PETER COLE
Three hundred years after the publication of Pope’s Iliad, which Samuel Johnson called “the noblest version of poetry which the world has ever seen … a performance which no age or nation can pretend to equal,” and close to a century after Pound’s invention of a China for his time in Cathay, we know more or less, or think we know, what is meant by “the art of translation,” even as we argue over tactics and taste. (“You like Plotzkin?! Plotzkin stinks! I like Motzkin!” “Motzkin?! Motzkin’s tone deaf!”—as a conversation I once heard between two poets went, around English renderings of a classic work by veteran contemporary translators, whose names I change to protect their innocence.)
But what do we mean when we speak of “the ethics of translation”?
Interest in the ethical dimension of literary translation has swelled over the past several decades—ostensibly yet another boon to a field that has begun to gather about it, almost like a halo, a serious theoretical and practical literature. But since there’s so often an abyss between theory and practice in this discipline, perhaps it’s best at the outset to ask: Can ethics really account for an art in any way that matters? The result of the study of ethics is, traditionally, action, not just knowledge; we study ethics in order to improve our lives (to alter our behavior). Do we study the ethics of translation in order to improve our renderings? To affect the way a culture responds to them? Does the theoretical examination of ethics help—as many theorists claim—jar us out of unexamined assumptions about the art of translation and the role of the foreign in our lives, or do the doctrine and abstraction of ethical inquiry render us deaf and numb to the material realities of actual translations and make it harder to recognize excellence? In other words, does the desire for ethical clarity and consistency all too often reflect an inability to accept the elusive essence of the art?
For we are in translation always defined by relation, and throughout the history of its art we come upon a wide variety of strategies and tacks. Accounting for “foreignness,” for instance, is one part of being-in-relation—and a vital one: but the doors of perception in translation’s restaurant swing both ways, and waiters who serve there had best watch their heads, and what’s on their trays, as translation exists, too, always in relation to its own tradition—its predilections and expectations, its trajectory and demands.
Take an almost never discussed set of ethically relevant considerations. How clearly does a translator hear or see or grasp the goal ahead, the tone to be struck or the shape to be molded? And, since action generally arises from perception, what will he do about it—about that hearing and grasping, or not being able to hear and to grasp? What sort of effort, in other words, will a translator be willing to exert to reach a given goal, and what should that exertion consist of? To what degree will desire and patience—under the stress of a somehow chronic state of both physical and metaphysical frustration—combine in a translator’s craft to realize the vision of translation’s highest good, an afterlife for the literature in question? There’s negative capability and then there’s negative capability. Clearly it’s critical to develop a high tolerance for “being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts,” without too much in the way of “any irritable reaching after fact and reason”; but it’s also vital to move through these uncertainties and on to the hundreds and sometimes hundreds of thousands of hard decisions the translation of poetry and prose alike entails. Each stage of the process involves discomfort and pleasures of a kind. To remain in bilingual or even polyglot mysteries is to enjoy the full resonance of literary possibility—to be tortured by its pleasures, if not always to be pleased by its torture; to decide is to find oneself—for a while—blessedly free of those doubts, but also hemmed in by one’s choices, possibly forever.
Under those pressures, what kind of knowledge will stubbornness and talent lead a translator toward, and will that knowledge serve as a conduit to effective translation or, as so often happens, will knowledge eventually become an obstacle to it? And, even less fashionably, what sort of training and attunement, what kind of artistic or intellectual and, forgive me, spiritual preparation is called for in order to bring about the transformation that translation is? What, to put it differently, will the quality of our translator’s devotion to this ever-hungry and restless god be?
At this point the “s” falls away from our ethics, like a spent booster rocket, and the ethic attending to one’s labor becomes central. Ethical excellence, says Aristotle or one of his students (in Magna Moralia), is not something that develops naturally; it is the result of what he calls “accustoming.” As the Greek word for custom or habit (êthos) produces êthike, or ethics, so our English mores or habits are developed by a person, over time and through experience, into what is moral. At the heart of this fossil poem in the making is the question of character—that Heraclitean determiner of a person’s fate, and, if that person happens to translate, of the fate of his translation. For the habits and customs a translator develops in his reading, listening, writing, and learning run like nerves and veins toward every syllable he’ll render.
