In Translation: Translators on Their Work and What It Means

ELIOT WEINBERGER

Some years ago, Bill Moyers did a PBS series on poetry that was filmed at the Dodge Festival in New Jersey. Octavio Paz and I had given a bilingual reading there, and I knew that we would be included in the first program. The morning of the broadcast, I noticed in the index of that day’s New York Times that there was a review of the show. This being my national television debut, I naturally wondered if their TV critic had discovered any latent star qualities, and quickly turned to the page. This is what he wrote: “Octavio Paz was accompanied by his translator,”—no name given, of course—“always a problematic necessity.”

“Problematic necessity,” while not yet a cliché about translation, rather neatly embodies the prevailing view of translation. I’d like to look at both terms, beginning with the one that strikes me as accurate: necessity.

Needless to say, no single one of us can know all the languages of the world, not even the major languages, and if we believe—though not all cultures have believed it—that the people who speak other languages have things to say or ways of saying them that we don’t know, then translation is an evident necessity. Many of the golden ages of a national literature have been, not at all coincidentally, periods of active and prolific translation. Sanskrit literature goes into Persian which goes into Arabic which turns into the translation of Ovid. German fiction begins with imitations of the Spanish picaresque and Robinson Crusoe. Japanese poetry is first written in Chinese; Latin poetry is first an imitation of the Greek; American poetry in the first half of this century is inextricable from all it translated and learned from classical Chinese, Greek, and Latin; medieval Provençal and modern French; in the second half of the century, it is inextricable from the poetries of Latin America and Eastern Europe, classical Chinese again, and the oral poetries of Native Americans and other indigenous groups. These examples could, of course, be multiplied endlessly. Conversely, cultures that do not translate stagnate, and end up repeating the same things to themselves. Classical Chinese poetry, perhaps the best literary example, is at its height during the T’ang Dynasty, an age of internationalism, and then becomes increasingly moribund for almost a millennium as China cuts itself off from the world. Or, in a wider cultural sense of translation: the Aztec and Inkan empires, which could not translate the sight of some ragged Europeans on horseback into anything human.

But translation is much more than an offering of new trinkets in the literary bazaar. Translation liberates the translation language. Because a translation will always be read as a translation, as something foreign, it is freed from many of the constraints of the currently accepted norms and conventions in the national literature.

This was most strikingly apparent in China after the revolution in 1949. An important group of modernist poets who had emerged in the 1930s and early 1940s, greatly under the influence of the European poets they were translating, were now forbidden to publish and were effectively kept from writing. All the new Chinese poetry had to be in the promoted forms of socialist realism: folkloric ballads and paeans to farm production and boiler-plate factories and heroes of the revolution. (The only exceptions, ironically, or tragically, were the classical poems written by Mao himself.) Yet they could continue to translate foreign poets with the proper political credentials (such as Eluard, Alberti, Lorca, Neruda, Aragon) even though their work was radically different and not social realist at all. When a new generation of poets in the 1970s came to reject socialist realism, their inspiration and models were not the erased and forgotten Chinese modernists—whose poems they didn’t know, and had no way of knowing—but rather the foreign poets whom these same modernists had been permitted to translate.

Translation liberates the translation language, and it is often the case that translation flourishes when the writers feel that their language or society needs liberating. One of the great spurs to translation is a cultural inferiority complex or a national self-loathing. The translation boom in Germany at the turn of the nineteenth century was a response to the self-perceived paucity of German literature; translation became a project of national culture-building: in the words of Herder, “to walk through foreign gardens to pick flowers for my language.” Furthermore, and rather strangely, it was felt that the relative lack of literary associations in the language—particularly in contrast to French—made German the ideal language for translation, and even more, the place where the rest of the world could discover the literature it couldn’t otherwise read. Germany, they thought, would become the Central Station of world literature precisely because it had no literature. This proved both true and untrue. German did become the conduit, particularly for Sanskrit and Persian, but it also became much more. Its simultaneous, and not coincidental, production of a great national literature ended up being the most influential poetry and criticism in the West for the rest of the century. (And perhaps it should be mentioned that, contrary to the reigning cliché of Orientalism—namely that scholarship follows imperialism—Germany had no economic interests in either India or Persia. England, which did, had no important scholars in those fields after the pioneering Sir William Jones. Throughout the nineteenth century, for example, Sanskrit was taught at Oxford exclusively by Germans.)

