The Hall of Uselessness: Collected Essays (New York Review Books Classics)

by Leys, Simon

  TRANSLATION AS A SUBSTITUTE FOR CREATION (I)

  Somewhere, Roland Barthes remarked: “A creative writer is one for whom language is a problem.” As is often the case with Barthes, the brio of the formulation conceals a lack of intellectual rigour.

  Barthes’s phrase is both too narrow and too broad. Too narrow in that there exist creative writers for whom, in fact, language is not a problem—from Tolstoy to Simenon, the list is a long one, of inventors of worlds and characters who write in a functional, neutral, lack-lustre language. (Nabokov could not forgive Dostoevsky his flat, loose prose, which he judged suited to serialised romance. Evelyn Waugh reproached his fellow novelist and friend Graham Greene with using words without regard to their specific weight and autonomous life, wielding them as indifferent tools.) One might even claim that, frequently, the capacity for invention and creation is accompanied by a certain indifference to language, whereas an extreme attention to language can inhibit creation. Barthes’s phrase is too broad, however, in that for literary translators language always constitutes the central problem, and this in spite of the fact that translators are not creative per se. Translation is often a substitute for creation, whose procedures it imitates. As Maurice-Edgar Coindreau, the great translator and introducer to France of modern American literature, put it, “The translator is the novelist’s ape. He must make the same grimaces, whether these please him or not.” Translation can mimic creation as much as it likes, but it can never claim the same status; “creative translation” could only ever be a pejorative term, rather as it is said of a corrupt accountant that he practises “creative accounting.”

  A SUBSTITUTE FOR CREATION (II)

  There is a passage in Jules Renard’s correspondence which should be of interest to any writer, where he accurately describes the permanent and inexhaustible anguish of creativity: “However much I should be used to it, every time I am asked for something, anything, I’m troubled as if I were writing my first line. This has to do with the fact that I do not progress, that I write when it comes to me, and that I’m always afraid it won’t come.” When this anxiety is confirmed and freezes into a block, the work of translation, which is a sort of pseudo-creation, can become a writer’s refuge. Literary history offers numerous examples, from Baudelaire to Valery Larbaud: not only translation, but several other alternative activities can fill the same role—theatrical adaptations, for example, as when Camus adapted Faulkner. Equivalents present themselves from the other arts: Shostakovich talks in his memoirs of this stabbing terror of sterility, and gives various recipes for preventing inspiration from drying up: he underlines the usefulness of the work of orchestral transcription, for example—the goal being to preserve at all costs a form of artistic activity, an imitation of creative activity in order to “prime the pump” or to cross the desert in search of a new spring. As a temporary or permanent substitute for creation, translation is closely allied to creation, and yet it is of a different nature, for it offers an artificial inspiration. In place of the “I write when it comes to me, and I’m always afraid it won’t come,” what we now have is the comforting certainty of “It’s arrived, here it is!” One can sit down at one’s table every morning at the same hour, assured of giving birth to something. Of course, the quality and the quantity of daily production can vary, but the nightmare of the blank page is, for its part, definitively exorcised. It is, moreover, this very reassuring guarantee which fundamentally places translation in the domain of the artisan rather than in that of the artist. However difficult translation may sometimes be, as distinct from creation it is fundamentally risk-free.

  A SUBSTITUTE FOR CREATION (III)

