Is That a Fish in Your Ear?

TWELVE Custom Cuts: Making Forms Fit

Chinese people love to pass around shunkouliu on oral grapevines. These are satiric rhythmical sayings, often consisting of quatrains with seven-syllable lines. The regularity of the form is audible and also visible in writing, because each Chinese character corresponds to one syllable. Here’s a jingle of that kind:

Compact, patterned, dense, allusive, bitter, and humorous … translating a shunkouliu is a tall order. So why bother to try? Yet despite the odds, this barbed rhyme about New China’s old guard can be tailored into a pleasing and meaningful shape in a language completely unrelated to its original tongue. Here’s how it can be done, step by step.

1. Translated character for character

2. Translated group for group

3. Explanation, sense for sense

4. Plain translation

5. Adding some rhythm

6. Matching words to Chinese syllables

7. Adding rhyme

8. First polish

9. Adaptation, with double rhyme

10. As a word rectangle (6 × 4)

11. Isogrammatical lines (21 × 4)

12. Sounded out in Chinese

What’s been done in the later versions of this translation is to exploit the flexibility of English to simulate artificially the patterned visual effect of a script whose appearance naturally represents patterned sound. Counting characters and spaces along the line isn’t usually considered a translator’s task, but it’s really just one variant of the need in a whole variety of fields to make words fit shapes.

Strip cartoons are not redrawn when they are translated, and of the four-color plates used, only the black-and-white one with the lettering is remade for international sales. The cartoon translator has to make his version fit physically into the bubble spaces left blank by the three other plates. A very small amount of flexibility is provided by being able to alter the size of hand-drawn lettering—but limits are set by the requirement of legibility. The cartoon translator also has very little freedom to move meanings around between frames, since the captions must fit the picture, right down to the details of what the depicted characters are doing with their arms and hands. If you thought translating Proust might be difficult, just try Astérix:

The “Breton” cousin of the Gaulish heroes speaks a parody of schoolbook English in French, with word-for-word renderings of “I say,” “a bit of luck,” and “shake hands.” Moreover, his name, Jolitorax, is a pun on “fair chest,” “pretty thorax,” which is not remotely funny in English. The translator Anthea Bell deftly reinstates the caricatural nature of the representation of English in French by inserting “Oh” and “old boy,” and she substitutes a rather better pun of her own for the name. Doing all that within the confines of a physical space that can take only so many letters makes this translation an exploit, a victory over language itself. But only slightly lesser feats are performed every day by professionals and amateurs the world over who translate Japanese manga into English or Belgian graphic novels into Portuguese, and so on. Graphic translation is much bigger business than literary fiction and probably rivals the translation of cookbooks in volume and turnover. Studying translated captions of works of this kind is an education in the flexibility of human languages and human minds. Nothing ever fits easily, but in the end a really surprising amount of form and content can be made to fit external constraints of nonlinguistic (bubble size) and paralinguistic (gestural) kinds.

Subtitling is a smaller business, but the skills it engages are of the same kind. It has become conventional to regard average moviegoers as capable of reading only about fifteen characters per second; and in order to be legible on a screen as small as a television set, no more than thirty-two alphabetic characters can be displayed in a line. In addition, no more than two lines can be displayed at a time without obscuring significant parts of the image, so the subtitler has around sixty-four characters, including spaces, that can be displayed for a few seconds at most to express the key meanings of a shot or sequence in which characters may speak many more words than that. The limits are set by human physiology, average reading speeds, and the physical shape of the movie screen. It’s really amazing that it can be done at all.

A further constraint on subtitling is the convention that a subtitle may not bleed across a cut: if you have someone chatting to his neighbor on an airplane seat and then a cut to a shot of the plane landing, for example, the subtitle must disappear at or just before the cut, and the following caption may not appear before the next audio sequence begins. Consequently, a film has to be decomposed into the “spots” in which subtitling may occur. The delicate job of “spotting” (made a lot easier if the film distributor can provide a transcript of the voice track) may or may not be done by the translator hired to write the captions. Usually, at least two people are involved. It follows almost automatically from this that subtitles do not offer a translation of all the words spoken, and in particularly fast-talking films they can offer only a compression or a résumé.

