Is That a Fish in Your Ear?

by David Bellos

  The truth of literary translation is that translated works are incommensurable with their source, just as literary works are incommensurable with one another, just as individual readings of novels and poems and plays can be “measured” only in discussion with other readers. What translators do is find matches, not equivalences, for the units of which a work is made, in the hope and expectation that their sum will produce a new work that can serve overall as a substitute for the source.

  That’s why Douglas Hofstadter’s version of the poem by Clément Marot given here of this book is a translation of it. It matches many (but not all) of the semantic, stylistic, and formal features of the source. You may not like it—that’s your affair. But you cannot claim that it is not a translation on the grounds that its overall effect, or one of its subunits, or some specific feature, is not “equivalent” to the source.

  A match may be found through all or any of the means that we have for rephrasing something in our own or any other tongue.

  What counts as a satisfactory match is a judgment call, and is never fixed. The only certainty is that a match cannot be the same as the thing that it matches.

  If you want the same thing, that’s quite all right. You can read the original.

  TWENTY-NINE

  Beating the Bounds: What Translation Is Not

  What translators do includes all the things that speakers normally do when speaking their own tongues. But just because translation involves everything of that kind, not everything of that kind is usefully thought of as translation. Beyond its ability to call on all and any among the resources of natural languages, translation has features that are specific to it. What they are and what they have been is what this book tries to say.

  Like language itself, translation has no rigidly fixed limits, and similarly fuzzy borderlines can be found in many other arts. A violinist may add his own cadenza, or modify a cadenza written by someone else, and still without question be the performer of Mendelssohn’s Concerto in E. An actor may modify the lines of his role on some occasions and not others and still be performing the same part. In translation, likewise, the point where a reformulation ceases to count as a match for the source is open to negotiation within frameworks that vary widely among different traditions and genres.

  In India, where average West European ideas about translation have no roots, stories, myths, legends, and religious texts have moved for millennia between different languages—under the guise of adaptations or retellings of the source. In the West, poets have frequently taken possession of a source by using it as a springboard for a new creation in the same or another tongue. The lyrics Raymond Queneau wrote for a song that was sung by Juliette Gréco—“Si tu crois, fillette, fillette …”—have a source in a poem by Pierre de Ronsard and could count as a translation from French into French, just as Robert Lowell’s Imitations, explicitly modeled on poems in other tongues, can count as translations, too, without ceasing to be genuinely new things.

  To ask whether what Queneau did with Ronsard is a translation or something else is to ask a question about the meaning of words—specifically, the meaning of the word translation. That’s an inquiry that can lead us down many quaint historical, linguistic, and cultural back alleys. In medieval times, for example, a “translation” occurred when the relics of a saint were taken from one shrine to another (the Russian word retains the same sense). In the ocean, a translation wave is one that transmits forward movement, and in law translation is the transfer of property. No end of other entertaining contexts for the word can be found: the way a ceiling crab walks (translation latérale, in French), direct passage from earth to heaven (the translation of Enoch), and so forth. Roman Jakobson, a linguist of great renown, tried to sort out the field by dividing it into three. He distinguished translation between media (“transposition”) from translation between different states of the same language (“intralingual translation”), and both of those from “translation proper”—translation between languages. Jakobson’s attempt at clarification actually introduced a great muddle that has to be tackled before the end of this book.

  Many cultural practices have a broad structure that can be described, like translation, as consisting essentially of “before” and “after.” Knitting, cooking, and the production of automobiles are processes that start with some source material (a ball of wool, edible ingredients, or a range of separately manufactured parts) and end up with something that is radically different (a sweater, a meal, or a car). English is flexible enough to allow us to say without risk of being seriously misunderstood that our partner has translated a few dozen tubes of dried durum wheat into a plate of spaghetti—or to say that by putting on a tuxedo I have translated myself into a swell—but users of English are wise enough to know that such statements have no relevance to translation itself.

  In like manner, what a playwright does when he adapts a narrative text for performance onstage has no more relevance to translation than knitting does. Jakobson’s proposal to regard switching media as a form of translation is a red herring, and it’s not clear to me why he should ever have come up with it. But his many readers over the past decades have swallowed the bait and treat stage and film adaptation of novels and other prose as particular instances of translation itself.

  Making a movie calls on numerous skills and resources that have no connection with any of the things translators do or use. To call David Lean’s Doctor Zhivago a translation of Pasternak’s novel is not only to disregard the specificity of film art but to make such woolly use of the word translation as to fit it to refer to any kind of transformation at all. Knitting included.