  One can only really translate successfully those books which one would have liked to write oneself. For a literary translation to be inspired and lively, the translator must achieve identification with the author, by whose spirit he becomes inhabited. It would seem to me impossible to translate well a writer for whom I had neither sympathy nor respect, or whose values I did not share, or whose intellectual, moral, artistic and psychological universe was indifferent or hostile to me. This is so commonplace that it is repeated by every master-translator. So Coindreau: “A translator must know his own limitations and not take on works which he himself could not, or more exactly would not, have wished to write. Translating is an act of loving collaboration.” And Valery Larbaud: “I’ll never be shaken from the idea that a translation whose author begins by telling us in his preface that he chose it because he liked the original has every chance of being good.” But then Larbaud goes much further, as he develops the idea that translation is a sort of sublime plagiarism. According to him, the writer’s first gesture is that of plagiarism. (Malraux underlined the same phenomenon in the plastic arts, commenting for example on the way in which the young Rembrandt used to imitate Lastman: “Genius begins with pastiche.”) Larbaud continues: “It is only later, when we have noticed that as a general rule we don’t like our own works, that it is enough for us to like a poem or a book to feel that it is not our own; it is only then that we note the difference between yours and mine, and that plagiarism becomes not merely odious to us, but impossible. And yet there remains in us something of this primitive instinct for appropriation. It dwells deep within us as one of the instinctive vices of childhood, which the full development of our character refuses to permit to be reawakened.”

  Contact with a masterpiece communicates a sort of electrical charge: remember the famous cry of the young Correggio discovering a masterpiece by Raphael: “Anch’io son pittore!” (“I too am a painter!”). In the literary field, according to Larbaud, there exists a “profound instinct to which translation responds, and which turns individuals, depending on their moral worth, or perhaps on their degree of intellectual strength, into plagiarists or translators.” Translation is, then, a sublimation of our spontaneous propensity for theft or plagiarism: “Translating a work which we like means penetrating into it more deeply than we can do by a simple reading; it means possessing it more completely, in some ways appropriating it to ourselves. That is always the goal for us, plagiarists as we all are at origin.”

  A SUBSTITUTE FOR CREATION (IV)

  The fact that translation is a substitute for creation has its corollary: translations have a rightful place in a writer’s oeuvre, alongside his original works. It is legitimate and appropriate to include, for example, in an edition of the complete works of Baudelaire, of Proust, of Larbaud, or of Lu Xun, the translations they did. The great modern Chinese writer Zhou Zuoren, whose essays are interspersed with a vast range of translations (Greek classics, classical and modern Japanese literature, English literature), developed this idea: a writer can translate various texts in order to give form to things he had within himself but which he could not find other means of expressing. This is why it is appropriate to include these translations in any collection of his own works. The same goes for the quotations and the notes on reading that certain writers accumulate, and that the English sometimes call a commonplace book (see for example that of E.M. Forster, published recently, or Montesquieu’s Spicilège). String together all the pages that you have copied out over the course of your readings and, without there being a single line by you, the ensemble may turn out to be the most accurate portrait of your mind and your heart. Such mosaics of quotations resemble pictorial “collages”: all the elements are borrowed, but together they form original pictures.

  SOME TECHNICAL PROBLEMS

  When the translation is into English (for instance), the question is less that of knowing the foreign language than that of knowing English. This could be turned into an axiom: It is desirable to understand the language of the original, but it is indispensable to master the target language. This formula may look like both a joke and a truism, but it is a fact that there are translations which are literary masterpieces, which have exerted considerable influence, and which have been composed by translators who barely knew the language of the original, if they knew it at all; their sole q
ualification was that of being great stylists in their mother tongue. The most singular and illustrious case of this is without doubt that of Lin Shu (1852–1924), a capital figure in the literary history of modern China. Without knowing a single word of any foreign language, Lin Shu translated nearly 200 European novels, and this vast constituency of foreign fiction contributed powerfully to the transformation of the intellectual horizon of China at the end of the empire. Convalescent after a serious illness, towards 1890, Lin Shu was visited by a friend who had recently returned from France. The friend spoke to him of a novel very popular in Europe at the time, La Dame aux camélias, and suggested to him that he undertake its translation. The two collaborated in the following manner: the friend recounted the plot, while Lin Shu transcribed it into classical Chinese. This Chinese Dame aux camélias was a prodigious success. It needs to be said that it is vastly superior to the original: even while it is scrupulously faithful to the narrative of Dumas fils, reproducing it paragraph by paragraph, sentence by sentence, its style is admirable for its nobility and force of concision—imagine what a serialised novel would become if rewritten in the Latin of Tacitus! (Mao Zedong, receiving a delegation of French senators, lauded La Dame aux camélias as the finest example of French literary genius, much to the perplexity of his visitors: like all intellectuals of his generation, he had read Lin Shu’s translation, a half a century previously, and had retained an indelible memory of it.) Encouraged by this initial success, Lin Shu stuck to his course and undertook translations with various collaborators; entirely at the mercy of their variable knowledge and tastes, he built an enormous and heteroclite oeuvre, translating pell-mell the giants of world literature—Hugo, Shakespeare, Tolstoy, Goethe, Dickens—as well as good second-tier authors such as Walter Scott and R.L. Stevenson, and popular writers such as Anthony Hope and H. Rider Haggard (for whom he developed a particular predilection); and then also the spokesmen of oppressed nations—of the Poles, the Hungarians, the Serbs, the Bosnians . . . and even Hendrik Conscience, with his Leeuw van Vlaanderen (Lion of Flanders)!

