Is That a Fish in Your Ear?

TWENTY-SEVEN Translating Literary Texts

In the English-speaking world, there are no job postings for literary translators and few openings for beginners. Insofar as it is remunerated at all, literary translation is paid at piece rates equivalent to a babysitter’s hourly charge. It is pursued mainly by people who have other sources of income to pay the rent and the grocer. There are a few exceptions, but literary translation into English is for the most part done by amateurs.

Yet it plays a central part in the international circulation of new literary work. The disparity between global role and local recognition is perhaps the greatest curiosity of the whole trade. Literary translation into any language has features that mark it off from most other kinds of language work. To begin with, it usually has liberal time constraints compared with work in commercial, legal, or technical fields. It also engages the translator’s responsibility in less daunting ways. Translation mistakes in court, in hospitals, and in maintenance manuals may cause immediate harm to others. Making a mess of a masterpiece certainly has consequences, but they don’t threaten the translator or the client in comparable ways. Producing fluent prose to stand in place of a story told in German or Spanish is also more entertaining than writing an English-language summary of a Russian document on border issues in the Barents Sea. All these things make sense of the fact that the rewriters of foreign novels in English translation have low pay and low profiles. They don’t have too hard a time.

It could hardly be more different in Japan. Motoyuki Shibata is without question the most famous translator from English in the country: his publisher puts out the Motoyuki Shibata Translation Collection, and bookshops set aside whole sections for it. His name does not just appear on the dust jacket but is printed in the same type size as the author’s name.

Japanese literary translators have much the same status as authors do in Britain and America. Many author-translators are household names, and there’s even a celebrity-gossip book about them: Honyakuka Retsuden 101, “The Lives of the Translators 101.”

Many other countries give translators greater symbolic and material rewards than America or Britain. In Germany, literary translators are usually granted a significant royalty on the books they translate; French literary translators, too, are better paid than their American counterparts. In the English-speaking world, almost all literary translators have a day job to support their avocation, but in France, Germany, Japan, and elsewhere you can use translating as your day job to finance a second calling—such as writing fiction of your own.

These discrepancies in the social and economic context of literary translation among the Far East, Continental Europe, and the anglophone world reflect the asymmetry in the global flow of translations. The situational contexts of literary translation are so different when translating UP and translating DOWN—toward the center, or toward the periphery, in Pascale Casanova’s terms[165]—that they cannot fail to have broad effects on the way the task is done.

In cultures that lie on the periphery of the global circulation of literary works, what is wanted is access to the center. The cultural standing of literary works in translation is determined in the first place by the simple fact that they give access to the foreign. In central languages, on the other hand, the foreignness of a new book is of no special importance. New writing from abroad has to win its place in the culture by other means. But as there is only one central language at the moment, the gulf in translation practice lies between English and the rest.

Translating the new into English nearly always uses a fluent and relatively invisible translation style. This is obviously related to the fact that, like budding authors, literary translators of previously unknown work have a hard struggle finding a publisher to take them on. But, in practice, few books arrive in English as the direct result of a translator’s efforts. Most international literature that is published has been picked by commissioning editors whose opinions are formed by pitches from international literary scouts, foreign publishers, and gossip at book fairs around the world. Literary translators almost always get to hear about their next book when a publisher is already committed to bringing it out.

There aren’t many publishing executives in Britain and the United States who read foreign languages other than French. One result of this almost embarrassing situation is that translation into French is, if not quite a precondition, then a very useful introduction for a work in any other language seeking entry to world literature.[166] The international careers of writers such as Ismail Kadare and Javier Marías, for example, hinged at the start on their works being read in French translation by publishers in America and Britain. But many works are acquired for translation by editors relying exclusively on reports and “buzz,” and the English translator is often the only person in the chain who really knows very much about the book or its author at all. It’s a daunting position, with responsibilities going far beyond the already difficult business of producing an acceptable and effective translation.

Retranslation of ancient and modern “classics” takes place under a quite different set of real-world constraints. It gives rise to arguments about the translator’s responsibilities that are distinct from those that rule the translation of new work.

Just after the end of the Second World War, Penguin Classics brought out a new translation of Homer’s Odyssey, by E. V. Rieu. It was an unexpected success. As the company’s website records, the liveliness of Rieu’s style “proclaimed that this was a book that anyone—everyone—could, and should, read.”[167] The classics were no longer restricted to the privileged few.

