Sometime in the mid-1600s, the blind poet and political activist John Milton deployed one of the most influential mistranslations in the history of literature. Leaning on biblical tradition, he began his epic Paradise Lost by invoking “the Fruit / Of that Forbidden Tree, whose mortal tast / Brought Death into the World.” In this, Milton was following centuries of scholarship, which usually translates the Hebrew term peri as a generic “fruit,” sometimes likening it to a fig, citron, apricot, or pomegranate (Michelangelo's man-serpent on the Sistine ceiling, for instance, hugs a fig tree). But some seven thousand lines later, Milton returned to the scene of the crime to ID his forbidden fruit in a way that's been familiar to us ever since: “To satisfie the sharp desire I had / Of tasting those fair Apples, I resolv'd / Not to deferr …” Was this pure fancy? Perhaps, but not on Milton's part. Like most learned Christians of his time, Milton took his cues largely from Saint Jerome's Vulgate, and it was Jerome who, coming upon the forbidden timber in his Hebrew source text, had created a Latin pun, essentially turning the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil (malum) into the tree of apples (malus).
Or something along those lines, for even malus could, in Jerome's day, mean not only “apple” but any number of other fleshy fruits, such as pears or peaches. Enter Albrecht Dürer, whose engraving Adam and Eve (1504) shows the couple beside an unmistakable apple tree, made still more unmistakable in his painted version of 1507, and again in Lucas Cranach the Elder's painting of the same scene from around 1530. And even then, Milton, over a century later, might himself have been using apple in a more generic sense—Eve's intoxication after partaking of the Forbidden Fruit is more suggestive of grapes—but somewhere along the line, his “fair Apples” came to mean the bright rubine Malus pumila that we know today.1 In other words, from Hebrew to Latin to English, by way of German visual arts, an essential trope of our cultural and religious mythology was founded on what amounts to a mistranslation, or at least a misreading.
One could object that regardless of whether Eve bit into a forbidden apple or pomegranate, the transgressive substance of the message remains the same, and that the course of humanity probably would not have altered if we instead referred to the eponymous bit of neck cartilage as an “Adam's apricot.” Then again, who's to say exactly what impact the fruit of Original Sin has had in the last two millennia (or at least in the centuries since Milton) precisely because it was an apple? Symbols are powerful things, and this one in particular is of enough universal notoriety to suggest that the apple is not just an apple, even if we can't decide whether it's also a citron or a fig.
Other mistranslations, meanwhile, have had more easily demonstrable consequences. Jerome, again, in his description of Moses's head as he descends from Mount Sinai (Exodus 34:29), mistook the Hebrew word karan, or “radiance,” for keren, meaning “horned”—a potentially humorous slip that any editor might have queried. Nonetheless, from it originated the protuberances on Moses's forehead in Michelangelo's sculpture in the church of San Pietro in Vincoli and, much less humorously, the longstanding anti-Semitic stereotype of Jews as sprouting devilish horns. And another religious misapprehension that could and should have been avoided: the phrase Satanic verses, referring to one or several suppressed verses in the Quran (which the Prophet Muhammad is said to have repudiated as having been suggested by Satan), is actually not used in the Muslim world. It is an invention of nineteenth-century British Orientalists, whereas in Arabic, these rejected lines are referred to as gharaniq, meaning “the cranes.” When Salman Rushdie's novel The Satanic Verses was published in Arabic, the translator rendered the title literally but in the event incorrectly, thereby inadvertently suggesting, not the excised “crane” verses, but rather that the Quran itself had been dictated by Satan. The perceived blasphemy, unintended by the author, led to international rioting, the fatwa against Rushdie, his enforced seclusion and the breakup of his marriage, the murder of the book's Japanese translator, Hitoshi Igarashi, and the attempted murder of its Italian translator, Ettore Capriolo.2
Does translation matter? Various misrepresentations throughout history, such as Nikita Khrushchev's over-translated “We will bury you” and the Cold War paranoia it fueled (the Russian phrase was actually a prematurely boastful “We will outlast you”), have shown how much can turn on a single word. Empires have been won and lost, crucial actions taken or neglected, on the strength of how a translator did or didn't convey certain information. The events of September 11, 2001, and the tragic aftereffects they have had on lives and national attitudes, might have been averted had the messages in Arabic intercepted on September 10 been processed sooner than the twelfth.3 Sometimes it's as subtle as a difference in nuance: when in July 1945 the Allies issued an ultimatum for Japan's unconditional surrender, Premier Suzuki's response to reporters' pressing questions was, “No comment. We need more time.” But Suzuki used the word mokusatsu, which can also mean, in effect, “Yeah, yeah, whatever,” and that is how it got back to Harry Truman. Ten days later, “Little Boy” decimated Hiroshima.