  As to what concerns us here, what the fascinating case of Lin Shu illustrates is the importance of style: the literary art of the translator can even compensate for profound linguistic incompetence—though this is, of course, an extreme example. As a general rule it would be fair to say that if the translator is truly a writer, even the occasional mistaken meaning cannot spoil his work. By contrast, all the resources of philology will be of no use to him if he writes without literary ear. From which it emerges also that the best translators are normally those who translate from a foreign language into their mother tongue, and not vice versa. One example will serve: in English, the two most authoritative translations of Confucius’s Analects were for a long time those of Arthur Waley and D.C. Lau. The relatively old translation by Waley contains some rather flagrant mistakes and several debatable interpretations, but it is written in an admirable English. The more recent translation by Lau is more reliable philologically, but from a literary point of view it seems to have been composed on a computer, by a computer. An English-speaker who knows nothing of Confucius would do better to start by passing through Waley: even if he is led astray on certain points of detail, at least he will discover that Confucius’s Analects constitute a beautiful book, whereas there is a risk that this essential aspect will escape readers of Lau’s more accurate translation. Equally, French scholars of German have severely criticised the translations of Kafka by Alexandre Vialatte. While accepting that Vialatte did make numerous errors, when I read the new, rigorously correct versions which are now replacing the old ones, it seems to me that what Vialatte still offers, and which is more fundamental than philological exactitude, is literary truth. Even if his knowledge of German can often be found wanting, his understanding of the genius of Kafka—of the essentially comic nature of this genius—is in the end the yardstick of a truer sense of the text; a sense which, in turn, is served in French by Vialatte’s incomparable artistic abilities. What we encounter here is an illustration of the primordial axiom established by St. Jerome, the patron saint of our fellowship: “non verbum e verbo, sed sensum exprimere de senso”—render the sense rather than the words of the text.

  VERBUM E VERBO

  When rendering the words of the text, it happens to all translators to go astray here and there, but such accidents are remediable, as are basic spelling errors and typos. The recipe for success is simply to use good dictionaries, preferably of the monolingual variety. The easiest to render are difficult expressions; the hardest are easy expressions. By this I mean that abstruse expressions and rare terms declare themselves, can be spotted from afar; they are hazards clearly marked that can be negotiated with prudence, dictionary in hand. The danger arises with words of simple and everyday appearance that one believes one grasps perfectly, whereas in their context they may in fact be drawing on quite different technical or specialised vocabulary, or on a non-codified use of spoken language. I had intended to offer some examples of surprising blunders committed by excellent translators in order to demonstrate how profoundly knowledgeable translators, expert at unravelling the most complex linguistic puzzles from within the enclave of their libraries, far from the street and its life, managed to fall into very basic traps. But what’s the use in nitpicking? I am sure my meaning is clear, being at root nothing but an illustration of the old principle of navigation: it is dangerous not to know one’s position, but not to know that one does not know is much worse.

  Let me mention again the particular problem posed by obscure or corrupt passages in ancient texts. Certain translators err here by an excess of ingenuity: they create meaning in passages which no longer possess any; and where the original is hermetic and bumpy, their translation gives a deceptive impression of lucidity and fluidity. Jean Paulhan highlighted this phenomenon (à propos of a translation of Lao Zi): “The best translators are in this case the stupidest ones, who respect obscurity and don’t seek to make sense of the matter to hand.”

