Found in Translation

by

Lev Raphael

They say the past is a different country, or at least L.P. Hartley did, and so is translation. But though I’d spent my college years happily reading Penguin translations of Balzac, Zola, Turgenev, Tolstoy, de Maupassant and many more classic European authors, I’d never really thought of them as different.

Different from the original books, that is. They were the original books to me, discovered as I scoured the shelves at the high-ceilinged Coliseum Bookstore at Columbus Circle in New York (I browsed books the way other people went shopping).

The translator’s name was on the title page, but his or her role in making this book accessible didn’t mean much to me. And, there was always a translator’s note inside which I sometimes read, but I never reflected on what it meant to be reading the books in a form not intended by the author. This was the book, not some unknown “foreign” version.

And all the years I later reviewed mysteries and other books for the Detroit Free Press, including many books in translation, whether they were French or Spanish or Russian in the original, I read them without contemplating that the book in my hand had undergone a profound transmutation, a voyage from one culture to another. In her fascinating short volume about the art of translation, Why Translation Matters, Edith Grossman clarifies the difficulty of that voyage and urges us to see its centrality in the perpetuation of all cultures and their mutual betterment.

Only 2-3% of all books published in the U.S. and England are translated from a foreign language, which also means those books might not reach huge markets like China, where books tend to be translated from English rather than the original language. Publishers claim that readers won’t buy translated books. Tell that to the fans of Stieg Larsson!

Rather than talk about “translating a book,” Grossman repeatedly uses the phrase, “bringing a book into another language.” It’s an appealing image that evokes not just work but weight, time, and distance. It makes the translator seem as much guide as confederate. It reminds us that the translator has an intimate relationship with the text quite unlike our own reading of the finished product. And it points to the fact that translation when it works is an incredible balancing act of negotiating between languages and cultures. Translation is much more than getting the words right, she says:

To my mind, a translator’s fidelity is not to lexical pairings but to context—the implications and echoes of the first author’s tone, intention, and level of discourse. Good translations are good because they are faithful to this contextual significance. They are not necessarily faithful to words or syntax, which are peculiar to specific languages and can rarely be brought over directly in any misguided and inevitable muddled effort to somehow replicate the original. This is the literalist trap, because words do not mean in isolation. Words means as indispensable parts of a contextual whole that includes the emotional tone and impact, the literary antecedents, the connotative nimbus as well as the denotations of each statement. I believe . . . that the meaning of a passage can almost always be rendered faithfully in a second language, but its words, taken as separate entities, can almost never be. Translators translate context. We use analogy to create significance. Searching for the phrasing and style in the second language which mean in the same way and sound in the same way to the reader of that second language. And this requires all our sensibility and as much sensitivity as we can summon to the working and nuances of the language we translate into.

It sounds an almost impossible job, and yet Grossman has won prizes and is especially acclaimed for her translation of Don Quixote. I’ve seen the power of a good translation many times, as when I read Margaret Mauldon’s 2004 translation of Madame Bovary. Though I’d enjoyed two volumes of Flaubert’s letters several times and sampled a few biographies of the author, on each of the previous encounters I’d had with his masterpiece about dreams and adultery, I always felt chilled and a little bored. This time, however, I devoured it, stirred by one scene after another, reading almost breathlessly at the novel’s denouement. Whatever Mauldon had done differently, she had made the book vital, immediate, fierce. It finally matched its reputation and I imagined felt the impact it had when it first appeared in France.

So I enjoyed Grossman mounting a vigorous defense of her art, which is little understood or appreciated, and is under siege. Lamentably there are American college professors who don’t believe any literature in translation should be taught in their schools. Think of what our students would lose in terms of classic literature and even more so of contemporary voices.

Grossman raises a poignant question: how can we know other countries and peoples if we never engage with the minds of their authors? Putting her book down, I thought of contemporary foreign authors I have come to love, like Israel’s Aharon Appelfeld, Colombia’s Perez-Reverte, Italy’s Italo Calvino. They’ve become part of me in the ineffable way everything an author reads becomes his. And now that I’ve read Edith Grossman, I can be doubly thankful that publishers made it possible for translators to “bring them over.”

The flood of self-published writers has reviewers and critics outdoing each other in their threnodies, but even centuries before our current print-on-demand age, the complaints were being made, Gabriel Zaid reminds us in his clever, conversational So Many Books. Ecclesiastes complained in the Bible that “of making many books there is no end” while Ibn Khaldun in the fourteenth century moped, “too many books on a subject made it more difficult to study” and Samuel Johnson warned “No place affords a more striking conviction of the vanity of hopes than a public library.”

Reading has supposedly been doomed by the invention of the radio, the TV, the personal computer—and still survives, with more books being published yearly than ever before, at the rate on one every thirty seconds. Witty Mexican author Zaid says that’s a good thing, not The End of Days. Most books don’t appeal to a mass audience anyway, not in any country, so what’s wrong with books reaching a few thousand readers, sparking conversation and change, rather than passivity?

While authors may feel that their book is the center of the world, there are many centers. After all, unlike most business, publishing can flourish with small audiences. We now live very much in a world of “segmented clienteles, specialized niches, and members of different clubs of enthusiasts.” Diversity is good, and the opposite of conformity and mass taste. Print-on-demand has even made it possible to write books that only fifty people will read. Aren’t those fifty people lucky?

Now, Zaid admits, we may end up with cultures that write more books than they read, but at the moment we haven’t reached the tipping point. And while the death of the book is perpetually being predicted, nothing replaces reading a book (in whatever format):

The freedom and happiness experienced in reading are addictive . . . reading liberates the reader and transports him from his books to a reading of himself and off of life. It leads him to participate in conversations, and in some cases to arranged them, as so many active readers do: parents, teachers, friends, writers, translators, critics, publishers, booksellers, librarians, promoters. The uniqueness of each reader, reflected in the particular nature of his personal library . . . flourishes in diversity.

Memoirist Mike Steinberg told me once that when he retired early from academe to write, he didn’t want fame, what he wanted was to “be part of the conversation.” It’s what all writers want, and what most readers enjoy, so after you read this book, share it with a book-loving friend.

Books mentioned in this column:
Why Translation Matters by Edith Grossman (Yale University Press, 2010)
Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert, translated by Margaret Mauldon, (Oxford University Press, 2003)
So Many Books by Gabriel Zaid, translated by Natasha Wimmer (Paul Dry Books, 2003)

Lev Raphael grew up in New York but got over it and has lived half his life in Michigan where he found his partner of twenty-four years, and a certain small fame. He escaped academia in 1988 to write full-time and has never looked back. The author of nineteen books in many genres, and hundreds of reviews, stories and articles, he’s seen his work discussed in journals, books, conference papers, and assigned in college and university classrooms. Which means he’s become homework. Who knew? Lev’s books have been translated into close to a dozen languages, some of which he can’t identify, and he’s done hundreds of readings and talks across the U.S. and Canada, and in France, England, Scotland, Austria, Germany and Israel. His memoir My Germany was published in April 2009 by the University of Wisconsin Press. You can learn more about Lev and his work on his website. Lev has reviewed for the Washington Post, Boston Review, NPR, the Ft. Worth Star-Telegram, Jerusalem Report and the Detroit Free Press where he had a mystery column for almost a decade. He also hosted his own public radio book show where he interviewed Salman Rushdie, Erica Jong, and Julian Barnes among many other authors. Whatever the genre, he's always looked for books with a memorable voice and a compelling story to tell. Contact Lev.