Is That a Fish in Your Ear?

by David Bellos

  Je la tu la ti la toi

  La spinash o la bouchon

  Cigaretto Portabello

  Si rakish spaghaletto

  Ti la tu la ti la toi

  Senora pilasina

  Voulez-vous le taximeter?

  Le zionta su la sita

  Tu la tu la tu la oi

  Sa montia si n’amura

  La sontia so gravora

  La zontcha con sora

  Je la possa ti la toit

  Je notre so lamina

  Je notre so consina

  Je le se tro savita

  Je la tossa vi la toit

  Se motra so la sonta

  Chi vossa l’otra volta

  Li zoscha si catonta

  Tra la la la la la la

  That sounds like French—or Italian, or perhaps Spanish—to an English speaker with no knowledge of the languages, only a familiarity with what French (or Italian, or Spanish) sounds like. The verses have no meaning, and only a few of the words are actual words of French (Italian, Spanish). The point is this: you do not have to make any sense at all to sound foreign. For the ancient Greeks, the sound of the foreign was the unarticulated, open-mouthed blabber of va-va-va, which is why they called all non-Greek-speakers varvaros, that is to say, barbarians, “blah-blah-ers.” To sound foreign is to mouth gibberish, to be dim, to be dumb: the Russian word for “German” is , from , “dumb, speechless,” and in an older form of the language it was used for any non-Russian-speaker.

  However, since the 1980s a number of modern European classics have been retranslated into English and French by translators whose avowed intention was to make familiar classics such as Crime and Punishment or The Metamorphosis sound more foreign—although they certainly did not wish to make them sound dumb.

  Nineteenth-century translators frequently left common words and phrases in the original (but mostly when the original was French), though this device is rarely used by contemporary retranslators into English, however “foreignizing” they may seek to be. When Gregor Samsa wakes one morning and finds that he has turned into an insect overnight, he does not exclaim, Ach Gott! in any modern English version; nor does Ivan Fyodorovich say in any available translation of The Brothers Karamazov. Had these novels been written in French and translated into English by the conventions of the 1820s, we can be fairly sure that Gregor Samsa would have said Oh mon Dieu! and Ivan Fyodorovich would have said Alors, voilà in the English translation.

  Things have changed, not in French, German, or Russian, but in English. In the language culture of today, English-language readers are not expected to know how to recognize conversational interjections such as “Good God!” or “Well, now” when spoken in German or Russian; whereas within the language culture of Victorian and Edwardian Britain, educated readers were familiar with French expressions of that kind.

  A genuine educational and social purpose can be served by maintaining items of the source text in the translation. It allows readers to acquire what they had not learned at school, or to refresh their memory of half-forgotten lessons. Retention of the original expression in narrowly delimited and self-explanatory speech situations such as greetings and exclamations provides readers with something they might well want to glean from reading a translated work: the vague impression of having read a novel in French. When reading French was an important mark of cultural distinction, this could be a very satisfying feeling indeed.

  Selective, or “decorative,” foreignism is available only in translation between languages with an established relationship. For many centuries, French was a requirement of advanced education in the English-speaking world, and bits of French were therefore part of the educated English speaker’s general linguistic resource. What those fragments of the other language signified was, simply, “This is French!” together with the pleasing corollary, “I know some French!” The effect on the reader’s self-esteem was hardly diminished if the exact meaning of phrases such as parbleu and ma foi had been lost. When a mastery of French was the hallmark of the educated classes, part of the point of reading a French novel in translation for those whose education had not been quite so complete was to acquire the cultural goods that the elite already possessed. The more French was left in the translation of work from French, the better the reader’s needs and wants were served.

  You can’t do that with Russian or German anymore. These languages are taught to only tiny groups of students nowadays. Knowledge of either or even both has no relation to cultural hierarchies in the English-speaking world—it just means you are some kind of a linguist, or maybe an astronaut or an automobile engineer.

  What could represent “Russianness” or “Germanness” inside a work written in English? Conventional solutions to this conundrum are no more than that—cultural conventions, established within the English-language domain by historical contact, patterns of immigration, and popular entertainments such as Cold War dramas like Dr. Strangelove. But if we were to take d’Alembert’s recommendation as our guide, then we would try to make Kafka and Dostoyevsky sound like the foreigners that they surely were … by having them write English “embellished” with features not native to it.

  In German and Russian, of course, Kafka and Dostoyevsky, however unique their manners of expression may be, do not sound foreign to native readers of those languages. Foreignness in a translation is necessarily an addition to the original. In Chaplin’s gibberish as in retranslations of literary classics, foreignness is necessarily constructed inside the receiving tongue. As a result, the “foreign-soundingness” of a translation seeking to give the reader a glimpse of the authentic quality of the source can only reproduce and reinforce what the receiving culture already imagines the foreign to be.

