On Reading in Translation 2

Here is the third entry in our Reading in Translation Giveaway

We hear a lot about what is ‘lost’ in translation. But what about what is gained? The work of a translator has a purity of attention at the level of language and the sentence that cannot be obtained by the writer.

To write fiction is to engage at many levels simultaneously. Editing her own work, a writer always has the option of making any number of changes, from minor nuances to radical shifts: to decide that some event should not take place, or should be moved to a different point in the narrative; or that a metaphor is clumsy and should be replaced; or that the story should be seen through someone else's eyes, or told backwards or in a series of flashbacks; or that a comma would be better, in this specific sentence, than a semicolon; or that the pacing of this chapter is too slow, or too fast, or uneven—or too even; or that the rhythm of a sentence should be changed; or that the whole project is misconceived and should be abandoned in favour of something else. The process of writing an original literary text is necessarily one of constant distraction and the negotiation of different kinds of work, all of which constantly threaten to interrupt each other.

One may attempt a division of labour between different periods or modes of work, to 'wear different hats': scribbling a first draft, then rewriting for structure, then making fine-grained textual revisions. But these are artificial limitations. The author's responsibility is to the text as a whole. There is no time at which larger-scale questions—structure, character, voice—are guaranteed not to interrupt the fine detail of literary composition, at the level of the paragraph, the sentence, the word.

The translator, to some extent, is shielded from such distractions, and the vertigo and angst that accompany them. The source text is always there, fixed and immutable. Since she must retain sufficient fidelity to the original to be considered a translation, a whole range of choices and decision-making are removed. It's this limitation of the scope of the translator's task that, paradoxically, grants her a freedom the writer can never experience: the freedom to focus on the most intimate details of the text. To a large extent, the translator is able to stay 'zoomed in' on the text; questions of structure have already been resolved. Of course, translators do have concerns that are broader than the minutiae of sentence construction: establishing a consistent voice for the narrative that's equivalent, in some way, to that of the source text; transposing characters and places, narrative and diction not just across languages but from one culture to another. But there is always a frame of reference, the original text, that will not change. Regardless of whether the relationship of the translated text to its original is one of fidelity, adaptation, reimagining, or even subversion or hostility, the translator works in relation to a fixed point.

No-one else involved in the production of literary texts can truly say this: editors intervene on the original text itself, not just cosmetically but structurally. Adaptations, whether dramatisations of novels or novelisations of scripts, are expected to deviate substantially from their source material because of the different demands of each medium. Only the translator is expected to hew as closely as possible (regardless of whether that closeness is envisaged as fidelity to syntax or to vision) to an original text. One might well imagine, therefore, that the craft of a translator is, of all the labours involved in the production of a literary work, the most intensely intimate with the text itself. Reading a translated novel, then, we might reasonably expect to encounter a richer text than we would if we were reading a novel that has not been translated.

Josh

@JoshuaMostafa

Stay tuned for more short essays on reading in translation. You have just about a week to send in yours for a chance at a stack'o'books.