Double allegiances

Why it’s impossible to separate a translated work from the translator

May 06, 2018 12:02 am | Updated 10:06 am IST

There will be no Literature Nobel Thursday this year, that day in October when the Swedish Academy makes known the winner. There will be none of that exciting build-up, as our hearts beat faster, when the big London bookmakers update the odds on who is in the reckoning, and we update our lists of personal favourites from the year before and wonder, will finally Haruki Murakami receive the summons to Stockholm? (Murakami is like V.S. Naipaul of the years before 2001, you knew he had his claim on the prize, and the question was only, when?) Or whether it’ll be Syrian poet Adonis’s time at last. Or if the Academy will shape-shift the definition of literature yet again after wonderfully expanding it to award Belarusian journalist Svetlana Alexievich in 2015, and exasperating even the recipient by narrowing in on singer-songwriter Bob Dylan the next year. Or if the Academy will stick by English language writers for a second year running and award, say, Margaret Atwood.

There will be no wondering if, almost by a magical act, the Academy will present before us a writer who many of us had not known, but will now be the richer for being nudged to read, as it did most recently in 2014 when it awarded French novelist Patrick Modiano. With the Swedish Academy hit by a scandal that includes charges of sexual harassment, financial fraud, cover-up and leaking information to bookmakers, we will not, most of all, have the necessary occasion to pause long enough to thank the community of translators who allow us, across languages and geographies, to see the Nobel as a moment to come together as a global readership to keep faith in literature as a shared endeavour.

But do we read the same book when we go through it in different languages? In a new book, Sympathy for the Traitor: A Translation Manifesto , Mark Polizzotti makes the case for translators be equals to the writers they translate, as Edith Grossman, translator of writers including Nobel laureate Mario Vargas Llosa, does so valuably in her 2010 book Why Translation Matters . Polizzotti, who has translated Modiano’s work into English, also asks the question that assails all translators, and one we readers do not grapple with enough as we expand our reading lists across languages we cannot comprehend in the original: “Should you (and how much should you) improve upon the original?” He is an improver, and counsels that the mark of a good translator, as it is of an editor, is to be able to determine what needs fixing in order to maintain the integrity of the work and help it be the best it can be to achieve its purpose. Many writers do not agree, including Milan Kundera, but thankfully they are in a minority.

In a particularly intriguing passage, Polizzotti explains how the craft of the translator is akin to the spy’s, and examples include Richard Burton (translator of One Thousand and One Nights , and spy for the East India Company). He explains how this works: “In some ways, translation and spying are natural bedfellows: both involve double allegiances, parallel modes of expression, the ability to observe and interpret; to jump, like a seasoned performer, from one role to another, one voice to another, one persona to another. And, as with a performer, the translator’s loyalties are never to be taken for granted… In other words, a translator is a double agent, constantly playing two texts, two language, two cultures, two readerships off each other in order to arrive at a truth that ultimately serves no master but his own exacting ideal of excellence.”

In other words

Curiously, in an author’s note in In Other Words , the English translation by Ann Goldstein of her book in Italian, Jhumpa Lahiri explained why she did not render it into English herself: “Had I translated this book, the temptation would have been to improve it, to make it stronger by means of my stronger language. But I wanted the translation of In altre parole [the Italian original] to render my Italian honestly, without smoothing out its rough edges, without neutralising its oddness, without manipulating its character.” It would be interesting to ask Goldstein how she went about the dilemma of ‘to improve or not to improve’.

And as we postpone our speculation about the possibility of a Nobel for Murakami till 2019, when the Academy will present this year’s and next year’s Nobels, you could consider the odd case about English translations of his first bestseller in Japan, Norwegian Wood . It was first translated into English by Alfred Birnbaum for a Japanese publisher. But overseas, the English translation distributed was by Jay Rubin. As Wendy Lesser notes in Why I Read: The Serious Pleasure of Books , the Rubin volume had this in the Translator’s Note: “Alfred Birnbaum’s earlier translation of Norwegian Wood … was produced for distribution in Japan… to enable students to enjoy their favorite author as they struggled with the mysteries of English.” Lesser read both versions, and preferred Birnbaum’s.

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