ON LITERARY TRANSLATION (ISAAC BABEL)
If you want a job that demands excruciating, intense
travails, and for which your reward will be mostly nil—both financially and in
terms of appreciation—try literary translation. I spent roughly twenty-five
years, on and off, translating the Russian writer Ivan Bunin, who won the Nobel
Prize for Literature in 1933. My second book of Bunin stories and novellas—718
pages long and complete with extensive notes on the translated stories and a
lengthy critical afterword—was published in 2006: Ivan Bunin, Night of Denial: Stories and Novellas, Northwestern
University Press. The book was received with thunderous, gut-wrenching silence,
not even reviewed anywhere in the professional journals devoted to Slavic
languages and literature.
But even when literary translations are reviewed, seldom do
the reviewers do anything approaching a thorough job at analyzing the text. The usual thing is to
discuss the writer and his works for most of the review, then spend a few
paragraphs at the end caviling with the translation. I was reminded of this
when reading—in The New York Review of
Books, Feb. 8, 2018—Gary Saul Morson’s review of new translations of the
great Isaac Babel. The translators are Val Vinocur (Babel, The Essential Fictions, Northwestern Univ. Press) and Boris Dralyuk
(Babel, Red Cavalry and Odessa Stories, London: Pushkin Press).
Prof. Morson rightly emphasizes the strangeness of Babel’s
style and opines that the task of a good translator is to preserve the
strangeness. He goes on to say that both Dralyuk and Vinocur “provide a
readable text that captures much of what makes Babel’s stories great, but they
often explain—that is, explain away—Babel’s oddities.” Morson takes one line
from the story “Pan Apolek” and disputes its translation by both D. and V. He,
I think rightly, demands that the word “crumpled” be used for the description
of a “hastily crumpled city,” whereas the two translators have explained away
the odd imagery by using “swiftly crushed town” and “hastily crushed city.”
“Babel’s strange lexicon [writes Morson], and the peculiar
image of a town resembling a crumpled letter disappear. And the translators
omit the double use of the word ‘in’ (‘In Novograd-Volynsk, in the hastily
crumpled city’), so the sentence’s rhythm changes.”
Up to this point I am okay with Morson’s charges, but he goes too far when he insists on those two “ins.” In fact, the
greatest genius of a literary translator on earth cannot retain the rhythms of
Russian prose in an English translation, nor should he be expected to.
English-language prose has its own rhythms, and the good translator finds those
rhythms in the target language.
Probably the most famous line Babel ever wrote is the
following (in Morson’s rendering), from his story “Guy de Maupassant”: “No iron
can enter the heart as icily as a period placed in time.” The original Russian:
“Nikakoe zhelezo ne mozhet voiti v
chelovecheskoe serdtse tak ledenyashche, kak tochka, postavlennaya vovremya.”
Morson laments that “It is especially sad when translators get the timing of
this sentence wrong. They drag it out, which is like giving a joke a wordy
punch line. In Morison’s version [Walter Morison is an earlier translator of Babel],
“No iron can stab the heart with such force as a period put just at the right place,”
while Vinocur has: “Nothing of iron can breach the human heart with the chill
of a period placed just in time.”
Morson continues. “’Stab’ and ‘breach’ are interpretations;
‘with force’ does not mean icily; the right place is not the right time; and
the word ‘just’ is only implied. For both translators, Babel’s fourteen words
needlessly expand to eighteen. The period arrives, like a bungled witticism, a
bit late.”
Hold it, hold on, hold it; here the nitpicking runs amuck. We are, of course, back here as well to the age old argument, which no one will
ever resolve: how far is the literary translator, in aid of producing
literature in his own language, allowed to get away from the original text?
Morson here is close to demanding literal translation, and literal translation
means literature is lost. Let’s look in some detail at the points he makes.
The idea of the timing of the sentence, how the translators
get the timing all wrong and drag out their sentences. They don’t. In fact, the
two criticized sentences are both good in English. They flow well, they read
well, their timing is fine, they do not drag. David McDuff, a British
translator not mentioned in Morson’s review, has the following: “No iron can
enter the human heart as chillingly as a full stop placed at the right time.”
That “chillingly,” while accurate, does throw a monkey wrench into the rhythm
of the sentence.
Does it matter that Babel has fourteen words, while the
translators V and M have eighteen? Not a jot. Counting the exact number of
words and holding translators to that standard is absurd. And given that
Russian words on average are two to three times longer than English words, the
sentences of V and M come out here sounding shorter and more pithy than Babel’s
original. Note that in Walter Morison’s sentence sixteen words out of the eighteen
have only one syllable. Now, that’s terse, economical Anglo-Saxon writing. By
the way, how many one-syllable words does Babel have in his sentence? Four.
Odd that Prof. Morson leaves out Babel’s “human” (“the human
heart”). Does it matter? Not really. The context tells us quite clearly that
the heart of a monkey or crocodile is not under discussion. I might concede
that the ‘stab’ and ‘breach’ have to go. Then again, I might not. Take a look
at the four sentences, in the four translations given here. McDuff’s
“chillingly” knocks his sentence out of the competition for best rendering. In English Prof. Morson’s
sentence, however, is weaker than either of the other two. Okay, so he made
sure the iron “enters the heart,” as Babel had it. He kept the iciness in there
(I like Vinocur’s use of the word ‘chill’). He insists on “a period placed in
time,” but that phrase is somewhat ambiguous: “in time” as in “just in time,”
or “in time” as “in the realm of time, the thing that passes”?
In a word, Walter Morison’s sentence gets the furthest away from
the original Russian, but Morison’s sentence still does the best job of
expressing, in very good, terse English, the essence of Babel’s thought: No
iron can stab the heart with such force as a period put just at the right
place. It could be slightly improved, perhaps, if we put Vinocur and Morison
together: No iron can stab the human heart with the chill of a period placed
just in time. If Isaac Babel were alive to read that English sentence, I think
he would smile. Down with the literal in literary translation!
