Translating myself #8: High fidelity
"As translators know, the passage of a text from one language to another is not a smooth or easy one. It requires negotiation."
Peter Burke, historian
Hello.
I finished yesterday's newsletter with a question:
"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?"
A reader has challenged, rightly, one of the question's underlying assumptions:
"The difficulty in replying," she wrote, "lies in how you interpret the notion of faithfulness. Many people say that a more literal translation is more faithful, when in fact something translated more freely may be infinitely more faithful in many cases (faithful to the spirit of the work.) And to translate literally may be the best way to betray an author."
(I have translated freely.)
An old Italian proverb equates translation to treason: “Traduttore, traditore”. A French version, dripping with misogyny, suggests that, as with women, a translation’s fidelity is inversely proportional to its beauty.
The real question, as the reader cited above has suggested, is: fidelity to what, exactly? Should a translator aim to be faithful to a work's letter, or to its spirit?
The French thinker Voltaire (1694-1778) was not uncritical of translations (which, he complained, "increase the faults of a work and spoil its beauties") but he recognised the need for translators to avoid slavish (re)interpretations.
“Woe to the makers of literal translations," he said, "who by rendering every word weaken the meaning!" Before adding: "It is indeed by so doing that we can say the letter kills and the spirit gives life.”
Paul Valéry, the French poet (1871-1945), took a similar view, arguing that “Fidelity to meaning alone in translation is a kind of betrayal.”
Taken to its ultimate consequences, this approach might best be embodied by what Argentina's Jorge Luis Borges described as the ideal state: one in which "the original is unfaithful to the translation."
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Tomorrow is publication day for Violeta Among the Stars.
You are warmly invited to join Dulce and me for the novel's virtual launch, 5:00-6:30 pm, at an event hosted by the Portuguese embassy. We may well be discussing issues such as the ones raised above, including the tension between fidelity to her words and the need to interpret them for an English language readership. Details for registering and joining are here. I hope you can make it.