In the case of the Chinese poets, their coming-of-age during the Cultural Revolution meant that they had been unable to study foreign languages (or much of anything else) and thus were themselves unable to translate. But to escape from their sense of cultural deficiency, they turned to the translations of the previous generation, and began to discover new ways of writing in Chinese, with the result that Chinese poetry experienced its first truly radical and permanent change in centuries.

Among American poets, there have been two great flowerings of translation. The first, before and after the First World War, was largely the work of expatriates eager to overcome their provinciality and to educate their national literature through the discoveries made in their own self-educations: to make the United States as “cultured” as Europe. The second, beginning in the 1950s and exploding in the 1960s, was the result of a deep anti-Americanism among American intellectuals: first in the more contained bohemian rebellion against the conformist Eisenhower years and the Cold War, and then as part of the wider expression of disgust and despair during the civil rights movement and the Vietnam War. Translation—the journey to the other—was more than a way out of America: the embrace of the other was, in the 1960s, in its small way, an act of defiance against the government that was murdering Asian others abroad and the social realities that were oppressing minority others at home. Foreign poetry became as much a part of the counterculture as American Indians, Eastern religions, hallucinatory states: a new way of seeing, a new “us” forming out of everything that had not been “us.” From 1910 to 1970, it is difficult to think of more than a very few American poets who didn’t translate at least something, and many translated a great deal. It was one of the things that one did as a poet, both a practice for one’s own work and a community service.

By the early 1970s, of course, this cultural moment was over, and the poets became detached from the intellectual and cultural life of the country, as they vanished along career paths into the creative writing schools. There were now more American poets and poetry readers than in all the previous eras combined, but almost none of them translated. The few who continued to do so, with two or three notable exceptions, were all veterans of the 1960s translation boom.

The obvious result was that we were simply not getting the news. In the 1960s—to take only Latin America—works by Neruda, Paz, Parra, and many others were being translated as, or shortly after, they were being written. There was a lively international dialogue among the living. But for the next thirty years or so, the subsequent generations remained invisible. At various times I was asked to edit anthologies of Latin American poetry, but I realized that at least half of the poets I would want to include had never been translated, and there were simply not enough poet-translators to take on the work.

Paradoxically, the rise of multiculturalism may have been the worst thing to happen to translation. The original multiculturalist critique of the Eurocentrism of the canon and so forth did not lead—as I, for one, hoped it would—to a new internationalism, where Wordsworth would be read alongside Wang Wei, the Greek anthology next to Vidyakara’s Treasury, Ono no Komachi with H.D. Instead it led to a new form of nationalism, one that was salutary in its inclusion of the previously excluded, but one that limited itself strictly to Americans, albeit hyphenated ones. Freshman literature courses began to teach Chinese-American writers, but no Chinese, Latinos but no Latin Americans. In terms of publishing, if you were a Mexican from the northern side of the Rio Grande, it was not very difficult to get published; if you were from the southern side, it was almost impossible. Coincident with an explosion of Chicano Studies departments, Chicano literary presses, special collections at libraries, literary organizations, and so on, readers in the United States had far less contemporary Mexican literature available to them than they did in the 1960s.

This complacent period—nationalist without overt flag-waving, isolationist without overt xenophobia, and uninformed—came to end with 9/11, the rise of the Cheney–Bush administration, and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Once again, Americans were ashamed to be American, were fed up with America, and began looking abroad just to hear the sound of someone else’s voice. The first years of the twenty-first century have seen a boom in new presses that publish translation, grants and prizes, courses in translation, international festivals, websites. Relative to publishing in other countries, the situation is still pathetic: the total number of translated literary books with any sort of national distribution is still in the low hundreds. But an awareness has changed—and, for the first time, there is actually some interest in Arabic literature, an almost entirely unexplored library of wonders. George Bush may be the best thing that happened to literature.

The necessity of translation is evident; so why is it a problem—or, as they now say, problematic? Milan Kundera famously considered the poor translations of himself as—and only a man would write this—a form of rape, and he characterized the bad translations of Kafka as betrayals in a book called Testaments Betrayed. All discussions of translation, like nineteenth-century potboilers, are obsessed with questions of fidelity and betrayal. But in the case of a writer like Kundera, who came of age in a society dominated by the secret police, “betrayal” carries an especially heavy weight. We know what a translation is supposedly a betrayal of, but is it unfair to ask to whom the text is being betrayed?

And one can never mention the word “translation” without some wit bringing up—as though for the first time—that tedious Italian pun traduttore traditore. Luckily, the Italian-American philosopher Arthur Danto has recently and I hope definitively laid it forever to rest: