(I’m going to keep referencing Greek. The background is that about 3 years ago I started learning ancient Greek. Over the last couple of years, as learning exercises, I’ve translated a couple of plays, and this year it’ll be Plutarch’s Life of Anthony. So I spend more hours a week on translation that I do on reading Briggs and Barthes combined. Talk about slow reads, try word by painful word…)
Briggs tells us that Helen Lowe-Porter first translated Thomas Mann’s works into English and she chose translation work for the intellectual challenge. It was her translations that contributed to the wide readership of his work, and his literary reputation.
And bang! I realise that must be the case for much translated literature most widely read in translation. We are reading a text that has been intermediated for us, in which all the words have been newly-chosen from those available to the translator, and reassembled. Yet the work is still presented as that of the original author. (I checked my just bought copy of The Magic Mountain, and it was only at the end of the translator’s preface that I found the initials H.T.L-P.).
This is, I think, less the case with Classical works, where the translator gets not quite equal billing but a reader is more likely to know that they are reading, for example, Emily Wilson’s translation of Homer’s The Odyssey. Which I have read and enjoyed, having read very little of The Odyssey in Greek and that about 30 years ago. But I do know that to achieve an enjoyable, readable translation of Greek is to go through almost a double translation process. There is ‘what does this mean?’ in the very literal sense, that most likely results in scrambled English. And then there is the rendering and stretching into literary language, which may of necessity wander some way from its starting point. (This could well be my own poor language skills making it impossible for me to comprehend someone translating as they go into a fine literary work.)
pp. 42-43 So I’m interested that Briggs, as a translator, feels that she has read a work when she’s read it in translation. I’m always haunted by the ghost of the original text, a pervading uncertainty as to whether what I’m reading is what the book ‘really’ says. Have I read it ‘properly’? I had something of the same with audiobooks, another way in which the originally written word is mediated. Is it ‘proper’ reading? (I do not in any way believe that the only true, valid form of reading is to read in the original language, in print.) I think I need to exorcise the spirits and approach translated works as works of creation in their own right.
p. 42, Briggs says,
‘when we feel, in a translation, that it must indeed be these necessary words in this necessary order, the translation has become literature too’.
So there is a state of translation that perhaps does not attain to ‘literature’ in its own right but has importance as a contributor to the ongoing literary reputation of the original. Is it the iterated fact of translations of ‘great’ classic works that testifies to the greatness of the original? Does a superior translation enhance the reputation of the original? Could a terrible translation diminish a reputation?
p. 46, I love Ann Carson’s translation exercise from Nay, Rather. It is something of a reductio ad absurdam (should I translate that?!) but it makes a valid point about the limitations and potential variations of translation. As I said above, a translator can only draw on the language available to them. But with modern languages I’m guessing it would be unusual and unnecessary to make up an entirely new meaning for a word.
With Greek, because so few texts survive, often when I look up a word it is only attested in that one text. So that is the only meaning available to me for that word, or at least the only one that I can have confidence could have been intended. Other words have dozens or hundreds of references, illustrating the fluidity of a dynamic language, the shift from literal to metaphorical. The poor isolated words suggest a paucity of meaning that may be entirely due to accidents of survival. Or, it could be that the writer invented the word for that specific context, particularly in tragedy when metrical convenience was a factor. Shakespeare wasn’t the first to crack on with the neologisms. But as someone translating the text for learning purposes, I’m out of options.
It must bring an extra layer of richness to the process to be engaged on translation work while in contact with the author. I wonder how often Helen Lowe-Porter asked Thomas Mann, ‘But what does this mean, exactly?’