“Classic” here means Greek and Roman literature. Earlier translations had been done mostly to accompany the learning of Latin and Greek in the classier kind of schools, and so Rieu’s colloquial version was a revelation for less privileged folk. Its success and the long series that followed also reflected an important social aspiration of postwar Britain—to give much greater educational opportunities to the broad public than it had ever had before. The early Penguin Classics were mostly of ancient and medieval texts, including Neville Coghill’s famous rendering of Chaucer, but the series soon came to include literature ranging from ancient Egypt to the closing years of the nineteenth century. A collective enterprise of that kind was sustained by a conscious and explicit culture of translation. “It is the editor’s intention to commission translators who can emulate his own example and present the general reader with readable and attractive versions of the great books in modern English, shorn of the unnecessary difficulties and erudition, the archaic flavour and the foreign idiom that renders so many existing translations repellent to modern taste.”[168] Rieu’s marching orders point firmly toward an adaptive translation style. At the start, he tried to recruit academics but found that very few of them could write English of the kind he appreciated. He turned to professional writers such as Robert Graves, Rex Warner, and Dorothy L. Sayers, with personalities ranging from the scholarly to the idiosyncratic. But a stringent house style was imposed on these versions, and the result is that the first two hundred Penguin Classics read as if they had all been written in the same language—fluent, unpretentious British English, circa 1950. It was a remarkable achievement. The series certainly did educate millions, and it is undoubtedly one of the historical sources of the strong preference in English-language translation for adaptive, normalizing, or domesticating styles.

However, the social and cultural aspirations of these early retranslations are not necessarily those that motivate later retranslation projects. Save at special moments such as 1945 (or the immediate aftermath of the Russian Revolution, when Maksim Gorky launched his “World Literature” publishing house), retranslation is nearly always a strictly commercial affair.

Copyright is a modern invention, dating from 1708, but international copyright is even more recent. First sketched out in bilateral treaties in the 1850s, modern arrangements for the translation of literary works were first codified in the 1920s. The Berne Convention, which has since become the Universal Copyright Convention, doesn’t allow a publisher to put out a translation without purchasing that right from the owner of the original text. But when a publisher does acquire the right to publish a foreign work in translation, he becomes the sole owner of the translated work for as long as the edition remains in print.[169] He has a monopoly in the target language—until the original work falls into the public domain.

International copyright protection is now set at seventy years from the author’s death or from first publication, in the case of posthumous works. Marcel Proust died in 1922, and the last volume of A la recherche du temps perdu was published in 1927. Franz Kafka died in 1924, and his most famous works came out in 1925 (The Trial), 1926 (The Castle), and 1927 (America). English-language publishers of these perennial works lost their monopoly toward the end of the last century. Freud died in 1939, and so his works are now also “free of rights.” Publishers generally seek to retain some part of their market share in these hardy perennials by commissioning retranslations. That’s why over the last twenty years there has been a steady output of “new” Prousts, Kafkas, and Freuds.

The legal constraints on the international circulation of literary texts explain why there is only one translation available for most works first published since the First World War. Retranslation is not a practice that has any application to most of world literature created after the birth of the last generation but two.

A retranslator, whether working with older texts or with ones that have just become available at the seventy-year limit of protection, has to cope with ambiguous and conflicting demands. If the new translation is to be copyrighted as a new text, then it has to be measurably different from any other translation. The easiest way to ensure originality is to not even look at earlier versions, since the chance of any two translators coming up blind with the same target formulation is nil. On the other hand, a retranslator also needs to be able to explain why the new translation is better than the existing one, and to do that you have to read what is already there. The older version may help—it may be very useful indeed—but it always gets in the way of inventing a fresh solution to the trickier parts of the text. I don’t envy retranslators of modern classics one bit. They have to steer a clifftop path between inadvertent plagiarism and gratuitous change.

In some cases, a new translation is amply justified by the discovery or publication of the full or unexpurgated or corrected version of a text that had originally been brought out on the basis of a censored or imperfect manuscript (such is the case of Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita). In the case of work that has been intensively studied over several decades, a new translation may be able to incorporate readings and interpretations that were not available to the first. But the general principle that old translations need redoing “every generation or two” is not well supported by these individual cases. It is supported with arithmetical exactitude by the law of international copyright and the commercial interests it creates.

