by Tim Parks
Now, two decades later, I am obliged to sign up to gotten. Commissioned by an American publisher to write a book that explores the Italian national character through an account of thirty years’ commuting and traveling on the country’s rail network, I am looking at an edit that transforms my English prose into American. I had already sorted out the spelling, in fact had written the book with an American spell check, and didn’t expect that there would be much else to do. Wrong. Almost at once there was a note saying that throughout the three hundred pages my use of carriage for a passenger train car must be changed to coach. Since this is a book about trains and train travel there were ninety-eight such usages. There was also the problem that I had used the word coach to refer to a long-distance bus. Apparently the twenty-four-hour clock was not acceptable, so the 17:25 Regionale from Milan to Verona had to become the 5:25 PM Regionale. Where I, in a discussion of prices, had written “a further 50 cents” the American edit required “a further 50 euro cents,” as if otherwise an American reader might imagine Italians were dealing in nickels and dimes.
I had started the editing process in a spirit of easygoing cooperation, determined to set aside any pride in Englishness and work to produce the best package possible for an American public. After all, the work was being paid for by an American publisher, and my commissioning editor had proved extremely helpful when it came to discussing the shape of the book. But doubts soon arose. Prose is not something that remains the same when words are substituted—jeans for dungarees, for example—or when one synonym is preferred to another. Rhythm is important, and assonance likewise. Ninety-eight uses of a two-syllable carriage are not the same as ninety-eight occurrences of a single-syllable closed-o coach. This is why, statistically, assonance, alliteration, and rhythm tend to be weaker in translations than in original texts; consciously or otherwise a writer, even of the least ambitious prose, is guided by sound, while the language itself is constantly forming standard collocations of words around pleasantly assonant combinations—fast asleep, wide awake. Any intervention in these patterns, whether simply substituting words to suit a local use of the same language, or, more radically, translating into another language, disturbs the relationship between sound and semantics.
But my train book isn’t just a text written by an Englishman to be published in America. It’s about Italy, the Italians, how they see things, their mental world. One of the ways one can get across the difference is to focus on words or usages that don’t quite translate—the appearance of coincidenza, for example, in station announcements, which can mean a planned and timetabled train connection, or a quite unplanned, unexpected development to which an urgent response is required, such as a last-minute platform change. Over these matters the American editor dutifully followed. But where I had written mamma and papà, the edit had transformed to mamma and pappa. This rather threw me, in part because I had assumed that Americans said mama and papa, but mostly because papà is accented on the second syllable, whereas in Italian pappa, with the accent on the first syllable and that double p that Italians, unlike Anglo-Saxons, actually pronounce, is a word for mush, or baby food.
Despite my hailing from England—a country that still uses miles—I had expressed distances in meters and kilometers and it seemed odd now to find my Italian characters speaking to each other about yards and miles and, of course, Fahrenheit, which they never would. Or saying AM and PM, rather than using the twenty-four-hour clock as they mostly do, even in ordinary conversation. Slowly, as well as being concerned that some sentences were now feeling clunky and odd, I began to wonder if American readers really needed or demanded this level of protection. Wouldn’t they soon figure out, if I said “the temperature was up in the sizzling thirties,” that I was talking Celsius? Or at least that in another part of the world people had another system for measuring temperature according to which thirty was considered warm? Mightn’t it be fascinating for them to be reminded that the twenty-four-hour clock, which Americans usually associate with military operations, has long been in standard civilian usage in Europe? Italy introduced it as early as 1893.
Or again, does a newsagent really need to become a news dealer, a flyover an overpass, a parcel a package, or in certain circumstances between among and like such as? Does the position of also really need to be moved in front of the verb to be in sentences like “Trains also were useful during the 1908 earthquake in Catania,” when to me it looked much better after it? And does making these relatively small changes really make the text 100 percent American anyway? One thinks of how thoroughly the Harry Potter novels were Americanized for their US editions: would they really have sold fewer copies had the Anglicisms been kept? Wasn’t half the charm of the series its rather fey Englishness (occasionally Scottishness)? Would we Americanize the Irish Joyce? Or again, if we want to have language conform to local usage, what about considering chronology as well as geography? Shouldn’t we bring Dickens, Austen, Fielding, and Shakespeare up to date? Make it easier? Forget that language is constantly changing and different everywhere?
Turning page after page of the copy editor’s notes, I began to make connections between this editing process and many of the things I have written about here. America is very much a net exporter of literature. Its novels are read and translated worldwide, where readers generally accept miles and Fahrenheit, pounds and ounces, AM and PM, and indeed have grown accustomed to these old-fashioned, American oddities (when it comes to doing science, of course, Americans use the more practical European systems). In Germany, for example, where around 50 percent of novels are foreign works in translation, Roth’s and Franzen’s characters are not obliged to discuss distances in kilometers.
