Performing Without a Stage

PERFORMING WITHOUT A STAGE The Art of Literary Translation by Robert Wechsler Catbird Press 1 © 1998 Robert Wechsler Performing Without a Stage: The Art of Literary Translation by Robert Wechsler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States License. For more information about this license, visit http:// creativecommons.org/about/licenses/ CATBIRD PRESS 16 Windsor Road, North Haven, CT 06473 203-230-2391, [email protected] www.catbirdpress.com Our books are distributed by Independent Publishers Group Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Wechsler, Robert, 1954- Performing without a stage : the art of literary translation / by Robert Wechsler. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-945774-38-9 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. Translating and interpreting. I. Title PN241.W43 1998 418'.02--dc21 97-35268 CIP I would like to thank the people who so kindly gave me feedback on this book: Peter Glassgold, Nancy Hughes, Floyd Kemske, and Peter Kussi. I would also like to thank the dozens of people who allowed me to interview them. 2 Contents Introduction 4 Preparing for the Best 10 The Intimacy of Submission 27 Lost and Found 45 The Romance of Infidelity 58 The Obligations of Polygamy 95 Decisions, Decisions 104 Bettering 137 It’s Even Good for You 155 No Translator Is an Island 181 Love Is All There Is 217 Performing Without a Stage 237 Recommended Reading 274 Endnotes 282 3 Introduction Literary translation is an odd art. It consists of a person sitting at a desk, writing literature that is not his, that has someone else’s name on it, that has already been written. The translator’s work appears to define derivativeness. Would anyone write a book about people who sit in a museum copying paintings? Copiers aren’t artists, they’re students or forgers, wannabes or crooks. Yet literary translation is an art. What makes it so odd an art is that physically a translator does exactly the same thing as a writer. If an actor did the same thing as a playwright, a dancer did the same thing as a composer, or a singer did the same thing as a songwriter, no one would think much of what they do either. The translator’s problem is that he is a performer without a stage, a performer who, when all his work is done, has something that looks just like the original, just like a play or a song or a composition, nothing but ink on a page. Like a musician, a literary translator takes someone else’s composition and performs it in his own special way. Just as a musician embodies someone else’s notes by moving his body or throat, a translator embodies someone else’s thoughts and images by writing in another language. The biggest difference isn’t really that the musician produces air movements while the translator produces yet more words; it is that a musical composition is intended to be translated into body and throat movements, while a work of literature is not intended to be translated into another language. Thus, although it is practically invisible, the translator’s art is the more problematic one. And it is also the more responsible one, because while every musician knows that his performance is simply one of many, often one of thousands, by that musician and by others, the translator knows that his performance may be the only one, at least the only one of his generation, and that he will not 4 have the opportunity either to improve on it or to try a different approach. And while the translator is shouldering this responsibility and forcing literary works into forms they were never intended to take, no one can see his difficult performance. Except where he slips up. In fact, he is praised primarily for not being seen. Even when we listen to an album, we can imagine the musician bowing or blowing, but nothing comes to mind when we think of a translator translating, nothing more than what we imagine an author doing. Which isn’t much. The Czech writer Karel Capek wrote of what he did when he wrote, “even if I were to sit on the porch with my work, I don’t think a single boy would come and watch my fingers to see how a writer’s business is done. I don’t say that it is a bad or useless profession, but it is not one of the superlatively fine and striking ones, and the material used is of a strange sort — you don’t even see it.”* But we don’t expect any more of writers. We expect to be excited by what a creator creates, not by the way in which he creates it. Unless he is also a performer, like a jazz musician. With a performing artist, we do expect the doing to be exciting, because the creation has already been done. The performing artist doesn’t create, he interprets. But the translator’s interpretation not only takes the form of the original—ink—but it doesn’t even depart from the content, the way a literary critic’s interpretation does. Only now we can read the ink. The creator’s work looks like gibberish, or would if we ever saw it. Just like a musical score to someone who can’t read music. But the musician’s performance doesn’t look anything like a score; the two couldn’t be any more different. The translation is so similar, the result is a palimpsest, two works, one on top of the other, an original and a performance, difficult to tell apart. Due to the literary translator’s odd situation, he is not very well respected. He is expected to submit to his authors and always be faithful to them, never make mistakes, work on a piecemeal basis, and accept bottom billing at best. He is not considered an artist at all, neither a creator nor a performer, but rather a craftsman. And he is generally considered a poor and unimportant one. His work is scarcely mentioned in reviews, and almost never critiqued. His art is 5 rarely taught inside or outside universities, his interpretations are rarely given credence in academia, and his thoughts and life story are not considered worthy of publication. He performs not with hopes of fame, fortune, or applause, but rather out of love, out of a sense of sharing what he loves and loving what he does. We tend to think of the literary translator as someone who’s good with languages. Which is like saying a musician is someone who’s good with notes. Of course he is, but being good with notes won’t make you a good musician; it’s just one of the requirements. In fact, some of the great jazz musicians never learned to read music; and there are great translations by poets who didn’t know the original language. To play music, you have to be able to play an instrument, and you have to be sensitive to nuances and understand what combinations of notes mean and are. Similarly, a translator has to be able to read as well as a critic and write as well as a writer. John Dryden said it best back in the seventeenth century: “the true reason why we have so few versions which are tolerable [is that] there are so few who have all the talents which are requisite for translation, and that there is so little praise and so small encouragement for so considerable a part of learning.”* Not much has changed. Yet Pushkin called the translator a “courier of the human spirit,”* and Goethe called literary translation “one of the most important and dignified enterprises in the general commerce of the world.”* Well, this isn’t really what they said, but this is how their words have been translated into English. On the other hand, translators have been called plagiarizers, looters of other cultures, collaborators to colonialism, traitors, betrayers. They betray their people, their language, the original work, themselves. And all for seven cents a word, if they’re lucky. Whether dignified or traitorous, translators are at least considered modest, especially for artists. What could be more modest than submitting yourself to someone else’s vision, characters, style, imagery, even sense of humor? Translators bring something to art that in many other times and cultures has been its core, its central aspect: devotion, service. Yet what could be more boastful than saying that you are capable of writing a work as great as what 6 you so admire, say, a French (or Japanese or Nguni) play the equal of King Lear? Odd indeed. The invisible performance of translation is hard to describe. So translators have come up with all sorts of metaphors and similes for it. The translator is “like a sculptor who tries to recreate the work of a painter,” Anne Dacier wrote in the introduction to her 1699 French translation of the Iliad.* In translating poetry, wrote Petrus Danielus Huetius, a seventeenth-century French bishop and educator, “the most important rule is to preserve the meter and the syntax, so that the poet can be shown to his new audience like a tree whose leaves have been removed by the rigors of winter, while the branches, the roots, and the trunk can still be seen.”* Translators have for centuries used the metaphor of pouring wine from one bottle into another. Rosemarie Waldrop, an American translator from French, has taken this image one step further: “Translation is more like wrenching a soul from its body and luring it into a different one.”* More recently and scientifically, the American translator from Spanish Margaret Sayers Peden constructed a complex metaphor out of an ice cube: “I like to think of the original work as an ice cube.

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