There is a direct correlation between the degree of emotion which the writer of the original puts into his text and the degree of emotion which the translator is obliged to put into his. The nature of the respective audiences, as between literary texts and legal and business documents, is every bit as different as are the respective documents. But responsibility is omnipresent. Though the repercussions for irresponsible translation also differ, repercussions of some sort do exist and, for the most part, are usually evoked: bad reviews, publisher unwillingness to use the translator again. An inept or indifferent translator of legal or business documents needs no more elaborate chastisement than being relieved of his post.
The question of why one translates is more complex still. Many translations, obviously, are contracted for—bought and sold like potatoes and pears. Nor is this necessarily esthetically or morally injurious. Artists of all kinds have always lived by selling their work; before they were called “artists,” they went by the name of “craftsmen,” or “artisans.” Paul Hindemith was commissioned, immediately upon the 1936 death of King George V of England, to write a memorial piece. He put pen to paper and, though he had no personal knowledge of the king, and no obvious connection with either British royalty or England itself, produced his “Trauermusik” (translatable as either “Sorrowing Music” or “Funeral Music”), a fine and moving musical essay, scored for solo viola and strings. It was played over and over on the BBC, during the period of mourning, and it is still played, in recital halls all over the world. Michaelangelo, Bach, Haydn—one could list an enormous number of magnificent artists whose work was ordered, commissioned, contracted for—bought and sold exactly like potatoes and pears. Many of those who produced that art were also treated not much better than sacks of potatoes or baskets of pears. We maintain a Romantic (now a post-Romantic) bias about the sanctity of art and artist alike; we harp on originality, and treat the expression of creative genius almost like a form of religion.
And yet, in the world we do live in, rather than the world men used to live in, what we call “originality” has become deeply connected, in most men’s minds, with artistic worth. Has the psychology of art and of artists changed, along with these changed perceptions? To a degree, I suspect it has. Artists have always been susceptible, inevitably, to the wishes of their patrons. These relationships between artist and audience (in the broadest sense of that word) are inextricably woven into the history, and the present status, of all arts. The translator, though as I have said a lesser artist, is unavoidably affected by the change in public perception of and reaction to his art, and along with him so too is his work. I do not believe, however, that a magnificent Renaissance painting, or a gorgeous piece of Renaissance music, bought and sold like potatoes or pears, would be notably less magnificent or gorgeous than if it had been sought and paid for as the fervid outpouring of an artistic Superman. Tastes may change, but “taste,” as a general phenomenon, is reasonably stable. The old saw, “I don’t know much about art, but I know what I like,” is in this respect quite true. Absent the kinds of publicity and persuasion machines the twentieth-century has developed for us, an artist earned his reputation by his performance. Would the Sistine Chapel painting of Michaelangelo be any less moving, any less spectacular, if it had not been bought and paid for like potatoes and pears?
These things being given, pretty much like the sun rising in the morning and setting at night, there seem to me two principal reasons why literary translators translate. The first, and I think the larger motivation, is to enable others who do not have the needed linguistic resources to be excited, informed, pleased, or disturbed exactly as translators, who are fortunate enough to have both linguistic resources and access to splendid, stirring writing in assorted other languages, have themselves been excited, informed, pleased, or disturbed. I do not think this requires very much comment, except perhaps to note that being endowed with such linguistic resources may be due to an accident of birth, or to childhood circumstances or events, perhaps even (though I think less likely) to adult circumstances. (Language-learning is clearly fuller and also easier for children; it said that no one learning a language after about the age of eleven will develop a fully native accent.) By “an accident of birth” I mean that language ability (which the Germans nicely call Sprachgefühl), just like a pronounced affinity for music or mathematics, may be simply genetic. Familial heightening of such a genetically-given capacity is, I suspect, usually also a matter of genetics. How many generations of musical Bachs were there? Or musical Mozarts, musical Liszts, musical Verdis? Igor Stravinsky’s father was a famous basso, as was the harpsichordist Igor Kipnis’ father. Peter Serkin, one of the world’s finest pianists, is the son of Rudolf Serkin, one of the world’s finest pianists.