  Friedrich Schleiermacher, a distinguished nineteenth-century philosopher and the translator of Plato into German, hovered around this fundamental paradox in his much-quoted paper “The Different Methods of Translating.” He’s usually understood to have taken his distance from fluent, invisible, or “normalizing” translation when he said, “The goal of translating even as the author himself would have written originally in the language of the translation is not only unattainable but is also in itself null and void.”6 But that famous statement can also be understood the other way around: that it would be just as artificial to make Kafka sound like a “stage German” writing English as it would be to make Gregor Samsa sound as if he had turned into a beetle in a bedroom in Hoboken.

  Why should we want or need Kafka to sound German in any case? In German, Kafka doesn’t sound “German”—he sounds like Kafka. But to the ear of an English speaker who has learned German but does not inhabit that language entirely naturally, everything Kafka wrote “sounds German” to some degree, precisely because German is not quite that reader’s home tongue. Making Kafka sound German in English is perhaps the best a translator can do to communicate to the reader his or her own experience of reading the original.

  For Schleiermacher, in fact, apart from “those marvelous masters to whom several languages feel as one,” everybody “retains the feeling of foreignness” when reading works not in their home tongue. The translator’s task is “to transmit this feeling of foreignness to his readers.” But this is a peculiarly hard and rather paradoxical thing to do unless you can call on conventions that the target language already possesses for representing the specific “other” associated with the culture of the language from which the source text comes.

  Foreign-soundingness is therefore only a real option for a translator when working from a language with which the receiving language and its culture have an established relationship. The longest and most extensive rapport of that kind in the English-speaking world in general is with French. In the United States, Spanish has recently become the most familiar foreign tongue for the majority of younger readers. English therefore has many ways to represent Frenchness, and American English now also has a panoply of devices for representing Spanishness. To a lesser degree, we can represent
Germanness, and, to a limited degree, Italianness as well. But what of Yoruba? Marathi? Chuvash? Or any one of the nearly seven thousand other languages of the world? There is no special reason why anything within the devices available to a writer of English should “sound just like Yoruba” or give a more authentic representation of what it feels like to write in Chuvash. We just have no idea. The project of writing translations that preserve in the way they sound some trace of the work’s “authentic foreignness” is really applicable only when the original is not very foreign at all.

  On the other hand, translated texts can teach interested and willing readers something about the sound and feel and even the syntactic properties of the original. So can originals—Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart introduces elements of African languages, and Upamanyu Chatterjee’s English, August gives you a good start on Hindi and Bengali vocabulary. But when foreignness is not thematized—not made the explicit subject of the story—some prior knowledge of the original language is essential for a foreign effect to arise. In order to even notice that this sentence from German a foreignizing translation is have you to know that in German subordinate clauses at the end their verbs put. Otherwise it is comical, clumsy, nonsensical, and so forth—not “German” at all.

  Modern Times and Adriano Celentano play entertaining games with literal foreign-soundingness in sung and spoken speech sounds. A recent translation of Metamorphosis could of course be sounded out in the reader’s head in a nonnative phonology. Gregor Samsa’s first words in direct speech—

  “Oh God,” he thought, “what a gruelling job I’ve picked! Day in, day out—on the road.”

  —would then be taken as a written representation of sounds more recognizably transcribed as:

  “Och Gott,” e saut, “vot a kruling tschop aif picked! Tay in, tay out—on ze rote.”

  This is surely very silly: no translator ever intends his or her work to be sounded out with a stage accent. It nonetheless forces us to ask a real question: If that is not what is meant by foreign-soundingness in the translation of a foreign text, then what exactly is foreign-soundingness? What allows us to judge whether the following passage retains some authentic trace of the Frenchness of Jacques Derrida, or whether it is just terribly hard to understand?

  The positive and the classical sciences of writing are obliged to repress this sort of question. Up to a certain point, such repression is even necessary to the progress of positive investigation. Beside the fact that it would still be held within a philosophizing logic, the ontophe-nomenological question of essence, that is to say of the origin of writing, could, by itself, only paralyse or sterilise the typological or historical research of facts.

  My intention, therefore, is not to weigh that prejudicial question, that dry, necessary and somewhat facile question of right, against the power and efficacy of the positive researches which we may witness today. The genesis and system of scripts had never led to such profound, extended and assured explorations. It is not really a matter of weighing the question against the importance of the discovery; since the questions are imponderable, they cannot be weighed. If the issue is not quite that, it is perhaps because its repression has real consequences in the very content of the researches that, in the present case and in a privileged way, are always arranged around problems of definition and beginning.7

  We know that the content of this hard-to-follow extract isn’t related to whether it “sounds like” English or not—Celentano’s song has shown us already that you can make completely meaningless concatenations sound like perfect English if phonetic English-soundingness is all you want to achieve. However, one detail that marks it as a translation from French is the anomalous use of the word research in the plural, matching a regular usage of a similar-looking word in French, recherches. Obviously, that can be seen only by a reader who knows French as well as English: the foreignness of “researches” is not self-evident to an English-only speaker, who may well construct quite other hypotheses to account for it, or else accept it as a special or technical term belonging to this particular author. But if the bilingual reader also has some additional knowledge of French philosophical terminologies, then the word positive preceding researches becomes transparent. A bilingual reader can easily see that “positive researches” stands for recherches positives in the source. What that French phrase means is another issue: it is the standard translation of “empirical investigation” into French.

