Demons, grains and beads

I'm perfectly aware that writing this is a diversion from actually reading the damn book (Dostoevsky's Demons) but sometimes a word leaps out that suggests the translators' dilemma.

In Part One, Chapter 5 (which P-V translate as "The Wise Serpent", Garnett as "The Subtle Serpent", hmm) a hitherto unknown character appears. The narrator pauses a little to describe him. Garnett translates this in past tense and here's an extract:

His words pattered out like smooth, big grains, always well chosen, and at your service.

P-V translate that sentence as:

 his words spill out like big, uniform grains, always choice and always ready to be at your service. (p 180)

The change in tense is interesting. I'd guess the original is written in present tense, but Garnett felt unable to use the present historic in English: it was much less common then than now. I'd imagine there are huge amounts of translation from French where this has happened. So it's an example of a wider change in the translating language enabling a translator to be more literal.

Then the stranger speaks:

"... Only fancy, Varvara Petrovna," he pattered on, [Garnett]

or

"... And imagine, Varvara Petrovna," the beads spilled out of him [P-V]

It was that word "beads" that made me check the two translations. It's out of nowhere in English. You have to supply a missing metonymy: words are like grains; big grains are like beads. Again, I'm guessing, but might the word "grains" in Russian have a closer link to the Russian for "beads"? A quick look at an online dictionary suggests the words зерно and бу́син(к)а don't sound alike, but maybe they're more interchangeable culturally. Maybe Russians (in the 19th century) couldn't see a big grain without thinking of a bead.

Maybe one day this association will become part of English understanding and we won't find the transition weird, just as we don't now find the use of the present tense weird. (I doubt it, though.)

This is the kind of problem that has always put me off reading translations. I don't know if the use of "beads" is clumsy or meaningful. But the fact that P-V use the word so awkwardly strikes me as clear evidence it's a literal translation of Dostoevsky's term. Maybe Garnett's decision to repeat "pattered" is closer to Dostoevsky's original impact.   

Later (p 219) the same character (Pyotr Stepanovich Verkhovensky) is described as having "words spilling out like peas", a word that Garnett also uses.

Why bother?

I've just clicked, excitedly, on a link on the Observer website to an article from Sunday that promised:

Writers pick their favourite translations...
Novelists and translators on the translated books that have impressed them most

What a let-down! Six writers have a paragraph each, and three of them don't in any way mention the quality of the translation - including Tim Parks, who is himself a translator. Here's the most useless contribution (in whole), from Xiaolu Guo, author of A Concise Chinese‑English Dictionary for Lovers.

Some of the most poetic and imaginative sentences I've ever read are from Italo Calvino's novels, especially Invisible Cities, as well as Death in Venice by Thomas Mann. I think those works have reshaped and enriched our vision of history and reality.

A total waste of space. Once again, a reason to be glad I don't get the Observer.

(Apologies for this post, which might itself be considered a waste of space. But the Observer isn't taking online comments on the article, so I can't vent there.)

EDIT. Since writing this post, I've discovered that Jo Nesbo, one of the writers, is Norwegian, and his choice, Knut Hamsun's Hunger, is Norwegian. So he presumably didn't read it in translation (unless he's really perverse.) Pfft. Why didn't they just call the feature "favourite books in forrin"?

Chekhov/Garnett

Inspired by Elif Batuman, I impulse-bought a collection of stories by Chekhov, translated by Constance Garnett. Publishers love the Garnett translations because they're out of copyright. Scholars seem less fond. This led me to a fascinating New Yorker article by David Remnick about "translation wars", where among other things I learned that Garnett was working at high speed and so didn't polish the translations, or indeed take time over difficulties. So, maybe, reading her translations is a fairly accurate re-creation of the experience of reading the originals with a limited skill in reading Russian: the experience that most readers, even Russian readers, will have.

In the first two pages of the story I've just started reading, "Peasants" (itself possibly a near-enough translation that really requires a footnote), we find these phrases:

 What lots of flies!
... huge stones jutted out bare here and there through the clay.
"It's lovely here in your parts!" said Olga [...] "What space, oh Lord!"

I could "improve" all of those, without any knowledge of Russian, without damaging the sense. But I'd be making them more regular, more English. The awkwardness is a reminder that we're reading a foreign text about foreign experiences, and I'm glad it's there.

New fuel

I've neglected this blog and the work behind it recently, but today brought me two new books that ought to get me going. On the right, and following up on my last post is the collection of essays by ARG on the new novel. The immediate impression is of the lovely design. The covers are simple card with, as you can see, simple and authoritative typography. Inside, the text has what I guess is the original setting, with an unpretentious and so far timeless serif font. Also, ARG's prose is beautifully straightforward. I'm looking forward to reading this.

The second book in the Amazon package was The Translation Studies Reader, a collection of pieces dating from St Jerome onwards. Again, it's a beautifully produced book. A large format, and cleverly using serif for the essays, and sans for the commentaries. So far I've read the piece by St Jerome, which is surprisingly alive. He wrote in defence of his own translation practice in response to an attack. He went on to produce the standard Latin version of the Bible, so he's an important figure. The introduction to this section of the book says that St Augustine had an interesting view of translation. The septuagint, which was the Greek version of the Hebrew scriptures prepared in the third century BC, was, to him, more accurate than the Hebrew original, because it was divinely (re-)inspired. (As if God needed the opportunity to make some revisions.)

