire, Kant, Tolstoy, Freud, and if the writers we could read had themselves read no more than a few of the great writers and thinkers of history and their time. We would be unenlightened, thirsty for knowledge, hungry for art.
My intention in this book is to give people access to the people who give us access, and to the art by which they provide such access. And to do it with humor and passion. I will talk about what someone has to have and be to make a good translator, about how translators relate to the literary works they translate, as well as to the authors and editors they work with and for. I will talk about what translators do, about the big and little decisions they have to make. I will talk about the translator's public image and what can be done by translators, publishers, reviewers, professors, writers, and even readers to change it. In other words, I will try to shake up perceptions about translation and translators.
But my principal goal is to help readers understand what translation is all about, so that they can learn to appreciate this hidden art. This labor of love and of joy deserves to be loved and enjoyed itself. In fact, nothing would make me happier than if this book were to lead readers to try their hands at translation themselves. Nothing I could say would better show how difficult and enjoyable translation is.
There are a lot of common misconceptions, not to mention a good number of real obstacles and a touch of laziness, that have stood in the way of the enjoyment of literary translation. I will try to remove some of the obstacles and show why and in what way the misconceptions are misconceived. And I will also show how the recent decline in literary translation reflects serious changes in the way our intellectual culture views literature, especially poetry. For the most part, I will rely on what translators have written and have told me in dozens of interviews. But I'll also get my two cents in.
Since no one can give translators a stage on which to give their performances, my goal is to give them an audience.