Conversely, America imports very little—only 3 to 4 percent of novels published in the States are translations—and what it does import it tends to transform as far as possible into its own formulas and notations, in much the same way that Disney has turned every fable and myth worldwide into a version of Mickey Mouse. This situation is a measure of American power, but brings with it the danger of mental closure and inflexibility. Speaking recently at a conference in Milan, the Italian literary agent Marco Vigevani lamented that fewer and fewer American editors are able to read novels in Italian, French, and especially German, and this inevitably has reduced their enthusiasm for publishing foreign literature, since they are obliged to rely on external readers for advice.
Travel books are popular, likewise novels set in distant exotic countries, suggesting an appetite for awareness of other societies and their different lifestyles. But how far can literature really expose us to another world if everything is always returned to the reassuring medium of our own language exactly as we use it, with all our own formulas, dimensions, accents, and habits? More than anything else, what makes a foreign country foreign and difficult is its language, and though we can’t be expected to learn a new language for every country we want to know about, it seems important to be reminded of the language, reminded that one’s own language is not the supreme system for understanding the world, but just one of thousands of possibilities. Does anybody in the end really know with absolute certainty, all the differences between American and English usages? Aren’t there a wide range of usages in both these countries? How can I know, when I see a particular edit, if it is an Americanism I have to accept, or a matter of individual taste I can take issue with?
And all this without mentioning house style, that frighteningly powerful dye which, in some magazines, turns every contributor’s prose the same color. In my train book, for example, after a few pages discussing the fate of Italian railways under Nazi occupation, I begin a new paragraph “2,104 railwaymen died in the war”: to my ear the bare number has exactly the brutal eloquence that such statements demand. But I find this changed to “A total of 2,104 railwaymen died in the Second World War.” What is the sense of a total of? Surely it’s not a requirement of Americanization. What does it add? I have to presume that some house style forbids me from opening a para
graph with a number. Why? This whole question may seem a quite different matter from the contrast between Americans Americanizing and Europeans accepting Americanisms, but the truth is that house style is a much more common occurrence in the US and more aggressively enforced, to the point that when one rereads work one has written for The New Yorker it no longer seems like one’s own voice at all. I can think of no similar experience with English or European magazines, as I can remember no experience quite like my tussle over tense changes for the American edition of my book Medici Money.
Not that good editing is not precious. I have been saved a thousand stupid mistakes and much ugly phrasing by good editors; it is the desire to fix style in an unchanging standard that is noxious. As if people didn’t have different ways of speaking. And a cultural trait like this must mean something, must come out of some deep assumption. Is it simply the publisher’s anxiety that his readers are weak, ready to put their books down at the slightest obstacle, and hence must be reassured by a homogeneity of usage that more or less makes language invisible? Or could it be that the long American hegemony has bred an assumption that American formulations are inevitably global currency and should be universally imposed?
IN PRAISE OF THE LANGUAGE POLICE
HOW FAR SHOULD writers be asked to conform to standards of language and syntax? Behind this apparently innocent editorial dilemma lies the whole issue of what we expect from literature.
Most readers seem to favor (and indeed favour) complete freedom for writers, seeing nothing but pedantry in the application of rules and in some cases questioning whether such things can really be said to exist anywhere but in the heads of copy editors and the establishment police. As readers, it seems, we love to feel we are in direct contact with an especially creative, possibly subversive mind and that we are getting all of its quirks and qualities unmediated and unmitigated by the obtusity of lesser folks perversely eager to return everything to the expected and mundane. This is no doubt why so little is said about editing even in the more learned papers, while nothing at all appears in the popular press, let alone at a promotional level. One cannot imagine, for example, a publisher launching an advertising campaign to boast that it has the most attentive copy editors in the business and can guarantee that everything you may read from its list has been properly purged of anything grammatically iffy, or foreign, or idiosyncratic.
By the same token, very little is said of the mediating work of translators, even though we know that when a great piece of literature has been translated more than once, the various versions can sound quite different and obviously owe a great deal not just to the technical expertise but also to the personality and mindset of people we usually know nothing about. In general, we don’t like to think of creative writing as a joint venture, and when it emerges, for example, that Raymond Carver allowed his work to be drastically edited, our appreciation of him, and indeed the work, is at least temporarily diminished. We want to think of our writers as geniuses occupying positions of absolute independence in relation to a tediously conventional society. Conversely, we abhor, or believe we abhor, the standard and the commonplace.
Yet nobody requires the existence of a standard and a general pressure to conform to that standard more than the person who wishes to assume a position outside it. It is essential for the creative writer that there be, or be perceived to be, a usual way of saying things, if a new or unusual way is to stand out and to provoke some excitement. So when D.H. Lawrence in Women in Love writes of Gudrun’s insomnia after first making love to Gerald that she was “destroyed into perfect consciousness,” he needs the reader to sense at once that this is syntactically anomalous; a person can be “transformed into,” “turned into,” “changed into” but not “destroyed into.” The syntactical shock underlines Lawrence’s unconventional view of consciousness as a negative rather than positive state, something that again is emphasized by the unexpected use of the word perfect,—“perfect consciousness”—rather than a more immediately understandable and neutral intense.
