A Culture of Translation
In Canto XXXI of the Inferno, as Dante and his guide Virgil approach the edge of the Ninth and final circle of Hell—where traitors meet their eternal punishment—Dante hears a blast louder than the loudest thunderclap and catches sight in the distance of something that to the contemporary reader may seem a description of the Manhattan skyline: “me parve veder molte alte torri” or, in Robert and Jean Hollander’s translation, “I saw what seemed a range of lofty towers.”1
Virgil, who’s been here before, sympathizes with Dante’s misconstrual of the hazy shapes and explains that his eyes have been deceived: these are not towers but the giants that ring the pit within which lies the Ninth Circle. The first giant’s grotesque features soon loom into better view, and as the two travelers through Hell draw closer, the giant blows furiously on his horn and shouts these strange words at them: “Raphel mai amecche zabi almi.”
“You muddled soul, stick to your horn! Vent yourself with that when rage or passion takes you,” Virgil shouts back. He then identifies this horn-blower:
…He is his own accuser.
This is Nimrod, because of whose vile plan
The world no longer speaks a single tongue.
Let us leave him and not waste our speech,
For every other language is to him as his
To others, and his is understood by none.2
Medieval tradition associated Nimrod, grandson of Noah, with the building of the Tower of Babel and hence the demise of monolingual unity and the sad, plurilingual confusion that became mankind’s destiny. The words Nimrod bellows—“Raphel mai amecche zabi almi”—belong to the lost language of Babel, of which he is the only remaining speaker. In every translation of the Commedia, this one line remains identical, for it represents untranslatability itself: a dead language “understood by none.”
Dante’s Virgil deplores the linguistic plurality Nimrod inflicted upon mankind. The historic Virgil wrote in Latin, the language that, for Dante and many centuries of educated European men who came before and after him, held the greatest claim to universality, transcending temporal and spatial differences and rendering all learned men, whatever their local vernacular, mutually intelligible. Among all European languages, Virgil’s was the one that came closest to overcoming the punishment at Babel. Meanwhile, the figure of Dante at Virgil’s side says nothing either to or about Nimrod; once he’s been apprised of the giant’s identity, he simply heeds Virgil’s advice to remain silent and move on.
How can we translate that silence? We know that Dante, author of the Commedia—as distinct from the character who appears within it—was an accomplished linguistic theorist who, in his incomplete Latin treatise De Vulgari Eloquentia, evinced a fully developed and startlingly modern understanding of the fact that linguistic diversity arises out of the plurality of human contexts. Dante knew that human beings in different professions, social classes, places, and times speak different languages, and that these languages are living entities that ceaselessly evolve. Furthermore, Dante himself was a kind of translator, who sought to transfer meaning between these distinct linguistic entities; his avowed ambition for the Commedia was to translate the power and scope of the epic poems of classical antiquity into his own vernacular. Small wonder that his literary alter ego fails to chime in when Virgil castigates Nimrod.
And indeed, later on in the Commedia, Dante the author reveals that he does not view Nimrod as guilty of humanity’s polyglot condition. Mankind turns out to have always been multilingual—as Dante’s theory of the inevitable emergence of different languages out of differing contexts would suggest. In Canto XXVI of the Paradiso, Dante meets Adam, the first soul, who makes clear that the language he spoke was not that of Babel. His words conjure an almost Darwinian sense of linguistic evolution in which many languages are continually being born, evolving, and dying. “The tongue I spoke,” Adam says,
before the followers of Nimrod turned their minds
to their unattainable ambition.3
Yet before we embrace Dante too readily as a standard-bearer for linguistic plurality, let’s remember one of the primary aims his masterpiece was intended to achieve—and did achieve, in very large measure. Dante wrote passionately in De Vulgari Eloquentia of the need for an “illustrious vernacular” that would replace the “cacophony of the many varieties of Italian speech” with a single, enlightening, exalting, and unifying language.4 Viewed within the context of the domination of European thought by Latin, the Commedia constitutes a bold argument for the vernacular, for linguistic plurality. Viewed in the context of the many competing dialects out of which modern Italian emerged, the Commedia is a work of consolidation and unification, a step toward monolingualism of a different sort.