We often hear, from Chapman’s “with poesie to open poesie” and on, that the translator of a work of art must at some level be an artist. And that is true. But artists are notorious for their (necessary) egoism. And strong artists are distinguished, well, by their strength—which consists, in part, of their resistance to possession by the spirit of another artist. How will the translator-artist’s character bear up, let alone thrive, under the strain of all that subordination? How much of his so-called own work—as if there were a real difference, and the translator’s creation were not owned—will he give up to make room for these foreign voices? (When it comes to the translator’s soul, let’s call it, translation can both nourish and drain, strangle and sustain.) What ethical currents inform—and lend form to—the delicate give-and-take translation is? And how will our translator fare on the tightrope of his art, where one wrong move can topple him from an ethically desirable and even critical humility directly into humiliation? How will he manage in a vocation and sometimes a profession where success is often marked by silence and notice reserved largely for failure?
Or, to cast it in more concrete terms: When one of my translations came out a few years ago—a book of fiery political poetry about Israel/Palestine—I sent it to my mild-mannered and politically middle-of-the-road retired lawyer-father, now of blessed memory, who, though he almost never read poetry, picked it up and was at once taken in. Struggling to find a way to talk about something he rarely experienced—being moved by poetry, and in translation—he went on one morning at the breakfast table while I was visiting about how powerful he thought the poetry was, how much he’d come to admire the poet and his courage, and then, as a wave of guilt washed across his face, and as though suddenly remembering that the offspring of his loins had something to do with it all, he said: “And you … you had a difficult job there, I mean, you coulda botched it. … But you didn’t.”
As the laurel descended on my head.
And then there’s the question of accounting in ethical fashion for the mercurial aspects of Time in translation. That is, how might one responsibly factor in the centuries between the composition of a given literary artifact from the distant past and the instant of translation? Is it ethically more appropriate to call attention—through register, cadence, and the like—to the passage of time and the difference of cultural context; or, when push comes to translational shove, is it ultimately more honest to create an illusion of immediacy—to account for the way a story or poem might have been heard by its original audience? And what about the nagging awareness that, as each generation retranslates the classics, one’s rendering will most likely become obsolete? Should that be factored into the ethical calculus? If so, how?
With all this in mind, it’s worth pausing for a moment over the word “responsibly.” One needs in translating, and especially in translating works from the distant past, to respond and be responsible not only to the original poem or passage of prose but also to the body of knowledge that has accrued around it, around the would-be reader of the translation, and around the two (and sometimes three or more) languages and literary traditions involved. The responsible response will inevitably encode a complex, integrated sense of duration—syllable by syllable, word by word, and line by line. Because translation takes time. Actually, and seriously. When it comes to the rendering of poetry, it takes a lot of time. And in crossing centuries, languages, and cultural galaxies, factoring in the thousands of elusive elements that come into play, the straightforward algebra of equivalence won’t do: if we want to approach it in scientific fashion (as some are wont to), we’ll need to look in the direction of postquantum physics, or the nature of scientific study itself.
Along the lines of the latter, Max Weber reminds us in “Science as a Vocation” that each realized work of art is its own fulfillment and can never be surpassed or antiquated. (Edwin Denby expresses something similar when he writes that there are in art “as many first prizes as contestants, even if so very few ever win one.”) Not so with science, where a worker engages, if not selflessly, then with the self as a vehicle for something much greater, in the production of a kind of knowledge he knows will become outdated—taking a strange if complicated delight in that knowledge and the process of production. Weber then asks: “Why does one engage in doing something that in reality never comes, and never can come, to an end?” To do so with passionate devotion, he implies, is to stand “in a service of moral forces.”
“The genuine translator,” says Friedrich Schleiermacher in a classic statement (translated by André Lefevere), “… wants to bring those two completely separated persons, his author and … to his reader, truly together, and to bring the latter to an understanding and enjoyment of the former as correct and complete as possible without inviting him to leave the sphere of his mother tongue.”
Driving Schleiermacher’s desire for “understanding and enjoyment” is that most maligned of phenomena in discussions of translation—sympathy. As the Earl of Roscommon put it in his 1684 poetic “Essay on Translated Verse”:
Examine how your humour is inclined,
And which the ruling passion of your mind;
Then seek a poet who your way does bend,
And choose an author as you choose a friend:
United by this sympathetic bond,
You grow familiar, intimate, and fond;
Your thoughts, your words, your styles, your souls agree,
No longer his interpreter, but he.
Which is very beautiful and all well and good; but what about needing or wanting to translate someone to whom your spirit or humor does not incline? Are there ethical and possibly artistic advantages in that? Does it necessarily guarantee failure? What about the power of assuming someone else’s skin, for a moment, or a month, or a year, and trying to form something from that point of view that will last perhaps longer than you will?
If ethics in the Aristotelian sense involve the study of traits that human beings need in order to realize their nature and live well in the noblest sense, in the pursuit and practice of the happiness that is the highest good, then the study of ethics in the context of literary translation should concern the ways to best realize translation’s true nature as a carrier or embodiment of the highest literary good. Our ethical goal in this vision of what literature has to tell us should be to enter a place of integration, where emotion, thought, and sensation come together to produce a made-thing-that-will-matter. As virtuous living, again, for Aristotle, entails the blending of temperance, courage, humility, a sense of justice, self-discipline, generosity, a feeling for action’s consequence, and the capacity for certain kinds of pleasure (including friendship), among other things, so too translational ethics should call for a combination of—among other things—temperance, courage, humility, a sense of justice, self-discipline, generosity, modesty, a feeling for action’s consequence, and the capacity for certain kinds of pleasure (including friendship). The vices in both cases might also be thought of as overlapping: recklessness, cowardice, vanity, self-indulgence, dishonesty, and, in the end, injustice.
That’s on the Hellenistic side of the ledger. The Hebraic version of this vision might reduce all of translation ethics to two precepts: “Do unto [the work of] others as you would have them do unto [work by] you,” and, of course: “Thou shalt not kill.”
In this translational scheme, sympathy involves not a matter of parallel personal feeling so much as what I think of as making sense—though I should note, at this point, that by “sense” I’m talking not only about “meaning” and “common sense,” or even “sense for sense” renderings (as opposed to “word for word” translations, as the classic formulation has it), but something that happens along, or under, the skin: a tangential sensation, one that is rooted not in ideology, not even in good will or fellow feeling, but in syntactical, rhythmic, and acoustic experience, as well as the ambient aspects of a given culture.
The difference is critical.
For what I’ll call a lesser-order or simply flimsier sympathy often lies behind the worst sort of distortion in translation and the greatest ethical violation. Hostile Orientalism, to take one easy example, is an indication of condescension and lack of sympathy at every level; but there are also seemingly benign forms of Orientalism that impede translation: the overly infatuated, if well-intentioned outsider who possesses a heartfelt sympathy for, say, Palestinian literature that depicts the oppressed and their oppressors but does not feel the cadences and timbre of a given story or poem across his skin and in his being will not enter sufficiently into the physical or sensory dimension of the text, and his translation will not do it “justice.” Nor will an “insider” translator of Hebrew whose ethnic pride or nationalism substitutes for experience of the specific surface of the work in both languages. In socially charged literary situations such as these it is even possible to be ideologically unsympathetic to the politics behind a given literary composition and still translate in ethically responsible fashion with the sort of sympathy I have in mind.
Along the same lines, we should also note that there is an often invisible, or at any rate hard to detect, political dimension to the consideration of ethics in translation, beginning with the choice of texts to be translated and deciding how a given literature or even a single poet will be represented. Choices of this sort are made every day by both translators and publishers, or editors—sometimes together, sometimes not. This backstage dynamic has shaped our American view of the Middle East, for instance, though the reading public knows almost nothing of it, and, for that matter, neither do most of the publishers. Political sensitivities of the readership and the publishing industry, dull questions of funding in both the commercial and nonprofit hemispheres of the translation globe, chemistry and temperament extending to the bonds among translator, author, and editor—all play a central role in the development and dissemination of translations from a given culture. Which mouths will the time and money move toward? This, too, is part of the ethical equation.
