Literary translation is an odd sort of art, if it can be called an art at all. It consists of a person sitting at a desk, writing fiction or poetry that has already been written by somebody else. It’s not even derivative; it seems like nothing more than copying.
Literary translation, however, is an art, and an art that matters a great deal. Our misperception of its value, based on a lack of understanding of what it’s all about, stunts our culture in many ways.
The misperception is based on an improper comparison of translation to the art it seems to resemble most: writing. But translating is nothing like writing a poem or a novel, and when the comparison is made, translating appears to be just a pale shadow. Translation is not a creative art; it’s a performing art. And as an editor of literary translations, I’ve come to see that what makes the role so odd, and so hard for us to grasp, is the fact that, physically, a translator does exactly the same thing as a writer. If an actor did the same thing as a playwright, a dancer did the same thing as a composer, or a singer did the same thing as a songwriter, no one would think much of what they did, either. The translator’s problem is that he is a performer without a stage, an artist whose performance looks just like the original, nothing but ink on a page.
Like a musician, a literary translator takes someone else’s composition and performs it -- interprets it -- in his own special way. Just as a musician interprets someone else’s notes by moving his body or throat, a translator transmits someone else’s thoughts and style by writing in another language. But it’s hard to see the translator’s performance. In fact, the translator is praised primarily for not being seen, a fate no other performing artist has to suffer.
However, even though translators’ performances are scarcely noticed by their audiences, and poorly recompensed by the publishers who commission their work, it could be argued that we readers suffer even more than translators do because the failure to value translators means that there is an entire art that we do not appreciate.
What do we lose by not being able to appreciate the art of literary translation? Well, think what it would be like not to have any appreciation of what musicians do -- or dancers or singers or actors. If every time we heard a song, we thought: “Oh yes, there’s Gershwin again.” Not, “Ah, there’s Ella singing Gershwin.” What would it be like if we were unable to listen to her interpretation of a song and compare it with other interpretations? The same goes for performances of Beethoven’s piano sonatas and Shakespeare’s soliloquies.
For nearly all of us, reading a translation is a one-dimensional experience. We don’t see a creator and a performer; we don’t even know where to look for signs of the performer’s artistry. And we are hampered not only by ignorance, but also by prejudice. Most of us tacitly accept Robert Frost’s comment, “Poetry is what gets lost in translation,” which implies that literary translation is destructive, that there is not much about translation that is worth appreciating. That is a fine excuse for denigrating and ignoring translation, except to the extent that we see it as a display of linguistic ability or that we see a translator as someone “good with languages.”
But without translation, there would be little poetry at all in our own language. The great majority of the world’s poets did not, and do not, write in English. Without translation, we would be without Homer and Virgil, without Dante and Cervantes, Celan and Akhmatova.
Ah, but we have the original Shakespeare; we’re very lucky. However, the rest of the world is, arguably, even luckier, because it has new translations of Shakespeare every year, full of different sorts of beauty and power. We can see Shakespeare interpreted on stage by actors and directors, but not in language by translators. Many of the world’s great poets have translated Shakespeare, including Boris Pasternak, Yves Bonnefoy, and Pablo Neruda, and their countries’ literatures are richer for it.
We in the United States suffer not only from our own inability to appreciate literary translation, but also from our writers’ inability to appreciate it. Because our writers do not understand translation, they feel it is an art unworthy of practicing. In the past, translation was part of writers’ educations, allowing them to learn how to write -- not by copying great practitioners of the past, as painters do -- but by translating their works.
Today, translation is no longer a part of a young writer’s training, partly because of the decline in teaching languages, particularly the classical languages that required students to translate. In addition, translation does not help a writer’s career, unless he is translating Dante or Homer. Younger writers seem to be focused more than ever on self-expression, and they do not believe that they can express their aesthetic sense, their judgment, their ethics, their interpretive and writing skills in translation. But more than anything, young writers have a different concept of culture than their predecessors had. Differences in language used to be seen as central to cultural differences; now they take a back seat to differences in race, gender, sexual preference. The result is self-absorption and little feeling of responsibility for enriching English-language literature with outside influences.
Every great age of poetry has also been a great age of translation. Shakespeare would not have used language as he did without the Elizabethan translators of European literature, whose goal was to raise their language out of what they considered its barbaric state. Every language has a youthful period when it is primarily a spoken tongue, without significant literary works. Rather than create great works out of nowhere, writers in young literary languages expand their capabilities by translating the great works of other languages. Swahili and modern Hebrew are two recent examples of languages in which writers, intellectuals, and even politicians have translated as many works as they can.