The second principal reason for translating has rarely been commented on or even confessed. A translator knowing and deeply admiring a work in another language will sometimes feel that, if he leaves the work in that language, he will never fully possess it. So he translates, and satisfies a very deep urge. This happens to be the case, for me, with most of the translating I have done from Indonesian, a Malayo-Polynesian tongue enormously unlike any Indo-European language and, as it happens, almost as unlike the only other non-Indo-European language I happen to know, that being Hebrew. I do not feel this need to possess in English the work that I translate from French or German. I sometimes feel it, in dealing with Spanish, and sometimes do not. I have no sure-fire way of explaining any of this. But I can shed some interesting light on the matter by citing a former colleague of mine who was raised in trilingual style, one parent speaking Spanish, one speaking Portuguese, and his family living in the United States. He became a fine linguist, and a most adept translator, with a remarkably sensitive feeling, in particular, for the historical nuances of many languages. When I commented, once, in a seminar I was leading, that translations of Friedrich Schiller’s work into English were on the whole terrible, in good part because of history’s unfortunate (unfortunate for Schiller, that is) shifts in literary styles, my colleague produced, the very next day, a superb rendering of a Schiller poem. But not in English. He cast it, deftly, perfectly, in the French of Napoleon Bonaparte’s, and Schiller’s, time.
But gradually I began to notice that, despite his unmistakable high competency, it was only my colleague’s translations into Spanish that truly rang, truly sang. The others were almost uniformly good; those he did in Spanish were vivid, tremendously alive. “Do you,” I finally asked him, “feel that you have to first translate into Spanish, and thereafter translate from Spanish into your target language?” He admitted that this was in fact the case. “Only Spanish feels right to me,” he said. “I always feel fully at home, when I’m reading or writing or speaking Spanish. It’s the only language in which I feel that way.”
Are there, then, cognitive differences in the different approaches to translation? Surely the answer is yes. Nor is it simply a matter of respect, or responsibility. These can be important factors, as I have said. But it is also clear that some minds, some personalities, some ears, some tongues, some memories, are differently constructed from others. When Ezra Pound, the father of twentieth-century translation into English, decided to make his deservedly famous translation of the Old English elegy, “The Seafarer,” he was pursuing—maniacally, as artists tend to pursue their goals—the notion of bringing into modern English the sounds and structural movement of Old English. In Old English, let me point out at once, “The Seafarer” begins like this:
Maeg ic be me sylfum sothgied wrecan,
sithas secgan, hu ic geswincdagum
earfoth-hwile oft throwade,
bitre breostceare gibiden haebbe,
gecunnad in ceole cearselda fela,
atol ytha gewealc, thaer mec oft bigeat
nearo nihtwaco, aet nacan stefnan,
thonne he be clifum cnossath.
In an excruciating dogtrot rendering,
May I by/of myself a true tale tell,
tell of journeys/voyages how I days of labor
difficult/troublesome times often endured/suffered,
bitter sorrows experienced,
knew/experienced on ship many places/seats of sorrow,
the terrible rolling of the waves, where/when often I performed/served
anxious night-watch at the ship’s bow/prow,
as/when it dashed along cliffs.
These snippets of both the Old English, and a ruthlessly dogtrot English rendering thereof, should be enough, in terms of both sound and sense, to enable you to perceive what Pound’s translation does with the poem:
May I for my own self song’s truth reckon,
Journey’s jargon, how I in harsh days
Hardship endured oft.
Bitter breast-cares have I abided,
Known on my keel many a care’s hold,
And dire sea-surge, and there I oft spent
Narrow nightwatch nigh the ship’s head
While she tossed close to cliffs.