More comments on both these books will follow, you can be sure of that.

Translating Wallander (again)

I'm watching one of the BBC Wallanders, starring Kenneth Branagh. They are different from the Swedish ones, in ways I generally don't like. A lot of this is to do with the fact that they're in English, but there are other reasons.

First, the BBC versions have a big star as the lead, which means a lot of the attention is drawn to him. This is intensified by the style of cinematography. There is typically a shallow depth of field, with ostentatious focus-pulling, which means that often only one face is in focus, and of course that's usually Branagh/Wallander. There seems to be much greater use of close-up, again usually Branagh/Wallander. The effect is to characterise the programmes as being about him, his troubles and his development. Of course the Swedish versions did this too, but less so, I think.

All the characters have - inevitably - some kind of accent. Posh/common/regional for example. I'm sure the Swedish characters did too, but we didn't know what they were. We didn't have any presuppositions offered to us. So the characters were much blanker canvases.

In all, the effect is to make BBC Wallander much more lisible. I recognise that Swedish Wallander would have similar effects, but I'm talking about my response, not the response of a Swedish audience.

I could go into this further, but not now.

What has struck me now, is a scene where Wallander takes a phone call from the pathologist. She tells him she has sent him an email and so he looks at his inbox. Here's what he sees:

To make the obvious point, they're all in Swedish! So, all these people who talk to Wallander in English revert to Swedish when they send him an email. There's something wrong here, but I don't know exactly what.

Lacan (2)

I've brought my copy of Écrits 1 down from my "library" (spare room), and my first happy discovery was a bookmark at page 112. Did I really read that far? Probably not, since that is the second page of an essay called "Fonction et champ de la parole et du langage", which is doubtless the first essay I would have tried to read. I used to be able to explain the difference between mot, parole, langue and langage.

Second discovery is that Lacan was let down by his translator. His French has a lightness about it that the translation (in MCT) doesn't attempt to capture. Here's an example.

Nous ne nous fierons quant a nous qu'aux seules prémisses, qui ont vu se confirmer leur prix de ce que le langage y a effectivement conquis dans l'expérience son statut d'objet scientifique.

As for us, we shall have faith only in those assumptions which have already proven their value by virtue of the fact that language through them has attained the status of an object of scientific investigation.

It's not easy in either language, of course. I suppose the translator has been at pains to be as literal as possible, but there's a slight difference between prix and value, and the connotations of conquis has disappeared. Expérience has gone completely, or maybe it's there in investigation. So you can't blame the clumsiness on literalness. Better to paraphrase, surely, than to translate like this.

I've also seen that the first essay in the collection is on Poe's story "The Purloined Letter". How the French seemed to have loved Poe! Barthes used another story of his as a mini-version of S/Z. I haven't read the essay yet, but have read the story. You can understand why it would appeal to (post)-structuralists: the form of the story is of three repetitions of a similar action. One of these actions is related as taking place before the story-time; the second takes place during the story-time (but again, before the narration begins), and the third is imagined in the story-time's future (no doubt it has happened by now!).

But there's an obvious danger in building a literary theory around one type of writing. I've been reading about the development of New Historicism, which came from renaissance studies. Although it later broadened its scope, who knows what kinds of adjustments and trimmings had to be made? Not me, not yet.

Borges

I've now got hold of Labyrinths by Borges from the library, a fairly new copy (bought in 2008) of the Penguin Modern Classics collection. I've got it particularly to remind myself of what really happens in the story "Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote".

First thing to strike me was how irritating the story is. Borges uses as a narrator an unnamed academic, who is commenting on the works of Pierre Menard and the criticism that has so far been made of him. There is a short list of Menard's published work and then the narrator discusses his work on rewriting Don Quixote. If this story were the work of an English writer, we'd describe it as "donnish". Borges clearly aims the work at people whose work involves textual and literary studies. Here's the best joke. One of the cited works is:

A technical article on the possibility of improving the game of chess, eliminating one of the rook's pawns. Menard proposes, recommends, discusses and finally rejects this innovation.

Oh my sides.

In my memory, Menard had adopted the personality of Cervantes, by reading everything he had. But Borges is clear that he discarded this method. He wanted to remain Menard but still recreate the novel. The way he did so is unclear (deliberately - Borges' narrator makes it clear that there was no trace left of Menard's work in progress). The point is that if we assume that a 20th century writer had - somehow - written Don Quixote, it would be a much richer work, because it would have been written with all the knowledge of what has happened since.

And of course the real point is that when a 20th century reader reads Don Quixote, they are reading something different to what a 17th century reader would have read. A fair point, but I'm not sure we needed to endure all the donnish humour to get to it.

