For Jill Levine, usque ad mortem
Think not that I am come to send peace on earth:
I come not to send peace, but a sword.
(Matthew 10:34)
The words of a great if seditious teacher. We might wonder if he said them with either a smile or a grin on His face, just as we will never be sure if the translators of the King James Bible could tell the difference between smile and grin in Aramaic. What He had to say was so radical that it would tear families asunder.
The following discussion is not that radical. But what might sound radical is my wish to shift the subject of translation away from politics, esthetics, and sociological lucubrations in order to see it instead as work. Does that make it banal? Maybe, if you assume that work—getting things done, properly done, rather than talking about how they might get done or what the possible consequences might be of their getting done—is boring. Does this mean that I decry translation theory? Not at all. Here is a theoretical angle to consider. Let us imagine a chance encounter: Two tribes or clans meet at opposite sides of a stream. They could fight, but neither has any advantage in numbers or position. Suddenly a member from each side moves forward, pointing. The one on the left is pointing to some beautifully woven baskets the people on the right are carrying, baskets of all kinds with intricate figures and patterns woven into them. The one on the right is pointing to some small shields the men on the left are carrying. Deerskin targets painted with signs.
The group with the shields wants baskets; the group with the baskets wants shields. There’s a deal in the air: But how are they going to figure out how many baskets a shield is worth and vice versa? It was then, in this economy of exchange, that the first translators appeared. They took it upon themselves to create equivalence. There are more baskets than shields, so it takes more than one basket to get one shield. At the end of the day, each clan goes its way thinking they’ve made the deal of a lifetime.
What really happened? First, metaphor was born, the idea that an equivalency was established between things (baskets and shields) that are in no way equivalent or even comparable. Second, the parties involved in the transaction believed the equivalency between baskets and shields was real, that one shield was truly worth x-number of baskets. But the exchange was entirely fictitious, not just because I made it up, but because accepting metaphor as fact is an act of faith unrelated to the real objects involved: The substitution of metaphor for reality may be the distinctive feature of what it means to be human. Without that faith we could have neither dollars nor bitcoins.
The translation that establishes an equivalency (and let’s not forget that metaphor derives from transference) between baskets and shields is a fiction, a lie. The metaphoric equal sign (=) between baskets and shields tells us it’s all make-believe. But that act of self-deception is essential: All acts of exchange are built on it, right down to the one in which I am engaged in here. So translation establishes imaginary or metaphoric equivalencies.
The translation of a text from one language into another, the rephrasing or paraphrasing of a text in the same language, the transmutation of words into visual images (murals, movies, performances): despite the fact that all are rooted in language, are different things. The conceptual artist Lawrence Weiner graphically represented this idea in a 1969 piece composed of two wedge-shaped pieces (like doorstops) placed back to back. On one, in yellow letters, are the English words “A Translation from One Language to Another” and on the other it says the same thing in Dutch but in black letters. They’re the same, but they aren’t the same. This means that when we reverse the equivalence that metaphor establishes, we return to difference—to the fact that shields and baskets are not equivalents, that saying “A Translation from One Language to Another” in English or Dutch is two different things.
But isn’t something always “lost in translation”? Yes. Let’s go back to the baskets and the shields. The patterns woven into the baskets were not random but deliberate. They defined the use to which the basket was to be put and displayed the icon of the clan. The shields contained the pictographic biography of the owner. In the exchange, all those particularities and specificities are lost, and what is information becomes design or art.
For those fictitious groups, let’s substitute the meeting of 17th-century Dutch traders with Native Americans on the island of Manhattan. We’re told the Native Americans were cheated when Peter Minuit exchanged $24 worth of miscellaneous items for Manhattan. What did the Native Americans get? Blankets, knives, kettles, and hatchets as well as the promise of military support. The Native Americans had no knowledge of legal contracts or land ownership, so there were misunderstandings on both sides. But the goods the Native Americans got were things they themselves couldn’t produce—imagine trying to chop wood with a stone ax. How do you cook a stew without a pot? So the same self-deception we saw earlier applies in the real 17th century. An exchange of pseudo equivalencies took place, though, once again, total communication was absent.
All societies create names for sensory experiences. Therefore, we can translate them, but when we do we are immediately trading in metaphors: “the lady in red” who epitomizes sexual allure for us might be a grieving widow in another culture. Let’s add another ingredient to those metaphorizing Cro-Magnons and colonizing Dutchmen: irony. Like metaphor, irony is consubstantial with translation precisely because it is the flashpoint of metaphor, the moment we know words and not sensory perceptions are creating our reality. Irony has so many connotations: saying one thing but meaning another or simply pointing out the gap between the things metaphor is trying to bring together. René Magritte’s picture of the pipe with the inscription “This is not a pipe.” is a good example.
