The English language seems, generally, to have a greater anxiety about translation than do others. It is not just bringing other works into translation (which we do rather sparely) or translating out (which we do a lot, but with occasional hand-wringing) it is the fact of translation’s existence, and how it affects literature:
Tim Parks, writing in the NYRB blog, seems to fault translation for a “Literature Without Style” that has made him weary of contemporary fiction. Some of the writing is lovely, particularly when he is talking about the style of writers he appreciates, such as Henry Green and F. Scott Fitzgerald.
Parks moves his way toward this definition:
“Style, then, involves a meeting between arrangements inside the prose and expectations outside it. You can’t have a strong style without a community of readers able to recognize and appreciate its departures from the common usages they know. Much of what is surprising in Green’s text is inevitably lost in translation, in a language, for example, with different rules of deixis; some is lost simply by shifting the book across the Atlantic. Green’s work never travelled well.”
This style is something translation — and here he generalizes, mostly from the Italian translations of Gatsby — cannot do:
I’ve looked at five Italian translations. None is able to convey “unrestfully,” “permanent move,” or “get rich together.” … In translation, stripped of its style, Gatsby really doesn’t seem a very remarkable performance.
Translation — or even movement between different communities within a language — is at fault because:
…style is predicated on a strict relation to a specific readership and the more that readership is diluted or extended, particularly if it includes foreign-language readers, the more difficult it is for a text of any stylistic density to be successful.
Parks yearns for a very particular (recent, Anglo) past where literature is first appreciated by critics, then by a local audience, and then (maybe! some time down the road!) translated by “cosmopolitan literati.” But the translators and audiences both keep their distances; they don’t get too near to the literature itself.
Parks then makes this great leap, central to his argument (which has been made elsewhere, although not with much evidence):
“it seems inevitable that style will align with what can be readily translated more or less into multiple languages and cultural settings, or into a readily intelligible international idiom.”
It is perhaps true — I’m not sure — that wild flights of style are not as common as they once were, that there are fewer Ahmad Faris al-Shidyaq and Tristam Shandys and more Booker-clone, MFA-styled (insert your own perjorative) texts.
Parks talks about the style of two celebrated contemporary novels, both of which don’t seem really located in their particular present. I could agree that this is, indeed, a real phenomenon. But can we trace this to “too much” translation? It seems far more likely that we can lay it at the doorstep of the Internet, of Twitter, of a “globalized” lifestyle that is not global so much as it is based on affinity groups that might not be in our neighborhood but are mediated online.
That is, the “global” of similar book festivals in Pakistan, India, Germany, Scotland, and Mexico isn’t particularly universal. It is certainly a real thing — and yes, give me Hanan al-Shaykh’s Story of Zahra over her Only in London any day of the week — but I’m not sure what it has to do with translation.
Parks says, for his part, he has taken to reading poetry, where “writers are still allowed to produce texts that are untranslatable and for the most part unprofitable.”
Indeed, glory to the “untranslatable, unprofitable” text, that reinvigorates language. And particular glories to the translations that do bring across style (cheers, for instance, to what Humphrey Davies did with Leg over Leg); that bring something new into a language. Because while the “globalization” of particular elite communities is not much to celebrate, and neither are most “hurry-hurry-quick-to-market” translations, certainly we don’t want to live in isolation, either, without knowing what is going on in other literatures.
” If one translates Dickens into another language, an enormous amount is lost”
people actually get paid to write condescending c**p like this?
but then, how would i know, i’m just a lowly translator who wouldn’t know henry green from adam.
Interesting how he only talks about translating out of English & not into.
hehe. was gonna say dante must be better in english, but thought better of it.
How is this condescending? We may think of him primarily as a powerful, often sentimental storyteller, but Dickens wrote extremely idiosyncratic, stylized prose that jumped between very specific registers and rhythms of spoken (nineteenth-century) English. Many modern readers find his work very difficult, and passages in his later novels can be almost incomprehensible. There’ no doubt that _some_ of that is going to be lost in translation, so it seems really a question of whether you think that some is a lot or a little. I would argue that for a writer like Dickens that’s a considerable amount – which doesn’t mean he’s not worth translating.
I think Lydia Davis’s translation of _Swann’s Way_ is miraculous (and extremely different from her original writing, so it’s not just her), but I have no doubt that there is a great deal in Proust’s language that simply can’t be conveyed in English, although a good translator might find an evocative equivalent.
This is Tim Park’s earlier essay on the same subject — http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2012/jan/19/writing-adrift-world-mix/ — and perhaps a good introduction to the one you’ve posted Marcia. For people who haven’t read Tim Parks’ (incredibly good) novels or other books and don’t know who he is or what he spends most of time doing, it may help them position his argument better.
Yes, now I see an expansion on his argument against the novel “with international appeal,” although I think this has little or nothing to do with translation, and everything to do with how we imagine / position ourselves in the world, how we imagine “the world.”
“Matters that genuinely concern the author and the culture he’s living in” supposes a singular sort of culture, which perhaps one can’t. Anyhow, interesting, and he clearly has a brilliant feel for language and style, but I don’t find myself agreeing.
Reblogged this on A Few Extra Cubic Metres.
“Indeed, glory to the “untranslatable, unprofitable” text, that reinvigorates language.”
Hoda Barakat apparently used to say that her novels were considered to be ‘untranslatable’ until Marilyn Booth started working on them. Surely a good translator is an artist just as much as the original writer is, and their role is to work in that space between “arrangements inside the prose and expectations outside it”.
I can’t seem to load the earlier essay, but I do wonder what he’d say about his translations of Calvino, Moravia; how he positions himself vis a vis this work.
Oh really! I appreciate Marcia’s calm and attempt at even-handedness. But Tim Parks entire stance on translation is best summarized with one word: privilege. And in real tangible terms, these views promote and justify the exclusion of a large number of writers from profitable markets. Frankly, I pity us Anglophone readers.
well one often wonder what we lose between languages but then again on the plus side is what is gain ,a recent example would be finnegians wake into Chinese it worked but just does that make it any less of a pleasure for those that can’t read english no because they still get a little of the book .All the best stu