MR CYRIL CONNOLLY has said that the most sympathetic reviewers are those who have themselves written books: they know the pain that goes into even the meanest production. The gougers and snappers of the Sundays are usually incapable of giving birth to even a sixty-thousand-word baby. In the field of translation a similar situation holds. British writers who try to make a living from their craft regard anything except the coarser pornography and political propaganda as within their province, and they will take on translation as a legitimate chore. Thus they know, if they are novelists who have been translated, the agonies that go on over the water. Like any other Grub Street man, I have done my share of translating: indeed, I translated before I published any original work of my own. My first big effort was a Malay version of The Waste Land – difficult to do, since, in the tropics, April is no more nor less cruel than any other month, and summer cannot surprise one if it is summer all the year round. Translation, as the anthropological linguists keep telling us, is not just a matter of words.

Given a language like French, however, which most Grub Street men used to know, it is mostly words, and the turning of a French novel into English is essentially a matter of Part One of the big Harrap, a little book called Beyond the Dictionary in French, and the marshalling of what elegance one can find in oneself. I have done three French novels for money, such as it was, and only one was worth doing – Servin’s Deo Gratias, which became The Man Who Robbed Poor Boxes (though I wanted Now Thank We All…) and also a rather funny film. It was about a man who robbed poor boxes. Another novel, whose name I refuse to remember, was so indifferent in the original that I tried to transform as well as translate, and I gained a wry satisfaction from seeing my own felicities ascribed by reviewers to the original author and praised as the sort of thing that English novelists could not do. A lady in America considered this book so important that she sent at least twenty copies to her friends; she has not, I think, enough French for the revelation of the original.

I also translated Berlioz’s L’Enfance du Christ, a very brilliant and moving oratorio, for a special BBC Two Christmas presentation. Berlioz was his own librettist, and not a bad one either, and my difficulties were rarely those usually found in translating libretti not by men like Da Ponte and Boito – trying to make banalities (which do not seem so banal in a Romance language) sound like reasonable, meaningful, and moderately euphonious English. The trouble with this task was the French feminine ending, which is set to the odd flick of a note in the vocal line, often at the beginning of a bar. Berlioz, setting the word terre, holds the terr- for a whole slow semibreve, and then bites off the -e with a staccato quaver which, with English, demands a stressed monosyllable. All this is extremely difficult. At present I am translating Cyrano de Bergerac for a new production, and if anyone can tell me how to render the very last word of the play – panache – I shall be more than grateful.

I know, then, all about the difficulties of translation, and I am disposed to be charitable to the men and women who, translating my own books and articles, do not always quite understand my meaning. Sometimes, indeed, they find a meaning where none is intended. In a novel called The Doctor is Sick, I have a character who yawns. Instead of saying ‘He yawned’, I make him utter these vocables: ‘War, awe, warthog, Warsaw.’ The words were literally rendered in one translation, as were my phoneticisings of a man sneezing in The Wanting Seed: ‘Arch. How rash you are.’ I am ready to forgive, since I know that I myself have been guilty of similar nonsense. I did not, for instance, know what a passage à tabac was in a novel about Algeria. I thought it was a place for selling black market cigarettes, or something, but that did not seem to tie up with violence. At the page-proof stage I grew scared and decided to render passage à tabac as passage à tabac – the sort of expression that any decent well-travelled reader would know as well as coq au vin.

I am not well able to judge translations of my work into Japanese or the Scandinavian languages, but I get on well enough with German and the daughters of Latin. In French I seem to become French – so much so that a French version of Tremor of Intent was impounded by the Maltese postal authorities, French being ipso facto a questionable language. The title was Un Agent qui vous veut du bien. A week or so after this impounding, the same book was sent to Malta in Danish. The title – Martyrenes Blod – ensured that it was whizzed through to me almost with an archiepiscopal blessing. When I eventually, in Montreal, managed to get hold of Un Agent qui vous veut du bien (the shop-girl said: ‘Burgess? Un auteur pas trop lu’), I found that the translator, Michel Deutsch, had done far better in his translation than I had done in the original, especially in passages concerned with love and eating. Compare the following:

… he saw the girl. At once, with a kind of groan of habituation, his body made its stock responses – tightening of the larynx, minimal pain in the frenum, a shuddering re-stoking of the arteries, a sense of slight levitation. She was beautiful: corn-hair piled up carelessly, a nose like an idealisation of a broken boxer’s, a mouth whose scolding ought at once to be stopped with kisses. She was in a straight gold dress, deep cut; legs, arms, neck were bare, honeyed, superb.

 

… il vit la jeune. Aussitôt, avec une espèce de plainte née de l’accoutumance, son corps eut la réaction globale habituelle: constriction du larynx, infime lancinement au niveau du filet de la langue, frémissement des artères qui s’engorgment, impression de planer légèrement au-dessus du sol. Une beauté: des cheveux couleur de blé négligemment ramenés en chignon, un nez qui était l’idéalisation d’un nez cassé de boxeur, une bouche dont la moue méritait d’être sur-lechamp effacé sous les baisers. Elle portait une robe droite en tissu doré, généreusement échancrée. Des jambs, des bras, un cou aux tons de miel – une créature superbe.

The French is a good deal longer, of course, but the girl is a good deal more desirable and elegant. Here, perhaps, there is little to choose between the original and the translation:

But somehow the French sounds more civilised and plausible, less like a dream of gourmandising, than my original.

