Translators | Traitors

I am starting to worry about this class I will teach next semester in translation. So I was excited to see a couple of reflections on the problem of translation by Daniel Mendelsohn and Dana Stevens in The New York Time Sunday Book Review.

Mendelsohn has a few interesting and not immediately apparent examples that stress the importance of accuracy, but he really wanted to emphasize tone.

Tone is everything. A novel in which characters say “I daresay” is galaxies apart from one in which characters say “I kinda think.” Aeschylus’ “Agamemnon” is notorious for its elaborate diction and inscrutable syntax — a murky Greek that nicely suggests the moral and political murkiness that is the play’s subject. When David R. Slavitt chose to pepper his 1997 translation of this titanic masterpiece with phrases like “learning curve,” “stress-related” and “Watch what you say, mister,” he was not only cheapening the diction but hamstringing the play’s larger meanings. Clytemnestra is not Joan Crawford.

Interesting point, but I am tempted to agree with Stevens, who says that translation is how, "succeeding generations and cultures to reinterpret and reshape [stories] as their own." This is the classic confrontation: for whom is the translation written? For the author, or for the reader? Certainly authors have a stake in how their works are represented when they are carried over from one tongue to another (and that's where I find myself in sympathy with Mendelsohn's criteria of accuracy), but the skillful translator knows the language and idioms of the target language and how to carry the sense of the text across in such a way that readers can access it. 

While translation has been a powerful metaphor around which I organize my own work, I fear it risks being a gimmick when you're dealing with artists who are not all that sure of what they are saying and not all that fluent in any one specific means of expression (I simply cannot use the phrase 'visual language,' which I grow to despise more every day). I wonder if thinking about translation is missing the point - possibly we should be thinking about bilingualism, or about processes of editing and publication. 

But still something inheres to the idea of translation that makes it seem like a good way to understand the process of making something. It makes intuitive sense to some people to see an idea as 'translated' between head and hand.