But let's apply these methods to the collection of stories etc we have in front of us. It was first published in 1964 by New Directions. The editors, Donald A Yates and James E Irby did an introduction and some of the translations. Other translations are taken from various magazines and journals. The preface is by André Maurois, and undated, but he died in 1967. So all of the translations and all of the editorial comment in the book are over forty years old. More than a lifetime in literary studies. And Maurois makes the same mistake I did: he states that Menard's method was to be Cervantes. Wrong! The fact that Maurois' mistake doesn't stop him from getting the point suggests to me that the story obscures a fairly simple idea by proposing an impossible scenario to (purportedly) embody it.

The editors' introduction then reports Borges' poor reputation in Argentina, blaming the fact that he was perceived as too European. That seems a fair accusation to me. They quote Ernesto Sábato: "if Borges were French or Czech, we would all be reading him enthusiastically in bad translations". I've a feeling that's what a reader of this book may be doing.

Even if these translations aren't "bad", they're old: new translations are needed, precisely because the Borges a translator reads now is very different from what these translators read 50 years ago. And a new introduction is needed: Borges' reputation has changed and his place in translation theory - a theory that has developed enormously in those 50 years - needs to be reviewed. The preface by Maurois is a historical document now. It might be worth keeping, but surely the opinions of someone who's been affected by magic realism, for example, would be more valuable to contemporary readers. Even the selection and arrangement of works is ripe for review.

I'm disappointed that Penguin is still publishing this sixties view of Borges. Ultimately, it makes it hard to know what Borges' quality and status is. Now.

(Edit. After writing this I've looked at the Wikipedia entry on Borges. It appears his estate is obstructive to publication of translations, in ways that aren't entirely clear. So I guess Penguin have little choice but to persist with this volume. Apologies to them.)

MCT: Walter Benjamin

The essay in MCT is “The task of the translator” - originally the introduction to Benjamin's own translation of Baudelaire's Tableaux Parisiens. Benjamin wrote in German, but that doesn't excuse this sentence:

Translatability is an essential quality of certain works, which is not to say that it is essential that they be translated; it means rather that a specific significance inherent in the original manifests itself in its translatability.

In the English, at least, there's an unfunny pun on the meaning of essential, followed by an explanation that explains nothing. The whole piece is horribly written, with huge paragraphs, twisted syntax, and unhelpful similes and metaphors. A key metaphor is that of the 'life' of literary works. In fact, Benjamin is at pains to point out that he is not being metaphorical when he uses the term.

The concept of life is given its due only if everything that has a history of its own, and is not merely the setting for history, is credited with life.

Translation is a way in which the life of a work is continued; this is one of the reasons translations have to be renewed.

The bulk of the essay, though, is on the question of literalness v freedom in translation. Benjamin separates out meaning and 'the inessential'. In this passage, I think there's insufficient consideration of what those terms really mean. Benjamin show that a totally literal translation is impossible, so then goes on to say that translations serve language – both the source and the target. He refers to the Romanticists' views on translation – he's talking about Schlegel etc – and their view that translations should enrich the target language, bringing in new concepts and terms. I think I have the same trouble with this as I had with Schlegel in Venuti's book.

More worringly, he seems to believe in the idea of a pure language (I think – it really is hard to grasp what he's going on about), a language of forms, of which all real languages are a poor approximation.

A real translation is transparent; it does not cover the original, does not block its light, but allows the pure language, as though reinforced by its own medium, to shine upon the original all the more fully. This may be achieved, above all, by a literal rendering of the syntax which proves words rather than sentences to be the primary element of the translator. For if the sentence is the wall before the language of the original, literalness is the arcade.

Honestly, at this point he seems to me to have crossed the line into the mystical. The wall/arcade metaphor sounds biblical, and the editor's note tells us that Benjamin at this time (1923) was studying Hebrew and considering taking a teaching post in Jerusalem. The text ends with some comments on 'Holy Writ':

in which meaning has ceased to be the watershed for the flow of language and the flow of revelation. Where a text is identical with truth or dogma, where it is supposed to 'the true language' in all its literalness and without the mediation of meaning, this text is unconditionally translatable.

One thing my readings of the extracts in MCT is showing me is that they are only a sketch of the writer's work, often a sketch of a relatively small part of it. I've read some Benjamin before – ages ago, the essay on The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction – too long ago to remember anything about it, except the sense that it raised exactly the questions that its title promises. The current essay is also about reproduction of a work, but exactly not in a mechanical way. I shouldn't discard Benjamin's work on the basis of this essay, but it really hasn't encouraged me to read any more.

Susan Sontag

First, a thought about the crazy economics of book publishing. Where the Stress Falls by Susan Sontag is a collection of essays and speeches from the last 20 or so years of her life. As I've noted earlier, it's a beautiful looking book, and the production inside is just as clean and stylish as the cover. But at about 350 pages, and with no new content, the cover price of £12 is ridiculous. Waterstone's has it in stock at full price, and not included in any 3 for 2 offer. Amazon has it for £8.60, which is more like it, but I bought it from a dealer in Amazon's marketplace for just £3.84 (plus p&p). To make any profit, the dealer must have got it for around £3.50. This is surely a mad, unsustainable business model.