Stringent formal constraints in film translation are believed to have had important retroactive effects on original work. Filmmakers dependent on foreign-language markets are well aware of how little spoken language can actually be represented in on-screen writing. Sometimes they choose to limit the volubility of their characters to make it easier for foreign-language versions to fit all the dialogue on the screen. Ingmar Bergman made two quite different kinds of films—jolly comedies with lots of words for Swedish consumption, and tight-lipped, moody dramas for the rest of the world. Our standard vision of Swedes as verbally challenged depressives is in some degree a by-product of Bergman’s success in building subtitling constraints into the composition of his more ambitious international films. It’s called the “Bergman effect,” and it can be observed in the early films of István Szabó and Roman Polanski, too.

The supposed Bergman effect in film may actually be only a “keyhole” example of a much wider modern trend. Steven Owen has argued that some contemporary poets from China, for example, write in a way that presupposes the translation of their work into English—and that all writing in foreign languages that now aspires to belong to “world literature” is built on writers’ effective internalization of translation constraints.[78]

Subtitling into English is a very small part of the translation world because so few foreign films are screened in the United States. At present there are only two American companies that provide subtitling services (and neither of them do only that), and they rely on a loose network of translators whose main jobs are elsewhere. Paid derisory sums at piece rates, the tiny band of English-language subtitlers are among the least-loved and least-understood language athletes of the modern media world.

In many countries, dubbing is preferred. It is rarely done into English nowadays, because American audiences insist on complete lip-synching, so that no trace remains of the foreignness of foreign-language films. To make a translation of speech such that when pronounced it matches the lip movements of the original speaker—measured in fractions of a second—is no trivial task. But it’s not only the microseconds that count. The translated dialogue is also constrained by facial gestures and movements of the body, even when those are not the customary accompaniment of the words spoken in the target language. The writers of dubbing scripts are not just athletes; they are world-class gymnasts of words—but almost never credited with their achievements in the English-speaking world.

The popularity of English-language films worldwide means that most American and British films are dubbed in multiple versions for sale abroad. Dubbing skills are much more widely used and appreciated in German, Italian, Spanish, and many other languages. One result of this asymmetry that is quite perceptible on-screen is that perfect lip synchronization is not always felt to be necessary by non -English-language audiences. American and Brazilian soap operas broadcast on Russian television channels frequently have voice tracks that bleed (when dialogue continues beyond the point at which the characters’ lips stop moving)—but the voices of familiar actors are characteristically those of well-known “dub stars” in the target tongue. Everyone in Germany knows the voice of “Robert De Niro,” for example, and knows also whose actual voice it is—that of Christian Brückner, a prizewinning star among audiobook readers, too, nicknamed “The Voice” in the German-language media press. Meryl Streep’s German voice is that of Dagmar Dempe, for all her films; Gabriel Byrne has been voiced by Klaus-Dieter Klebsch throughout his career since 1981. German moviegoers would be discombobulated if Russell Crowe, in his next blockbuster appearance, didn’t have the voice that really is his—that of Thomas Fritsch.[79] The French voices of Homer and Marge Simpson, Philippe Peythieux and Véronique Augereau, have their pictures in newspapers.[80] In this respect as in others, English speakers find in the language culture of almost any other country a truly foreign land.

In Palestine, biblical Hebrew ceased to be a spoken language among Jews long before the Roman occupation. From perhaps as early as the fifth century B.C.E., Aramaic interpreters read out a translation of the words of the service sotto voce, just after or even while the rabbi was speaking or chanting the more ancient tongue. Eventually, the words of such Aramaic whisper translations (called chuchotage in the modern world of international interpreters) were written down, mostly in small fragments, and these targums now provide precious linguistic and historical records for scholars of Judaism. For contemporary rebroadcasts of British and American television soaps and comedy programs in Eastern and Central European languages, the targum device—low-volume voice-over translation—has been reinvented. Lectoring, as it is now called, often astounds English-language visitors to Poland or Hungary. It doesn’t make even a nod toward aural realism: a single voice speaks on behalf of all characters of both genders, and the original English-language sound remains clearly audible.