Naturally, anyone writing with this level of creativity needs a copy editor willing to accept that rules can be bent and broken. But that doesn’t mean such editors have no role. It is important that the “special effect” stand out from a background of more conventional prose, and that a deliberate departure not be mistaken as something merely regional, British perhaps, or simply that there not be so much clutter around it of one kind or other that it is hardly noticed. George Orwell, a champion of strict grammar as a vehicle of clear thinking, memorably begins 1984 with a very simple, almost embarrassingly conventional novel-opener of a sentence in order that the anomaly constituted by the last word pack a big punch: “It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.” In a different field, David Hume, when presenting his radical and unconventional philosophy, did everything to remove from his writing any indication of his “Scottishness,” sending drafts to friends to have them check his writing for “Scottishisms.” It was not that he thought standard English superior, just that he did not want a reader’s attention to be distracted from his main purpose.
The editor’s job then becomes one of helping the writer to see where an unessential, perhaps unconscious departure from the norm is actually draining energy away from places where the text is excitingly unconventional. That is, the editor reminds an author that to construct a coherent identity he has to remember his relationship with society and with the language we share and cannot express ourselves without. To go out on a limb linguistically, accepting no compromise and creating an idiolect that really is entirely your own, may win awed admiration, as did Finnegans Wake, but will likely not attract many readers, and arguably does not allow for the communication of nuance, since all the ordinary reader will understand is that you are indeed off on a trip on your own; even Joyce’s hitherto staunch supporter Pound, hardly a slouch himself when it came to literary experiments, would have no truck with it.
However, linguistic conventions, in so far as they exist and editors seek to apply them, tend to be national. Albeit with a degree of flexibility, the ear is accustomed to local patterns, and the eye has grown used to a certain system of punctuation, a certain approach to paragraphing (the London Review of Books, for example, is markedly different from The New York Review of Books in this regard). Hence the problem of what to do with a text from a different culture, a different country, a different language, or simply from the distant past, where any deliberate departures were intended to stand out against conventions that are not our own and that we very likely don’t know or don’t care about.
But if language habits tend to be national, we live in a world that is more and more international, a world where, certainly in Europe, readers are just as likely to be reading books in translation as in their national language. For translators, and indeed for editors of translations, there is a risk that they might not recognize the exciting subversiveness of a certain usage if they are not entirely familiar with the cultural standard and social context in which it is uttered: the first Italian translation of 1984 has the clocks striking one, not thirteen, its translator apparently unaware of how interesting a clock striking thirteen would be.
Even where translators and editors are sensitive to such effects, it may be impossible to achieve them within the different conventions of their own language. I have looked at translations of “destroyed into perfect consciousness” in many languages, and most of them split the structure into such formulas as “destroyed, absolutely aware.” This is not because the translators are poor but because in their languages it is hard to find a standard usage (“transformed into”) that can be bent to accept a word like destroyed, for the trick of Lawrence’s expression is that its strangeness does not lead to a loss of fluency. Milan Kundera objected vigorously in Testaments Betrayed that his subversive formulations in Czech were returned, in translation, to standard German or French, but although it’s true that translators and their editors are not always the most
adventurous people, it is also the case that one language’s rules are not another’s.
All this alerts us to the fact that each text and each usage in the text has no absolute existence, content, or meaning, but is always understood in relation to where we are now, what we regularly read and expect to see on the page. The translator frequently finds himself obliged to translate not the words themselves, but the distance between those words and other words that might normally have been used, but weren’t. It is a tough proposition.
Unless . . . unless we come to the conclusion that it no longer makes sense, or very soon may not make sense, to talk about different territories and rules and being “one of us.” Very soon it may be that we are all, at least as far as literature is concerned, part of one global territory where we are obliged to be constantly aware of different customs not as if they were happening far away within fairly well-marked and self-contained boundaries, but as if they had become part of what happens on our street. In that case, we may, for a while, as international stylistic conventions slowly form, be obliged to accept that we live in an era of great confusion, where the exact position any writer is taking in relation to a presumed cultural standard has grown extremely problematic.
There is a fascinating moment in the history of translation that occurs sometime in the early twentieth century when, with some notable exceptions, translators stop translating the names of characters. It is as if Italian readers had become so aware of England that one could no longer go on talking of Niccolò Nickleby, Samuele Pickwick, and their famous author Carlo Dickens. Or you could say that the Christian name no longer suggests a parental choice and social reference that we can easily transfer into our own system of names, but rather an absolute unchangeable denotation of an individual. Charles Dickens is Charles Dickens throughout the universe.