What Do You Look for in Modern Translation? Tone is everything. Translating “Agamemnon”? Clytemnestra shouldn’t sound like Joan Crawford. “He has Me beaten to my knees.” By the time Lawrence of Arabia wrote those words, in June 1928, his résumé was so dense with dashing military exploits that the casual reader would be forgiven for thinking he was referring to some cunning Ottoman general. But the “he” in question was Homer. Six months into a new prose translation of the “Odyssey,” he had produced six drafts of his rendering of only the first 441 lines (out of some 12,000). “I see now,” he wrote miserably, “why there are no adequate translations of Homer. He is baffling.” Mais oui. Every text is, to some extent, a bafflement to its translator, because every language, like every writer, has characteristics that can’t be “carried across” — which is what “translate” means — into another tongue, another culture. (Think of words like “chutzpah” and “chic.”) Traduttore traditore, the Italians pun: “The translator is a betrayer.” Yet translations must be made. And reviewed. What often baffles readers of book reviews are the standards applied in judging a translation. What qualities make a translation feel “right”? How important is faithfulness to the original? Do the same criteria apply equally to classic and contemporary works? Every critic has his or her own criteria. To my mind, no translation can work without the following: Accuracy. You can argue about the fine points of certain words, but some things aren’t up for discussion. The Italian translator of one of my books thought the “20-dollar bill” one character handed to another on her deathbed referred to an invoice rather than a bank note, with results that inverted the meaning of the scene. But while insufficient accuracy is a problem, so, in a way, is too much accuracy. In the first lines of the new “Iliad” by the distinguished Homer scholar Barry Powell, we meet a character called Chryses, a priest of Apollo. Powell renders areter, a Greek word for “priest” (literally, “one who prays”), as “a praying man.” But while this is correct, strictly speaking, it betrays the original: for English readers, “a praying man” is a devout individual, not an officiant at a religious ritual, which is what Chryses is. Sensitivity to formal considerations. While it’s often impossible to recreate elements like rhythm, rhyme and enjambment, to ignore them is another kind of betrayal. The fantastically precise meters and word positioning of the Roman poet Horace have confounded translators for centuries; but no serious translator would render his famously lapidary lyrics as (say) free verse dribbling down the page, because in Horace, the formal meticulousness is inextricable from his message, his cautious ethics (this is the poet who gave us “carpe diem”). The translator must be intimate with the author’s larger outlook, not just the “words.” Texture. Good translators work hard to bring across the feel of the original writing: the liquid smoothness of Ovid’s slyly shape-shifting “Metamorphoses,” the suggestive meanderings of Proust’s sentences, the precocious adolescent grandiosity of “The Catcher in the Rye.” The best translations find just the right way to convey even the unappealing qualities of the original. Richard Howard’s 1999 rendering of Stendhal’s “Charterhouse of Parma” went so far as to reproduce the grammatical errors in that hasty writer’s prose: you believe the novel was written in seven weeks. Tone. Tone is everything. A novel in which characters say “I daresay” is galaxies apart from one in which characters say “I kinda think.” Aeschylus’ “Agamemnon” is notorious for its elaborate diction and inscrutable syntax — a murky Greek that nicely suggests the moral and political murkiness that is the play’s subject. When David R. Slavitt chose to pepper his 1997 translation of this titanic masterpiece with phrases like “learning curve,” “stress-related” and “Watch what you say, mister,” he was not only cheapening the diction but hamstringing the play’s larger meanings. Clytemnestra is not Joan Crawford. Then again, “Watch what you say, mister” is great advice for all translators. Or in the words of Rilke — to elevate the tone a bit — “What, if not this deep translation, is your ardent aim?” Source : Daniel Mendelsohn, The New York Times
Posted on: Thu, 10 Oct 2013 05:06:06 +0000
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