English is a mature literary language, but through the 1970s, the poets writing in English, even the Beats, looked abroad for much of what they injected into their poetry. For example, Ezra Pound drew on imagery-rich Chinese poetry. The Chilean poet Pablo Neruda’s sensuality of form and content meant a great deal to the American poets of the 1960s and ‘70s, many of whom translated his work. In fact, the translation of Latin- American fiction and poetry in the ‘60s was the last significant infusion of contemporary foreign writing into English. Since then, it’s been hit or miss, with an emphasis on retranslating ancient and modern classics, as well as political works, mysteries, and works chosen to appeal to political, ethnic, and gender interests.
We, the audience for contemporary English-language literature, suffer from this lack of hospitality: We live in a poor age of translation -- and of poetry. Thank goodness so many foreign writers have immigrated into our culture by writing in our language! The works of the Indian subcontinent, of the Caribbean, of Africa, and of Brits and hyphenated Americans to a great extent have replaced English-language translations as our literary trade winds. But they are only a partial recompense.
Today, translation is done primarily by professors and minor writers. The creative and performing sides of writing have been separated, and translators are respected less for their artistic abilities than for their linguistic skills. The best translators are putting out first-rate work, but most stick to fidelity to the original text. Getting it right has replaced experiment and interpretation.
The decline in translation in the United States is not only a matter of the indifference of writers. It is also a matter of decreasing demand by educated readers, of our increasing interest in ourselves. The shrinking number of works translated from other languages, and the change in who is publishing them, testifies to that decline. The high-water mark in the publishing of literary translations in the United States was 1970, when 756 titles were published. By 1984 (the last year the United States bothered providing figures to the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization), we were publishing only a third as many (289). That figure was 6 per cent of the figure in both West Germany and Spain, 12 per cent of the comparable figure in the Netherlands, a quarter and a third, respectively, of the translations in France and Japan -- the most chauvinist of nations -- and fewer even than the number of translations in Great Britain. Unfortunately, no more recent figures are available.
One reason for those differences is that our government does not recognize the value of translation, and subsidizes translations far less than other rich nations do. (Other countries also subsidize translations of works in their languages into foreign languages, supporting the spread of their cultures.) But the major explanation for the decline in translation in the United States is a matter of supply and demand.
Sales of translations have declined because literary translations are increasingly published by university and small presses, which charge higher prices and have more limited distribution to bookstores and libraries than do commercial presses. When commercial presses do publish literary translations, they concentrate on new translations of familiar works that have guaranteed sales in bookstores and universities. And they are less likely to publish literary translations as inexpensive paperbacks -- as they did with translations of Latin-American fiction in the ‘60s and ‘70s.
Translators also share responsibility for our limited appreciation of their art. They have not done enough to show writers, book-review editors, academics, and other readers how important their work is to our literary culture. Now that translators are mostly academics, they tend to talk to each other, rather than to the outside world.
Book-review editors are as unconcerned about the dearth of translations as the average American reader, as I learned with my recent book on literary translation. I had suggested that book-review editors use the book as an occasion to pay homage to translators. This would be especially appropriate, I noted, because the book was coming out in May, during World in Translation Month. This is a national celebration of translation that the PEN American Center -- the sole organization of writers that has created a committee concerned with translations -- was trying to get off the ground. Only The Washington Post paid any attention to Translation Month.
What can the academy do? American academics should not wait for translators to take courses in public relations; they need to start looking differently at the role of translation in the university. They might consider, for example, the opportunity that a seminar on translation (in which students translate work from various languages into English) would provide for a truly multicultural experience. And they need to start asking questions: Why it is that, although translation is so clearly the best way for young writers to focus on form, so few creative-writing programs offer seminars on translation? Why is there so little discussion by academics of the quality and prejudices of the translations they teach, so few comparisons of multiple translations? Why, when they do publish literature by professional writers in other languages, do university presses often sign up graduate students or people who are not fully proficient in English to do those translations?
Until we begin to ask -- and answer -- those questions, we will continue to undervalue an important art. We will also have less of the world’s literature available to us, in less-interesting translations. Our own literature will be less vital, less varied, and more inward looking. And we won’t be any the wiser.
Robert Wechsler edits literary translations at Catbird Press. He is the author of Performing Without a Stage: The Art of Literary Translation (Catbird Press, 1998).
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Section: Opinion & Arts
Page: B4