Irony explains why I wanted to use this economic model of translation. On the one hand, I think it works, and on the other it shows the necessity, the inevitability, and the absurdity of translation. Let’s get our hands dirty by dealing with real translations and see when the metaphor works and when it doesn’t. I was asked by the Spanish division of Random House to check the translations of Philip Roth into Spanish for both accuracy and literary quality.
The first book was American Pastoral (1997), a traditional novel with psychologically complex characters living through a complicated period in U.S. history: from World War II until Vietnam. The setting is New Jersey, whose economic and social history Roth meticulously dissects. The original Spanish version illustrates everything I’ve said about translation as self-deceptive exchange. The first issue was neither about English nor Spanish: The translator deleted all the Yiddish words in Roth’s text. When I asked why, he said that while those expressions “fit in” with English, they don’t blend well with Spanish. I consulted several people, including Roth’s close friend Carlos Fuentes. Fuentes agreed with the translator, believing that the Spanish reader wouldn’t know what those words meant. He automatically assumed that most of Roth’s readers were Jews and that Jews know Yiddish, but the fact is that for the vast majority of Roth’s readers, including American Jews under 40, most of those words would be meaningless.
Why did Roth include Yiddish words? First, to mark a difference between generations. The father of the protagonist (Seymour Levov, nicknamed “the Swede” because he’s blond and athletic) uses lots of Yiddish words because he’s from a generation that spoke Yiddish at home. The Swede belongs to a generation of “assimilated Jews” who avoid such words. But the narrator, Roth’s alter-ego Nathan Zuckerman, along with the Swede’s brother and their friends, use Yiddish when they want to express their difference from the Christian world surrounding them. So, second, the Yiddish words, understood or not, are really symbols or cultural markers—like the images on the baskets or shields—rather than words used as communication. In fact, the translator had an advantage because he could include a parenthetical explanation.
The first sentences of any novel are extremely important: We’re staring at three or four hundred pages of prose, so we’d rather be seduced than repelled. Roth begins:
The Swede. . . . During the war years, when I was still a grade school boy, this was a magical name in our Newark neighborhood, even to adults just a generation removed from the city’s old Prince Street ghetto and not yet so flawlessly Americanized as to be bowled over by the prowess of a high school athlete. The name was magical; so was the anomalous face. Of the few fair-complexioned Jewish students in our preponderantly Jewish public high school, none possessed anything remotely like the steep-jawed, insentient Viking mask of this blue-eyed blond born into our tribe as Seymour Irving.1
The translation:
El Sueco. . . . Durante los años de la guerra, cuando yo todavía iba a la escuela primaria, ése era un nombre mágico en nuestro vecindario de Newark, incluso para los adultos a los que sólo una generación separaba del viejo gueto de la calle Prince y que aún no estaba tan impecablemente americanizados como para quedarse como si les hubiera dado un balonazo en la cara ante la destreza de un atleta de escuela media. Su nombre era tan mágico como su rostro anómalo. Entre los pocos alum-nos de tez blanca en nuestra escuela, donde preponderaban los judíos, ninguno poseía nada que se pareciera ni remotamente a la máscara vikinga inexpresiva y de mandíbula escarpada de aquel rubio con ojos azules nacido en nuestra tribu con el nombre de Seymour Irving Levov.2
Zuckerman first evokes the Swede and then refers to the “the war years,” “los años de la guerra.” For Zuckerman, the war is World War II. For the Swede, that war ends not with the defeat of Hitler but when the atomic bombs fall on Japan. That’s because he denies his Jewishness by joining the Marines to fight the Japanese in the Pacific rather than the Army to fight the Germans in Europe. No translation can capture this. After the war, the Swede begins a new life, complete with non-Jewish wife, a life that abruptly ends in 1968, when his daughter accidentally kills an innocent man while protesting the Vietnam War. Would Spanish readers see all this?
Zuckerman says, “when I was still a grade school boy,” translated as “cuando yo todavía iba a la escuela primaria.” The English is slightly strange; we’d usually say “when I was still in grade school,” but Roth emphasizes the word “boy” to heighten the sexual and social immaturity of Zuckerman and the others who idolize the Swede. Also—and how could this be incorporated into the translation?—grade school then ran from first to eight grade. There was no middle school, so when you entered high school as a freshman, you also entered puberty. So the pre-sexual boy gets lost in translation along with the comparison of boys to men, which is central to the novel. The Swede is such a great athlete that in high school he’s a man among boys, though later he will turn out emotionally to be a boy among men.
Roth says “as to be bowled over,” an ordinary metaphor derived from a sport—bowling. The translator first said “les dejara atónitos,” which eliminates the sports metaphor but is concise. Changed to “como si les hubieran dado un balonazo en la cara,” the translator creates a sports image but loses concision. Which is better, retaining the metaphor or brevity?