(Pound 207)
Pound wants to capture the sheer, pounding beat of the original, its hammering alliteration, its overwhelmingly consonantal character—capture it, to the extent that can be accomplished in a much later form of the language, a linguistic system which no longer adheres to the pounding four-beat alliterative line, which was tied together by consistent, heavy alliteration, reinforced by a jarring plethora of initial consonants. Modern English is different in all these respects; one can argue that it is in some ways more effete, that it has lost some of its early medieval barbaric splendor. (Never mind what it has gained: that is, for this discussion, beside the point.)
Pound would not only go that far, he would go much farther. The Old English were bold and fiercely secular pagan unbelievers, he insists, not yet corrupted by Christianity and other so-called civilizing vectors, as all religions of whatever stripe pretend to be. Down with civilized meaningfulness! Even further down with religion! If Old English poets could alliterate like utterly secular wild men, so too can we. Accordingly, let the Old English phrase sithas secgan, which means “tell of journeys/voyages,” become “journey’s jargon,” which pretty much means nothing at all. Bitre breostceare, meaning “bitter sorrows,” becomes “bitter breast-cares,” which is not exactly English but can at least be understood, if marveled at. So too let gecunnad in ceole, meaning “knew/experienced on/in the ship,” become “known on my keel,” which is stunningly noncommunicative, and let nearo nihtwaco, meaning “anxious night-watch,” become “narrow nightwatch,” which has a meaning but not one that matches the sense of the original. Pound is not especially interested in that sense; for him, it is enough to give a general outline, so long as one captures the smashing primitive drive which he quite correctly finds in these lines.
This is an abiding concern for Pound. As he is in his often similarly constructed translations from the Chinese (written at a time when he knew no Chinese), he is splendidly successful —in terms, that is, of what he intends to do. No translation into modern English, so far as I know, has ever equaled Pound’s evocation of what Old English poetry sounds like, what it feels like.
But poems are complex creations, and if “Jabberwocky” does not convey any full sense of meaning, it does not try to, it is quite satisfied with a generalized, uproarious half-gibberish. “Jabberwocky” too is brilliant. The trouble is that, when the Old English poem we call “The Seafarer” has unfolded the full length of its 124 lines, it has revealed itself, and many times over, to be profoundly Christian, not pagan at all. Here are lines 39 - 42 of my own translation, which I think shows due respect for the differences in verse form, but focuses far more on what the poet is trying to say:
But there isn’t a man on earth so proud,
So born to greatness, so bold with his youth,
Grown so brave, or so graced by God,
That he feels no fear as the sails unfurl … .
(Raffel 1998, 11)
Pound’s version of these same lines should, by now, be more or less predictable:
For this there’s no mood-lofty man over earth’s midst,
Not though he be given his good, but will have in his youth greed;
Nor his deed to the daring, nor his king to the faithful
But shall have his sorrow for sea-fare ...
(Pound 208)
Deeply reverent moments occur throughout: Pound, whose translation is twenty-five lines shorter than the original, consistently extirpates them. What happens to “Thus the joys of God/ Are fervent with life, where life itself/ Fades quickly into the earth,” as my translation has it, is in Pound's version “My lord [secular/feudal lord] deems to me this dead life/ On loan and on land, I believe not/ That any earth-weal eternal standeth ...” Every single religious reference is twisted into a secular one. But the last twenty-five lines are a prayer, and even so expert an extirpator of religion as Pound cannot simply smother away an extended, solemn prayer. What then does he do? The original has 124 lines; Pound’s version contains only 99. He has simply omitted the last twenty-five lines, and done so without any indication to the unwary, uninformed reader. Not a single explanatory word. And, probably, no regrets.
The psychological problem with Pound is that, all too often, he simply wants to translate a certain way and does not much care what the original author wrote. Pound is of course not alone in this. Indeed, to some extent, because no translation can ever be the original it translates, and is thus inevitably different, all translators regularly deal with and succumb to subjectivisms, whether they are conscious of so doing or not. In the interests of brevity, let me give you just the first six lines of Louis Zukofsky’s translation of Catullus 11:
Furius, Aurelius: comities—Catullus.
If he penetrate most remote India,
lit as with the long resonant coast East’s wave thundering under—
if in Hyrcania, mull of Arabia,
say the Sacae, arrow ferocious Parthians,
why even the seven gamming mouth, colored ichor of Nilus— ...