  We could say that “positive researches” is a poor translation of a standard French phrase that the translator seems to have treated as something else; or we could see it as a trace of the authentic sound of the original. Indeed, unless an English phrase is perceptibly anomalous, we would not be able to see it as containing any trace of not-English. But it is equally clear that we would not be able to see the “authentic Frenchness” of the phrase if we had no knowledge of French.

  Back-translation of the foreignism “positive researches” into a number of other languages, among them Modern Greek, would produce the same result—that is to say, would allow its meaning to be identified as “empirical investigation.” Without the information that the work in question has been translated from language A, foreignizing translation styles do not themselves allow the reader to identify which foreign language A is.

  Foreignizing translation styles bend English into shapes that mirror some limited aspect of the source language, such as word order or sentence structure. But they rely for their foreignizing effect on the reader’s prior knowledge of the approximate shape and sound of the foreign language—in the quoted case of Gayatri Chakravorti Spivak’s translation of Derrida given above, specific items in the vocabulary of the foreign tongue.

  Imagine a novel translated from a language such as Hindi, where there are three ways of saying “you”: tu, tum, and ap, corresponding to the intimate, the friendly, and the formal. Alternation among the three forms of address is a significant part of the way the characters of our imaginary novel relate to one another. Could a translator create a linguistic anomaly in English that corresponds to this triple division of “you”? Yes, of course. But would we know that it was a mark of Hindi? Not without a translator’s footnote—because we do not know any Hindi.

  Since the majority of translations take place between languages spoken by communities that have quite a lot to do with each other, culturally, economically, or politically, formal and lexical borrowings from the source have often been used to represent the foreignness—and the prestige—of texts imported from abroad. In the sixteenth century, for example, many works of literature and philosophy were brought from Italian into French, just as many Italian craftsmen were imported to beautify palaces and castles across the land. The translators of that era wrote French with a wealth of Italian words and turns of phrase, because they felt that their readers either did or really should know the words and phrases they imported. More than that: they thought French would be positively improved by being made a little more like Italian. And in fact the process of making French more like Italian has continued down to the present day. The caban (pea jacket) and the caleçon (underpants) in your closet and, if you’re lucky, the cantaloup and the caviar in your refrigerator, like a huge number of other ordinary, scholarly, refined, and delicious things, are all named in French by words taken from Italian, and for the majority of them the taking was first done by translators.8

  A similar kind of lexical enrichment took place in the nineteenth century when German-speaking peoples sought to constitute themselves as a distinct and increasingly unified nation. German translators consciously imported a quantity of words from Greek, French, and English not only to make European classics accessible to speakers of German but also to improve the German language by extending its range of vocabulary. The issue as they saw it was this: French and English were international languages already, propped up by powerful states. That was why nonnative speakers learned French (and, to a lesser extent, English). How could German ever be the vehicle of a p
owerful state unless nonnatives learned to read it? And why should they learn to read it unless it could easily convey the meanings that arise in the transnational cultures held to represent the riches of European civilization?

  In today’s world, translators into “small” languages also often see their task as defending or else improving their own tongues—or both at the same time. Here’s a letter I received just the other day from a translator in Tartu:

  My mother language, Estonian, is spoken by about a million people. Nevertheless I am convinced that Life A User’s Manual and my language mutually deserve each other. Translating Perec I want to prove that Estonian is rich and flexible enough to face the complications that a work of this kind brings along.

  Translation can clearly serve national purposes—but also their opposite, the cause of internationalism itself. A contemporary writer of French who uses the pen name Antoine Volodine has formulated in striking terms why he wishes to use his native language as if it were a foreign tongue. For Volodine, French is not just the language of Racine and Voltaire. Because translation into French has been practiced for a very long time, French is also the language of Pushkin, Shalamov, Li Bai, and García Márquez. Far from being the privileged vector of national identity, history, and culture, “French is a language that transmits cultures, philosophies and concerns that have nothing to do with the habits of French society or the francophone world.”9 It is not that French is by its nature or destiny an international language: on the contrary, only the practice of translation into French makes the language a tool of internationalism in the modern world. Thanks to its long history of translation from foreign languages, French is now a possible vehicle for an imaginary, infinitely haunting literature that Volodine would like to consider absolutely foreign to it.