Anyway, I bought the book largely because there's an essay on Roland Barthes. It praises him very highly, but largely despite his theoretical views. Earlier in this blog I looked at S/Z, where you can see Barthes succumbing to a classic narration, despite its lisibility. Sontag more or less argues that he was like that throughout his career; he was an old-fashioned practical criticismist in modernist clothing. I think there may be something in this. As with Stanley Fish, Barthes's analysis depends on many of the skills that people like Richards and Empson valued and developed.

A later piece, "On Being Translated", shows that Sontag doesn't hold with modernist denials of the primacy of the text. In a parenthesis she says:

You will have already noted that I am assuming that there is such a thing as an "original" text. Perhaps only now, when ideas utterly devoid of common sense or respect for the practice of writing have great currency in the academy, would this seem to need saying.

This is from a speech given at a conference on translation. It refers to Sontag's time in Sarajevo, working on a production of Waiting for Godot during the siege. Production was threatened because some people wanted a new translation of the play into Bosnian, to replace the existing Serbo-Croat one. But Bosnian is to all intents and purposes exactly the same language as Serbo-Croat. The call for a new translation was political.

The speech also covers some general points about translations. Unsurprisingly, given the above quotation, Sontag says the translation must serve the original text, but accepts the spread of means in which this can be attempted.

Margaret Jull Costa

A mention in today's Guardian Review led me to this interview with the woman who's made so much brilliant literature available to English speakers. I think her translations of Saramago are wonderful, in that she creates a wholly believable stream of language, unlike anything anyone else has ever written in English. I love her comment that one of her pleasures is when

a sentence suddenly clicks into place, or when I find the perfect solution to a pun or a proverb (Saramago is full of them). There is, above all, the pleasure of working so closely with a text that it almost becomes mine and of working almost inside the mind of an author whose work I love.

I'd never spot those puns and proverbs, and it's good to have someone trustworthy to pick them up.

Hoots

I was watching one of the Swedish Wallander episodes the other night. They're brilliant programmes, and thankfully subtitled rather than dubbed. You really begin to feel you're learning Swedish as you watch, because sometimes the rhythm of speech sounds so much like English - or even more like Scots. It turns out that the Swedish for come in - a phrase people use a lot - is komm ein. I'm picking up some words that I'd heard in Grieg songs: glömma is forget and aldrig is never. The usual word for good is bra (pronounced braw), which is exactly Scottish.

However, to get to my point, towards the end of this episode, a clue was given by a child. Watching a children's animation, she says "That's how they [the attackers] spoke." I assumed they (the animation characters) were speaking Swedish with an accent. The attackers turn out to have been north Africans. In fact, replaying, I've realised that the speech was in French. It's a brief, quiet speech and it took a while to realise this. Obviously, first time around, I thought it was just more Swedish I didn't understand. But a Swedish viewer would have known immediately that the speech was in a foreign language, even if they didn't know which one.

Moving on to a question of accents, there's a character (Marco Zuluaga) in Almodóvar's film Hable con Ella who turns out to be Argentinian. This is, I assume, obvious for a Spanish audience from his accent, but it's only apparent to an English-speaking audience (me) when one of the other characters refers to him as "The Argentinian", as if it were obvious. For a moment you wonder who she's talking about. His nationality doesn't seem to be significant to the plot, but the accent must arouse stereotype assumptions in a Spanish audience, just as an Australian accent in an English film would.

The final example is from Balzac. Several of his novels feature a character called Nucingen, who's German, and don't we know it. He speaks like this: Je fus tonne ma barole t'honneur te vaire le bossiple, which in standard French is je vous donne ma parole d'honneur de faire le possible. It's a fairly simple system: voiced consonants (d, b) are replaced by unvoiced equivalents (t, p) and vice versa. It's really fucking irritating, though. Every speech is represented this way, and always in italics. I suppose in time you don't have to read aloud or subvocalise to get the meaning, but I've never got to that stage. You have to stop and listen to the sound. I don't know how English translations handle this: to be accurate, they'd have to be really fucking irritating too.

So, three examples of ways of signifying, or not, a foreign accent. Another thing for me to get exercised about.

Babel (2) - Language and Gnosis

In chapter 2, Steiner looks at the contrasting views of language as monadic or universalist: are languages all similar at some deep level or not? First though, he raises the question of why different languages evolved at all. He says it can't be an evolutionary process, because there's no benefit from the change. Why would a community lose the ability to communicate with neighbours? Well I can think of political reasons, which can be seen at work even now. Serbian and Croatian are, as I understand it, essentially the same language in different scripts, but I bet they are diverging more than coalescing at present. Similarly, I think it's likely that Portuguese diverged from Spanish as an act of national self-definition.

The discussion on the deep structure of language boils down to this paragraph right in the middle of the chapter:

Whether it is indeed 'possible to convey any conceptual content in any language' is what I seek to investigate.

and it's nice that he's finally expressed the purpose of the book.

I don't want to go into any detail of the discussion of linguistic theories for these reasons:
(i) the book's over thirty years old, and I'm sure the discussion of Chomsky's view has moved on a lot
(ii) I don't fully grasp the points being made or
(iii) the relevance of the detail to the general point.

