On Literary
Translation
These remarks are based, largely, on Emily Wilson’s book
review of Mark Polizzotti, Sympathy for
the Traitor: A Translation Manifesto (MIT Press, 2018). The review appears
in the New York Review of Books, May
24, 2018, p. 46-47.
Assuming that most of us are not bilingual or trilingual,
without literary translation we cannot read novels, stories, poems written in
foreign languages. But practically no one seems to agree on what makes for a
good literary translation. The crucial question always seems to be how much
leeway the translator is given. Must he/she (1) remain very close to the
original, producing a literal translation that may not read well in the target
language? (2) diverge from the original to produce a kind of imitation? (3)
push the imitation so far that it amounts to a traducing of the original (even
though it may read well and be a work of creative art in the target language)?
According to Emily Wilson, Translation Studies as an
academic discipline is a phenomenon only of the past fifty years or so.
Professors who are not themselves translators have made careers in “translation
theory,” which, alas—like so many academic disciplines—involves “increasingly
abstract discourse.” In fact, Polizzotti suggests that Translation Studies is
“one of the few disciplines in which the study of a subject seems bent on
demonstrating that very subject’s futility.”
According to Polizzotti, academic specialists on literary
translation seem to be asserting that (1) it cannot really be done successfully;
and (2) you should not even try to do it, if successfully means producing a
fluent, readable, creative literary work in the target language. Being totally
faithful to the original means, apparently, creating “unreadable, unidiomatic,
clunky translations.”
This recalls Vladimir Nabokov’s attempt in the sixties of
last century to translate the greatest narrative poem in Russian literature,
Pushkin’s Evgeny Onegin. After making
herculean efforts to get the thing across into an English that maintained the
creativity and literary form of the original, Nabokov finally gave up and said
it could not be done. He published his four-volume translation into English,
the first volume containing the original and a “pony” literal translation, and
the other three volumes containing extensive academic commentary on the work. He
also wrote a little poem, in commemoration of his new attitude toward literary
translation:
What is translation? On a platter
A poet’s pale and glaring head,
A parrot’s screech, a monkey’s chatter,
And profanation of the dead.
Of course, only academics, who often make abstraction and
obfuscation for its own sake a paramount virtue, could argue logically for
bad—awkward, unreadable, “foreignized”—literary translations. Not an academic
himself, but “a prolific translator of French experimental fiction into
English,” Polizzotti argues for a commonsense approach to the issue. “He quotes
approvingly the maxim of Dante Gabriel Rossetti that ‘a good poem [must] not be
turned into a bad one.’”
Polizzotti asserts what should be apparent but what often is
not: “the single most crucial requirement in producing a viable target version
is to be a talented writer in one’s own language.” Emily Wilson continues, “It
is never enough to ask if a translator knows the source language well enough to
translate from it: we must also ask, always, whether she is a good enough
writer of English to create something that will live on its own. In his blithe
assumption that there is such a thing as literary value and that you know it
when you read it, Polizzotti stands outside the fashions of the contemporary
academy; he is quite willing to claim that some pieces of writing are simply
better than others.”
Just try reading reviews of translated literature in
practically any American periodical. Does the reviewer dwell upon the literary
talents—or lack thereof—of the translator? Seldom. The reviewer is most often
concerned with quibbling over how the translator failed to get this or that
word right, or how the translator missed some single subtlety in the original.
Reviewers “very rarely comment on how any new translation might enrich
contemporary English literature, or on whether the translator is a thoughtful,
well-read, or original writer of her own language.”
“Polizzotti meanders around the crucial question of whether
a translator can go too far from the original and slip from translation into
imitation, or betrayal. It depends on whether the result is any good, and we
are given no general parameters by which to make this judgment. The implicit
criterion is not whether this or that phrasing or syntax is preserved, but
whether the overall result allows the text to speak as best it can ‘across
nebulous cultural boundaries, and not lie mute and moribund on the page.’”
When I taught Russian literature in a university I would
sometimes ask my students why anyone would want to read creative literary art.
There are a variety of answers to that question. Unfortunately, the number one
answer in the twenty-first century, I fear, is that no one, or practically no one, does
want to read creative literature. But my best answer, back then, and even still
now, is that you read literature for pleasure.
It’s not a simple, easily attained pleasure, but it is pleasure nonetheless:
the joy of communing with the aesthetics of art, which are contagious. You read
great literature, you commune with it properly, and it infuses you with
creativity; you end up making creative art in your own mind—and that’s a joyful
business.
Polizzotti’s book “is in some ways a negative polemic,
against the excesses and abstractions of contemporary translation theory.”
Polizzotti argues for “making sure that literature is enjoyable, so that people
actually want to read it . . . . . . The academic theorists often imply that
clunky, unidiomatic, foreignized translations are good for us, no matter how
stodgy they may be. By contrast, Polizzotti makes one feel that creating and
reading translated literature can be a genuinely pleasurable experience.”
As for myself, it should be obvious by now that I’m on
Polizzotti’s side. I have translated literary works by the Russian writer Ivan
Bunin extensively. My book of Bunin’s stories and novellas appeared in 2006
(Ivan Bunin, Night of Denial,
Northwestern University Press). I would like that book judged largely on
whether the translated works read as literary art in English.
Lately I have
begun translating some Russian poetry, with the emphasis largely upon whether I
can create an effective poem in English. This means translating not word for
word, but “sense for sense.” I try to make a good poem in English, while
retaining, to the extent this is possible, the same sense of the words in
Russian. I try for the same atmosphere, the same mood, the spirit of the
original—but not the exact words of the original.
Are my results not translation, but “imitation,” not
translation, but even “traducement”? Some would say so. Most Russian poems are
metered and rhymed. I try for the meter and the rhyme in the target version.
This in itself places a huge burden on the text. Rhyme is especially
tyrannical, in the way it has of forcing the translator into “imitation” to
satisfy its ringing and jangling demands.
For years before he gave up on the possibility of literary
translation, Vladimir Nabokov did his best at the same thing I’m trying to do
now. Sometimes he was remarkably successful at producing an English version
that remained, essentially, true to the spirit of the original, but also
succeeded as a work of art.
Here is Nabokov’s version in English of one of Mikhail
Lermontov’s most well-known poems.
Михаил Лермонтов
Парус
Белеет парус
одинокой
В тумане моря голубом.
Что ищет он в стране далекой?
Что кинул он в краю родном?
Играют волны, ветер свищет,
И мачта гнется и скрыпит;
Увы! - он счастия не ищет
И не от счастия бежит!
Под ним струя светлей лазури,
Над ним луч солнца золотой:
А он, мятежный, просит бури,
Как будто в бурях есть покой!
написано в 1832 году (written in 1832, first published in 1841)
|
The Sail
Amid the blue haze of the ocean
A sail is passing, white and frail.
What do you seek in a far country?
What have you left at home, lone sail?
The billows play, the breezes whistle,
And rhythmically creaks the mast.
Alas, you seek no happy future,
Nor do you flee a happy past.
Below the mirrored azure brightens,
Above the golden rays increase—
But you, wild rover, pray for tempests,
As if in tempests there were peace!
Vladimir Nabokov, Verses
and Versions, Edited by Brian Boyd and Stanislav Shvabrin (Harcourt, Inc.,
2008), p. 287.