Lectoring is obviously cheaper and quicker to do than dubbing, as it requires a smaller team of translators and performers. The high volumes of English-language media imported into the smaller European countries would make it difficult to find all the linguistic trapeze artists you would need to dub everything in lip synch while the shows were still “hot.” So lectoring is a rational solution—but its underlying justification is not economic at all.

As in the synagogues of Palestine and Syria long ago, lectoring is done for people who view the original language as endowed with prestige. English is nowadays seen as a cultural asset and an object of desire. Lectoring allows English-language learners to check that they have understood correctly and to improve their English as they enjoy the film. The Hungarian viewer of The Colbert Report wants to experience authentic American comedy, and the lector—like an interpreter performing chuchotage at a high-level meeting of heads of state—serves primarily as a check on the viewer’s grasp of the real thing. How much of Colbert’s political satire can be truly grasped by a Hungarian viewer of a lectored episode is slightly beside the point: something gets through. Because the original has not been erased by translation, that something is better than naught.

Lectoring makes no attempt to fit form to form. But in a medium of much greater cultural distinction than TV and film, even the wish to do so has been derided as futile and vain. Vladimir Nabokov is famous among students of translation for his thundering assault on the folly of trying to translate rhyme by rhyme. His notorious comments accompany his own annotated translation of Pushkin’s novel in verse, Eugene Onegin. Any attempt to reproduce the wry, light, witty, and rhythmical movement of the special form of the sonnet Pushkin used, Nabokov declared, was bound to misrepresent the poet’s true meaning and was therefore to be abhorred. Nabokov’s views on poetry translation have colored many arguments in the translation-studies field with a peculiarly vituperative tone. What he said needs to be understood in context. It is unfortunate that Nabokov put his strong opinions in such absolute and radical terms as to distract attention from the real issues.

This statement (mimicking and also reversing John Dryden’s much earlier distinction of imitation, paraphrase, and meta-phrase) introduces Nabokov’s own nonrhyming translation of Pushkin’s novel, accompanied by an immensely long and learned, line-by-line commentary on the meanings of Pushkin’s verses. The main work is not the translation at all but Nabokov’s appropriation of it through his inflated peritext. Master of style in two languages and a uniquely skillful crafter of translingual puns, Nabokov laid down his writer’s mantle on the altar of Pushkin and adopted what he called “the servile path.”[82] There’s a profound reason for his frankly uncharacteristic modesty in this case. Who can rival Pushkin? No Russian can dream of doing such a thing—yet every Russian writer also dreams of unseating Pushkin from his throne. For the Russian writer that Nabokov still was twenty years after the adoption of English as his literary tongue, translating Pushkin was not a straightforward translation task.

Let’s consider what the stakes were for Nabokov (but for no one else) in recasting Pushkin in English verse. It’s safe to assume that Nabokov could have done so like no other had he let himself dare. He would have set himself up as Pushkin’s rival. More than that: he would have written Eugene Onegin himself.

At much the same time as Nabokov started his plain prose version of Pushkin, Georges Perec read Herman Melville’s story of a New York clerk, “Bartleby the Scrivener.” It seemed to him quite perfect, and he wished he had written it himself. But I can’t do that! he wailed in a letter to a friend, because Melville wrote it first.[83] The same sense of having been already outwritten—of having been robbed in advance of a glory that could perhaps have been his—lies at the root of Nabokov’s strange operation with Pushkin’s sublime verse.

In fact, Nabokov had done some stanzas of Onegin into English verse in the 1950s already—but then turned around in fright. He could see he was not Pushkin. Later on, he adopted his servile path of pseudo-literal translation not because it was relevant to the study or practice of literary translation but because it helped hide that embarrassing fact.