As before, in this chapter Steiner displays the enormous breadth of his knowledge, but doesn't always show how it relates to the matter in hand. The multiplicity of examples hammer home arguments that aren't contentious. The book could be a lot shorter.

But here's a question. There's a film (Windtalkers) about the US military's use of native Americans to transmit messages in their language, which was so obscure and different from any known language, that it acted as an unbreakable code. The monadist view of language difference would surely say messages either could not be translated into and out of that language or that they would be irrepairably changed in the translation process. But apparently it happened. I haven't seen the film, and don't know more about the case, so I'll leave the thought there to come back to.

The Invisible Translator (last part)

Chapter 6, "Simpatico" is in some ways one of the most interesting, as it's largely based on Venuti's own practice, and follows his developing beliefs. He tells the story of how he was advised, early in his career, to begin translating someone of roughly his own age, so that he could develop as a kind of alter ego, all the better to express that poet's meaning. Venuti's field is Italian poetry, and he began to concentrate on the works of Milo de Angelis. So he uses the word simpatico to express the desired relationship between poet and translator.

I know nothing about modern Italian poetry, and helpfully Venuti gives a crash course. It is apparently dominated by Eugenio Montale (1896 - 1981) but since the war a generation of poets Venuti describes as experimentalists has arisen; in fact they seem like old-fashioned modernists. Montale is accepted in anglophone poetry circles, whilst the experimentalists are seldom translated or published. Venuti argues this is because Montale's work usually adheres to the dominant romantic view of the poem as the expression of the poet's thought. Even when it doesn't, translators twist it so that it does. He quotes a translation which even I thought was dodgy. Montale says:

La speranza di pure rivederte
m'abbandonava;

which is translated by Dana Gioia as:

I had almost lost
hope of ever seeing you again;

and I spotted (hooray for me!) before Venuti pointed it out that this changes the structure of the sentence making the poet's voice more active grammatically, and so conforms to the anglophone idea of a feeling, suffering poet.

De Angelis goes further in refusing to construct a poet's voice in the poems. Like Ez, you are often unsure who is talking. The poems could be translated 'helpfully' - inserting words that appear to give context, but this would be to add something to the poem. The concept of simpatico presumes that the translator can become so like the poet that s/he can understand what the poem means, and reproduce that meaning in the target language. (Incidentally, Venuti never uses the term 'target language'. It's always 'translating language' - a subtlety I don't grasp.)

And I think for the first time the term Platonic crops up: the mistaken belief that there's a real reality the poem refers to, so that a translation can be another, though inevitably flawed, image of that.

So Venuti's translations of De Angelis don't tidy up the discontinuities. Even where the Italian might be easier than it seems - eg in the lack of a subject pronoun for a verb, he leaves the uncertainty in (looking back to the Flaubert snippet, this would be equivalent to leaving out the word 'forward' in 'she leaned forward'). He calls this 'resistancy'..

The end of the story is that in trying to be 'simpatico' with a poet whose work resists the idea of the poet being a constant persona, he learned that this approach doesn't work.

The final chapter "Call to action" sets out, after a discussion of Burton's translation of the Arabian Nights, which again seems to 'valorise' (one of his favourite words) generic archaism, sets out some proposals for ways readers, translators, editors, critics etc might bring the translation process into the foreground.

Final thoughts are that this was an interesting read - a good way to get started on the subject - but I'm not wholly convinced by Venuti's argument. Which is strange, because I thought I would be. The weakest point is that so many examples of 'foreignising' translation concentrate on the use of multiple linguistic resources (language, register, era) which although they all say "this is a translation", don't say, for example, this is a translation from early Italian and you need to know that virtu is complicated concept. Another gap in the book, I think, is about variety of purpose of translation.

But I'm very happy that I do disagree. Those critical faculties are still alive.

The Invisible Translator (5)

As previewed some time ago, Chapter 5, "Margin" is about modernist approaches to translation, starting with Ezra Pound, mainly for his work on translating from the Provencal.

The trouble with this chapter, as with the chapter on Newman's Homer, is that the products of a "foreignising" translation practice appear so ropey. Obviously, that may be because I've absorbed the hegemony too much, but I think there are other problems.

Pound obviously had a better ear for music than I do, and a major concern of his translation is to keep the music of the original, which he points out were always intended for singing. So words are chosen to replicate the rhythm and melody. But like Newman his process of foreignising often involves use of English archaisms. Venuti suggests this is to communicate the strangeness of the originals. But it seems a generic strangeness. Similarly, as I saw throughout the Cantos, there's a use of jarringly 20th century idioms, but again it's hard to see how these do anything other than say look how different those other words were.

Venuti then looks at the translations of Catullus by Zukofsky. These translations are interesting. Hm. Mrs Zukofsky provided a literal translation, and Mr Z then roughly translated them homophonically, using words that closely fit the sounds of the Latin, but are barely intelligible. I have to give an example:

Catullus:

Nulli si dicet mulier mea nubere malle
quam mihi, no si se Iuppiter ipse petat.
dicit: sed mulier cupido quod dicit amanti,
in uento et rapida scribere oportet aqua.

