Gained in Translation

Tim Parks

“But isn’t it all just subjective?”

The scene is a Translation Slam, so-called. Two translators translate
the same short passage and discuss their versions with a moderator
in front of an audience of other translators. “Slam” suggests violent
struggle and eventual victory or defeat. In reality, it’s all very polite
and even protective. There will be no vote to decide which version
wins. Nobody is going to be humiliated.
All the same, the question of which choice is better comes up again
and again. Right now, we’re looking at the difference between
“group” and “phalanx” in the phrases “commander of a group of
loyal knights” and “commander of a phalanx of faithful men”—both
translations of the Italian “comandante a una schiera di fedeli.”

The translator who has used “knights” explains that since the
“commander” in question is King Arthur, the “fedeli” or “faithful”
whom he commands would surely be the Knights of the Round
Table. The translator who has used “phalanx” explains that the
Italian word “schiera,” as he sees it, means men arranged in a
particular formation or order. And a phalanx would be such a
formation.
What about “faithful” and “loyal”? “Faithful” alliterates with
“phalanx.” “Loyal” commonly collocates with “knights,” and
perhaps borrows a corroborating aura from its assonance with
“royal.”
We discuss all this for some time, until someone in the audience
objects, “Isn’t it all just subjective?” Meaning, this debate is
pointless. De gustibus non est disputandum. Once the literal
meaning has been more or less respected, a translation choice, or
indeed any literary usage or style, is merely a question of personal
taste. You like it or you don’t.
The objection is persuasive, but is it true that aesthetic preferences
are “just subjective?” We need to put some pressure on this idea.
Does such a description match our experience of books, theater,
films, and music? Not all our dealings with books are arbitrary.
Young children tend to like a certain kind of story, a certain manner
of storytelling, then they “grow out of it.” This or that narrative
formula begins to seem too simple, perhaps. Adolescents might
enjoy romance or fantasy fiction, then their accumulating experience
leads them to look elsewhere.
Two facts seem obvious here. Any element of choice is limited. The
child cannot help first liking such and such a story, then eventually
putting it aside. When your mother reads you Where the Wild
Things Are, you are immediately hooked. Or not. So it’s true that
one simply likes or doesn’t like something. You can’t choose to
respond positively to “Earth hath not anything to show more fair” if
it doesn’t grab you. And if you like Fifty Shades of Grey, you like it,
even though it might be convenient to say you don’t.
But it’s also true that when preferences shift they do so for a reason,
if not as a result of reasoning. Growing up, one brings more context
and experience, more world, to one’s reading and this “more”
changes one’s taste. We might even say this new experience
changes the person and with the person the book. At this point,
earlier preferences will likely be disparaged, or fondly set aside.
From this observation, it’s a small step to the idea of education and
learning. I deliberately, systematically, increase my experience and
knowledge in order to have a richer encounter with what I read. The
appropriateness of this approach is obvious when, say, reading in a
second language: I know enough French to read Bonjour Tristesse,
perhaps, but not enough to appreciate Proust. Or when reading
things from other times: I pick up The Faerie Queene and am soon
aware that the experience would be less frustrating if I knew more
about the period and the genre. Our responses and preferences are
not arbitrary; they depend on what we bring to what we read or
watch.
Does this mean we can say that this preference is better than that?
Or that this critical reading is superior to another? Let’s go back to
the Translation Slam. The passage we’re looking at is the opening,
three short paragraphs, of L’isola di Arturo, by Elsa Morante, which
was a major bestseller when it was published in 1957. The first thing
that strikes the reader is the way a highly elaborate style, packed
with parentheses, subordinates, and rhetorical outbursts, has been
placed in the mouth of someone remembering what it was like to be
a little boy. Here is an unapologetically literal translation of the first
paragraph, to give you an idea:
One of my first boasts had been my name. I had soon learned (it was
he, it seems to me, who was first to inform me of it) that Arturo is a
star: the fastest and brightest light of the constellation of Boötes, in
the northern sky! And that what’s more this name was also borne by
a king of ancient times, commander of a band of loyal men: who
were all heroes, like their king himself, and by their king treated as
equals, like brothers.
As an evocation of childhood, this is hardly Huckleberry Finn or
The Catcher in the Rye. Or even David Copperfield. How to deal
with it? One of the translators felt that the challenge of the Slam was
to translate the passage in isolation, so he hasn’t, he tells us, looked
up the novel or read any further. In the Italian, he finds the style
over-elaborate in places; it needs reining in, he feels, because
English doesn’t do these things.
The other translator says she initially felt disoriented by this
extravagant voice and so found a copy of the novel and read on.
What did she find? The narrator tells of his lonely boyhood on the
island of Procida off the bay of Naples. His mother died at his birth.
His father—who turns out to be the “he” of the second sentence—is
mostly absent. Aided by a couple of elderly peasant folk, Arturo
grows up in a house mysteriously known as the House of Rascals, in
the company of a cheerful dog. The house is full of classical
literature, myths and heroes and epic wars, which become the boy’s
only education; so he spends his days in a fantasy world imagining
grand exploits, beside his dog, in his Mediterranean paradise,