  The popularity of the idea that everything is translation is no doubt a contemporary reflection of an ancient tradition of thought—in fact, an ancient tradition of thought about thought. It was obvious even to the Greeks that if words began as the proper names of things, then the many words that do not name things that can be seen in the world must be the names of mental states. Call them ideas. In fact, even for things that can be seen, the word does not name any one of them but only that which allows all of them to be seen as instances of an idea. Thus tree is not the proper name of this oak or that aspen, it names the idea of a tree—a mental representation of treeness that allows all actual trees to be recognized as such. In this way of thinking, all linguistic expressions are the external form of thoughts. What we do when we speak to each other is to transmit mental images through a process of translation, thus:

  This diagram of “telementation,” or thought transmission, is actually taken from Ferdinand de Saussure’s Course in General Linguistics, which, despite its profound innovations, firmly maintained the long tradition of treating language as the dress of thought.

  This visual representation of linguistic interaction does not, in fact, require A and B to be speaking the same language. As long as both A and B know languages L1 and L2, then the process of understanding speech that is displayed—translating a sound stream into a mental image, then producing a sound stream to represent a mental image for the interlocutor to translate inwardly in turn—would be exactly the same. You come to the same conclusion that language is thought in translation and thought is language translated if you extend the diagram to introduce person C, a translator mediating between A and B speaking in different tongues. C would look exactly the same, with identical lines of transmission between mouth, ear, and brain. Adding translation makes no difference to the model because the model already says that everything is translation already. As a consequence, Saussure’s Course, as well as the bulk of work on language that has taken place in its shadow, pays no attention to translation between languages at all.

  I don’t know whether language is possible without thought—on the face of it, it must be, since so many people speak without thinking—and I wouldn’t dare contribute to the unending argument about whether thought is possible without words. The sole contribution I feel confident of making is to say that assimilating all uses of language
to translation on the grounds that all speech is a mental translation of thought seriously diminishes our capacity to understand what the practice of translation between languages is about.

  To avoid such objections, some scholars use the term transcoding to refer to the transformation of work in one medium into an altogether different thing (a play into a movie, a musical into a film, but most often a novel into anything else). It’s a tactic that has even more damaging effects, since it leads people into thinking that all expressions can be treated as instances of some kind of code. Codes are clever and useful things, but as early adventures in machine translation proved without appeal, languages don’t behave like codes at all. Turning a play into a movie has not the slightest analogy to or connection with turning a coded message into another code, and to call it transcoding is to use a figure of speech based on not bothering to think what you might mean by “code.”1

  The fellows of Oxford colleges inspect the properties the colleges own in various parts of the country by annual outings when (in principle if not in fact) they process around the perimeter. It’s called “beating the bounds,” and that’s what we’ve now done with translation.

  One of its sides is as unbounded as the line of a shore—tides rise and fall, and coasts can change shape. But other boundaries are clearly marked. Translation does not extend in every direction. Its own field is quite large enough.

  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.”1 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.”2 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.”3

  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.”4

  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 proba
bly 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.

  THIRTY-ONE

  Sameness, Likeness, and Match: Truths About Translation

  For a repeated utterance in a different natural language to count as a translation of the source, it must give the same information and have the same force. It may make explicit information that is unstated in the source (by inserting it into the text or by adding footnotes); and it may also, but less frequently, omit information because it is assumed to be too widely known among intended readers to merit the same prominence given to it in the source. But within these areas of tolerance, sameness of information and force is a widely respected norm for the translator’s art.

  It’s worth remembering that these are not the only features of an utterance that could in principle be preserved in a repetition of it in some other tongue. It would not be hard to reproduce the exact pattern of commas and periods when moving a text between, say, English and French, but nobody bothers to do that. (I did once work briefly with an author who insisted that his punctuation was an inalienable feature of his style, but this only confirmed my initial impression that he was slightly mad.) A competent translator with a lot of time on her hands could easily preserve the word and character count of a source by paragraph, sentence, or line, but these kinds of sameness are not considered relevant to the translator’s task.1 Nor does the notion of sameness extend to the selection or distribution of the letters of the source—though there is an exception in Douglas Hofstadter’s replacement of the title of Françoise Sagan’s La Chamade by That Mad Ache. In the translation of poetry and song lyrics, sameness in the syllable count, line by line, may be accepted as a constraint, and approximate sameness in length of script is a requirement for strip cartoon legends, for road signage, and for museum and exhibition captions. But these are all regarded as special cases. Everywhere else, the requirement of sameness stops at information and force.