Every human being is, on the one hand, in the power of the language he speaks; he and his whole thinking are a product of it. He cannot, with complete certainty, think of anything that lies outside the limits of language.. . . On the other hand, however, every freethinking and intellectually spontaneous human being also forms the language himself. (p. 38, Theories of Translation)
My response to this quote, like many of my feelings about translation, may get a bit rambly and out of hand... but I like Shleiermacher’s use of the word ‘power’ in the context of an essay on translation and language. This might be a slight diversion from the original topic of the quote, but the question of translation and power is one that greatly interests me. I think the statement that he makes here about language in general can be adapted to fit a discussion of translation: the notion of a “freethinking and intellectually spontaneous [translator] forming language himself.”
There’s often a conflict in translation between an idea of translating with audience in mind, or less so—in other words, how much work you want your readers to have to do. Listening to a student’s presentation of his work translating a Japanese novel the other day, I found myself thinking, “well, instead of going into a whole explanation about the Japanese system of honorifics and the role it plays in terms of addressing teachers there, he could easily translate it in a slightly fudged way that plays into sensitivities already present in the American idiom.” Later in the same lesson, I again found myself thinking – it would be so easy to translate this into an American equivalent ... and that way, in the case of this mystery novel, the audience wouldn’t be drawn out of the comfortable rhythm of the story, suspense and atmosphere could be more easily created, and the whole thing would unfold without jarring, stilted, educational asides.
This impulse, I think, is the one that leads to more freeform translation, the “imitations” of Abraham Cowley, plus adaptations such as, for example, a Bible in modern “teen” English, or the transformation of The Taming of the Shrew into a romantic comedy like 10 Things I Hate About You: an idea of making source material accessible and easy. Although a lot of people might resent this idea as corruptive or unfaithful to source materials, I do think there’s something to it both in terms of creating receptivity to the ideas of the original and in terms of creating a version of the original that’s exciting to readers of the receiving culture. Sometimes I read overly annotated or didactic translations [such as the Norton Critical Edition of Turgenev I am currently reading, which is a bit slow to say the least] and I’m more struck by the seemingly unbridgeable abyss between my own culture and 19th-century Russian culture than by the universal, human commonalities literature often brings out. This may be, in part, a fault of language or pacing, but check out these two passages, so alien, and meant to convey the main character’s uncle as a total dandy:
“Pavel Petrovich hadn’t gotten undressed; he’d only exchanged his patent leather shoes for some red Chinese slippers without heels. In his hands he held the latest issue of Galignani, but he wasn’t reading ... [2] He was wearing an elegant morning suit in the English style; his head was graced with a small fez... the stiff collars of his shirt stood up as inexorably as ever against his well-shaved chin.”
--all this is marvelous but doesn’t quite pass into an American reader’s consciousness with ease... it’s quite an effort to insert ourselves into the narrative here. What if it was translated as:
“Pavel Petrovich hadn’t gotten undressed; he’d only exchanged his loafers for a pair of red slippers. In his hands he held the latest issue of The New Yorker, but he wasn’t reading... he was wearing a Brooks Brothers morning suit, and a small golfer’s cap... the stiff collars of his Abercrombie shirt stood up as inexorably as ever against his shaved chin.”
--I recognize that many might think this is a travesty, but to me it makes a lot of sense in terms of what it immediately conveys to an American reader: luxury, comfort, money...something that can’t help but be stilted in another cultural framework.
So I think there is definitely a case to be made for translations that attempt to bridge that gap with culturally familiar references—both linguistic (on the level of idiom and word) and conceptual (e.g., saying “Mr.” with your teacher, versus using an honorific, in the case of the Japanese novel).
On the other hand, more prevalent in the literature about translation we’ve read and also in a lot of people’s instinctual views is the idea of faithfulness to a source text as a way of expanding cultural horizons. I think this is a marvelous idea too—one of the maddening things about discussing translation is how “right-seeming” and generally compelling both sides of an argument can be. Walter Benjamin, in his extremely famous essay “The Task of the Translator,” writes about translation as innovation on a linguistic level: his essay argues that by trying to find “the intended effect upon the language into which he is translating which produces in it the echo of the original,” the translator is actually actively expanding and changing the dynamic of his language (and rather mystically, language in general) for the good. I think this is a very compelling argument and works on the phraseological level as well; some of the magnificent Russian idioms I’ve learned would make English incalculably richer if transplanted whole. My favorite is from Dead Souls: “ ‘You’re drunk as a cobbler!’ cried Chichikov...” –it might completely change our national view of cobblers were this to make it into our everyday speech. But on a more serious note, I can think of a few translations that have changed our daily speech: The King James Bible, for one, with such notable idioms as “the apple of my eye” and “like a camel through the eye of a needle” etc., etc. The process of changing a national idiom or a language is, like most change, an uncomfortable one, and sometimes the price of a translation that changes your idiom is a certain stiltedness, a cultural gap that requires real emotional and intellectual effort on the part of the audience to grasp. On the other hand, there’s no doubt that that very emotional and intellectual effort is a valuable one, and one that can be offset by skilled use of language and good pacing, by that rare translator that tries to toe the border between real faithfulness and real readability. The trouble with replacing “honorific” with “Mr.” in your translation? Then your audience misses out on the chance to learn what an honorific is—and the degrees of politeness that play such a fundamental role in the world-understanding of the Japanese people. So it’s a question of ease versus knowledge.
I was less able to bring my own translation into this discussion simply because, well, the question of stiltedness is kind of ineluctable in terms of my translation. It’s kind of an extension of last week’s post about register, but maybe more of a poke at the intellectual underpinnings of that question.
Expect more posts soon with more updates now that I have actually started the meaty process of extracting some English out of Tschernichovsky—and adventures in learning just how well you have to understand your source text in order to translate it with some measure of confidence. [Which brings me to another discussion about translators, power, and moral obligation... but more for that later – rest, weary reader.]
No comments:
Post a Comment