Translating myself #19: Metaphors of translation
Hello.
Apologies for today’s later-than-usual e-mail.
This is my penultimate newsletter with thoughts on translation. Thank you for staying the course!
As we come to the end of this series of posts, I have been reflecting on the many ways in which the act of translation is described or represented.
Metaphors of translation abound – I have used many in these posts. You may recall some of them:
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Translators as a travellers, carrying their luggage from one culture into another.
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Translation as transhumance – moving huge flocks of words between pastures.
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Translation as a river flowing from one language to another.
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Translation as dancing on ropes with tied-up legs.
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Translation as a mirror.
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Translation as a transparent sheet of glass.
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Translation as a stained glass window.
Ángeles, a regular reader and correspondent, asks her university students to consider and discuss metaphors of translation. She shared with me some of the examples they have used:
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In Don Quixote, Miguel de Cervantes described reading a book in translation as the equivalent of seeing the back of a Flemish rug – you can make out the pattern, but it’s never as beautiful.
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For French writer Maurice Blanchot, the translator is an incomplete being, seeking in the act of translation some form of wholeness.
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For translator Margaret Sayers Peden, the act of translation is like melting and then refreezing an ice-cube – the molecules remain the same even when they acquire a different shape.
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For essayist Walter Benjamin, to translate is to reconstitute a work of literature as if putting together the pieces of a broken pot.
As I did some quick research on the subject, I discovered that entire books might be written (in fact, some have already been written) about metaphors of translation. An excellent source of ideas was fellow translator Jenny Croft, who on Twitter asked for people’s favourites. Here are a few of them:
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Translation is like trying to catch an eel in one pond and put it in another.
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Like squeezing a jellyfish.
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Like making love to a hedgehog.
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Like catching a wild horse, and taming it until it lets you ride it.
There are frequent comparisons to other performing arts. Translation is:
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Like conducting an orchestra or playing an instrument using someone else’s sheet music.
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A form of acting or impersonation.
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A form of ventriloquism or mimicry.
One person has described translation as “preserving biodiversity”. Someone else has equated it to watch-making (because it is so painstaking). Yet another has compared translators to horticulturalists, taking a rare plant out of its natural environment and making it grow and blossom in a foreign one.
Architectural metaphors are inevitable: translation as a bridge, as a channel, as opening a gate, as taking a house down and rebuilding it.
I loved the idea of the translator as Penelope, from The Odyssey – unravelling one text ony to weave it again into another.
For José Saramago, who I have mentioned before, translation is a form of alchemy in which “something must be transformed into something else so that it keeps on being what it was.”
One of the funniest metaphors is from Israeli author Etgar Keret: “Translators are like ninjas – the only time you notice them is when they’re not good.”
Do you, dear reader, have any favourite metaphors for translation or translators? Please let me know.