These are only some of the better-known instances. They, and thousands of others like them throughout history, give haunting proof of the impact that interlingual communication, and its all-too-frequent breakdown, can have. And as the global reach of nations grows more pronounced, their weapons more destructive, their business dealings more intertwined, the need for reliable forms of cross-cultural understanding becomes all the more urgent—not only in the realm of statecraft, but also in the everyday spheres of medicine, commerce, research, communications, entertainment, and so on.
But there's another way to frame the question, one that has less to do with geopolitics and more with cultural amplitude. Earlier, I contested the frequently voiced notion that publishing and consuming literary translations is some kind of ethical imperative. This view, held by many translators as well as by organizations like PEN International and Words without Borders, is articulated by Edith Grossman like this:
Translation not only plays an important traditional role as the means that allows us access to literature originally written in one of the countless languages we cannot read, but it also represents a concrete literary presence with the crucial capacity to ease and make more meaningful our relationships to those with whom we may not have had a connection before. Translation always helps us to know, to see from a different angle, to attribute new value to what once may have been unfamiliar.4
Translation, in other words, is what opens the path, and keeps it open, to the world of attitudes, viewpoints, and modes of expression beyond our local parameters. It is what keeps us receptive to possibilities other than those suggested by our own linguistic and cultural experience. Eliot Weinberger reminds us that “cultures that do not translate stagnate, and end up repeating the same things to themselves.” Or, in George Steiner's motivating and chilling dictum, without translators “we would live in arrogant parishes bordered by silence.”5 Translation takes the fact that cultures are by nature amalgamations of other cultures and pushes it to the head of the class. It keeps us aware of the uncontrollably heteroclite subsoil beneath any cultural surface, however undifferentiated that surface might appear.
One common cliché is that if there were only one language in the world, or if by some miracle humans could read and understand all languages, the need for translation would evaporate. It's true that, were we to take language strictly as a conveyer of facts simple and straight, then perhaps translation would become superfluous in a world where everyone immediately grasped what everyone else was saying. Translation, however, fills a function beyond mere data transmission, which is why talking about “equivalences” is so pointless. Instead, as a mediator and re-creator, translation provides a new way of looking at a text, and through that text a world, as represented by someone with an entirely distinct (though presumably complementary) vision. And, as I've stressed many times in this book, it allows for the emergence of a new literary work, at once dependent on and independent of the work that prompted it.
This is where I can't help but feel uneasy with the moral subtext of statements such as Grossman's, however much I agree with them in spirit. On the one hand, I recognize the ethical benefit of seeing things from different angles, breaking out of our arrogant parishes. At the same time, there is a true-believer aspect to this way of putting the matter that ultimately does translation a disservice—not helped by the fact that the listings for many presses, especially the earnest independents, tend to skew toward a fairly homogenous, equally earnest, profile. As with many well-meaning efforts, the accent is laid on shoulds and oughts, whereas the real joy of translation is precisely the new vistas it affords, the thrill of discoveries not otherwise possible, the appeal to our sense of pleasure rather than duty. I prefer to consider translation a fine liqueur, not a medicine. But too often it comes bottled with a prescriptive label.
That said, translation in this more joyful sense depends on a world situation that might itself be disappearing. When I think of translation, I think not so much of bridges as of borders, their dissolution but also their utility. In our increasingly interconnected world, it is not only tempting but logical to posit the end of national and cultural boundaries. It's a position held by many, and one that to a large extent I endorse, especially since, as I write this, border-related issues are the excuse for many of the abuses perpetrated by the world's governments, mine included. Politicians rail about the dangers of unchecked migration, of infiltration by the villains du jour; but these threats have existed, in one form or other, since before the time of Troy, and never has the intensification of borders substantially changed that fact, or the benefits regimes have derived from them.