Sympathy of the sort I’m trying to describe, complex sympathy grounded in sense, involves the preparation of the self for the reception and registration of an actual other, and as such its ethic is technical, and its technique is ethical. Though it does not initially involve a rendering into another visible or audible language, this preparation-for-reception and the reception itself comprise, as I see it, the most important stage of the translation process, and the quality of that reception will to a large extent determine the quality and even the content of what one represents. And as the translation itself unfolds, it is crucial that the translator (and the translation itself) continue to listen to, and sense, not only the sounds of the original work being registered but also the shape, pitch, and timbre of what is produced. An economy of pleasure, in other words, is part and parcel of this literary justice.
But pleasure of this sort is hardly possible without its contrary; and pain, too, is part of the elusive sympathy at the heart of sense. For the ongoing preparation of the self is hard, as is the hosting of that second soul of the foreign text. Both call for constant vigilance, and their reward is the ability to absorb something that will disturb and to a certain extent hurt you as it alters the way you see or hear or speak. Something that will shift the muscles around your mouth and chest, and, instant by instant, revise the way you relate to the world. If this sounds a little like a kind of surrogacy, it is perhaps worth noting that the kabbalistic term for the beneficent transmigration of a meritorious soul from one generation to another is ibbur—impregnation. Moreover, fourteenth-century kabbalists sometimes called this transmigration ha’ataqah, or transference, which also happens to be a term Hebrew uses to mean—translation.
There is, in short, no serious afterlife for a given poet or writer of prose that does not re-embody (as it reimagines) the sensory dimensions at the heart of an art.
So how is that sort of re-embodiment brought about?
A start might be made by avoiding talk of “inscription” and “translemes,” “decomposition of the source message,” “invariant transfer,” and “the release of domestic remainders”—all of which are the product of an academic industry run seriously amok. Reading late twentieth- or twenty-first-century translation theory, one often gets the sense that many of the principal theorists simply resent the imagination, if not the English language itself. For the fact is that the best translators I’ve read, worked with, and known, even those who are well versed in theory, ultimately rely as they translate on instinct, not ideology. Trained by long apprenticeship to attention in language, they let themselves be led by a feel for the words before them in an asymptotic rehearsal and performance involving desire, denial, vision, revision, imagination, and regret—nearing, perhaps, but never achieving something we choose to call perfection. Though the perfect translation, as Borges knew, is not a translation at all.
Bad translation, then, is senseless; it is (often, when closely examined) unreasonable in some basic way, but more important, it lacks tactility, or produces tactility that we find merely tacky, and so it ends up just getting in the way. The “tact” at tactility’s heart is the one we find in George Steiner’s comment that “Tact intensified is moral vision.”
Good translation, on the other hand, is translation that both makes and discovers sense. It is reasonable, and coheres emotionally, but it also and more importantly engages the senses as it embodies, in a physical manner, what the translator recognizes as the salient properties or qualities of the original and its artfulness. And in taking on the responsibility for another work of art in a different language—for the particular pressure, pleasure, texture, tension, and tone of its constituent parts—the translator also (if he is up to the task) becomes more responsive to these same constituent qualities; and so he will in the passage to a new language try to account for them as live elements, to preserve them through transformation rather than salting or pickling them through superficial mimicry.
Call it the recognition of a dignity.
Vital transformation of this sort will not be brought about by focusing on discrete one-to-one equivalence, what Dryden called “tedious transfusions,” as so many translators and certain kinds of scholars like to do, especially when they take us “into the workshop.” Make no mistake about it, the choice of individual words is extremely important; but far more important to a translation’s chances for success—if one looks back across the history of English—is attending to the way words in a row, their shapes in the mouth and their echoes in the body, come together as a whole.
When they do coalesce, something extraordinary occurs: “Three or four words in exact juxtaposition,” Pound tells us, “are capable of radiating … energy at a very high potentiality: … [These words] must augment and not neutralize each other. This peculiar energy which fills [them] is the power of tradition.”