That monolingualism has reached an apogee centuries later with a quite different language: English. Its rise was foreseen as early as 1780 by John Adams, who wrote, “English is destined to be in the next and succeeding centuries more generally the language of the world than Latin was in the last or French is in the present age.”5 Adams was prescient: English is now indisputably the dominant global lingua franca, and this puts the contemporary English-language translator in a peculiar position. Certainly, translators into English can be said to labor in the service of monolingualism, as translation consolidates the global domination of English by increasing the degree to which the culture of the entire globe is available through English. At the same time, translation works to strengthen the pluralism of world languages and cultures by giving writers in all languages the opportunity to reach English’s global audience while still writing in their native tongues. Sheldon Pollock has compellingly summed up “the single desperate choice we are now offered: between, on the one hand, a national vernacularity dressed in the frayed period costume of violent revanchism and bent on preserving difference at all costs and, on the other, a clear-cutting, strip-mining multinational cosmopolitanism that is bent, at all costs, on eliminating it.”6 In the sphere of literature, at least, translation offers an alternative, a way beyond these mutually exclusive extremes.
In the current phase of linguistic globalization, second- or third-language acquisition (second, if the student’s native language is English; third, if it is something other than English) occupies an embattled place in universities in many parts of the world, which are seeing language departments other than those that teach English targeted for cuts. Lawrence H. Summers, former president of Harvard University, has openly questioned the usefulness of investing educational resources in the study of any language other than English, declaring in an article published in the New York Times (January 20, 2012): “English’s emergence as the global language, along with the rapid progress in machine translation and the fragmentation of languages spoken around the world, make it less clear that the substantial investment necessary to speak a foreign tongue is worthwhile.”7 (Summers is less vehement than his predecessors on an early nineteenth-century Harvard University committee, who weighed in on the hotly debated subject of allowing modern languages into the curriculum—as opposed to Greek and Latin—by proclaiming that “the simplistic grammatical structures and base literature of modern languages would irreparably harm a student’s capacity for disciplined learning.”8)
A long list of intellectual, literary, socio-cultural, political, diplomatic, and neurobiological arguments could be adduced to counter the idea that foreign language study is not worth the investment, but that is not our subject here. In short, people benefit enormously in a number of ways from learning languages and should learn as many as they can. But no one can or will learn all languages, and that irrefutable fact must not be a barrier to the circulation of literature and culture. Those Nabokovian linguistic purists who turn up their noses at translations are inadvertently adopting a stance oddly similar to “English only,” the rallying cry of citizens’ groups in the United States who want to block the use of languages other than English in government communications and public schools. Denying the intellectual and artistic value of translation closes off English to other languages and leads to a situation in which books not written in English are undervalued or ignored, even as students in the English sphere are less and less likely to acquire a second language over the course of their education: “English only,” indeed.