What concerns and puzzles me more is the infiltration of homogeneity, for borders can also be seen as guardians of difference. The flip side of unrestricted circulation, as well as of potentially infinite contact (including, paradoxically, the kind of contact made possible by translation), is that it can also lead to the erosion of diversity. What concerns me is the emergence of a world in which translation really is no longer necessary, not because we can all speak the same language but because the world's languages no longer express the psychological and cultural differences that make them distinct and interesting. Earlier, I characterized translation as both the bridge linking cultures and a measure of the distance between them. But what happens when that distance becomes negligible? What happens when you can go anywhere in the world and find the same McD's, the same Starbucks, the same Gap, the same Apple Store, and—most insidious of all—the same basic outlook, regardless of whether you're in Paris, Prague, or Parsippany? What would be the point of traveling under such conditions, whether physically or in the pages of a foreign novel?
In this regard, the defiant catchphrase “Art has no borders” becomes both an aspiration and a threat. The diffusion of ideas, the intellectual and aesthetic free-for-all of arts, literatures, philosophies, and viewpoints ricocheting throughout the world, aided and abetted by our ever-faster messaging media, could bring one of the greatest revitalizations of cultures in the history of humankind, a new Renaissance. Or it could lead to the blandest global monoculture we've ever known. I would argue that, in significant measure, this will depend on how the translation of these ideas is handled, and whether it can maintain its freedom. In this regard, it is crucial not to let translation be co-opted by commercial interests (obscuring the fact that it is a translation, for instance, or choosing only those foreign texts that reinforce the domestic conversation), by political strictures (of whichever wing), by moral injunctions (“Read this, it's good for you”), or by academic vogue. It is necessary to claim for translation the same rights, responsibilities, prerogatives, and pleasures that we accord any form of artistic expression—first and foremost, the right to speak with authority and invention.*
And, while we're at it, let's be sure to leave a creative space for mistranslation. Misinterpretation can lead to disastrous treaty negotiations or religious upheavals, but it can also give us Eve's apple. We know that writers throughout history have influenced later writers in other languages (such as Faulkner's influence on the Latin American Boom, which in return energized a subsequent generation of US authors; or the inspiration that modern Chinese poets took from Pound's Cathay), and of course this ping-pong of influences has most often taken place via translation. But the more interesting question is, how many essential works can be traced to an unwittingly fruitful misinterpretation, whether on the reader's part or the translator's? It's perhaps an impossible question to answer, but Adam Thirlwell, in The Delighted States, gives us a hint when he posits that erroneous translations can sometimes be more seminal, literarily speaking, than accurate ones. Specifically, Thirlwell brings up the Russian Pushkin and the Brazilian Machado de Assis, both taking inspiration from poor French translations of Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy and A Sentimental Journey. “My baffled conclusion is that the version of Sterne they were reading was an entirely plausible one; it was still useful. … It is obvious that in Rio de Janeiro, or St. Petersburg, reading this approximation to a rough translation, it was still possible to see what Sterne was up to and develop his techniques.” And Thirlwell concludes with an aphorism that applies equally well to translation: “Every theory of literature has to incorporate a theory of the fluke.”6
In the end, the importance of translation might just be to safeguard those distances it supposedly is meant to bridge. I'm not talking about keeping cultures apart, of course, but about helping ensure that the contact produces sparks rather than suffocation. At the same time, the point is not, as proponents of foreignization would have it, to make funny-sounding translations that ape another language's syntax but rather to bring in foreign viewpoints; and not to sanitize these viewpoints in the interests of the target audience but to preserve the source author's thought and expression in a target idiom that speaks to that audience, even while conveying something radically unlike anything it has conveyed before. As I mentioned earlier, the single most valuable service translation can render is to identify and bring us into contact with those rare minds and voices that are truly unique, that have something to say that is dissimilar from what anyone else has to say. That make a difference, in every sense of the word. That literally change our minds.
Somewhere beyond our linguistic, cultural, and attitudinal borders, a thought or viewpoint born of a context distinct from ours is being formed, will be expressed, and will have the power to move the world, or at least our world. The best we can hope for is to find it before everything becomes so hopelessly alike that no such expression can be conceived—because once that happens, translation, and the ancient impetus that fostered it, really will cease to matter.