I first got the notion of translating when I was learning Italian by reading Natalia Ginzburg, one of Italy’s greatest writers of the twentieth century: novelist, essayist, biographer, chronicler of the war years and the stunned, chaotic melancholy of the postwar period. Her essays were marvels of emotional and psychological penetration, written in deceptively simple language, simple enough for a beginner. Although Ginzburg wrote of a kind of suffering I could only imagine—her internal exile during the war, the Fascists’ murder of her husband—I felt an immediate affinity with her idiom. The shape and structure of the sentences felt familiar, almost as if I could have written them myself—they followed so closely the patterns and syntax my own mind generated. Except I hadn’t lived the life and I didn’t know the language. Still, I wanted to get close to those sentences, get inside them.
The best way to do this was to translate them, which I did. A labor of love, narcissistic, like communing with myself in a new tongue.
From there I became interested in the process itself. Transferring words, thoughts, sounds from one language to another. A kind of alchemy, and as usual with alchemical experiments, it takes a near miracle to make it yield anything precious. But this near miracle occurs more often than one might expect. Translation has been going on for millennia. There have always been intrepid and willing translators like those who brought Homer and the Trojan War to Western Europe, or the Italian novellas of the Renaissance to Britain, for which Shakespeare was clearly grateful. Not to mention the translators of the King James version of the Bible. The examples are countless, and in recent times have come from every continent and every era. They are the cultural foundation that has shaped us, that we take for granted. The ways we conduct private and public affairs would be quite different without them.
All the while there have been ready detractors. Their disparagements are well known: Chana Bloch refers to several in her essay, “Crossing the Border” (which suggested the title for this collection). My favorite is by Cervantes, that translation is “the other side of the tapestry.” Not a bad definition, come to think of it; it’s provocative and yields a striking visual image, curious in itself, if not something we’d want to hang on the wall. And of course there’s the often-cited Italian equation: “traduttore = traditore,” translator means traitor, which has endured not because it’s true but because it’s clever.
What I strove to be while translating Ginzburg was the opposite of a traitor. An accomplice. I wanted to work alongside her toward the same end—bringing her vision to readers, resounding in my native tongue rather than hers. To manage this I needed to find the places where her sensibility and my own connected, like wires that produce sparks. These points of connection would have nothing to do with biographical similarities; they were not anything that could be named. I imagined her inside my head and gave her my excellent facility with English. At the same time I tried to inhabit her, to feel what it was she felt compelled to find words for, her Italian words. An odd form of intimacy. A neat, if impossible, acrobatic feat. Later I realized I was following along the lines of the seventeenth-century British poet John Dryden’s definition of translation. When he was translating Virgil, he said, he wanted Virgil to speak as if he were living in the seventeenth century and writing in English.
Translation theorists have taken issue with this definition— indeed with every rival definition—on a number of grounds. As the number of translated works has grown, so the theoretical baggage has grown along with them, dragged behind on wheels, as it were. Translation theory is rife with novelty, argument, enthusiasm, and controversy—all of which shows that translation itself is alive and well. Some of the controversies are oppositional and unsolvable, like nature versus nurture. Should translations be faithful (to the letter?) or free (to the point of paraphrase?). Even broader is the question of whether translation is possible at all. Can one language ever render all the verbal, intellectual, aural subtleties and connotations of another? The great German critic Walter Benjamin, in his famous, inspiring, and occasionally impenetrable essay, “The Task of the Translator,” comes down on the side of the possibles. Translation, he writes, “expresses the central reciprocal relationship between languages.” Since all languages are interrelated in what they hope to express, Benjamin posits a “pure language,” an abstraction of all of the world’s languages, from which each translation draws and in which each partakes. “It is the task of the translator to release in his own language that pure language which is under the spell of another, to liberate the language imprisoned in a work in his re-creation of that work.” I especially like the notion of our English being imprisoned in, say, Sophocles’s Greek, and needing the translator’s strong hands to release it.
The contemporary critic George Steiner takes a similarly positive view of translation’s efficacy: the central theme of his great book After Babel is, “Inside or between languages, human communication equals translation.” In the simplest terms, finding words for an inchoate idea or feeling is a form of translation; giving it shape and voice is another stage of the process; and having it heard and comprehended completes the translation cycle. And that is only the beginning of communication. (Speaking of communication, it is a pity that the United States lags far behind other developed countries in translating major works from all over the world. Visit a bookstore in other urban centers and you’ll find dozens of translated books, many that of them important American works. Publishers and bookstores here don’t reciprocate.)
In any event, I suspect most translators are not influenced by theory as they work; I know from experience that writers don’t write with critics’ voices in their heads—unless they want to provoke a migraine.
I became far more absorbed in practice than in theory. The more I translated, the more I was enchanted by the inner process, the peculiar cohabitation that takes place within the translator. This enchantment persisted even when I translated authors for whom I didn’t start out feeling any spectacular affinity. Even so, the task required a kind of moving into the thought processes of another. When I was done I felt I knew those authors, the same way you might a know a stranger you share an intimate dance with, a perfect dancing partner, who teaches you new steps, and the feel of whose body in motion you never forget.
On a more selfish level, I loved the process because it felt like writing; it had all the piquant delights of seeking and finding words, arranging and rearranging them, molding the sentences like Play-Doh, taking them apart and molding them again, and again. And all this without having to make anything up! It was all done for you, waiting on the page. It offered the most pleasurable parts of writing, without the burden—or nuisance—of invention.