On being sent a translation of one of his books, any author will look at once to see how the untranslatable has been dealt with. The untranslatable is often a pun, and a mere explanatory footnote seems a feeble way out of the difficulty. The novel I have just finished is a mass of wordplay and riddles, and it will, in translation, be either half footnotes or the translator’s basic re-working, in his own tongue, of the whole linguistic fantasy. Translators are frequently not bold or free enough: they behave as though they are sitting an examination. The untranslatable is also sometimes, as with the book of mine the Germans, if they read it, call Der Doktor ist Übergeschnappt, a comic take-off of the very language the book is being done into.

I have a German character called Renate, who uses German word-order when speaking English. She says, for instance (I have to quote from memory): ‘At the corner is a little shop where man can swineflesh and calf and ox with Sauerkraut and pumpernickel get.’ In German (rather cunningly) this has become: ‘Um die Ecke ist eine kleine Laden, dort man kann bekommen SchweineFleisch und Kalb und Ochsen mit Sauerkohl und Schwarzen Brot’, which sounds less like German than an English person trying to speak German. In the same book, the hero’s attempt to give a lecture on Cockney rhyming-slang gets over the difficulty of a German rendering by refusing to face it:

‘Arse – arsch,’ sagte Edwin laut, ‘gibt ein gutes Beispiel dafür. Arse wird im Reimslang zu ‘bottle and glass’. Bottle wird seinerseits mit ‘Aristotle’ gereimt. Dieses Wort wird gekürzt, so dass das Ersatzwort für ‘arse’ dann ‘Aris’ heist, sich also vom Grundwort kaum unterscheidet…’.

This character, by the way, is facetiously introduced before his lecture as ‘Dr Livingstone I Presume’. This is so much part of British mythology that the German cannot cope at all: ‘Dr Livingstone I zu begrüssen, in unserer Mitte zu begrüssen.’ But who am I to complain?

Eight years ago I published a short novel called A Clockwork Orange – a title, by the way, which comes from old Cockney (‘he’s as queer as a clockwork orange’) and is not, as some have thought, my own surrealist coinage. This book has run into great translation difficulties, whereas linguistically the concept is quite simple: I have created a futuristic teenage slang our of Russian elements, and these elements are easily carried over into another host-language (peet, to drink, becomes piter or pitare or pieten, and horrorshow, good, becomes horocho or oroscio or choroschoh).

The only translation so far published – though a fair number have actually been made – is the Italian one – Un Arancia a Orologeria – and its main fault seems to be an excess of local realism: the whole thing sounds like a story about Milanese thugs, inevitably when a kind of modified Milanese slang is used instead of a futuristic linguistic creation, and the fabular point seems somehow to be missed. Since Stanley Kubrick is at present filming the book – another kind of translation – foreign publishers who previously shied at it are trying once again. I have a feeling that the Japanese, whose language is only too ready to embrace Western loanwords, adapting them to the native phonetic patterns without fuss, are likely to do best with it. The Russians, of course, would have no difficulty at all: they would merely have to replace my Slavonic loanwords with English ones. Thus, ‘bolshy great yarblockos’ could become ‘greti bolshoiy appli’ and ‘a tolchock in the kishkas’ could be something like ‘push v belye’. But official Russia notices my work only to condemn it: they had the nerve to sneer at my interpretation of Shakespeare’s character in Nothing Like The Sun on Moscow Radio. On the other hand, a furtive message has informed me that I have a small underground readership in the Soviet Union, and that pleases me more while paying me no less.

I am married to an Italian translator – translatrix, rather – whose problems in getting English cis- or transatlantic, into Italian excite my professional sympathy, though they can elicit little help. She and I hope to pool our literary and linguistic resources in order to attempt a translation of Finnegans Wake. Our preliminary work on this is already showing, as it was bound to, that the resultant book – if it ever appears – will be less a translation than a sort of free Italian fantasy on Joyce’s themes. The working title is pHorbiCEtta, which means ‘earwig’. The sacred initials HCE have been working in there, but the initial f had to be hellenised first. Orbi is also present, and will do for Earwicker’s universality as well as his prisoner-of-the-vatican postures. But the translation is bound to move away more and more from the Liffey to the Tiber, and Joyce will end as truly Giacomo. The book will be a ghost of what Joyce might have written had he conceived Finnegans Wake in Italian.

There are, in this venture, lessons for me as one of the translated. The development of a novelist like myself has to lie in a greater concentration on the resources of my own language and, as I move on, I have to resign myself to being progressively more difficult to translate. Rendering into another language, if undertaken at all, will be transformation rather than translation – Bourgeois or Borghese rather than Burgess. This is in order, if anybody wants it, but it has nothing to do with my own aims. Evelyn Waugh was always presenting translatability as a test of good writing, but such a test would only be valid for the plainest prose. All literature, including the novel, moves in the direction of poetry, and it is always the most poetic poetry – Hopkins, Mallarmé, Rilke – that is the hardest to translate. Campbell, Leigh Hunt and Yevtushenko are easy to do, but hardly worth doing. Writers are not only guardians of the language in the sense of watchdogs; they also gladly open the door to visitors. Dr Johnson, a Grub Street man who was always right, said that we learn Latin in order to read Virgil. I would rather be one of those writers for whom foreigners learn English than a producer of easily translatable plastic. Mickey Spillane is undoubtedly read, completely rendered by Gastvicz Grontjwarlt, in Upper Slobbovia.

 

Times Literary Supplement, 18 September 1970