I am an avid reader, but a shockingly monolingual one. The English language is the golden prison I inhabit: richly and divertingly adorned, but with all the exits closed off, preventing me from making my escape to French or Russian or Italian or Chinese. Only the Spanish door is slightly ajar, but its opening is just barely wide enough for me to peek through longingly. That is, I can read a novel in Spanish if I’m desperate, but I will get far more out of it if I read the same thing rendered in someone else’s English.
Because of this handicap, I am heavily dependent on the work of translators; they are the social workers, you might say, who bring essential luxuries to my cell. I could dispense with these do-gooders, I suppose, if I chose to read only works written originally in English, and I did so choose, during a brief period of callow youthfulness. But even the great outpouring of 19th-century English fiction can seem insufficient and tedious after a while, and if you start venturing into the 20th century, particularly the late 20th century, you will soon find yourself in need of foreign companionship.
So rather than resent my helpers, my crutches, I have come to feel a deep affection for these selfless workers, these brilliant shadows, these people whose highest aim is to remain at the very margin of visibility. No translator wants his achievement stolen or denied; yet just as certainly, no translator wants her voice to overpower that of her source author. It’s a very careful balance: However well the disappearing act is done, something of the translator’s own sensibility invariably enters into the work we’re given in English.
This is not to say that a Margaret Jull Costa translation of the Portuguese novelist José Saramago sounds like a Margaret Jull Costa translation of the Spanish novelist Javier Marías -- not at all. If it did, Costa would have failed in her primary aim, to let us hear the writer’s voice as she herself hears it in the original language. But it does mean that a Margaret Jull Costa translation of Javier Marías sounds slightly but noticeably different from an Esther Allen translation of Javier Marías. He is recognizably the same author in both cases: witty, self-aware, elaborately eloquent, fascinated by sex and violence, immersed in movies and television, drawn to Anglo-American culture, but with a saving distance that makes him seem totally unlike anything we could have produced. (That, after all, is why we go to foreign writers, why we need them.) Still, Allen’s Marías is not quite Costa’s Marías. The difference is so subtle it’s hard to define: something to do with Allen’s receptive American ear, something to do with Costa’s uncanny ability to locate Anglo-Saxon equivalents for Latinate terms. If I were pressed, I would say that Allen’s Maras sounds more like a Spaniard, Costa’s more like a native English speaker. Which is preferable? I suppose it depends on what kind of reader you are -- or, more likely, on which translation you encountered first.
Priority, perhaps, is what accounts for my allegiance to Michael Hulse as the translator of W.G. Sebald. My discovery of Sebald came first through The Rings of Saturn and then through The Emigrants, both in Hulse’s marvelously poetic translations -- translations that seemed to me to be works of English literature in themselves. This was especially true of The Rings of Saturn, a book built around a walking tour of England and containing numerous references to the English author Sir Thomas Browne, a favorite of Sebald’s. The Germanness of the book’s narrator was impossible to miss, but it had been transmuted, in Hulse’s sinuous sentences, into an Anglo-German melancholic sensibility. So when I came to Austerlitz, translated instead by Anthea Bell, I was startled. I suspect that on some level Bell’s translation is as good as Hulse’s, but it was nonetheless a barrier I felt I had to overcome, a new voice added to “Sebald’s” old one. (My “Sebald,” that is, had consisted of Sebald plus Hulse.) And there was again the shock of a change when I moved to Michael Hamburger’s elegant, attentive translation of Sebald’s posthumously published After Nature. This time, though, I realized what was happening and was able to brace myself against the unexpected.
Also, in the case of After Nature -- a book-length unrhymed poem, set out on the page in broken lines -- I was alert to the way in which the transformation of genre would inevitably mean a transformation of voice. This, I subsequently reasoned, had also been true for Austerlitz, which is Sebald’s closest thing to a real novel, a sequential story featuring a fictional character other than the narrator. So what I took as a shift attributable to the translators might well have been just as much, or instead, a shift in Sebald’s own writing style. Anyway, despite the differences I was sensing, Sebald remained essentially Sebald, for great writers can never escape themselves, whether through translation or through their own development or even through death.