Yet despite these major differences between translating and retranslating, and between translating into English and into other tongues, the translation of literary works of all kinds has a feature that distinguishes it from all other translation tasks. We like to believe that a literary work, insofar as it really belongs to literature, is unlike all others—it is unique, not routine, and essentially just itself. This creates a real problem.

Translating serious nonfiction calls on skills and knowledge that literary translators don’t need (knowledge of the field, for a start), but there’s no special problem about knowing what linguistic norms the target text should meet. You naturally want to make a book about archaeology resemble other well-regarded books about archaeology in the receiving culture. When translating UP, the norms for nonfiction are those of original work in the same field done by speakers of the receiving language.

But difficult questions arise when the specific field of a nonfiction work is new or not easy to classify. There is perhaps no better example of the uncertain borderline between literary and informational translation than the works of Sigmund Freud.

Despite his worldwide fame, Freud’s complete works have been translated in full only into English, Italian, Spanish, and Japanese. Based on the complete works published in German in London in 1942, James Strachey’s English version is regarded by many as a masterwork of translation and by others as a betrayal of Freud. The long-running controversy over what kind of English should represent Freud’s writing turns on the question of the genre to which Freud’s writing should be attached. Does it belong to social science? Or is it more properly thought of as literary work?

Strachey took it for granted that psychoanalysis was a science. Scientific terminology in English traditionally relies on Latin and Greek roots to forge new words for new concepts. However, Freud himself wrote in a language that uses compounds of quite ordinary words in the natural and social sciences. Thus, where in English we use bits of Greek for hydrogen and oxygen, German uses only “plain words”: Wasserstoff is “water stuff,” Sauerstoff is “sour stuff,” but such terms are no less technical and precise than their Greek-based counterparts in English. Consequently, where Freud says Anlehnung (“leaning on”), Strachey coins anaclisis, and for Schaulust (“see-pleasure”), he invents scopophilia. Many now common words of English—ego, id, superego, empathy, and displacement, for example—were all first invented in Strachey’s translation of Freud, to replace the equally technical but less recondite neologisms of the original: Ich, Es, Überich, Einfühlung, and Verschiebung.[170]

Strachey’s approach is quite unexceptionable if Freud’s writings are seen as contributions to social or medical science. We can test that in a back-translation exercise. What could Freud have written had he wanted to coin a term in German for the English neologism scopophilia? The norms of German-language science writing of his era would have led him inevitably toward a compound noun such as Schaulust.

If, on the other hand, works such as The Interpretation of Dreams are assimilated not to science but to literary creation, then Strachey’s English, which gives a version that is tonally and stylistically distant from the original, could easily be seen as a misrepresentation.

In France, a large and coordinated team has been engaged since the 1980s in producing the first “Complete Works” in French. The enterprise aims to restore the German specificity of Freud, treating him less as the inventor of a new science than as a writer of a particular (and rather strange) kind of literary prose. Indeed, the team’s leaders have declared that Freud didn’t write German at all but “Freudish,” “a dialect of German that is not German but a language invented by Freud.” The result is widely regarded as incomprehensible in French—but then, if “Freudish” isn’t German, it wouldn’t have been easy to read in the original, either …[171]

The tangled disputes over Freud in English and French would not arise if it were clear how to categorize the field to which his work belongs. In most social-science translation, the problem does not arise. Because it is believed in many places that the best work in social science is done in the United States, translation of social science from English typically retains some linguistic features of the original, to authenticate the quality of the work. But in literature, there is no such collective agreement about where the “top model” lies. Should a new foreign novel in translation conform to the manner and style of some existing writer of English prose? Some would say, Of course not! What we want is something different from the familiar patterns of Philip Roth. Others would say, Of course it should! We want to read something that matches our existing conception of novelistic style in English prose. The book may have been written in Albanian or Chinese, but if it’s a good novel, then it should sound like one—of the kind we know.

There is no resolution to this squabble. You could say that literary translation is easy because, in the last analysis, you can do what you like. Or you could say that literary translation is impossible, because whatever you do, serious objections can be raised. Literary translation is different from all other kinds. It serves readers in a quite special way. Modestly, often unwittingly, but inevitably, it teaches them on each occasion what translation is.