Zukofsky:

Newly say dickered my love air my own would marry me all
whom but one, none see say Jupiter if she petted.
Dickered: said my love air could be o could dickered a man too
in wind o wet rapid a scribble reported in water.

Venuti says Zukofsky's works "heard a dazzling range of Englishes, dialects and discourses that issued from the foreign roots of English (Greek, Latin, Anglo-Saxon, French) and from different moments in the history of English-language culture."

When I looked at Pound's version of "Donna Mi Prega", I wondered if the word 'translation' was the right one. Same here. Isn't Zukofsky doing something different, which can only be called translation if you completely deny the existence of an author called Catullus?

The chapter then looks at the work of Paul Blackburn, a disciple of Ezra Pound, who also cut his poetic teeth on translations from the Provencal. Venuti comes over all Freudian, analysing Blackburn's oedipal conflict with Pound and its role in his development as a poet. It led to a similar blend of archaism and slang. And I have a similar doubt about the outcome.

I had a real problem with this chapter. In theory, something other than invisible translation sounds like a good idea, but in practice the results are horrible!

The Invisible Translator (4)

In the third chapter, “Dissidence” Venuti looks at how the selection of works for translation can be part of a foreignising project in the translating culture.

The major part of the chapter is about the work of Iginio Ugo Tarchetti, an Italian writer of the mid-19th century, who belonged to a group called scapigliatura (roughly, ragamuffinry). He wrote in the fantasy genre, and it’s suggested this was a literary and political challenge to the orthodox style of realism, enshrined in I Promessi Sposi, which underrepresented any social divisions within the new Italy. There’s a long discussion of Tarchetti’s translation/plagiarisation of a Mary Shelley story, "The Mortal Immortal". He published this as his own work but it is very much a translation. However, by not claiming (or admitting) to be a translation, the work is able to part company with the original. Venuti argues that this enables Tarchetti to strengthen the role of class divisions.

Venuti seems to regret that there’s no place for this kind of translation/plagiarisation today. It’s forbidden by copyright law and contracts. He suggests that the concept of the author as embodied in copyright law is over-simplified: the work is not simply the product of the person who wrote it, and the modern emphasis on single named authors doesn’t allow the kind of collaborative work that we may imagine Homer to be. And there would be a kind of frankness in a translator being able to say they have made several changes to the original to make it more relevant to the target culture.

But he says that people can attempt to introduce some foreignising influence into their translation work by their choice of material.

The chapter ends with a rather separate but interesting exploration of a recent phenomenon in English language publishing: the popularity of translated crime novels – eg the Wallander books. It’s unconclusive. On one hand, you can see the readers of these books as wanting to read about a different culture. But if that was so, why don’t they read mainstream literature in translation? On the other hand, the books that tend to be translated are firmly in the anglo-american tradition, focussed on the police officer or detective’s solution of the crime. The discussion has made me want to read some Wallander, though, as well as some of the other less mainstream books discussed, eg Miyuke Miyabe’s Kasha (translated as All She Was Worth. Venuti ends with the happy thought that even unchallenging books like the Wallander series can expand the range of acceptable books in the mainstream culture. I think that’s true: anecdotally, it seems to me that the choice of translated books that appear on Waterstone’s tables is becoming more adventurous - which bizarrely means more mainstream.

That’s it for today. The next chapter is called “Margin”. It’s quite a long one, and it features - tada! - Ezra Pound.

The Invisible Translator (3)

Chapter 3 of The Translator’s Invisibility is called “Nation” and it examines three studies of a “foreignising” approach to translation.

The first part is about Friedrich Schleiermacher’s 1813 essay “On the different methods of translating”. Schleiermacher was writing in a context where German-language culture was seen as subservient to the French, and from the account given here, it appears that he believed that there was an inherent superiority in German culture – actually, it’s becoming clear how often people involved in translation theory find their own culture to be superior – but could improve if translations incorporated some foreignness so that the scope of the thought would be widened. It’s a position that’s inherently contradictory in many ways, and I can’t actually see that Schleiermacher’s a good model to follow. What’s more interesting in this chapter is the underlying tension between Venuti and André Lefevere, who has translated Schleiermacher and Schlegel, using a very domesticating style. Sometimes this only shows up in the footnotes. But when I was reading the quoted text, this caught my eye. Schlegel wrote an imaginary dialogue in which a Frenchman says:

The Germans translate every literary Tom, Dick, and Harry.

That can’t be right, and it turns out, in a footnote, that the original reads

Die Deutschen sind ja Allerweltsübersetzer

which is quite different.

The second part is about the quarrel between Francis Newman and Matthew Arnold over Newman’s translation of Homer. He explicity tried to make the work seem strange, using a ballad metre, and copious archaisms. Arnold attacked the translation on grounds that rely on the existence of a cultural elite which is the arbiter of taste. He refers, tellingly, to the “nobility” of Homer’s prosody, while admitting that this nobility is hard to define but easy to recognise. Which sounds precisely ideological and hegemonic to me. Venuti argues that Arnold’s view (which became dominant) denigrates anything but the elite form of discourse, excluding class and regional differences.