Roth continues: “The name was magical; so was the anomalous face.” A short, symmetrical sentence. The translator originally translated “anomalous” as “fuera de lo corriente.” The published version is better because it retains the sharpness of the original. Zuckerman also mentions “the few fair-complexioned Jewish students,” transformed into “los pocos alumnos de tez blanca.” Roth means there are few nordic types like the Swede in the school, but “tez blanca” seems to distinguish whites from blacks, conspicuously absent from Weequahic High School.
Roth, curiously, says “public high school,” perhaps to point out that these Jews are too poor to go to private schools (assuming any would accept Jews). The subject of private schools comes up later when Roth contrasts the world of lower-middle-class Jews to the world of rich Christians: A woman says that when she was a girl she went to boarding school and brought her horse with her. Swede’s father finds the idea that a girl could own her own horse surrealistic and cannot comprehend why any parent would ever want to send a child away to school. What Jewish mother would send her son to boarding school?
Zuckerman refers to the Swede’s face as an “insentient Viking mask.” “Insentient” first became “inanimada,” which suggests the inanimate, while “insentient” suggests an “absence of perception, consciousness, or animation,”3 traits that reflect the Swede’s personality. “Inexpresiva” is much better, but we’d all have to admit that “insentient” is certainly an odd word. It’s 1995, and the Swede, though Zuckerman doesn’t know it, is dying. The Swede wants to talk Zuckerman into writing a book about his father, a major player in Newark’s defunct glove industry, but what he really wants is the book we’re reading, a book that immortalizes him. Suddenly this meditation appears in which Zuckerman talks about our incapacity to understand others:
You fight your superficiality, your shallowness, so as to try to come at people without unreal expectations, without an overload of bias or hope or arrogance, as untanklike as you can be, sans cannon and machine guns and steel plating half a foot thick; you come at them unmenacingly on your own ten toes instead of tearing up the turf with your caterpillar treads, take them on with an open mind, as equals, man to man, as we used to say, and yet you never fail to get them wrong. You might as well have the brain of a tank. You get them wrong before you meet them, while you’re anticipating meeting them; you get them wrong while you’re with them; and then you go home to tell somebody else about the meeting and you get them all wrong again. Since the same generally goes for them with you, the whole thing is really a dazzling illusion empty of all perception, an astonishing farce of misperception.4
The translation:
Luchas contra tu superioridad, tu trivialidad, procurando no tener unas expectativas irreales sobre la gente, relacionarte con los demás sin una sobrecarga de parcialidad, esperanza o arrogancia, lo menos parecido a un carro de combate que te es posible, sin cañón ni ametralladoras ni un blindaje de acero con un grosor de quince centímetros. No te acercas a ellos en actitud amenazante, sino que lo haces con tus dos pies y no arrancando la hierba con las articulaciones de una oruga, te enfrentas a ellos sin prejuicios, como iguales, de hombre a hombre, como solíamos decir, y sin embargo siempre los malentiendes. Es como si tuvieras el cerebro de un carro de combate. Los malentiendes antes de reunirte con ellos, mientras esperas el momento del encuentro; los malentiendes cuando estáis juntos, y luego, al volver a casa y contarle a alguien el encuentro, vuelves a melentenderlos (sic). Puesto que, en general, lo mismo les sucede a ellos con respecto a ti, todo esto resulta en verdad una ilusión deslumbradora carente de toda percepción, una asombrosa farsa de incomprensión.
A mistake? Perhaps. The English says “superficiality,” and the translation says “superioridad.” The translator knows what superficiality means, but his eyes tricked him, and he saw “superioridad.” That kind of error is easy to make and hard to detect—if indeed this was an error but it could have also been an interpretation of an underlying meaning or connotation.
Here are a few differences of opinion. “Shallowness” works as “trivialidad,” but in this context “shallowness” simply reinforces the “superficiality” that precedes it. The verb “to come at” is rendered “relacionarte,” which erases the aggression in the original that fits in with the combative tone of the passage. Then Roth says “sans cannon and machine guns and steel plating half a foot thick,” “sans” may be a Shakespearian echo (Jacques in As You Like It ), and instead of using the more common expression “six inches of armor,” he says “half a foot,” which sounds more serious. The fifteen centimeters in the translation is an exact equivalent but not necessarily the same idea.
