In Translation

Translators on Their Work and What It Means

Esther Allen, Susan Bernofsky

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780231535021
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Translating & Interpreting
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

The most comprehensive collection of perspectives on translation to date, this anthology features essays by some of the world's most skillful writers and translators, including Haruki Murakami, Alice Kaplan, Peter Cole, Eliot Weinberger, Forrest Gander, Clare Cavanagh, David Bellos, and José Manuel Prieto. Discussing the process and possibilities of their art, they cast translation as a fine balance between scholarly and creative expression. The volume provides students and professionals with much-needed guidance on technique and style, while affirming for all readers the cultural, political, and aesthetic relevance of translation.

These essays focus on a diverse group of languages, including Japanese, Turkish, Arabic, and Hindi, as well as frequently encountered European languages, such as French, Spanish, Italian, German, Polish, and Russian. Contributors speak on craft, aesthetic choices, theoretical approaches, and the politics of global cultural exchange, touching on the concerns and challenges that currently affect translators working in an era of globalization. Responding to the growing popularity of translation programs, literature in translation, and the increasing need to cultivate versatile practitioners, this anthology serves as a definitive resource for those seeking a modern understanding of the craft.

The Translator in the World

Making Sense in Translation

Toward an Ethics of the Art

PETER COLE

Three hundred years after the publication of Pope’s Iliad, which Samuel Johnson called “the noblest version of poetry which the world has ever seen … a performance which no age or nation can pretend to equal,” and close to a century after Pound’s invention of a China for his time in Cathay, we know more or less, or think we know, what is meant by “the art of translation,” even as we argue over tactics and taste. (“You like Plotzkin?! Plotzkin stinks! I like Motzkin!” “Motzkin?! Motzkin’s tone deaf!”—as a conversation I once heard between two poets went, around English renderings of a classic work by veteran contemporary translators, whose names I change to protect their innocence.)

But what do we mean when we speak of “the ethics of translation”?

Interest in the ethical dimension of literary translation has swelled over the past several decades—ostensibly yet another boon to a field that has begun to gather about it, almost like a halo, a serious theoretical and practical literature. But since there’s so often an abyss between theory and practice in this discipline, perhaps it’s best at the outset to ask: Can ethics really account for an art in any way that matters? The result of the study of ethics is, traditionally, action, not just knowledge; we study ethics in order to improve our lives (to alter our behavior). Do we study the ethics of translation in order to improve our renderings? To affect the way a culture responds to them? Does the theoretical examination of ethics help—as many theorists claim—jar us out of unexamined assumptions about the art of translation and the role of the foreign in our lives, or do the doctrine and abstraction of ethical inquiry render us deaf and numb to the material realities of actual translations and make it harder to recognize excellence? In other words, does the desire for ethical clarity and consistency all too often reflect an inability to accept the elusive essence of the art?

For we are in translation always defined by relation, and throughout the history of its art we come upon a wide variety of strategies and tacks. Accounting for “foreignness,” for instance, is one part of being-in-relation—and a vital one: but the doors of perception in translation’s restaurant swing both ways, and waiters who serve there had best watch their heads, and what’s on their trays, as translation exists, too, always in relation to its own tradition—its predilections and expectations, its trajectory and demands.

Take an almost never discussed set of ethically relevant considerations. How clearly does a translator hear or see or grasp the goal ahead, the tone to be struck or the shape to be molded? And, since action generally arises from perception, what will he do about it—about that hearing and grasping, or not being able to hear and to grasp? What sort of effort, in other words, will a translator be willing to exert to reach a given goal, and what should that exertion consist of? To what degree will desire and patience—under the stress of a somehow chronic state of both physical and metaphysical frustration—combine in a translator’s craft to realize the vision of translation’s highest good, an afterlife for the literature in question? There’s negative capability and then there’s negative capability. Clearly it’s critical to develop a high tolerance for “being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts,” without too much in the way of “any irritable reaching after fact and reason”; but it’s also vital to move through these uncertainties and on to the hundreds and sometimes hundreds of thousands of hard decisions the translation of poetry and prose alike entails. Each stage of the process involves discomfort and pleasures of a kind. To remain in bilingual or even polyglot mysteries is to enjoy the full resonance of literary possibility—to be tortured by its pleasures, if not always to be pleased by its torture; to decide is to find oneself—for a while—blessedly free of those doubts, but also hemmed in by one’s choices, possibly forever.

Under those pressures, what kind of knowledge will stubbornness and talent lead a translator toward, and will that knowledge serve as a conduit to effective translation or, as so often happens, will knowledge eventually become an obstacle to it? And, even less fashionably, what sort of training and attunement, what kind of artistic or intellectual and, forgive me, spiritual preparation is called for in order to bring about the transformation that translation is? What, to put it differently, will the quality of our translator’s devotion to this ever-hungry and restless god be?

At this point the “s” falls away from our ethics, like a spent booster rocket, and the ethic attending to one’s labor becomes central. Ethical excellence, says Aristotle or one of his students (in Magna Moralia), is not something that develops naturally; it is the result of what he calls “accustoming.” As the Greek word for custom or habit (êthos) produces êthike, or ethics, so our English mores or habits are developed by a person, over time and through experience, into what is moral. At the heart of this fossil poem in the making is the question of character—that Heraclitean determiner of a person’s fate, and, if that person happens to translate, of the fate of his translation. For the habits and customs a translator develops in his reading, listening, writing, and learning run like nerves and veins toward every syllable he’ll render.