Nabokov’s public lesson in poetry translation quoted above is threadbare and misleading. There are far more ways than three of translating fixed form. A “paraphrase” is not the only alternative to a “lexical” translation, and the latter can in no way even now be done directly by a machine. The “literal” style Nabokov proposes and claims to use is just what anyone else would call plain prose. Nabokov’s introduction to his exhaustive exploration of all the allusions and referential meanings of the words of Pushkin’s novel tells us many interesting things (about Nabokov, about Russia, about language and style) but nothing about the translation of form.

Onegin has attracted many gifted translators, and there are several versions now available that give good approximations of Pushkin’s verse. A secondhand copy of one of these, by Charles Johnson, published in 1977, fell into the hands of a polyglot Indian postgrad at Stanford around 1982, who was charmed and entranced by a whole novel in fourteen-line stanzas with alternating masculine and feminine rhymes in ababccddeffegg order and frequent use of enjambment. Vikram Seth decided to make this form his own. He composed a story of his own life in the same regular form. The Golden Gate—“The Great California Novel” according to Gore Vidal—set Seth on the path to literary glory. Fifteen years later, The Golden Gate in its turn fell into the hands of an Israeli scholar, Maya Arad, who was entranced by the stanza form relayed to her by Seth from Charles Johnson’s version of Pushkin, whose Yevgeny Onegin she then read in the original. She appropriated the form for her own novel in verse, Another Place, a Foreign City, published to great acclaim in Hebrew in 2003. Here is one of Arad’s 355 stanzas translated into English by Adriana Jacobs. Though the rhymes have gone, old Onegin’s zest for St. Petersburg partying remains intact in twenty-first-century Tel Aviv:

If the formal constraints of Eugene Onegin can be used to tell stories of America and Israel, why can they not be used to equal poetic effect to tell the very story that Pushkin told? Nabokov claims this is “mathematically impossible.” Mathematics has nothing to do with it. What he meant was that he wasn’t going to try.

Gilbert Adair was faced with a challenge of no lesser “mathematical impossibility” when he set out to translate Georges Perec’s La Disparition, a novel written exclusively with French words and expressions that do not contain the letter e. Writing without the letter e is hard to do for more than a short paragraph because we are simply not accustomed to conceptualizing words in terms of the letters by which they are set down in writing. It takes time and effort to learn the trick—but once you have taught yourself to do it, you can say as much as Perec learned to say in French. And more! Adair decorated his translation, called A Void, with many quips and interpolations of his own, and replaced Perec’s e-less parodies of famous French poems with e-less versions of well-known English-language verse:

Translators working in many languages in widely separated cultural fields—manga, subtitles, political jingles, experimental fiction, poetry, and popular verse—confront and overcome stringent formal constraints. Moreover, the forms themselves are often transported across historical, linguistic, and cultural space. These facts make it seem unwise to claim that anything is impossible. The only impossible things in translation are those that haven’t been done.

A less prejudiced way of understanding the work that translators do is to look more closely at the effects of successful matchings of strict form. Has Gilbert Adair improved Edgar Allan Poe? How come that the very diluted version of the Onegin stanza in Adriana Jacobs’s translation of Maya Arad’s imitation of Vikram Seth’s imitation of Charles Johnson’s verse translation of Pushkin resurrects something of the lightness and joy of Onegin’s youth? How has Anthea Bell made Astérix even funnier in English than in French? And why did anyone ever think that translating verse by verse was a dead end? The truth is quite the opposite. When you have to pay attention to more than one dimension of an utterance—when your mind is engaged in multilevel pattern-matching pursuits—you find resources in your language you never knew were there.

Of course there’s never a match that is 100 percent, because that’s not the way of the world. Just as it would be silly to claim that high-quality tailoring is “mathematically impossible” because we’ve never had a suit that was an absolutely perfect fit, it would be unwise to deny the possibility of translating form just because we’ve not yet done so in a way that is utterly impeccable in every respect.