yearning for the presence of a father, who, Ulysses-like, is always
traveling. Alas, with time Arturo will discover that the reality
behind the House of Rascals and his father’s absence is depressingly
squalid. The book ends as he abandons his boyhood island for the
continent of adulthood.
The elaborate nature of the style aligns with pleasurable illusion,
pretensions, posturings, and boyish boasts that are inflated only to
be later deflated and disappointed. Looking at the translations, one
of the slammers has talked about being “proud of my name”; one
has kept the idea of boasting. One has talked about Arturo being
“the name of a star”; one has stayed closer to the original and said,
“Arthur is a star.” One has simplified and shortened the paragraph;
one hasn’t. Perhaps we can’t decide which of these two brief
translations is better in absolute terms, as a passage in English, but
we might begin to sense which is more in line with the book’s
pattern of inflated illusion followed by disillusionment. And if we
want to translate a book because we admire the original, perhaps
that pattern is worth keeping. Fortunately, to warn us what she has
in store, Morante gives us the emotional cadence of her story in
miniature right on the first page. Thus the second paragraph, again
in merely literal translation, begins:
Unfortunately, I later came to know that this famous Arturo king of
Britain was not definite history, just legend; and so I left him aside
for other more historical kings (in my opinion legends were childish
things).
It is exactly the learning process we mentioned before. Discovery of
the problem of historicity has altered Arturo’s appreciation of his
name. But no sooner has the Camelot boast been shot down than the
boy launches into another self-aggrandizing reflection:
But another reason, all the same, was enough to give, for me, a
heraldic importance to the name Arturo: and that is, that to destine
me this name (even without knowing, I think, its titled symbols) had
been, I discovered, my mother. Who, in herself, was no more than
an illiterate girl; but more than a queen, for me.
Of course, the verb “destine” is rarely used, aside from the past
participle “destined,” and won’t do in a final translation, but I put it
in this literal version to suggest just how much the narrator is
puffing things up. One of our two translators felt this long sentence
(which, in spite of the period, actually continues in the relative
clause “Who, in herself,…”) was really too much; it was overheated,
he thought, and manically indirect. In fact, both translators have
split it into three, more standard segments. As if to show, though,
that the overheating was precisely the point, Morante’s next
paragraph again begins with a splash of cold water. Translated
literally, we have:
About her, in reality, I have always known little, almost nothing:
since she died, at the age of not even eighteen years, in the very
moment that I, her first son, was born.
Have we done anything to counter the objection that response to
translator choices are “just subjective,” and so beyond discussion? If
we turn to the published translation (1959; by Isabel Quigly), we
notice that our three paragraphs have been reduced to two; the boy’s
disappointment that King Arthur was only legend is now included in
the first paragraph, while the second begins with the fact that it was
his mother who chose the name. At the same time, the register in
this translation shifts radically toward something colloquial and
recognizably boyish: “ages ago there was some king called Arthur
as well… I thought legends were kid’s stuff… a sort of heraldic
ring.”
Here we have neither the rhetorical puffing-up of the boyish boast,
nor the paragraph interruption that underlines its deflation. This
observation is not subjective, any more than it is subjective to say
that “phalanx” is a word generally used in the context of ancient
Greece rather than ancient Britain. It’s true, though, that we might
find, in spite of these observations, that we prefer Quigly’s version.
There is no reasoning that can make us like or dislike something.
But with the knowledge we now have of the original, we might also
wonder how Quigly’s different, more laconic voice can possibly be
made to fit with the story that is going to be told. Just as, once it is
pointed out, you might start to feel that Arthur’s knights are not the
300 Spartans.
Translating literature is not always more difficult than translating
other texts—tourist brochures, technical manuals, art catalogues,
sales contracts, and the like. But it does have this distinguishing
characteristic: its sense is not limited to a simple function of
informing or persuading, but rather thrives on a superabundance of
possible meanings, an openness to interpretation, an invitation to
measure what is described against our experience. This is
stimulating. The more we bring to it, the more it offers, with the
result that later readings will be different from the first in a way that
is hardly true of a product description or city guide.
Translators are people who read books for us. Tolstoy wrote in
Russian, so someone must read him for us and then write down that
reading in our language. Since the book will be fuller and richer the
more experience a reader brings to it, we would want our translator,
as he or she reads, to be aware of as much as possible, aware of
cultural references, aware of lexical patterns, aware of geographical
setting and historical moment. Aware, too, of our own language and
its many resources. Far from being “just subjective,” these
differences will be a function of the different experiences these
readers bring to the book, since none of us accumulates the same
experience. Even then, of course, two expert translators will very
likely produce two quite different versions. But if what we want is a
translation of Tolstoy, rather than just something that sounds good
enough sentence by sentence, it would seem preferable to have our
reading done for us by people who can bring more, rather than less,
to the work.
December 9, 2017, 10:21 am