Is That a Fish in Your Ear?

by David Bellos

  “Style” thus has a very curious history. A sentence uttered in 1753 as a defense of literary eloquence came to be touted around as a pithy formulation of the idea that no two people speak or write in exactly the same way because no two speakers are the same person.

  It’s indisputable that every speaker of any language has an idiolect, a characteristic set of (ir)regularities that is not identical to the usage of any other person. Why this should be so is discussed see here of this book, but it should be obvious that there are no intellectual, psychological, or practical obstacles to speaking in the same way as some other person (impersonators and pasticheurs do it all the time). But the fact of linguistic variation at the individual level has some very practical applications—such as catching out forgers. Among the early applications of computers to the humanities were statistical programs for identifying the authorship of suspect documents. The programs themselves rested on rival theories about what “style” was: typical patterns in individuals’ use of verbs, or vocabulary, or other parts of speech, that were unfalsifiable by anyone else; or else that “rare pairs” (two words occurring typically together) could be used to identify and distinguish different authors; or that the position in the sentence of common words was what gives the identity of the writer away. This last guess was called “positional stylometry” and was developed in the 1970s by A. Q. Morton and Sidney Michaelson at Edinburgh University. Results of their computer program were admitted as evidence in court in many cases and also used to make scholarly hypotheses about the provenance of different parts of the Hebrew Bible.

  “Style” in this individual sense cannot possibly be the object of translation. It would make no sense to try to simulate in English the statistically irregular positioning of, say, the negative particle pas in some French original.

  Two interesting consequences ensue. If “style” is such an individual attribute that it cannot even be controlled by the writer (thus allowing sleuths to catch forgers out), then every translator has a “style” of that kind in his target language, and the style of all his translations must be more like itself than it can ever be like the style of the authors translated. I often wonder, in fact, whether my English versions of Georges Perec, Ismail Kadare, Fred Vargas, Romain Gary, and Hélène Berr—whose characteristic uses of French are manifestly quite different—are all, stylistically speaking, just examples of Bellos. By some accounts, they have to be: computational stylistics gives no quarter on that score. Secretly, though, I am quite happy that it should be so. After all, those translations are my work. But it will be known for sure only by some large computer program.

  All the same, style can’t be swept away just like that. Admittedly, we do not mean “elegance,” as Buffon did, when we talk about literature and translation, even if we still do when we talk about clothes or cucumber sandwiches. We do not mean statistical regularities in the way we place the indefinite article, though we do when we gratefully accept a court ruling on the incompatibility of the style of our uncle’s alleged will with its claimed authorship.

  We mean something else, not so difficult to express: “style” is the reason a novel by Dickens is just Dickens’s, why a piece of P. G. Wodehouse—even if it were written by somebody else—is still in its essence a piece of Wodehouse. Style is, if not the man, then the thing! It is what makes any work uniquely itself.

  I also know a Dickens when I see one. But that’s trivial. The question is: At what level is the Dickensianity of any text by Dickens located? In the words, the sentences, the paragraphs, the digressions, the anecdotes, the construction of character, or the plot? Because I, translator, can give you the plot, the characters, the anecdotes, and the digressions; I can even give you the paragraphs, and most of the time I can give you a fair approximation to the sentences, too. But I cannot give you the words. For that, you have to learn English.

  For Thirlwell, novelistic “style” is the name of a holistic entity that comes somewhere between “a writer’s special way of looking at the world” and “a writer’s own way of writing novels.” Characteristic uses of sentence structures and sound patterns are certainly a part of the latter, and maybe of the former, too—but only a part. Style in Thirlwell’s sense—the most usable and purposeful sense—is something much larger. If it were not, it would disappear in translation. The circulation of novels among all the vehicular languages of the world and their incontestable conversations with one another demonstrate without a shadow of doubt that style does survive translation. The means that translators use to ensure this are no more than the common skills used in all translation tasks.

  In sum, the widespread notion that style is untranslatable is just a variant of the folkish nostrum that a translation is no substitute for the original. There is no more truth to it than there is in the idea that humor can’t be preserved by rephrasing in the same or another tongue.

  There is a difference between translating jokes and translating style, however. The first is typically done by concentrated effort; the second is better done by taking a slight distance from the text and allowing its underlying patterns to emerge by their own force in the process of rewriting in a second tongue. What they have in common is this: finding a match for a joke and a match for a style are both instances of a more general ability that may best be called a pattern-matching skill.

  We’re still short of an answer to the question of what we mean by “match,” but we’re getting closer.

  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 terms1—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.2 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.”3 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.”4 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.5 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 t
he 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?