For the great German translation theorist of the early nineteenth century, Friedrich Schleiermacher, the fact that no one can learn all the world’s languages makes translation crucial. In his view, the exceptional linguistic finesse of the best translations transports the reader to the author’s social and cultural sphere, “transplant[ing] … entire literatures into a single tongue.”9 The preservation of cultural specificity through the translator’s skill is also implied in Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s description of the aim of what he called the third and highest epoch of translation (after paraphrase and loosely appropriative translation): “to achieve perfect identity with the original, so that the one does not exist instead of the other but in the other’s place.”10 While the ultimate feasibility of either theorist’s goal can be debated, without translation to engage people with literatures written in languages other than their own, Goethe’s sublime notion of Weltliteratur (world literature) could not exist. To be sure, in the era of the global book market, Weltliteratur may seem just another name for globalization, a thing to be resisted in the name of preserving local values. But Goethe had in mind something other than global best-sellerdom for Dan Brown, J. K. Rowling, and Stieg Larsson. In his view, it was precisely the constant traffic among the literatures of the world in all their plurality that kept each of them alive: “Left to itself, every literature will exhaust its vitality if it is not refreshed by the interest and contributions of a foreign one.”11
Today, the English-language translator occupies a particularly complex ethical position. To translate is to negotiate a fraught matrix of interactions. As a writer of the language of global power, the translator into English must remain ever aware of the power differential that tends to subsume cultural difference and subordinate it to a globally uniform, market-oriented monoculture. Weltliteratur is no longer (and may never have been) politically, culturally, or ethically neutral. At the same time, the failure to translate into English, the absence of translation, is clearly the most effective way of all to consolidate the global monoculture and exclude those who write and read in other languages from the far-reaching global conversation for which English is increasingly the vehicle.
Nevertheless, contemporary discussions of translation’s role—particularly in the English-speaking world—sometimes attest to a stance that barely differs from that of Dante’s Virgil, mourning for a lost prelapsarian oneness and concomitant frustration with the affliction of linguistic diversity. This attitude, as David Bellos observes, portrays translation as little more than “a compensatory strategy designed only to cope with a state of affairs that falls far short of the ideal.”12 All translation, in this view, is invariably an inadequate substitute for an original text that can only be legitimately apprehended in the purity of its original language.
To say of translation—as is so often said—that “the original meaning is always lost” is to deny the history of literature and the ability of any text to be enriched by the new meanings that are engendered as it enters new contexts—that is, as it remains alive and is read anew. The ability to speak and be understood, to write and be read, is one of the great desiderata of the human spirit. Meaning is a slippery fish, but all of us—and translators and writers more than most—prefer to live in a world where people make an effort to be intelligible to one another. This makes it hard to deplore the global rise of a lingua franca. Communication is never easy, but having a common language unquestionably makes it easier. The problem arises when those whose lives are made more convenient by the predominance of this lingua franca forget translation’s vital role in most sorts of intercultural communication. A view of translation as loss and betrayal—the translator’s presence a “problematic necessity,” as one of the contributors to this volume, Eliot Weinberger, once saw himself described—stubbornly persists, supported at one extreme of the intellectual spectrum by those who would have everyone read works only in their original languages, and at the other by those who would have everyone read and write in a single, global language, thus potentially advancing what Michael Cronin has described as the “dystopian scenario of the information-language nexus [that] would see everyone translating themselves into the language or languages of the primary suppliers of information and so dispensing with the externality of translation.”13
Our purpose in putting together this anthology is simple. We believe that there is much to be found in translation, and much to celebrate. Translation not only brings us the work of those who write in other languages; it simultaneously reveals the limits of our own language and helps us move beyond them, incorporating new words, concepts, styles, structures, and stories. Thinking about translation means thinking about the gaps in our literature and our ability to communicate, revealed by comparison with the capacities of other languages and traditions of thought. It also means thinking about the gaps in our political and cultural discourses, asking ourselves what and who has been left out. And finally, as Clare Cavanagh so beautifully demonstrates in the essay on relations between Polish and American poetry in the twentieth century that concludes this volume, it means thinking about the ways the literatures of different languages are perpetually enriched and revitalized by translation.
Anuvad, the Hindi word for translate, means “to tell again,” as Christi A. Merrill notes. When you tell a story, you become part of that story, and the translator too becomes part of the stories he or she tells. Yet translation inevitably involves guises and masks that can make this truth difficult to perceive; translators, like actors, appear to us under a persona, speaking to us with words that both are and are not their own. In the contemporary Anglophone world this fact does not keep us from appreciating actors. Often, however, it keeps us from even noticing the work of translators. To perceive the translator as endowed with agency, intent, skill, and creativity is to destabilize the foundations of the way we read, forcing us to take in both a text and a literary performance of that text, to see two figures where our training as readers, our literary upbringing, has accustomed us to seeing only the author.
