I have this theory regarding translation and regarding literature in general. When you read a book, there is a thin thread that connects each statement and idea with the previous one and the next one. It’s that element that makes the entire piece whole. It isn’t easily identifiable, but it’s absence is. It isn’t specific words, but it’s the way the words follow one another and how they relate back and forth to past and future ideas. Without that thread, you have a collection of words. Disjointed. Nonsensical. Uneasy.
The difficulty in translation is finding that thread and preserving it across the translation. I’m currently struggling over this novel by Françoise Sagan – Dans un mois, Dans un an – and the tricky bit is not finding her thread this time; it’s preserving it. Her words are all so ya know in how often she refers back to long-lost ideas, sometimes those ideas came and went unnoticed in other chapters. It’s awkward to word out all the implied “that which she had previouslys” and the unstated “of which could not be realized untils” in English, but the work doesn’t make logical sense without them.
I thought I was special for having discovered this issue, but it seems to be the age old folly of translation. A good translation of a text is good because the translator has forsaken trying to preserve that author’s thread and has made their own thread that exists in the adaptation. It is the step that happens after realizing the thread connecting the piece is different from the author’s voice. Sagan has a clear voice in French and it is easily rendered in English. But her thread is very culturally French and doesn’t appeal to American literary sensibilities. The appeal of her literary voice is lost in english because the thread she uses to tie her piece together gets lost in the transition. She leaves so much up to the imagination in a way that makes you question the translation’s rendering of her voice. You read translations of her work and you think, “She can’t possbily be writing like this! It just doesn’t make sense!” But the problem is that she truly is writing like that and it’s just that the connections between her words are lost and not the words themselves.
The solution to this problem is in the genius translation style of William Weaver, who is a translator of modern Italian literature. Recently, I compared his translation of Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities to the original Le città invisibili and it truly is incredible to see the differences and similarities, what he kept and what he let go, and, what could be seen as, fidelities and artistic infidelities. Calvino’s voice resounds so well in Weaver’s English, but that connecting thread that seems almost impossible to carry from the Italian into English is dealt with so masterfully. Weaver scraps the whole issue and makes a new one that is his own. Calvino’s pieces in English are of course still Calvino, but they are equally Weaver’s. In the end, it’s as if Calvino wrote Le città invisibili and Weaver wrote another book called Invisible Cities.
The difference in Weaver’s approach is that he addresses translation as a kind of adaptation. Just as the novel makes the transition from text to film by means of the director, the Italian text makes the transition to English in the same way. A director adds and removes. He changes the original. So does the translator, but just to a subtler extent and on a different level. Where the director may change a character or a setting or a plot element in order to communicate a symbol or concept differently, the translator changes the presentation of the words or the voice in order to do the same.
This all reminds me of a discussion I had with my French professor about what one of her students called “interlanguage.” Basically, it’s the issue of how much a student of a foreign language should relate back to their native language and how much they should just try to work solely in the target language. The issue is this: one approach to language learning is based on equivalencies of A=B and this=that, while another focuses on in-language. ESL follows the system for the latter. You can teach ESL to a class composed of speakers of numerous different mother languages, and because the principle is English taught in English, the student makes his own connections within the language.
In the world of translation, it’s easy to fall out of this “interlanguage” and rely heavily on equivalencies (i.e. le chat = the cat) without looking at the cultural connotations associated with each word and how through these specific connotations and cultural experiences associated with these words, they become entirely independent of each other (le chat =/= the cat because the French idealization and symbolism associated with le chat is entirely separate from that of the Anglophone idea of the cat).
But herein lies the crux of translation. To only rely on equivalencies renders a finished translation that means nothing. It’s incomprehensible. The translator has failed his secondary function of cultural liaison. To delve too deeply into what the French conceptualized chat is and to try and explain that into terms understandable by English speakers, raised in an Anglophone cultural context ends up with the product being too convoluted and hard to follow.
Thus, the job of a good translator is to know when to give up, basically. That is to know when it stops being vital to remain strictly faithful to the author and when to make artistic changes. Of course, translator involvement during the transition process is controversial and frequently language specialists would claim it is unethical. But, in this issue, the difference between literary translation and functional translation is the difference what meaning the translator is carrying across. In one, the translator is transitioning a concept and in the other he is transposing. In the transition, artist freedom to an extent is not unethical whereas in transposing, it should be avoided entirely.
In the end, the solution in my struggle to make Sagan’s words understood by English-speaking people is to reinvent her French concepts into, in this case, American ones. Not necessarily in an unfaithful manner, but as the bridge over which her message passes, I must re-contextualize her message so it makes sense on the other side of the bridge.