But again, I don’t think the issue’s entirely clear-cut. Newman’s strategy is not to make the work look Greek, but to make it look generically ancient. Here’s an extract that is quoted:

“Chestnut! why bodest death to me? from thee this was not needed.
Myself right surely know also, that ‘tis my doom to perish,
From mother and from father dear apart, in Troy; but never
Pause will I make of war, until the Trojans be glutted.”
He spake, and yelling, held affront the single-hoofed horses.

Naturally, Arnold found that yelling ignoble (it “leave[s], to say the very least, much to be desired”), but criticised the use of Chestnut for Xanthus, Achilles’ horse, as an unnecessary translation. But that’s a domesticating usage. Arnold’s concern isn’t so much with domestication v foreignising as with valuing and maintaining the position of the cultural elite.

But the history shows that it was the fluent strategy that came to be seen as democratic.

In the third part, Venuti looks at how foreignising translations can work and avoid the tag of elitism. His strongest case here is the 1990 translation of The Brothers Karamazov by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky. Apparently this has been enormously successful, and Venuti compares its somewhat alien style with the smoothness of Constance Garnet’s Edwardian version. It is, he says, a better reflection of the changes in register of Dostoevsky’s original. I have to take his word for that, of course.

Thanks again to Evri

Most of the time Evri produces quite comically useless links, but here's a good one: Adrian Hamilton in the Independent on the colonialising effect of translations. It refers to Ted Hughes' Phedre, but also includes Chekhov and Ibsen, with the comment that Ibsen, for example, is over-simplified to meet English expectations. It's a while since I've seen an Ibsen, but I remember Fiona Shaw's Hedda Gabler, which included one quite unforgiveable bit of comic business. Back again to Barthes' view of acting as translation. Here are the closing comments (which actually may overlook the pressure on good translators to domesticate the text; it treats translation as unproblematic, an alternative to 'versioning'):

This is more than a question of downgrading the translator's role. A "version" is, at heart, a form of colonialism, an act of ownership over a foreign literature. It says that the original is not quite good enough for us. It needs improving to be acceptable to a British audience. The sadness is that we have such good translators in this country. Why don't we use them?

The Invisible Translator (2)

I have now read the second chapter of The Translator's Invisibility and it seems like not a bad idea to use this blog to note what's in it.

The chapter is called "Canon", and is about the way fluent translation became the standard procedure. It's organised as a "genealogy" - a term I don't think I'd come across in this meaning before. It's derived from Foucault and the method is described on page 32. I'm trying to find a short definition, to minimise typing, but can only find this:

Genealogy is a form of historical representation that depicts, not a continuous progression from a unified origin, an inevitable development in which the past fixes the meaning of the present, but a discontinuous succession of division and hierarchy, domination and exclusion, which destabilize the seeming unity of the present by constituting a past with plural, heterogeneous meanings.

There is quite a lot of that kind of language, including the often-repeated phrase "the enthocentric violence of domestication". I'm sure some of it could be avoided, but also suspect it's like theological language, where a structure of concepts and terms is developed by various writers building on each other's work, and I've skipped straight to a higher storey. Eventually the structure - like this metaphor - will collapse.

The book looks at the development in translation in the early modern period, mainly focussing on translations from Latin. So there are several versions of Virgil. It's made clear how the choices in translation serve a current political purpose. For example, Denham's translation (1656) takes out a lot of the specific references to Priam and Troy, generalising the language to talk of the King and the Court, with an obvious reference to 17th century English politics.

Catullus also comes up, where the sexual content diminishes as the 19th century approaches.

One thing that I think was missed was that most educated English readers in the times covered would have been able to read Latin. Why would they even want a translation? Does the nature of translation change where there's a high incidence of functional bingualism?

The invisible translator

After my course at UCL yesterday - preparing for retirement - I went to Dillons. I still want to call it Dillons. I can't believe Waterstones just threw away that well-established brand, in favour of a name that briefly offered something new and interesting in mass bookselling, but is now a book warehouse, a major player in the growth of the influence of the bookseller's buyer on the range of books available. But that's beside my point today. Dillons in Gower Street isn't entirely a Waterstones yet. As it is still a major source of books for London University students, it has to maintain certain academic standards.

So I was really pleased to find good affordable editions of Pessoa - better than anything Grant & Cutler had last time I looked: an edition of Mensagem and a collection of poems under the heteronyms Caeiro, Reis, and Campos. Plenty of stuff to make a start on, although I realise I probably should also have bought the selection called Ortonimo - poems written under Pessoa's own name.

And also got The Translator's Invisibilty by Lawrence Venuti, who may be an important figure as he's the editor of the main course book on translation studies. I started reading it on the train home, and it quite closely matches the concerns I have. Venuti starts by noting that on the few occasions a book review mentions the translator or the translation, it's always fluency that is praised. This means that the ideal translation is invisible.

The translator's invisibility is thus a weird self-annihilation, a way of conceiving and practicing translation that undoubtedly reinforces its marginal status in British and American cultures.