(Zukofsky, unpaginated)
Only the second line threatens to break into comprehensible English: “If he penetrate most remote India ...” No fear: the translation quickly gives up any such pretension. And when you see the first six lines of the original Latin, you will I think understand that Zukofsky, too, is trying to reproduce the sound, not the sense, of the original. Reproduce it, mind you, exactly, phoneme by phoneme, virtually without regard to sense. To make that clear—since the translation pays no particular attention to English, whether lexicon or syntax, and my focus, here, is not on the Latin—I will set out first a line of Latin and then the more or less corresponding line of the translation:
Furi et Aureli, comites Catulli,
Furius, Aurelius: comities—Catullus.
sive in extremos penetrabit Indos,
If he penetrate most remote India,
litus ut longe resonante Eoa tunditur unda,
lit as with the long resonant coast East’s wave thundering under—
sive in Hyrcanos Arabasve molles,
if in Hyrcania, mull of Arabia,
seu Sagas sagittiferosque Parthos,
say the Sacae, arrow ferocious Parthians,
sive quae septemgeminus colorat aequora Nilus,
why even the seven gamming mouth, colored ichor of Nilus—
Says Zukofsky: “This translation of Catullus follows the sound, rhythm, and syntax of his Latin—tries, as is said, to breathe the ‘literal’ meaning with him” (“Translator’s Preface,” unpaginated). Loeb Library translations are about as close to “literal” as translations come:
Furius and Aurelius, who will be Catullus’ fellow-travelers, whether he makes his way even to distant India, where the shore is beaten by the far-resounding eastern wave, or to Hyrcania and soft Arabia, or to the Sa[g]ae and archer Parthians, or those plains which sevenfold Nile dyes with his flood ...
(Catullus 15, 17)
The Sagae are better known to us as the Scythians; sagittiferosque Parthos means “arrow-bearing Parthians,” not “arrow ferocious”; and Arabasve molles means “sweet/pleasant/mild Arabia.” What “mull of Arabia” means I do not know, and I doubt that you do either. Frankly, I doubt that Zukofsky knew—or cared.
What both these last two illustrations signify, I think, is that self-obsessed translators, depending on the degree of their self-obsession, really ought not to call what they are doing “translation.” Let it be labeled “adaptation,” let it be labeled “imitation” (à la Robert Lowell), let it be labeled whatever those who produce it prefer. Robert Lowell’s volume, titled Imitations, deserves a great deal of praise, as poetry, and severe dispraise, because in the essay which opens the volume he calls what he has done “translation.” “My first two Sappho poems,” he says, “are really new poems based on hers. Villon has been somewhat stripped; ... Hugo’s ‘Gautier’ is cut in half... About a third of [Rimbaud’s] ‘The Drunken Boat’ has been left out. Two stanzas have been added to Rilke’s ‘Roman Sarcophagus,’ and one to his ‘Pigeons.’ ... I have dropped lines, moved lines, moved stanzas, changed images and altered meter and intent” (Lowell xii). Altered meter and intent ? Immodesty may succeed—often does succeed—may even be necessary—in a primary art like poetry or fiction. But it cannot succeed in the translation of poetry, nor in the translation of prose. Obsessiveness of that sort should, “as is said” (to quote Zukofsky), do its own thing and leave other peoples’ writing alone.
Finally, as to temporal issues in translation, let me say simply that to work a text from one language to another is, in fact, by no means the hardest part of literary translation. Translating texts that have been framed and shaped by a totally different culture is, I believe, significantly more difficult than working from a text closer to your own. The greater the differences, the greater the difficulties of translation. And when in addition the culture of the text being translated also stems from a deeply different time, the task is the hardest, the most challenging, and also the most satisfying of all. Believing that to be the case, as I do, most of my own translations have been from times more or less long gone. The cognitive problems of such translations are fascinating, subtle—and, hélas, another subject, for another essay that may or may not ever be written.
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