This new century has shown itself to be an age of translation. A world once bifurcated by superpowers has become a place of new pluralities, with different parts of the globe continually coming to prominence. The Internet has given us an entirely new source of access to cultures not our own. We no longer wait for media purveyors to decide what to show us, but can instead go in search of content that interests us without leaving our homes. The Internet has affected every aspect of the translator’s work, from the process of producing a translation to the mode of publication, the scope of the audience, and the depth and complexity of the preexisting relationship between source and target languages and texts, particularly when the target language is English. It has also made various forms of machine translation available to everyone, thereby encouraging the belief that soon all translation will be effected by computers. At a point in the history of globalization when literary translation strikes some as on the verge of being definitively outmoded—the translator a scrivener about to be left behind by technological progress—the essays in this book, all written by translators, address the vital necessity of literary translation not only as a subject for theoretical pronouncements but also as an ongoing practice.
A paradigm shift in the translator’s role is under way in the Anglophone world. There is a generational move toward an image of the translator as an intellectual figure empowered with agency and sensibility who produces knowledge by curating cultural encounters. This shift has come about for a number of reasons, including the rise of the Internet and the power it can confer on individuals who attract an audience; a surge of interest and energy around the issue of translation into English since September 11, 2001; and an increased willingness within the Anglophone academy to view translation as a form of scholarship, as attested by the Executive Council of the Modern Language Association’s 2011 issuance of a set of guidelines for evaluating translation as scholarship.14 A burgeoning in recent years of smaller publishing houses and magazines focused on translation—some of which have cultivated large followings among younger readers in particular—has meant that both the production and reception of literatures not written in English have become less monolithic, less dependent on the tastes and marketing engines of the world’s publishing behemoths (some of the largest of which are owned by Dutch, German, and French corporations, which seem no more eager to foster translation into English than their U.S. and UK-based competitors). What we are seeing now, and what we hope to see more of, is a more horizontal process of reception and connoisseurship, a more directly representative and inclusive scenario by which the literatures of many languages have more diverse points of access into the global literary culture that exists in English.
In this anthology, literary translators from widely varying backgrounds, languages, fields, and genres are summoned into the spotlight to speak of the part they play in the works they have translated. If most of their stories were originally written in English, that is because our avowed purpose is to underscore the significance of the translator and translation in the English-speaking world. At the same time, we reject the global tendency so often seen in the social sciences, following behind the hard sciences, toward the universal use of English as the language of research. The translated essays included here—Haruki Murakami’s preface to his translation of The Great Gatsby into Japanese, and José Manuel Prieto’s essay about translating a poem by Osip Mandelstam from Russian into Spanish—invite further inquiry into cultures of translation that exist outside of English and may furnish alternate models for the further development of a translation culture within English.15
This volume’s first part, “The Translator in the World,” explores attitudes toward translation as seen in a variety of ethical, cultural, political, historical, and even legal contexts and offers a number of perspectives on the understanding and self-understanding of translators in the literary and critical arena. The essays by Peter Cole and Eliot Weinberger address ethical and political concerns, while David Bellos interrogates the ways translation engages with “the foreign.” Michael Emmerich describes the construction of the concept of translation within the Japanese language. Catherine Porter, former president of the Modern Language Association, addresses the place of translation in the contemporary North American university and its status as a form of scholarship. Alice Kaplan reports as both translator and translated author on some of the legal complications to which the art of translation is subject, while Esther Allen assesses a 150-year history of translation between Latin American Spanish and English.
