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The theory of translation is very rarely — how to put this? —
comical. Its mode is elegy, and severe admonishment. In the 20th century, its
great figures were Vladimir Nabokov, in exile from Soviet Russia, attacking
libertines like Robert Lowell for their infidelities to the literal sense; or
Walter Benjamin, Jewish in a proto-Nazi Berlin, describing the Task of the
Translator as an impossible ideal of exegesis. You can never, so runs the
elegiac argument, precisely reproduce a line of poetry in another language.
Poetry! You can hardly even translate “maman.” . . . And this elegiac argument
has its elegiac myth: the Tower of Babel, where the world’s multiplicity of
languages is seen as mankind’s punishment — condemned to the howlers, the faux amis, the
foreign menu apps. Whereas the ideal linguistic state would be the lost
universal language of Eden.
It’s
rarely flippant, or joyful — the theory of translation.
David
Bellos’s new book on translation at first sidesteps this philosophy. He
describes the dragomans of Ottoman Turkey, the invention of simultaneous
translation at the Nuremberg trials, news wires, the speech bubbles of Astérix,
Bergman subtitles. . . . He offers an anthropology of translation acts. But
through this anthropology a much grander project emerges. The old theories were
elegiac, stately; they were very much severe. Bellos is practical, and
sprightly. He is unseduced by elegy. And this is because he is on to something
new.
Bellos is
a professor of French and comparative literature at Princeton University, and
also the director of the Program in Translation and Intercultural Communication
there (at which, I should add, I once spoke). But to me he’s more interesting
as the translator of two peculiarly great and problematic novelists: the
Frenchman Georges Perec, whose work is characterized by a manic concern for
form, and the Albanian Ismail Kadare, whose work Bellos translates not from the
original Albanian, but from French translations supervised by Kadare. Bellos’s
twin experience with these novelists is, I think, at the root of his new book,
for these experiences with translation prove two things: It’s still possible to
find adequate equivalents for even manically formal prose; and it’s also
possible to find such equivalents via a language that is not a work’s original.
Whereas according to the sad and orthodox theories of translation, neither of
these truths should be true.
At one
point, Bellos quotes with rightful pride a small instance of his own
inventiveness. In Perec’s novel “Life: A User’s Manual,” a character walks
through a Parisian arcade, stopping to look at the “humorous visiting cards in
a joke-shop window.” In Perec’s original French, one of these cards is: “Adolf
Hitler/Fourreur.” A fourreur is a furrier, but Perec’s joke-shop joke is that
it also resembles the French pronunciation of Führer. So Bellos, in his English
version, rightly translates “fourreur” not as “furrier,” but like this: “Adolf
Hitler/German Lieder.” Bellos’s new multiphonic pun is a travesty, no doubt
about it — and it’s also the most precise translation possible.
The
conclusions that this paradox demands are, let’s say, bewildering for the old-fashioned
reader. We’re used to thinking that each person speaks an individual language —
his mother tongue — and that this mother tongue is a discrete entity, with a
vocabulary manipulated by a fixed grammar. But this picture, Bellos argues,
doesn’t match the everyday shifts of our multiple languages, nor the mess of
our language use. Bellos’s deep philosophical enemy is what he calls
“nomenclaturism,” “the notion that words are essentially names” — a notion that
has been magnified in our modern era of writing: a conspiracy of
lexicographers. It annoys him because this misconception is often used to
support the idea that translation is impossible, since all languages largely
consist of words with no single comprehensive equivalent in other languages.
But, Bellos writes: “A simple term such as ‘head,’ for example, can’t be
counted as the ‘name’ of any particular thing. It figures in all kinds of
expressions.” And while no single word in French, say, will cover all the
connotations of the word “head,” its meaning “in any particular usage can
easily be represented in another language.”
The
misconception, however, has a very long history. Ever since St. Jerome
translated the Bible into Latin, discussion of translation has dissolved into
the ineffable — the famous idea that each language creates an essentially
different mental world, and so all translations are doomed to philosophical
inadequacy. In Bellos’s new proposal, translation instead “presupposes . . .
the irrelevance of the ineffable to acts of communication.” Zigzagging through
case studies of missionary Bibles or cold war language machines, Bellos calmly
removes this old idea of the ineffable, and its unfortunate effects.
It’s
often said, for instance, that a translation can’t ever be an adequate substitute
for the original. But a translation, Bellos writes, isn’t trying to be the same
as the original, but to be like it. Which is why the usual conceptual duo of
translation — fidelity, and the literal — is too clumsy. These ideas just
derive from the misplaced anxiety that a translation is trying to be a
substitute. Adolf Hitler/Fourreur! A translation into English as “furrier”
would be literally accurate; it would, however, be an inadequate likeness.
In
literature, there’s a related subset of this anxiety: the idea that style —
since it establishes such an intricate relationship between form and content —
makes a work of art untranslatable. But again, this melancholy is melodramatic.
It will always be possible in a translation to find new relationships between
sound and sense that are equivalently interesting, if not phonetically
identical. Style, like a joke, just needs the talented discovery of
equivalents. “Finding a match for a joke and a match for a style,” Bellos
writes, “are both instances of a more general ability that may best be called a
pattern-matching skill.”
Translation,
Bellos proposes in a dryly explosive statement, rather than providing a
substitute instead “provides for some community an acceptable match for an
utterance made in a foreign tongue.” What makes a match acceptable will vary
according to that community’s idea of what aspects of an utterance need to be
matched by its translation. After all, “no translation can be expected to be
like its source in more than a few selected ways.” So 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.” In a translation, as any art
form, the search is for an equivalent sign.
And for
the inhabitants of London or Los Angeles, this dismantling of the myths around
translation has peculiar implications. As Bellos points out, those born as
English speakers are now a minority of English speakers: most speak it as a second
language. English is the world’s biggest interlanguage.
So two
futures, I think, can be drawn from this dazzlingly inventive book, and they
are gratifyingly large. The first is for every English speaker. Google
Translate, no doubt about it, is a device with an exuberant future. It’s
already so successful because, unlike previous machine translators, but like
other Google inventions, it’s a pattern recognition machine. It analyzes the
corpus of existing translations, and finds statistical matches. The
implications of this still haven’t, I think, been adequately explored: from
world newspapers, to world novels. . . . And it made me imagine a second
prospect — confined to a smaller, hypersubset of English speakers, the
novelists. I am an English-speaking novelist, after all. There was no reason, I
argued to myself, that translations of fiction couldn’t be made far more
extensively in and out of languages that are not a work’s original. Yes, I
started to cherish a future history of the novel that would be recklessly international.
In other words: there’d be nothing wrong, I kept thinking, with making
translation more joyful.
(Source:
The New York Times)
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