To stress the kind of work involved in reviewing this translation for “accuracy,” let me offer a rapid list of language differences anyone reading the English next to the Spanish might query. First, a problem with no solution: English creates inversions or negations by using “un”—unhappy, unlucky. Roth uses “unmenacingly,” which contains both “menace” and the negation of the menace, but the translator has to reconstruct the sentence. Roth says “on your ten toes.” The translation “con tus dos pies” is literally correct, but Roth links those defenseless toes with the caterpillar tread and in doing so slips in an allusion to the idiomatic expression “step on someone’s toes.” Then we have the machista “man to man, as we used to say.” Here I couldn’t tell if the translation managed to communicate the dig against political correctness. “Before you meet them” becomes “antes de reunirte con ellos,” but “meet” here means to know for the first time, as in “conocer.” Again, I don’t know if the translation communicates that idea. Yet another linguistic problem: “empty of all perception, an astonishing farce of misperception.” In ordinary American English usage, “perception” is more related to the sight than to hearing or smelling, but it also contains the idea of a mental image (a perception) and the associated word “perceptive,” which in the United States suggests rapidity in recognizing something—“she noticed I was sad; she’s very perceptive.” The play between “perception” and “misperception” disappears in the translation.
So, what do we learn from this task, aside from the evident limitations of translators and readers, and limitations imposed by the boundaries between and within languages in a global reality that is constantly in flux? First, that Roth is able to shift levels of diction in the blink of an eye, second that he will use unusual words like “insentient” if they come to his point, and third that at least one aspect of Roth’s narrative technique is the transformation of cliché or commonplace into literature. So one task the translator has is to be just as fluid in terms of vocabulary: this usually won’t work, first because as a translator you’re trying yourself to understand the text, and second because if you’re working with an editor, that person is going to ask for a more easily understood word. Then all you have to do is find similar clichés and perform the same transmutation. Not easy. Then there is the problem of Roth’s use of what I would call “halo words,” that is the echoing between words like "perception" and "misperception." That repetition derives from poetry or music and is virtually impossible to capture in translation.
The passages chosen here from American Pastoral are in a fairly neutral American English, not especially local, and almost devoid of slang. Sometimes, Roth uses regionalisms ( Letting Go, 1962) and sometimes he drifts into almost secret American idioms: His The Great American Novel (1973) scared, until very recently, every translator in Spain because of its baseball terminology and puns like “safe at home.” Let me give just a couple of slang examples from Portnoy’s Complaint (1969), the book that launched Roth’s career. Much of the book is about sex, and here Portnoy describes his intimate relationship with an apple: “the cored apple that I banged silly.”5
The translation is literal: “la manzana sin corazón que dejé hecha puré.” But apple sauce is one thing, while “banging silly” is an outrageous adolescent sexual fantasy. Later, Portnoy describes an altruistic friend: “in the living room Smolka tries to talk Bubbles into taking on his two friends as a special favor to him.”6 The translation stumbles: “en el salón Smolka intenta convencer a Bubbles de que traiga a dos amigas suyas, como favor personal.” The problem is the expression “take on,” which here means to have sex with. And the friends are Portnoy and another boy, not girl friends. Finally, one case where the Yiddish is important. Portnoy’s mother worries about his eating non-Kosher food outside the house and getting sick: “You go to Harold’s Hot Dog and Chazerai Palace.”7 The translator assumes “chazerai” or “chozzerai” is a proper name: “vas a Harold’s Hot dog y al Chazerai Palace.” It’s just a dump where Portnoy can eat “chozzerai,” chili dogs.
Perhaps a solution to the translation of Roth into Spanish would have been a translator from a Jewish community in Mexico, Chile, or Argentina. If the novel had been translated into a Mexican context, as it were, there would have been the possibility also of finding more creative or nuanced ways of dealing with the fair-faced Swede versus the darker shades of the Jewish complexion. But Roth’s agent or publisher did not think to come up with this solution—neither did I for that matter.
Here we have visited the nuts-and-bolts face of translation—its true face—but this visit immediately returns us to the metaphorical exchange concept which I mapped out at the start of this meditation on translation. Translation is a lonely, tedious process: it’s work. You need, desperately, help when you translate, because it’s only you and the book mano a mano or face to face. It’s a fool’s job. But finding that absurd metaphor and making that imaginary exchange is what keeps me going: Like Beckett’s characters face down in the mud, I can’t go on. I must go on.
1. Philip Roth, American Pastoral, First Vintage International 1998 ed. (New York: Random House, 1997), 3.
2. All translations of Roth come from a PDF sent to the author by the Spanish division of Random House.
3. “Insentient.” Merriam-Webster.com . www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/insentient.
4. Roth,American Pastoral, 35.
5. Philip Roth,Portnoy’s Complaint, Vintage 2005 paperback ed. (New York: Random House, 1967), 18.
6. Roth,Portnoy’s Complaint, 18.
7. Roth, Portnoy’s Complaint, 23.
“Insentient.” Merriam-Webster.com . www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/insentient. Roth, Philip. American Pastoral. First Vintage International 1998 ed. New York:Random House, 1997.
———. Portnoy’s Complaint. Vintage 2005 paperback ed. New York: Random House, 1967.