Is That a Fish in Your Ear?

THIRTY Under Fire: Sniping at Translation

By always saying some other thing a second time, and saying it in a different way, an act of translation inevitably makes the new utterance your own. A journalist rephrasing an agency wire, a lawyer-linguist readjusting the expression of an opinion given by a judge at the European Court of Justice, a writer putting Pushkin into English verse or prose—translators of these and all other kinds possess the outcome of their work in a personal way. Translation cannot but be, in some measure, an appropriation of the source.

Possession, appropriation, making something your own—these are words from the language of the passions. What then of desire and its natural companions, jealousy and hurt?

It’s a curious fact that much translation commentary in Western languages contains unmistakable signs of anger and hurt. Schoolmasters, book critics, even theorists routinely disparage other translators—bad translators, “servile,” “mechanical,” second-rate translators—with a range of insults that could easily be thrown about in a lovers’ tiff. You have a tin ear! You write dull, wooden, clunky prose! You have taken one liberty too many! What makes you think such license is allowed? What you have done, young man, is called betrayal! Ignoramus! Cheat! Commoner! Thief!

In 1680, John Dryden, in his thoughtful translator’s preface to Ovid’s Epistles, cast anathema on a rival translator, Spence, for having replaced “the fine raillery and Attic salt of Lucian” with the “gross expressions of Billingsgate.”[174] How uncouth!

The philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer denigrated those “people of limited intellectual abilities” who “use only worn-out patterns of speech in their own language, which they put together so awkwardly that one realizes how imperfectly they understand the meaning of what they are saying … so that [their translations are] not much more than mindless parrotry.”[175] Oafs!

“One of the main troubles with would-be translators is their ignorance,” sniped Vladimir Nabokov. Examples he quotes are introduced by him as “dreadful,” “incredibly coy,” and “grotesquely trite.”[176]

José Ortega y Gasset summed up a view that has been expressed without serious interruption since the beginning of the whole debate: “Almost all translations done until now are bad ones.”[177]

It seems implausible that anyone would ever make such a statement about any other human skill or trade. Let’s just try it out: “Almost all firefighters up to now have been bad ones.” “Almost all mathematical proofs devised up to now are bad ones.” “Almost all novels written before mine are second rate.” “Almost all the women I met before you were dreadful.” If you said any of these things except the last, you would be out of your mind—and the exception is granted only because we permit a degree of insanity in what we say about affairs of the heart. Translators, whose working lives are not sexy in the least, use the language of love to talk about their work. How strange!

But these circumstances make it not strange at all that laypeople don’t have a high regard for translators. When it comes to defending the profession, translation commentators lead the field in throwing most of its work in the direction of the garbage dump.

Most people encounter translation at school in foreign-language lessons. Success in learning a foreign tongue comes at that gratifying moment when, all of a sudden, you find you are able to read and perhaps even think in the foreign tongue without the need to translate in your head. At that point you leave translation behind. It’s a second-rate support for those who’ve not studied hard enough. And if you go on to study the classical or foreign languages at a higher level, using translations becomes almost taboo.

It’s a curious paradox. The disparagement of translation emanates most powerfully from those very circles where the ability to translate (at least in the technical sense) is most likely to be found. It is reinforced in many universities by departments of modern languages that grudgingly permit the teaching of literature in translation only if it’s restricted to a separate program in comparative literature. Of course, their colleagues in history, English, philosophy, sociology, anthropology, and even mathematics use translated works all the time. But modern-language departments don’t seem to notice that at all.

Not all translation commentary is negative, but the range of terms available for complimenting a translator on her work is remarkably small. When book reviews pay any attention at all to the translation of a translated work under review and don’t use the opportunity to trot out one or more of the false platitudes we’ve tried to demolish in other chapters of this book, they recycle one of a small set of standard words of praise: fluent, witty, racy, accurate, brilliant, competent, and stylish. You would have to comb through a great quantity of book reviews to find any nods toward translators that step outside of this set and its quasi-synonyms. Translation-quality evaluation criteria are hard to establish, as we pointed out; critical language to express such evaluations seems even harder to find.

When you are using translation as a language-learning device, what you want to know when you’ve done one is whether you got it right. Since few members of the English-speaking community ever get much further than that in acquiring a foreign language, what most people want to know when they have a translation in front of them is the same as what they needed to know at school. We are taught to value “rightness” very highly when we are young, and teachers exploit the competitive spirit to make children internalize the concept. Being wrong is a shameful thing, and the aspiration toward getting the right answer stays with us for a long time. It acts as a focus for self-esteem, and for many other feelings, often passionately held. When a lay reader asks of a translation, “But is it right?” a question of almost moral importance is implied. But it is the wrong question. If it could be abandoned entirely, then many of the passions that make translation commentary such a vituperative business would abate and maybe one day disappear.

A translation can’t be right or wrong in the manner of a school quiz or a bank statement. A translation is more like a portrait in oils. The artist may add a pearl earring, give an extra flush to the cheek, or miss out the gray hairs in the sideburns—and still give us a good likeness. It’s hard to say just what it is that allows viewers to agree that a portrait captures the important things—the overall shape as well as that special look in the eye. The mysterious abilities we have for recognizing good matches in the visual sphere lie near to what it takes to judge that a translation is good. But the users of a translation, unlike the friends of a portraitist’s sitter, don’t have full access to the model (they would barely need the translation if they did). That’s probably why translation raises such passionate responses. There’s no choice but to trust the translator. When it comes to speech and writing, and for reasons that are by now, I hope, quite clear, people are an untrusting lot.