We often hear, from Chapman’s “with poesie to open poesie” and on, that the translator of a work of art must at some level be an artist. And that is true. But artists are notorious for their (necessary) egoism. And strong artists are distinguished, well, by their strength—which consists, in part, of their resistance to possession by the spirit of another artist. How will the translator-artist’s character bear up, let alone thrive, under the strain of all that subordination? How much of his so-called own work—as if there were a real difference, and the translator’s creation were not owned—will he give up to make room for these foreign voices? (When it comes to the translator’s soul, let’s call it, translation can both nourish and drain, strangle and sustain.) What ethical currents inform—and lend form to—the delicate give-and-take translation is? And how will our translator fare on the tightrope of his art, where one wrong move can topple him from an ethically desirable and even critical humility directly into humiliation? How will he manage in a vocation and sometimes a profession where success is often marked by silence and notice reserved largely for failure?

Or, to cast it in more concrete terms: When one of my translations came out a few years ago—a book of fiery political poetry about Israel/Palestine—I sent it to my mild-mannered and politically middle-of-the-road retired lawyer-father, now of blessed memory, who, though he almost never read poetry, picked it up and was at once taken in. Struggling to find a way to talk about something he rarely experienced—being moved by poetry, and in translation—he went on one morning at the breakfast table while I was visiting about how powerful he thought the poetry was, how much he’d come to admire the poet and his courage, and then, as a wave of guilt washed across his face, and as though suddenly remembering that the offspring of his loins had something to do with it all, he said: “And you … you had a difficult job there, I mean, you coulda botched it. … But you didn’t.”

As the laurel descended on my head.

And then there’s the question of accounting in ethical fashion for the mercurial aspects of Time in translation. That is, how might one responsibly factor in the centuries between the composition of a given literary artifact from the distant past and the instant of translation? Is it ethically more appropriate to call attention—through register, cadence, and the like—to the passage of time and the difference of cultural context; or, when push comes to translational shove, is it ultimately more honest to create an illusion of immediacy—to account for the way a story or poem might have been heard by its original audience? And what about the nagging awareness that, as each generation retranslates the classics, one’s rendering will most likely become obsolete? Should that be factored into the ethical calculus? If so, how?

With all this in mind, it’s worth pausing for a moment over the word “responsibly.” One needs in translating, and especially in translating works from the distant past, to respond and be responsible not only to the original poem or passage of prose but also to the body of knowledge that has accrued around it, around the would-be reader of the translation, and around the two (and sometimes three or more) languages and literary traditions involved. The responsible response will inevitably encode a complex, integrated sense of duration—syllable by syllable, word by word, and line by line. Because translation takes time. Actually, and seriously. When it comes to the rendering of poetry, it takes a lot of time. And in crossing centuries, languages, and cultural galaxies, factoring in the thousands of elusive elements that come into play, the straightforward algebra of equivalence won’t do: if we want to approach it in scientific fashion (as some are wont to), we’ll need to look in the direction of postquantum physics, or the nature of scientific study itself.

Along the lines of the latter, Max Weber reminds us in “Science as a Vocation” that each realized work of art is its own fulfillment and can never be surpassed or antiquated. (Edwin Denby expresses something similar when he writes that there are in art “as many first prizes as contestants, even if so very few ever win one.”) Not so with science, where a worker engages, if not selflessly, then with the self as a vehicle for something much greater, in the production of a kind of knowledge he knows will become outdated—taking a strange if complicated delight in that knowledge and the process of production. Weber then asks: “Why does one engage in doing something that in reality never comes, and never can come, to an end?” To do so with passionate devotion, he implies, is to stand “in a service of moral forces.”

“The genuine translator,” says Friedrich Schleiermacher in a classic statement (translated by André Lefevere), “… wants to bring those two completely separated persons, his author and … to his reader, truly together, and to bring the latter to an understanding and enjoyment of the former as correct and complete as possible without inviting him to leave the sphere of his mother tongue.”

Driving Schleiermacher’s desire for “understanding and enjoyment” is that most maligned of phenomena in discussions of translation—sympathy. As the Earl of Roscommon put it in his 1684 poetic “Essay on Translated Verse”:

Examine how your humour is inclined,

And which the ruling passion of your mind;

Then seek a poet who your way does bend,

And choose an author as you choose a friend:

United by this sympathetic bond,

You grow familiar, intimate, and fond;

Your thoughts, your words, your styles, your souls agree,

No longer his interpreter, but he.

Which is very beautiful and all well and good; but what about needing or wanting to translate someone to whom your spirit or humor does not incline? Are there ethical and possibly artistic advantages in that? Does it necessarily guarantee failure? What about the power of assuming someone else’s skin, for a moment, or a month, or a year, and trying to form something from that point of view that will last perhaps longer than you will?

If ethics in the Aristotelian sense involve the study of traits that human beings need in order to realize their nature and live well in the noblest sense, in the pursuit and practice of the happiness that is the highest good, then the study of ethics in the context of literary translation should concern the ways to best realize translation’s true nature as a carrier or embodiment of the highest literary good. Our ethical goal in this vision of what literature has to tell us should be to enter a place of integration, where emotion, thought, and sensation come together to produce a made-thing-that-will-matter. As virtuous living, again, for Aristotle, entails the blending of temperance, courage, humility, a sense of justice, self-discipline, generosity, a feeling for action’s consequence, and the capacity for certain kinds of pleasure (including friendship), among other things, so too translational ethics should call for a combination of—among other things—temperance, courage, humility, a sense of justice, self-discipline, generosity, modesty, a feeling for action’s consequence, and the capacity for certain kinds of pleasure (including friendship). The vices in both cases might also be thought of as overlapping: recklessness, cowardice, vanity, self-indulgence, dishonesty, and, in the end, injustice.

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Table of contents

• Cover 
• Half title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents 
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: A Culture of Translation
• Part I. The Translator in the World
• Part II. The Translator at Work
• Permissions
• List of Contributors
• Index