Translating myself #5: Translation's coming home
“Where literature exists, translation exists.”
Edith Grossman, American translator
Allow me to be topical…
England is playing Scotland at the Euro Cup shortly. As long as England remain in the tournament, we can expect to hear the catchy football anthem, originally composed for the 1996 Euros, played incessantly.
“Three Lions” is a good football song: simple lyrics, a bit of self-deprecation, but ultimately uplifting. It does what good football anthems should do: bring people together. Yet whenever I hear someone singing that “Football’s coming home” I am reminded of the remarks, made many years ago, by one of the song’s two famous composers.
The main thrust of those remarks was (I paraphrase) that no matter how well translated it might be, the experience of reading a novel originally written in another language would always be unfulfilling.
He (for it is a “he”) went on to say that, when reading a novel in translation “I’m missing out on the full Flaubert or Musil or García Márquez experience.”
In a very limited sense, of course, he was right. When reading Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude in English, we are actually reading the words chosen and arranged by Gregory Rabassa. When we enjoy Orhan Pamuk’s Snow, we are enjoying the work of Maureen Freely. It was the Anthea Bell, not W.G. Sebald, who composed the exquisite text I know as Austerlitz.
In almost every other way, however, I profoundly disagree with the football song composer’s parrochial approach to literature. Thoughtful readers will understand, intuitively, that in reading a novel translated from another language they are doing much more than engaging with the surface of a text.
How else would I (and countless others) have read, and been transformed by, Franz Kafka, or Kōbō Abe, or Anton Chekhov, or Amos Oz?
How, indeed, might we explain the history of modern civilisations if not as a never-ending process of translating (and mistranslating) knowledge and stories from place to place, language to language, culture to culture?
So tonight, dear readers, I will be supporting England, but you will not catch me singing “It’s coming home!”.
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I had planned to write more about some of themes above (they merit further and deeper exploration) – but my thoughts were derailed by an unexpected development.
The first review of Violeta Among the Stars was published this afternoon. It is by Rosie Goldsmith, broadcaster and founder of the European Literature Network. It is warm and genenous, and I am thrilled to share it here.
My thanks to all of you for sticking with these newsletters. And let’s see what next week brings. In the meantime, please do send me your thoughts.