Last in the ethical precept department (though for most it’s first) is the injunction that in many ways relates to Frost’s semiapocryphal isolationist aphorism, namely, that the honest translator acknowledge the loss—and some would say the essential loss—inherent in his transfer. Clearly the translator must always, at some level, be aware of this loss; and translation does, again, require a firmly moored sense of humility. But it also requires a potent sort of presumption—one that is akin to the belief that lies behind fictional creation. Although the vast majority of poems in translation are no better or worse than the vast majority of original poems, the former and not the latter almost invariably lead to the sort of warning issued by the poet and essayist Donald Hall, who cautions poets against imbibing too much translation, since “almost always a translation omits the oldest and most primitive sources of eros in poetry,” what he calls “the intimacies of sound form.” But it is precisely those mysteries of sound, that eros of cadence and linkage, that intimate aspect of breath and articulation, that translators are, in the scheme I’m sketching, ethically obliged to embody anew. When they are successful, rare or partial as that success is, they manage to do what Hall says real poems do (however rarely or partially they do that). In fact, the description he offers of that doing is one I recognize as the ethical art of translating: “By the studious imagination, by continuous connection to the sensuous body, and by spirit steeped in the practice and learning of language,” poets, Hall tells us, “say the unsayable.”
So much for some of the eye-and-ear level ethical questions a translator lives with on a daily basis. There is also a transcendental aspect to the ethical dimension of the enterprise. Dedicated practitioners begin their days at the desk knowing full well, or at least deep down, that translation has traditionally been thought of as a curse or a necessary evil: the shame of knowing in Eden is matched by the frustration of having to translate after Babel (or talk about translation after Steiner). This too is part of translation’s moral makeup: that it is, at root, hubristic, delusional, even sinful. (Think of what has been said and done to translators in the name of religion: Wycliffe’s bones were exhumed and torched, and the great Tyndale was hanged and then burned, to take just two of the most prominent English examples.) And the Talmud, lest we forget, reports that even after the translation of the Greek Septuagint, or “translation of the seventy (two),” which has been called “the most important translation ever made,” three days of darkness descended upon the world—and that for a translation produced by divine inspiration, a kind of prophetic spirit that passed through all seventy-two translators in seventy-two days, so that each emerged from his solitary and wholly independent labor bearing a translation of Scripture that was identical to that of the other seventy-one.
But where some see hubris, a very different moral approach envisions translation as “a radically generous” enterprise, one that’s rooted in a desire to bestow—to offer others access to the Truth (especially where Scripture is involved), or merely to the splendors of art and maybe the larger global conversation. Seen in that strong light, translation implies a common humanity that might take us—in spirit, and however tenuously—beyond difference. Moreover, it has been argued that the very possibility of getting beyond that difference posits the existence of a mystical universal language. And some, as we’ll see, go so far as to suggest that the act of translation responds, imperceptibly, to the gravitational field of that inaudible universal tongue.
For, as it were, moral support, and since we’ve already touched on theology, let’s up the ante and note, apropos translation’s more sanguine aspect, that Franz Rosenzweig, Martin Buber’s partner in the German translation of the Old Testament, announced their project by declaring that “every translation is a messianic act.” While even the agnostics among us will understand what he means, this theologian-translator went still further and claimed—brows will furrow—that the messianic act of translation “brings redemption nearer.”
Brings redemption nearer. Certainly, when it’s working, it brings the foreign author or culture nearer. But redemption?
And yet, if we think of it, translation does embody longing for a kind of fulfillment, a restoration of worth, and possibly even deliverance from loss and suffering—of being partial and apart, of not knowing, or not quite being able to say something. Moreover, it is a matter of life and death—of reprieve (extended life for the work and possibly its translator) or of execution (again, of the work and possibly its translator). And when that work is from an earlier era, it leads to either profanation or resurrection of the dead.
Lest we get too self-righteous about it, a slippery question that theorists do not like: What is the role of falseness and the fictional in translation? And how might an ethics of translation account for it?
Writing in the eleventh century, the great Hebrew poet of Muslim Spain, Shmuel HaNagid, said:
He’ll bring you trouble with talk like dreams,
invoking verse and song to cheat you.
But dreams, my son, aren’t what they seem.
Not all the poet says is true.
Of course my sentence preceding his poem is also a kind of fiction, as HaNagid wrote no such thing, since he wrote in Hebrew, and in a mode that involves what we might as well call a deep translation from Arabic, collaged from a biblical vocabulary. In fact, the poem may involve the loose translation of specific lines of Arabic verse. The English translation is mine, and it is believed or not because a compelling fictional (or false) surface has or hasn’t been built up within it, in the way that we continually build up our worlds and vocabularies and the relationships in which we use these words and pass them back and forth, mostly managing to understand one another, inexplicably, it often seems.
