Best European Fiction 2013

Preface

It is not only in French that the words translate and traduce bear a close affinity. Legend has it that John Braine’s novel of ambition and opportunism in 1950s Britain, Room at the Top, in its Swedish version was very nearly entitled Vinden—‘The Attic’—until a vigilant editor thought to double-check. It is also said that in a passage in one of Sean O’Casey’s plays of Dublin working-class life where a character speaks of the ‘little chislers’, that is, children, an earnest Japanese translator rendered the colloquialism as ‘small stone-masons’. One laughs, of course, but at the same time one does sympathise with the hapless traducer. Language is a sly and treacherous medium.

We are all familiar with Robert Frost’s mournful contention that poetry is what gets lost in translation, but meaning itself can go subtly or grossly astray in the crossing from one tongue to another—not so much tripping lightly, one might say, as merely tripping. The problem, as any translator will ruefully remind us, is that in the original text meaning is not fixed, but is always more or less ambiguous. This is so not only in verse, but can be true of the most seemingly limpid passages of prose. You sit down to write a letter to your lover, or your bank manager, thinking you know exactly what you have to say, yet when you finish and read over what you have written you notice that the sense is not quite as you intended. Who speaks here, you wonder? The answer is, language itself, wilful, subtle, coercive. We think we speak, but really it is we who are spoken.

Even when language seems at its most docile, the sense, or non-sense, of a phrase can turn on the most innocent-seeming effect. Take that comma in the opening sentence of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus LogicoPhilosophicus. In the original the first proposition is written thus: ‘Die Welt ist alles, was der Fall ist.’ Wittgenstein in his early work was fond of symmetry, and certainly this is a handsomely symmetrical sentence. However, the rules of punctuation in German are strict, and by those rules a comma is called for here, at the halfway point in the sentence, making for a nice caesura.

Yet the translators of the 1961 London edition of the Tractatus, Pears and McGuinness, flexing the looser muscles of English, render the line as: ‘The world is all that the case is, as the German indicates.’ Thus at the very outset of this tangled text the reader meets with uncertainty. Does Wittgenstein mean to say that the world is all, that the case is, as the German indicates, or, as the English seems to have it, that the case is that the world is all? These are, surely, two separate propositions, and though the difference between them may seem slight, it is not negligible, especially in a work that sets out to explore and even prescribe the limits of language. In the German version of proposition 1 the emphasis is on the allness of the world, while the English seems primarily concerned with what is the case or state of affairs in the world. Wittgenstein himself might have devoted a whole section of his later Philosophical Investigations to the effect of that apparently innocuous comma.

So who would be a translator?

Occasionally, of course, a translation chimes happily with the original. The poetry of Paul Celan is notoriously difficult to render into another language—indeed, it is a question whether the attempt should be made at all, given the poet’s agonised relation to German, the language of the monsters who administered the Holocaust. Yet great and inventive translations have been made of his work, notably by Paul Hamburger and John Felstiner. In his search for a way of dealing with, if not expressing, the horrors suffered by the Jews in the Second World War, Celan formulated a negative aesthetic—a 1963 volume of his poems is titled Die Niemandsrose, ‘The No-one’s Rose’—and again and again he inverts usages, twists and bends them, turns them inside-out. For instance in the poem ‘Weggebeizt’, ‘Etched Away’, he speaks of

which Hamburger renders as

and Felstiner, wonderfully, as

In both these instances, ‘noem’, for ‘Genicht’, is a stroke of genius. Compared to what Seamus Heaney has called Celan’s ‘tortuosities’, or the knotty intricacy of the Tractatus, the novel, you might think, would surely present few problems for the translator. In fact, fiction is just as difficult to translate, if not more so, than verse. Here, too, the Frostian lament asserts its sad truth. The late John McGahern liked to make a simple distinction: there is verse, he would say, there is prose, and then there is poetry, which may be conjured in either medium. Thus the poetry of prose, no less than of verse, stands to lose badly when it is filleted from one language and fed into another.

For a novel or a short story even in its original state is already a translation. The version it presents of reality is as far from actual reality as our dreams are from the events of our lives out of which they propagate their lovely or malignant blossoms. In our lazy way we tend to imagine that a piece of fiction is a direct statement of a set of facts or factual images when in fact—in fact!—fiction is a kind of dream-metaphor, a moulded and mannered traducing of ‘what really happened’. This is the wonderful fact about fiction, that we know it is all made up, a farrago of marvellous lies, yet we regard it as if it were somehow all true—which it is, of course, although the truth of fiction is not the same as the truth of life.

When we consider it at all carefully, we realise that there can be no such thing as a translation. What a translator produces is a new thing, and when he finishes, there are two works where before there was one. That is inevitable, given the nature of language, and given that there are languages. The Book of Babel is legion.

Who would be a translator?

Coda: Worrying that I might make a blunder, a thing easily done in this context, I consulted a Swedish friend on the matter of the word, or title, Vinden. Is not vinden the Swedish word for ‘wind’? It is. But also it means, indeed, ‘the attic’. But should the title, the mis-title, not have been Den Vinden? No, because den vinden would mean ‘that [particular] attic’. Ah, the infinite undependability of words.