My most intense experience with translation, thus far, has involved a Japanese author. Like Javier Maras and W.G. Sebald, Haruki Murakami is a writer who is intimately acquainted with Anglo-American culture even as he remains outside it. (I think writers of this kind may well make the most interesting test cases for translation; at any rate, I find myself repeatedly drawn to them.) Murakami, who has translated Raymond Carver, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Paul Theroux into Japanese, is quite attached to the Beatles, jazz, Scotch whiskey, Marx Brothers movies, and many other products of Western culture. He repeatedly injects something akin to an American sensibility -- a rebellious, non-salaryman’s sensibility -- into his hapless fictional protagonists. Yet the novels are written in Japanese and set, for the most part, in Japan, so when we read them in English, we get (as with Marías and Sebald) a strange sensation of foreignness mixed with familiarity, of worlds collapsing in on each other.
The first three novels I read by Murakami -- A Wild Sheep Chase, Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, and Dance, Dance, Dance -- were all translated by Alfred Birnbaum. When I finished the books, I was mildly curious to know more about Murakami; I was desperate to know more about Birnbaum. Who was this guy who could come up with two completely different kinds of English, an old-fashioned fairy-tale diction and a sharp-edged modern idiom, to render the two intertwined plot strands of Hard-Boiled Wonderland? How did he manage to do that weird, youthful, but never annoyingly with-it voice in which Murakami’s narrator-protagonists spoke to themselves? How, in short, could he make a Japanese writer sound so remarkably American without losing any of his alien allure? All I could find out, from the jacket notes, was that Birnbaum was born in Washington, D.C., in 1957, grew up in Japan, and lived at various times in Los Angeles, Tokyo, London, and Barcelona.
Then The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle came out. This may still be Murakami’s best-known novel in America; it was his first crossover book, the one that signaled his emergence from the ghetto of Kodansha to the classy precincts of Knopf. I started the first chapter as soon as the book was available, but right away I sensed that something was wrong. Turning to the front of the book, I noticed the name of a new translator: Jay Rubin. What had happened to my beloved Birnbaum? I called Kodansha, Knopf, the Society of Translators -- no answer. Nobody knew anything about the missing Birnbaum. He had apparently completed the transformation required of the Ideal Translator and become a figment, a ghost, an invisible man.
But then I remembered some additional evidence of his corporeality, or at least of his presence as a translator. Before publishing his novel with Knopf, Murakami had given that same publisher a collection of short stories called The Elephant Vanishes, and the first story in the book consisted of the opening section of The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. I checked my copy of the book, and yes, my memory had not deceived me -- that story, that beginning, had been translated by Alfred Birnbaum. So the two translators of Murakami, the two alternate realities, existed side by side.
Here, submitted as Exhibit A, are the opening sentences of the Rubin translation:
“When the phone rang I was in the kitchen, boiling a potful of spaghetti and whistling along with an FM broadcast of the overture to Rossini’s The Thieving Magpie, which has to be the perfect music for cooking pasta.
“I wanted to ignore the phone, not only because the spaghetti was nearly done, but because Claudio Abbado was bringing the London Symphony to its musical climax.”
Not bad, eh? Perfectly good English sentences presented by a reasonably interesting narrator. But now listen to Exhibit B:
“I’m in the kitchen cooking spaghetti when the woman calls. Another moment until the spaghetti is done; there I am, whistling the prelude to Rossini’s La Gazza Ladra along with the FM radio. Perfect spaghetti-cooking music.
“I hear the telephone ring but tell myself, Ignore it. Let the spaghetti finish cooking. It’s almost done, and besides, Claudio Abbado and the London Symphony Orchestra are coming to a crescendo.”
And there he is, my Birnbaum -- or rather, my voice-in-the-ear version of Murakami, my Birnbaum-inflected Japanese narrator, my unemployed cosmopolitan wastrel who loves jazzy rhythms and thinks of his life in the present tense. Even the tiny details (the Italian rendering of the Rossini title, the use of the term “crescendo” rather than “musical climax”) seem to me crucial to the smart but strangely innocent voice. In this translation, the logic of cause-and-effect English sentence structure has been jettisoned in favor of some other mode, and it is that mode -- the intrusion of the surprising and the foreign and the unknowable into the mundane regime -- which marks the world of a Haruki Murakami novel.
