THE HIDEOUS, THE SUBLIME, AND THE LITERARY TRANSLATOR by Edith Grossman (Special Feature)
At first glance, the connections among literary translation, the hideous, and the sublime may appear tenuous, yet I believe that hideousness and sublimity encapsulate the nature of the work I do. If the middle ground between these esthetic poles is the eminently romantic construct of the grotesque, then its epitome may be the strange craft of translation, an occupation that many critics agree is impossible at best, a betrayal at worst, and on the average probably not much more than the accumulated result of a diligent, even slavish familiarity with dictionaries.
Bringing a text over into another language has a long and glorious history. It can boast of illustrious practitioners ranging from St. Jerome to Richard Wilbur, and it is undeniably one of the characteristic, defining activities of the European Renaissance. But Robert Frost is said to have called poetry the thing that gets lost in translation, an observation as devastating as the thundering accusation, made respectable by age, that all translators are traitors. Although my translating colleagues and I, with wounded pride and ruffled intellectual feathers, reject the description out of hand, it must affect us more deeply than we care to acknowledge since so many of us spend so much time denying it.
If one disavows the proposition that professional translators are acutely and incurably pathological, the obvious question is why any sane person would engage in a maligned activity that is often discounted as menial hack work or reviled as nothing short of criminal. Certainly, for most of us, neither fame nor fortune are serious motivations for so underpaid and undersung an enterprise. Something ineffable, something sublime in the work must move us to undertake it. This circumstance of the literary translator is the topic I would like to address, somewhat obliquely, perhaps, and undoubtedly in a highly subjective way. I’ll begin with the hideous part.
I can think of no other profession whose practitioners find themselves endlessly challenged to prove to the world that what they do is decent, honorable, and possible. Over and over again we are compelled to insist on what is called the “translatability” of literature, to assert the plausibility and value of translation, to defend our very presence as the intermediary voice between the first author and the readers of the second version of the work – that is, the translation. “Seamless” is probably the highest tribute a translation can receive from most reviewers, but if you’ll permit me an acerbic translation of the damnation concealed in that faint praise, seamlessness means the properly humbled and chastised invisibility into which the translator chooses to disappear. What a bizarre way to make a living: translation is grudgingly admitted to be an unfortunate necessity, perhaps even crucial to the transmission of culture, but translators are expected to self-destruct, as if we were personally responsible for the Tower of Babel and its dire consequences for our species.
That’s not all. We invariably have to confront the critic whom Gregory Rabassa called “Professor Horrendo,” the pedant ready to pounce on the one or two inevitable misinterpretations or infelicitous phrasings in a text that can be several hundred pages long. I confess, with reluctance, that translations are imperfect – one of the reasons why certain great works are periodically retranslated. Ortega y Gasset, in fact, in his essay “The Misery and Splendor of Translation,” called the effort to translate literature “utopian” but added that all human endeavor, even attempting to communicate with another person in the same language, is equally utopian. To Ortega’s mind, however, the unlikelihood of achieving the goal does not detract from the luminous value of the struggle to reach it. In translation, this goal – the utopian ideal that can never be fully realized – is fidelity, which should not be confused with literalness, a clumsy, unhelpful concept that radically skews the qualities I find intrinsic to the nature of languages.
The languages we speak and write are too sprawling and unruly to be contained. Despite the best efforts of prescriptive entities ranging from the French government to William Safire, languages will not be regulated. They overflow even the most modern and “complete” dictionaries, which on publication are always at least twenty years out of date; they sneer at restriction and correction and revel in local slang, ambiguous meaning, and faddish variation. Like surly adolescents they push against the limits imposed by an academic world they never made. Languages, in short, are in a state of perpetual rebellion. They are clearly more than accumulations of discrete lexical items, “correct” formulations, or acceptable syntax, and the impact of their words is variable, multi-faceted, and resonant with innumerable connotations that go far beyond first – or even fourth and fifth – dictionary definitions.
A single language is slippery, paradoxical, ambivalent, explosive. When one tries to grasp it long enough to create a translation, the byzantine complexity of the enterprise is heightened and intensified to an alarming, almost schizophrenic degree, for the second language is just as elusive, just as dynamic, and just as recalcitrant as the first. The experience of attempting to transfer meaning, to hear the effect, the rhythms, the artfulness of distinct languages simultaneously, can verge on the hallucinatory. Even first cousins like Spanish and Italian trail immense, individual histories behind them, and with all their volatile accretions of tradition, culture, and forms and levels of discourse, no two languages ever dovetail perfectly or occupy the same space at the same time. They can be linked by translation, as a photograph can link movement and stasis, but it is disingenuous to assume that translation, and photography for that matter, are purely representational arts in any narrow sense of the term. Fidelity is our noble purpose, but it has little, if anything, to do with literalness. If it did, describing a translation as good or bad, artful or awkward, sensitive or plodding, would be a futile exercise. If it did, the only relevant criterion for judging our work would be a mechanistic and naive one-for-one matching of individual elements across two disparate language systems. This kind of robotic pairing is scornfully called “translatorese,” the misbegotten, unfaithful, and often unintentionally comic invention that exists only in the mind of a failed translator and has no reality in any linguistic universe. In one of my favorite cartoons, the bewildered translator asks a disgruntled author: “Do you not be happy with me as the translator of the books of you?”