  SENSUM EXPRIMERE DE SENSO

  The errors committed of the order of “verbum e verbo” are venial and easily spotted. But in the domain of “sensum exprimere de senso,” all errors are fatal. Mistakes of meaning can be made, and inevitably are, but what are unpardonable are mistakes of judgement and tone. The way in which a translator chooses to convey the title of a work he is translating clearly indicates this, with Coindreau again supplying interesting examples. The title of William Styron’s novel, Set This House on Fire (which, with its biblical resonance, offers a challenge which Coindreau rises to magnificently with La Proie des flammes), were it to be translated by Fous le feu à la baraque, would instantly become the title of a cheap thriller. Steinbeck’s title The Grapes of Wrath is awkwardly rendered by Les Raisins de la colère, a title belonging to a pirate Belgian edition of the novel which gained notoriety during the Second World War, obliging Coindreau to let go of the brilliant solution he had envisaged: Le Ciel en sa fureur. In English, grapes possesses a solemn biblical ring, where the classic allusion to La Fontaine’s verse gives in the end the best possible equivalent, whereas the French connotation of “grapes” (think of “vignes du Seigneur”) evokes rather a Bacchic and Rabelaisian universe. Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë became, in the translation by F. Delebecque, Les Hauts de Hurlevent—a masterstroke. Coindreau explains why he translated God’s Little Acre (by E. Caldwell) as Le Petit arpent du bon Dieu: “Le Petit arpent de Dieu” sounded bad, he says, like some sort of Canadian swearword! “Bon Dieu” corresponds to the way in which one imagines the protagonist, an old peasant, smutty and sly, might naturally express himself. As for me, when it came to the narrative by Dana, Two Years Before the Mast, the expression “before the mast” would literally turn into “devant le mât” or “en avant du mât,” neither of which means much in French. In English, sailing “before the mast” means sailing as an ordinary seaman, since on tall ships the crew’s quarters were in the forecastle, and the sailors, unless on duty, w
ere strictly confined to the space “before the fore mast” (the aft section of the ship being reserved for the exclusive use of officers and passengers). To translate the title as “Deux ans de la vie d’un matelot” would have been too explicit, where what was required was an echo of the nautical jargon which Dana employs to such superb effect. As what was required was, moreover, avoidance of the infelicitous assonance of “deux ans”—“gaillard d’avant,” what I finally opted for was Deux années sur le gaillard d’avant.

  THE TEST OF THE TRANSLATION

  It is possible to be creative in a language that one knows only imperfectly: Conrad was still far from mastering English at the time he wrote Almayer’s Folly. It is impossible to translate into a language which one knows only imperfectly. No other literary activity demands so total a mastery of the language in which one is working; one must possess every register, one must be capable of playing in every key and on every scale. When one is composing, if one comes up against an obstacle, one has at one’s disposal numerous sidesteps: one can always tackle the subject from another angle, or if it comes to it one can even invent something else. When translating, by contrast, problems are immutable, and there is no question of avoiding or side-stepping them; they must all be confronted and resolved, one by one, wherever they present themselves. Translation not only deploys every resource of writing, it is also the supreme form of reading. In order to appreciate a text, re-reading is better than reading, learning by heart is better than re-reading; but one possesses only what one translates. First, translating implies total comprehension. When we’ve read a text with interest, with pleasure, with emotion, we naturally presume that we’ve entirely understood it . . . until the moment comes when we try to translate it. Then, what we usually discover is that rather than understanding, what we’ve been left with is the imprint of the text’s movement on our imagination and sensibility; sufficient to sustain a reader’s attention—but the translator, for his part, requires firmer foundations on which to base his work. Certainly, vague passages must be rendered in a vague manner; obscure passages must be rendered obscurely. But in order to produce an adequate obscurity and vagueness, the translator must previously have penetrated the fog to capture whatever is hiding behind it.