Translating myself #7: History as translation... Plus: invitation to launch
“Translation is not a matter of words only: it is a matter of making intelligible a whole culture.”
Anthony Burgess, novelist
Hello.
Only two days to go before the publication of Violeta Among the Stars, and I am incredibly pleased to share with readers of my newsletters an invitation to the digital launch event. It’s happening this Thursday 24 June, 5:00-6:30 pm, U.K. time.
The event will be hosted by the Portuguese embassy in London. Dulce and I will be there, and broadcaster and book journalist Rosie Goldsmith will chair the session. Please do join us!
In the run-up to the launch, you may wish to have a peek at the Words Without Borders website, which has just published en excerpt from the novel’s opening pages. You can read it here. I hope you enjoy it.
*
A regular reader has drawn my attention to the recently published review of a book by translator and interpreter Anna Aslanyan: Dancing on Ropes.
The book’s title is taken from a quote by the 17th century English poet laureate John Dryden, who in the preface to his own translation of Ovid’s Epistles concluded that the act of translation is “much like dancing on ropes with fettered legs: a man may shun a fall by using caution, but the gracefulness of motion is not to be expected.”
In other words – the more closely a translator clings to the original text, the less interesting the end result is likely to be.
This feels true in literature, but what about in other contexts?
Aslanyan’s book sheds light on moments in history where translation (or mistranslation) has been critical to the outcome. The bombing of Hiroshima is one example. 20th century Soviet-American summits are another.
“In our multilingual world,” Aslanyan says,”the balance of history, unstable as it is at the best of times, hinges on different interpretations of words.” With such high stakes, she asks, “[c]an translators take liberties? Should they?”
The regular reader who alerted me to the review of Aslanyan’s book – a very distinguished historian – tells me: “This rang a bell with me because I have been discussing the role of the cultural historian as a translator between cultures, walking a tightrope between fidelity to the original text and intelligibility to the targeted readers.”
Here, succinctly expressed, is the dilema that all translators grapple with: remain faithful to the source material, or adapt and naturalise it to accommodate an expected audience? Retain a text’s “foreigness”, or “domesticate” it? Dryden summed it up when he noted: “It is almost impossible to translate verbally [i.e. literally], and well, at the same time.”
Personally, I gravitate towards an approach that favours intelligibility, while conveying as closely as possible the original author’s intention. I will return to this in future issues.
My correspondent has noted elsewhere the parallels between translation and other forms of knowledge. He cites the anthropologist in the 1970s who, observing that his role was essentially to interpret and explain alien cultures, declared that anthropology “is an art of translation.”
And if, as the novelist L.P. Hartley famously wrote, “the past is a foriegn country”, then surely historians are natural translators – not only translating between different languages and cultures, but between different historical ages. As a non-practising historian who is also a literary translator, I feel the kinship very profoundly.
I was reminded of these affinities while looking into the furore about remarks by the composer of the English football song, which I discussed in an earlier issue. In the comments section of a translators’ blog, an anonymous commentator wrote:
“Q: What is an author?
A: A translator! He/she gathered information from MANY SOURCES to make others understand.
Q: What is a translator?
A: An author! He/she gathered information from ONE SOURCE to make others understand.”
What, dear readers, are your own thoughts – do you expect a traslation to be a faithful transposition of the original, or are you happy for a translator to take some literary licence and make the work more intelligible?
Until tomorrow.