The second part, “The Translator at Work,” focuses on questions of craft and considers specific acts of translation from various points of view. Forrest Gander raises the question of bilingualism in his translations of contemporary Mexican poetry. Maureen Freely describes the challenges of negotiating Western preconceptions of Turkey in translating the work of Orhan Pamuk and shows how a translator’s political engagement with a text continues long after it is published. Christi A. Merrill connects translation with ethnography and oral storytelling traditions from Rajasthan to the Mitteleuropa of the Brothers Grimm. Jason Grunebaum writes of the distinctions between the English of the United States and that of India and the dilemmas they pose for the translator of a contemporary Hindi novel. Haruki Murakami’s essay on the challenges of translating The Great Gatsby into Japanese describes the work as the culmination of a lifetime of literary preparation, while Ted Goossen translates and contextualizes Murakami’s essay within the literary culture of contemporary Japan. Lawrence Venuti offers a defense of theory as an antidote to “belletristic commentary” in his exploration of the use of intertexts in translating the archaic Italian religious poet Jacopone da Todi. Richard Sieburth demonstrates how the musicality of the sixteenth-century French poet Maurice Scève can be performed in contemporary English. José Manuel Prieto, translated by Esther Allen, ponders Stalinist totalitarianism and the relationship between translation and commentary. Susan Bernofsky strategizes the revision of literary translations into and out of German, inviting us to consider translation itself a space of writing. Finally, Clare Cavanagh meditates on the “art of loss” in the translation of contemporary Polish poetry and the riches to be found in a practice so widely associated with impoverishment and failure.
Against the hegemony of a single language whose literature, governed to an ever-greater extent by marketing considerations, is exported across the globe, translators interpose joyful multiplicity and a richness of cultural content and linguistic interplay; they invite us to engage in a more genuinely cosmopolitan literary and cultural conversation. Translators are writers and curators of cultural interaction who transport us between linguistic spheres, making their languages listen as well as speak and transforming them into vehicles for a wide range of literary traditions. Such is the culture of translation this book seeks to advance.
Esther Allen and Susan Bernofsky
Notes
1. Dante, Inferno, trans. Robert and Jean Hollander (New York: Doubleday, 2000), 567.
3. Dante, Paradiso, trans. Robert and Jean Hollander (New York: Doubleday, 2007).
4. Dante, De Vulgari Eloquentia, trans. Steven Botterill (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 27.
5. This line from John Adams’s letter to the President of Congress (September 5, 1780) is cited by David Crystal in his valuable work on the role of English in globalization, English as a Global Language (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 74.
6. Sheldon Pollock, “Cosmopolitan and Vernacular in History,” in Cosmopolitanism, ed. Carol A. Breckenridge, Sheldon Pollock, Homi K. Bhabha, and Dipesh Chakrabarty (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002), 17.
8. Cited by Lino Pertile in his introduction to Dante, Inferno, trans. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1867), ed. Matthew Pearl (New York: Modern Library, 2003), xii.
9. Friedrich Schleiermacher, “On the Different Methods of Translating,” trans. Susan Bernofsky, in The Translation Studies Reader, 2nd ed., ed. Lawrence Venuti (New York and London: Routledge, 2004), 55.
10. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, “Translations,” trans. Sharon Sloan, in The Translation Studies Reader, 2nd ed., 65.
11. Goethe, “Some Passages Pertaining to the Concept of World Literature” (from Weltliteratur, 1827), in Comparative Literature: The Early Years, no trans. credited, ed. H. J. Schulz and P. H. Rhein (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1973), 7. For a useful discussion of Goethe’s notion of Weltliteratur and contemporary literary globalization, see David Damrosch, “Goethe Coins a Phrase” in his What Is World Literature? (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003), 1–36.
12. David Bellos, Is That a Fish in Your Ear? Translation and the Meaning of Everything (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2011), 326.
13. Michael Cronin, Translation and Globalization (New York: Routledge, 2003), 16.
15. For more on the issue of translation in the social sciences, see Michael Henry Heim and Andrzej W. Tymowski, Guidelines for the Translation of Social Science Texts (New York: American Council of Learned Societies, 2006).