Lately, I have found myself increasingly interested in reading works about translation, including the recent illuminating book, The Philosophy of Translation by Damion Searls. Reading about translation has revivified my approach to writing, reminding me of the potentialities inherent in the English language, what Searls calls its affordances, and the need to carefully consider its usages.

For the longest time I read books in translation without giving much thought to the translation process. I imagined it to be relatively straightforward, primarily focused on the conversion of sentences from one language to another. Inevitably, some choices might need to be made regarding definitions or syntactical adjustments to enhance readability in the new language. I never imagined there might be significant deviations from the original text.

A turning point in my thinking came upon reading A Void (Le Disparition) by Georges Perec with its famous lipogrammatic constraint of not using the letter e, the most common letter in the French language. In a feat of linguistic legerdemain, the translator Gilbert Adair produced a novel in English without an e, yet it seemed clear this could not have been accomplished by adherence to achieving accuracy alone. Translating an Oulipian text such as this cannot simply be with regard to reproduction, but rather greater importance must be attached to capturing the spirit of the author’s work, a much more delicate task. Edna St. Vincent Millay in discussing translating Baudelaire emphasized that translating poetry in particular entails capturing ‘matter, style, mood, freshness, sincerity, and vigor’.

Vigor is one of Cicero’s quadrivium of tenets for intellectual discourse, as is knowledge, both being crucial not only for translation but also for writing. The vigor of expressive language and pure style should be combined with a breadth of knowledge, encompassing erudition, literary allusions, and a measured intelligence.

Adair decided to include a translation of Edgar Allan Poe’s The Raven, sans e, in A Void. He uses “black bird” for raven. Perec could not have used “courbeau” (raven), nor could he have used the literal counterpart of Adair’s, “oiseau noir”. It was interesting to discover that The Raven does not appear in La Disparition; by including it Adair has been true to the essence of Perec’s genius and playfulness, remaining faithful to the spirit of the text.

As Searls compellingly points out, an accurate verbal translation might be ill-suited to common English usage. Being fluent in Finnish, a word I have always been fond of because of its expressiveness is “hongankolistaja”, literally meaning “a shaker-of-pine-trees”. It is hard to imagine a context in English where this would not sound risible. “Tall, reedy person” would lose the delightful imagery. One might substitute “beanpole”, which if translated back to Finnish would likewise sound exceedingly odd.

Several years ago I wanted to read Rilke’s The Duino Elegies. I was admittedly bemused by the number of extant translations, having never given much thought to choosing a translation, imagining them to be more or less isomorphic. I finally chose that of William Gass, knowing that Gass would never be less than insightful and enthralling, and intrigued by the subtitle of Reading Rilke, which alludes to the problems of translation. He discusses fourteen different translations of the first two sentences of the first elegy. Among the translated phrases were “order of angels”, “ranked angels”, “angels’ hierarchies”, and “Dominion of Angels”, the latter being Gass’ own and the most compelling. This highlights the affordances of the English language, there being a world of difference in the subtle nuances between the semantic interpretations of “order”, “hierarchy”, and “dominion”.

Having cut my Proustian teeth on Lydia Davis’ translation of Swann’s Way, I found her discussion of translating Proust and Flaubert in her Essays II captivating, given her pellucid style and her contagious enthusiasm about language and words. Discussing Madame Bovary, she offers nine translations of a two-word phrase, boufées d’affandisement. There is chasm of meaning between “gusts of revulsion” and “stagnant dreariness”. Illustrative of the ludicrous results that can be generated by AI, I was offered upon my entering the above French phrase “puffs of fading”, which conjures up swirls of cigarette smoke carried on the evening breeze, hardly Flaubert’s intention.

Anne Garréta, the first female Oulipian, forces the reader of her latest book, In Concrete, to reevaluate their relationship to language, as the text is replete with puns, alliterations, neologisms, mondegreens, and more. Her translator Emma, Ramadan has the wonderful description of translating the book as ‘trying to catch an eel in one pond and put it in another.’ In her afterword, she highlights the importance of exploring the mutability and elasticity of language delightfully suggesting an immersion in a ‘language bath’.

Reflecting on all of this reinforces the importance of attention to linguistic matters and style in writing. Gilbert Sorrentino said that without style, prose with a cohesive narrative, however grammatically and syntactically correct, is wooden. Nowadays style and linguistic adventurousness oftentimes seem to be sacrificed at the altar of soul-baring (what Garréta refers to as ‘scraping the bottoms of mirrors’ in her book Not One Day), and so-called relevance and accessibility. Comfort level and familiarity does not necessarily do a service to the reader. My translation fascination has reminded me to continually reevaluate my relationship with language. As Gass, one of the great prose stylists, points out in discussing the music of prose, ‘language is not the lowborn, gawky servant of thought and feeling; it is need, thought, feeling, and perception itself.’

 

References

Damion Searls, The Philosophy of Translation, Yale University Press, 2024

Edna St. Vincent Millay, Foreword to Flowers of Evil by Charles Baudelaire, New York Review of Books Poets, 2024

William Gass, Reading Rilke: Reflections on the Problems of Translation (Knopf Publishers, 1999).
———“The Music of Prose”, in The William Gass Reader, Vintage Books, 2019.

Lydia Davis, Essays II, Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2021.

Emma Ramadan, Afterword to In Concrete by Anna Garréta, Deep Vellum Publishing, 2021

 

Kimmo Rosenthal, after a long career of teaching and publishing mathematics, has turned his attention to writing. He has nearly fifty literary publications and a Pushcart Prize nomination. Recent work has appeared in The Fib Review, BigCityLit, The RavensPerch, Sage Cigarettes, Indefinite Space, and After the Art.

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