“Tell all the truth,” scrawled Dickinson, “but tell it slant,” since “the truest poetry,” as Shakespeare noted, “is the most feigning.” Precisely in this claim for an essential falseness to poetry’s particular way of getting at the truth there is also something reassuring. “Yea though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil,” … for the translation comforteth me. For the translation—and in the case of the 23rd Psalm, the mistranslation (of an archaic word for “deep darkness” as “the shadow of death”)—endows us with a strong and almost conscious sense that we are not entirely alone in that valley and darkness.
If a translator doesn’t make use of that fictional dimension, in which truth and falseness are more than conventional moral badges, then won’t he create a lesser thing? Won’t he betray the art he is obliged to account for, to re-present? Is honesty in this scheme unethical? Can the fiction of essence precipitate essence, or at least partake of it? Is the lie really what ethical understanding requires? And is there anything wrong with the analogy of the Latin husband, who is faithful in his way as he strays (so as not to appear overly slavish)? Why isn’t that really appropriate? Because vows were taken and the straying is illicit? Doesn’t the translator tacitly take a vow as well (to honor, cherish, and—for the most part—obey)? And isn’t there always something illicit about the fictional? The metaphor of course breaks down with the very real pain of the betrayed wife and the absence of mutual enhancement—that most reliable mark of successful translation.
Note that I’ve said mutual enhancement. In giving the original new life, a translation sheds new light on it as well. And in the process, the language of the translation is also renewed. But the presence of the foreign body of sounds in the texture of the translator’s language need not be that of a freakish or distorting implant shouting, “Look at me, I’m different, foreign, unusual!” Presence does not equal conspicuous distortion. At times the specific nature of a particular foreign text will alter the language of the translation and perhaps bring it into peculiar territory; but more often than not the presence should be an animating force within the range of what Schleiermacher called “the malleable material” of one’s own language.
So whether you believe, with Scripture, that the matrix from which language emerges in the created world is sacred; or with Tolstoy trust that art through language links us in a critical bond; or if you simply feel that it is the writer’s job to be precise about the most elusive and critical dimensions of human experience—then, however unconsciously, you accept that literary translation partakes of something central to our existence, or is at the very least a transmitter of that central something. And that, like literature at its best, and as literature at its best, it extends our sense of what it means to be alive in the world as a user of words. For translation involves a binding back that leads us forward. It leaves us bound—recalling the Latin religare, or the binding that gives us “religion.” In a similar manner, Church relics “bind” as they are “translated,” or moved from one shrine to another, which must be consecrated, or invested with their presence and with belief in their power to transform. In each of these analogues, as in the word “translation” itself—which etymologically suggests a “ferrying or carrying across” (as does the root of the word “metaphor”)—investment, surrender, and belief lead to a place where alignment is sought between souls.
Gershom Scholem tells us something similar. Scholem is widely regarded as one of the major scholars of the twentieth century—the man who turned the study of Jewish mysticism into a serious discipline. Few, however, even among those who are familiar with his masterful prose, know that early in his career Scholem harbored thoughts of becoming a literary translator. He translated the stories of S. Y. Agnon (who would go on to become Hebrew’s only Nobel Prize winner), and in a letter to Rosenzweig while the latter was translating Scripture with Buber, Scholem—who in fact didn’t like the Buber-Rosenzweig Bible—wrote that “translation is one of the greatest miracles … leading into the heart of the sacred orders from which it springs.”
Rosenzweig responded in characteristic fashion: “All life beyond one’s own soul is conditioned by the possibility of this miracle,” which elsewhere he calls a Holy Wedding between two languages.
In the previous sentence Rosenzweig had readied the ethical ground: “Only one who is profoundly convinced of the impossibility of translation can really undertake it.”
And finally, a word from the rabbis, who—in nearly vaudevillian fashion—manage to sum up the translator’s predicament and possibly also his feeling about how art and ethics in his efforts might be one:
In the tractate known as—curiously—Consecration (again, as in marriage), and in the course of a chapter treating the conditions of binding betrothal, the Talmud surprises us with the following: “If one translates a verse literally,” says Rabbi Judah, “he is a liar; if he adds thereto, he is a blasphemer and a libeler. Then what is meant by translation?” Judah asks, and answers, not quite ethically: “Our translation!”