Translating may feel like writing, it is a form of writing, but in fact the art it resembles most is acting. The actor starts with words on a page—the given, the text—that present and define a character. His or her job is to recreate that character, to give it tangible life by using his own body’s movements and gestures, his own voice and inflections. Like the translator, the actor must find her way into the writer’s vision, and then find an analogue of that vision within herself. So we can speak of Olivier’s Hamlet in contrast to Kevin Kline’s Hamlet, say, as we do of Pope’s translation of Homer in contrast to Robert Fagles’s. Or the many versions of Dante, a work that great poets in English cannot resist; there are so many translations, and so many fine ones.
Since I’m primarily a fiction writer, I began wondering what other fiction writers would make of the task of the translator— to use Walter Benjamin’s famous phrase (appropriated with high irony in Todd Hasak-Lowy’s story). I searched out examples of stories in which translation or translators were the major theme. I was surprised by what I found: how many there were, and how many wonderful writers had been provoked by the subject. It was no surprise, though, that two of the situations that occurred most frequently—as the pages that follow will show—are love and war. They are situations that afford the greatest opportunities for misunderstanding, impulsive action, disappointment, illusion, and disillusion. In Joyce Carol Oates’s story, “The Translation,” the American “cultural emissary” to an Eastern European country falls in love with the colleague he gets to know through a translator; but when he’s assigned a new, less personally appealing translator, the love vanishes like unspoken words. Does he love the woman, or the translator, or some phantasmal merging of both? In “The Translator,” Lucy Ferriss shows the unease and incomprehension a young American living abroad feels toward her lover—again in an unnamed Eastern European country—who speaks so many languages that she cannot place him, except in an opaque silence. And Susan Daitch’s “Asylum” illustrates translation of a different kind—movie subtitles; the full impact of her many-layered story is not realized until the end.
I was curious, too, about what other translators made of the enigmatic alchemy simmering in their heads as they worked. Luckily a number have told their stories. Chana Bloch recalls her engagement with the Song of Songs, which required audacity in addition to skill and love; after reading her essay, our comprehension of the Song of Songs is changed forever. Michael Scammell’s essay on translating two early works of Nabokov—by accident, as it were—while he was still a graduate student is an amusing and revealing account of the lengthy correspondence he carried on not with the author himself, but with Nabokov’s wife and spokesperson, Vera. And if undertaking to translate takes nerve, offering oneself up for translation does as well. Primo Levi’s take on translation—he himself did a great deal of it—seems less kindly toward the process. Instead he is wary of the many pitfalls that await both the translator and the translated. Like Levi, I remember looking at some translated works of mine with a kind of dread; sometimes I felt relief, and sometimes I recoiled in shock and horror. And Laura Esther Wolfson, in a wry personal essay, describes conducting her marriage in Russian, her husband’s native tongue: could this have been a factor in the demise of the relationship? She thinks not, but cunningly suggests evidence to the contrary.
I was also surprised by how much of the fiction employs a similar framework: the United States at war, or after a war, sending its military to deal with the locals, some of whom may be secret rebels or refugees hoping to emigrate. The stories by David Huddle (set in Korea), Courtney Angela Brkic (in an unnamed Middle Eastern country), and Sharon May (set in Cambodia) share an implicit outrage at the ignorance of the occupiers. These characters make misguided use of interpreters, who in turn make use of them. Deceptions proliferate. Much is said; little is understood.
Besides the misunderstandings of language, magnified by interpreters whose allegiance is ambiguous, there are insurmountable cultural differences that no amount of translation can erase. Because of custom and usage, a Cambodian hoping to emigrate, in “The Wizard of Khao-I-Dang,” cannot say his brother’s name or the year of his birth in a way that will satisfy the American interrogator. Finally, there is the matter of individual will: in fiction as in life, not everyone wants to be understood. To some characters, misunderstanding in love or war brings a distinct advantage.
Svetlana Velmar-Janovic’s “Sima Street” is based on a historical event in Belgrade, but given the events of the ’90s in Bosnia and Serbia, it refers pointedly to modern times. And Norman Lavers’s story “The Translator” presents a translator with unpopular liberal views in an unnamed country, grown old, half starved, who’s spent her life shunted in and out of prison. In the midst of doing a most unusual translation of Hamlet, she is interrupted yet again by the police banging at her door.
The sober, ascetic translator of Michelle Herman’s “Auslander” lives up to her name: an outsider. She keeps her life orderly and keeps her distance from emotional entanglement, but she cannot resist the work of a brilliant Rumanian poet—a task that embroils her in the disorderly lives of others.
A number of the stories take a half-playful attitude toward translation: both Todd Hasak-Lowy’s and Robin Hemley’s protagonists feel justly inadequate to the translation tasks demanded of them. Hemley’s character is faced with the absurdity of adding gay sex to translations of classic Chinese poetry; while the reader chuckles, the hero is forced into an uneasy self-awareness. Hasa-kLowy’s story spirals by leaps and bounds into farce, at the same time that it raises old-world ghosts of past wars, persecutions, and sacrifices. And in “French Lesson I: Le Meurtre,” Lydia Davis plays slyly with words and their dissemblings: she lays the guilty words out like pieces of a puzzle, leaving it to the reader to reconstruct the plot, as in a true murder mystery.
Like translation itself, the situations are rarely simple. I find the variations in tone and style and mood a constant refreshment. The task of the reader, like that of the translator, is examination, interpretation, and above all, pleasure in the marvels that language can accomplish.