There are clearly fascinating questions implicit. I had already wondered if that platonic concept of a pure source text waiting to be revealed can be true. But it seems likely there's a question of economic and political power at work: all writing must be like English. Venuti also raises the question of this default view of translation as being entirely about meaning, ignoring form and other non-semantic elements. Sounds to me like Ted Hughes.

Phèdre in Yorkshire

Today's audience, it seems, consumes Racine in a purely anthological way: in Phèdre, it is Phèdre the character they come to see; more than that they come to see the actress herself, to see how she will play the role. [...] The text itself is seen as an assortment of materials, from which to choose one's pleasure. Memorable lines and famous tirades stand out from a background of boredom and obscurity. It is for these lines, these tirades, this actress that one goes to the theatre. One puts up with the rest in the name of culture, in the name of the past, in the name of a poetic flavour patiently awaited because centuries of the myth of Racine have localised it. Performances of Racine are a mixture of boredom and celebration, this is to say essentially a fragmented spectacle.

That is the start of Roland Barthes' 1958 essay "Dire Racine", collected in the book Sur Racine. It's my translation. I could translate it further. The first two words really ought now to be “the audience of 1958”. Or, to make the underlying point clearer, I could recast it as Shakespeare, and substitute Hamlet or King Lear for Phèdre. I think that could work pretty well (once I had also swapped in soliloquies for tirades). The point is that familiarity, particularly a culturally shared and shaped familiarity, risks changing the way a text is received. (I'd also change the title from Reading Racine to Speaking Shakespeare. Equally stupid sounding, after all.)

In the rest of the essay Barthes looks at what actors can do to speak the text in those circumstances. Surprisingly, in an essay in French about plays written in French and performed in French for a French-speaking audience, it sparks some interesting ideas about translation, which I'll be considering in the light of Ted Hughes' translation of Phèdre which is currently on stage at the National Theatre.

Barthes argues that the actor in Racine typically interprets the text by indicating certain key words and phrases. He uses two culinary metaphors: first the actor “chews” (mâche) the the text; he also says the actor acts like a parent, cutting up the food for a child. The outcome of this process is to enable the anthological approach, which Barthes identifies as a wholly bourgeois approach to art. He compares this to the use of rubato in music, which is the imposition of the artist's view of the piece. J S Bach springs to my mind here: the best performances, for me, are those in which the player most scrupulously follows the written notation. If Bach wanted rubato he'd have written it. Bach's music, like Racine's text, has effects written in it, that are produced simply by playing it. On the other hand, it's foolish to assume that there can be any pure, uninterpreted reading of a text.

Barthes writes that the actor works on a false belief that the words translate the thought (“les mots traduisent la pensée”). I've quoted the original because “mots” much more closely refers to words as individual items, rather than as a stream. He talks about actors speaking the text as a didactic exercise, not aesthetic. Their purpose is to make key words stand out, and those key words are the ones that express a fairly literal meaning.

At the same time, actors seem to try to disguise the alexandrine structure; instead they use pacing and rhythm that try to approximate to normal spoken language. He says the alexandrine contains its own musicality; there is no need for the actor to sing, to add a “secret music”.

English audiences for Racine don't have the background anthology of Racine in their head. They're not looking out for the memorable lines. So actually that familiarity isn't a problem. English audiences come to a performance almost naively. The actors don't need to cut up the meat for them. Maybe the text can speak directly through its own resources.

In the programme for the National's production, Blake Morrison writes about the translation. He's impressed by the fact that it sounds like Yorkshire, but then he would be. He quotes three lines of Racine in the “standard blank verse translation” and Hughes's version, which I may as well requote:

Athens revealed to me my haughty foe.
As I beheld, I reddened, I turned pale
A tempest raged in my distracted mind.

Hughes offers:

Suddenly he was there
Standing in front of me,
He had simply appeared -
Staring at me,
The man created
To destroy me.
Before I could grasp what I'd seen
I felt my face flame crimson – then go numb.
My whole body scorched – then icy sweat.

The original is:

Athènes me montra mon superbe ennemi.
Je le vis, je rougis, je pâlis à sa vue ;
Un trouble s'éleva dans mon âme éperdue ;

Obviously, the original is best. The simplicity of that second line is unparalleled in either of the Englishings. The staccato impact works so well among the longer more formal words, and the stress pattern almost demands a syncopation. But what's so notable about Hughes's version is that it adds so much meaning, letting the words translate the effect of the music of the lines. The short anglo-saxon based words – grasp, scorched, sweat – don't shock because they live in a context of short punchy words. And there's no music left.

Morrison clearly sees Hughes's version as an improvement on the standard blank verse translation. But I think that's precisely because it adds something – something Yorkshire – to the meaning. As foreseen, Hughes's lexicon is much bigger – not just here but throughout. A lot of the power of Racine comes from that very sparseness of words – that sense that all the characters are debating what these concepts – gloire, coeur, honneur – mean. It's claustrophobic, matching the closedness of the setting.

So Hughes's version (as the programme scrupulously calls it) adds explicit meaning to the text, making it much more lisible, and completely changing the experience. Later (later in my life, I mean, not later here – I've nearly finished) I'll consider if a translation ought to preserve the experience.