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October 11, 2008
I'm Lost in Translation
"A translator...must have a care," suggests Gregory Rabassa near the beginning of his memoir If This Be Treason: Translation and its Dyscontents, "and remember that with the addition of a slightly aspirated letter auteur becomes hauteur."
Ah, etymological puns make laugh! But as I've been tentatively lifting the curtain on the elements of style, this is one bit of particularly delicate gossamer that consistently intrigues me: the dynamics of translation, and the maddening process by which one might qualify equivalency between two separate works that represent, in different terms, precisely the same thing (I should preface this by noting that of the three languages I've studied, I've never been proficient enough in any of them to read a substantial native text, and so have no qualification to actually discuss the art of translation, or whether it is in fact an art as well as a craft, aside from those I have as a reader of translated works, and one who tends to vacillate between editions in bookstores, trying to determine which one will be the richest interpretation - a process achieved largely through intuition, forwards and critical blurbs on back covers).
In his essay On Linguistic Aspects Of Translation, Roman Jakobson wrote that "All cognitive experience and its classification is conveyable in any existing language...no lack of grammatical device in the language translated into makes impossible a literal translation of the entire conceptual information contained in the original." They keyword there is conceptual - and then, on the other hand, I just came upon this witticism from the philosopher Giles Ménage, who wrote that a translation is like a woman: it can either be faithful or it can be beautiful, but it cannot be both. Yikes, but you get the point. It's that precarious tightrope between aesthetics and precision which interests me - that, and what seems to be an inherent potential for improvement. With the understanding that, without deferring to mere substitution, the basic signifiers in one language can be amply approximated by another, one then turns to form; which is where, it seems to me, one would find the notion that if a given text is broken down into its mophemes and sememes and other little semiotic bits and pieces, and then reconstituted out of the same linguistic building blocks in pursuit of the same meaning, the translator can, without straying into adaptation, refine their arrangement. Which brings me back to Rabassa, whose translation of 100 Years Of Solitude was cited by Marquez himself as an improvement on his original Spanish version.
Even more strange and tempestuous is the idea of translating poetry, the formalist constraints of which constrict the interpretation in an entirely prohibitive fashion. To quote Jacobson once more:
...whether its rule is absolute or limited, poetry by definition is untranslatable. Only creative transposition is possible: either intralingual transposition - from one poetic shape into another, or interlingual transposition - from one language into another, or finally intersemiotic transposition - from one system of signs into another, e.g., from verbal art into music, dance, cinema, or painting.
There's something of a bombshell in there at the end that I'll ignore for now. Suffice to say, even a poem written in Middle English (which, unlike Old English, is relatively closed to what we use today) plays on the semantics of words which, when rendered to their modern equivalents, deprive the piece of its formal affect. So when one reads a translation of Rilke or Dante (or Shakespeare) is the best one can hope to find the essence of what makes those works great crammed into an obtuse diagram of conjugations and tenses? I'd say yes. But, then, is Pope's take on Homer all that different from Fitzgerald's? This is where things, to my mind, get even more tricky: if translation is, indeed, an art, and if art cannot be selfless, what happens when ego overtakes translation? This is all very basic supposition - I'm jumping around in the dark here and very likely knocking my head against quite a few walls - but this topic has me excited enough that it has starting to worm its way into the screenplay I'm currently writing. It's slipping in there subtly, enough so that it might slip right back out again - but at the very least, the idea of making the actor for whom I'm writing this speak in Old English makes me laugh.
Posted by David Lowery at October 11, 2008 11:53 PM