If translators do not match up “individual elements” and simply bring over words from one language to another, using a kind of linguistic tracing paper, then what do translators translate? Before I even attempt an approach to the question, I want to underscore a self-evident point: of course translators scour the dictionary, many dictionaries in fact, and rummage diligently, sometimes frantically, through thesauruses and encyclopedias as well, looking for definitions and meanings. But this kind of lexical search and research, accompanied by many consultations with infinitely patient friends who are native speakers of the source language, and preferably come from the same region as the author, is a preliminary activity associated with the rough draft – the first step in a long series of revisions. Completing this initial stage successfully is, perhaps, a sign of basic competence, but it is not central to the most important and challenging purposes of translation.
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 rarely faithful to words or syntax, which are peculiar to specific languages and cannot be brought over directly in any misguided and inevitably muddled effort to somehow replicate the original.
At the heart of the problem with the literalist notion is this: words do not mean in isolation. Rather, words mean 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. The meaning of a passage can always be rendered faithfully in a second language; its words, taken as separate entities, can almost never be. As a consequence, translators use analogy to translate the significance of the original, searching for the terminology, phrasing, and style in the second language which mean in the same way. And this requires all our sensibility and as much sensitivity as we can summon to the workings and nuances of the language we translate into.
When I began work on Love in the Time of Cholera, for instance, the great, looming issue for me was deciding on the tone I would use to render the fairly traditional periods, filled with Cervantine echoes, which to my ear typify the writing of García Márquez. As far as I know, English has no novelistic model, subliminal or conscious, comparable to Cervantes in Spanish. Shakespeare and the King James Bible seem to resonate more in drama and poetry, not fiction, and because English has changed more radically than Spanish over the past few centuries, even prose as powerful as John Donne’s sermons has an antiquated flavor that in no way reflects the real nature of García Márquez’ writing. I finally chose a kind of generalized nineteenth century Dickensian, perhaps Jamesian voice as filtered through the pages of William Faulkner, who is García Márquez’ favorite English-language author. I did not actually re-read their books, but I did have a notion of avoiding contractions in the narrative (as opposed to dialogue), favoring Latinate polysyllables over short Germanic words, and allowing leisurely and ornate sentences to flow as if Ernest Hemingway had never walked the earth.
This is representative of what I mean by attempting to recreate context. If we succeed, then we have kept the promise implicit in every literary translation: we have been faithful to the utopian ideal of allowing readers of another language to approximate the experience of reading the original text. Which leads to the sublime part, the reasons that motivate me to spend my days in pursuit of utopian goals. And here especially I make no claim to objectivity.
By now it is a commonplace, at least in translating circles, to say that the translator is the most penetrating reader and profound critic a work can have. The very nature of what we do requires it. Translating significance means that we must engage in extensive textual excavation and bring to bear everything we know, feel, and intuit about the two languages and their literatures. Translating by analogy means that we have to probe into layers of purpose and implication, weigh and consider each element within its context, and then make the great leap of faith into recreating both text and context in alien terms. And this kind of close critical reading is sheer pleasure for shameless literature addicts like me, who believe that the sum of a fine piece of writing is more than its parts and larger than the discrete words that comprise it. I am probably stumbling into metaphysical quicksand, but I have spent much of my professional life, not to mention all those years in graduate school, committed to the dual proposition that in literature, as in other forms of artistic expression, something more lurks behind mere surface, and that my role in life was to try to discover and interpret it, even if that goal was utopian. I think this kind of longing to unravel esthetic mysteries must lie at the heart of the study of literature. It surely is the essence of interpretation, of exegesis, of criticism, and of translation, and as General Patton mused in the voice of George C. Scott, I do love it so. I have brought up acting in order to introduce yet another analogy. Ralph Manheim, the great translator from German, compared translators to actors who interpret another person’s lines, who speak as the author would if the author could speak English. I relish his provocative observation because it implicitly denies the possibility, or even the desirability, of translators becoming invisible. How can we, if we are actually performers who bring all our experience, all our esthetic perceptions, all our quirks, and all our warts to the interpretation of texts?
I’ll conclude with a matched pair of anecdotes.
García Márquez often shifts the level of his language drastically as he moves from narration to dialogue, from formal speech to curses and colloquialisms. This was especially apparent in The General in his Labyrinth, where the character of Simón Bolívar alternated a courtly and archaic eighteenth century diction on public occasions, or when ladies were present, with still current obscenities so foul-mouthed they offended certain South American readers who did not care for the depiction of clay feet on national idols. In this country, one reviewer complained that I made The Liberator sound like a cop from the Bronx. I found this unsettling, but when I relayed the information, with some trepidation, to García Márquez, he was delighted. “Macanudo,” he said. “Terrific. Just the way it should be.” On the other hand, after the publication of Love in the Time of Cholera, I received an irate letter from a reader in Mexico who accused me of egregious Victorianism and intolerable prudery because I had translated the phrase “A la mierda con el arzobispo” as “To hell with the Archbishop.”
As the cliché has it, you can’t win them all. Better yet, in the words of Samuel Beckett, “Next time I’ll have to fail better.”
– November 2003
Edith Grossman is the award-winning literary translator of works by major Spanish language authors, including Alvaro Mutis, Mario Vargas Llosa, Mayra Montero, Julian Rios, Miguel de Cervantes, and Gabriel García Márquez. Her new translation of Don Quixote (HarperCollins, 2003) was met with universal acclaim, and her translation of Márquez’s memoir, Living to Tell the Tale, was selected by The New York Times Book Review as one of the top ten books of 2003.