I adapted, eventually, to Jay Rubin’s perfectly good translations, and even to the slightly more whimsical voice of Philip Gabriel, who did the English for Murakami’s latest novel, Sputnik Sweetheart. But all along, the Birnbaum passion simmered. So you can imagine how the flame leapt up when I finished the Rubin translation of Norwegian Wood (Murakami’s first huge best seller in Japan, published there in 1987 but not brought out in America until 2000) and read a reference in the Translator’s Note to “Alfred Birnbaum’s earlier translation of Norwegian Wood, which was produced for distribution in Japan ... to enable students to enjoy their favorite author as they struggled with the mysteries of English.” We should not, the note enjoined us, try to obtain this bootleg version, for “the present edition is the first English translation that Murakami has authorized for publication outside Japan.” Aha!, I thought. So Murakami (or Murakami-plus-Rubin) is indeed running away from Birnbaum, consciously suppressing him, attempting to do away with this shadow self.
Naturally I sought out the bootleg version immediately. Thanks to the Internet, such things are now readily available, if at a shocking price: The two little paperbacks of the Kodansha English Library edition cost me over $100. Not surprisingly, I found that the Birnbaum version was better, in exactly the way his opening sentences of The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle were better. But I have yet to read the whole of the Alfred Birnbaum Norwegian Wood. I am saving them for a rainy day, those two cunningly miniaturized volumes, a red one and a green one, each encircled with a band of metallic paper covered in Japanese writing. They’re like a souvenir brought back from a country I’ve never visited -- a strange, hard-boiled wonderland of wild sheep and vanished elephants, a place that never existed except in the imaginary terrain inhabited jointly if briefly by Haruki Murakami and Alfred Birnbaum.
But let me not end on such an elegiac note. If you can lose an author through a change in translators, you can also gain one in the same way. I found this out with Dostoyevsky, who has already benefited from a century of good translation into English, and whose latest incarnation is the work of Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky.
It seems to me that you are bound either to love Dostoyevsky or to hate him. Some people love him when they are young and hate him when older, but I have always loved him. I first loved him in Constance Garnett’s translations, but then I loved him at least as much in David Magarshack’s. Dostoyevsky’s own obsessions are so strong that he dominates any translator, to the point where the specifics of diction hardly seem to matter.
It wasn’t until I read Pevear and Volokhonsky, though, that I detected an element I had been missing up to then. To date, these two have translated The Brothers Karamazov, Crime and Punishment, Notes From Underground, Demons, and The Idiot. (They’ve also started in on Tolstoy, with Anna Karenina, but I haven’t sampled that yet.) What I found when I read their Demons -- the novel that, in earlier translations, was usually called The Possessed -- was that I understood, for the very first time, the source of the unease in a Dostoyevsky novel. We are kept off balance not only by the characters and their dilemmas, not only by the horrifying situations and social messes, but also by that very strange narrator who is both there and not there, who comes in when the author needs him and quietly disappears when he doesn’t. Pevear and Volokhonsky have done something with Dostoyevsky’s language -- I don’t know exactly what or how -- so that you can actually hear that ingratiating, whiny, gossipy, unreliable, all-seeing fellow who conveys the story to you.
Once you have had your ears opened to this, you can go back to the Magarshack or the Garnett and hear it in them as well. The narrator, it turns out, was there all along, but it took these new translators to make us aware of him. In giving us their own insightful version of this great Russian novelist, Pevear and Volokhonsky have magically enriched all the previous versions. Perhaps it takes a writer as large and multivoiced as Dostoyevsky to make room for all these translators at once. Or perhaps it takes someone who has been dead for over a hundred years, so that several generations of interpreters are required to convey him to us. But either way, it gives me hope. As long as a literary work is there in its original language, however inaccessible to me, there remains the possibility that it will eventually be given a new voice with which to speak its old lines. The prison of language is only temporary, that is, and someday a merciful guard -- the perfect translator -- will come along with his keys and let us out.
Well, I can dream, can’t I?
Wendy Lesser is the editor of The Threepenny Review. Her most recent book is Nothing Remains the Same: Rereading and Remembering (Houghton Mifflin, 2002).
http://chronicle.com Section: The Chronicle Review Volume 49, Issue 5, Page B7