A case of books occupies a wall in Dante’s House Museum in Florence, filled with translations of the Divina Commedia. This display of printed covers, gilt bindings and illustrated editions in a range of languages demonstrates Dante’s immense influence on global literature, his status as A Great Poet. Seamus Heaney’s published translations, discussed in my last log, are also evidence of such an appraisal for the Nobel Prize Winner (who himself translated verses from Dante).
Yet the work of translators who are not so famous is often trivialised, sometimes downright disrespected. Last year, Yilin Wang caught the British Museum using her translations of revolutionary feminist poet Qiu Jin (1875-1907) for exhibition China’s Hidden Century, without attribution or payment (cue remarks about the institution’s fondness for loot). When challenged, the museum removed the translations on display and offered only £150 for their temporary use. Part of an agreed settlement, a page on the museum’s website now features Wang’s credited translation of the poem A River of Crimson: A Brief Stay in the Glorious Capital above an apology, which admits that the museum has no clearance policy for translations (now under review).
In an essay written two years earlier, Wang called out the power imbalances of the translation industry, and the disparities of respect paid to non-white translators due to the ‘hierarchy of languages’ bequeathed by imperialism. Wang’s experience with the British Museum underscores the need to recognise ‘the many forms of undervalued labor and invisible layers of “translation” that marginalized translators perform on the page and beyond it’. Responding to the scandal, Wang explained:
Publishers neglect to put the name of translators on covers, book reviewers forget to name translators, and now, this happens […] Translation is an art, and it takes me just as long to translate a poem as it takes for me to write an original one in English. I have to work hard to research the poet, the times they’re living in, and the literary forms they’re working in, then find creative ways to convey the spirit of their work in English. Classic Chinese poetry has many cultural idioms, archaic diction, and completely different grammar and syntactical structures to English.
Given its highly skilled nature and historical-cultural significance (Christianity, for example, is essentially built on translation), I find it intriguing that translation can be considered so lowly. This Little Art (2017) by Kate Briggs draws attention to the traditionally feminised language often used to characterise modern translation. Ideally, the translator is a self-effacing helper, like a housewife or a maid. Industrious but modest.
Responding to this, several writers have deconstructed this condescension towards translation (a condescension with material impact on a translator’s ability to make a living), initiating lively discussions about what makes it unique. From Emily Wilson’s much-debated translations of Homer to Fitzcarraldo Editions’ commitment to publishing international fiction, the art of translation in the Anglophone world is becoming more and more visible.
This Little Art, a charmingly discursive exploration of translation, suggests that translation destabilises precious ideas of fixity about the ‘original’ and its authority as a work of art. It is a truism that reading in translation is a condolence prize for those unable to understand a book’s first language. Using Virginia Woolf’s idea of literature as ‘the right words in the right order’, Briggs points out that translation disrupts this sense of completeness, perfection. Languages rarely have one-to-one equivalences in idiom and emotional expression. What if the translator has missed the mark? Taken liberties? Made things up? Perhaps readers are not communing with the agreed genius of authors like Tolstoy or Proust or Roland Barthes (the French theorist whose late lectures Briggs translated), but with an underpaid and stressed everyperson wielding a red pen and their own agenda. Within this context of perceived inadequacy, sustained attention to the role of the translator is disconcerting. It brings home the uncertainties of culture — the precarities of communication itself.
This Little Art goes on to propose literary translation as a kind of romance. Translation is intimate. It requires ‘writing the other’s work out with your own hands, in your own setting, your own time and in your own language with all the attention, thinking, and searching, the testing and invention that the task requires.’ Such an endeavour is ‘illogical’ according to conventional metrics of success, the ‘efficient accumulation of status, money and things.’ The translating experience is ‘never resolved, ongoing, mobile and always intensely charged, always intensely accompanied.’ Briggs is drawn to the work of women like Helen Lowe-Porter (1876-1963), who worked on translating the novels of Thomas Mann until she felt she might have written them herself, and Dorothy Bussy (1865-1960), who used translation as ‘a way of spending time with and feeling close to’ adored friend André Gide.
Jhumpa Lahiri — who has written books in both English and Italian, and translated her own Italian into English — also uses this vocabulary of romance and companionship in her essay ‘In Praise of Echo’ (published in a shorter version online):
[…] the act of desiring, of falling in love […] is what instigates the impulse to translate […] There is no better or more satisfying way to satisfy one’s love for a text than to translate it. To translate a book is to enter into a relationship with it, to approach and accompany it, to know it intimately, word by word, and to enjoy the comfort of its company in return.
Lahiri also views translation as ‘first and foremost […] a metamorphosis: a radical, painful, and miraculous transformation in which specific traits and elements are shed and others are newly obtained.’ She views herself as a translator from birth, revealing the added resonance translation has for writers across diasporas: ‘I was raised speaking and living simultaneously in English and Bengali, and this meant translating between them, constantly, for myself and for others.’
Inspired by Roman poet Ovid’s Metamorphoses, which begins with the line: ‘My soul stirs to speak of forms changed into new bodies’ (In nova fert animus mutatas dicere formas / corpora), Lahiri particularly identifies with the myth of Echo and Narcissus. Echo, an eloquent nymph cursed by the goddess Juno to repeat the speech of others, falls in love with the hunter Narcissus, who in turn becomes captivated by his own reflection in a pool. They both waste away in unrequited pining, Echo speaking back Narcissus’ words.
The restriction of Echo’s speech is the condition of a translator (a ‘“mere echo’” of an original). Yet Lahiri highlights that Ovid’s verb is reddere not repetere — not just ‘repetition’ but a word that means ‘to restore, to render, to reproduce’. Spurned by Narcissus, Echo dwindles into a voice (‘sound is what lives of her’), suggestive of the paradoxical presence and absence of the translator, who must defer to the text but still holds significant power as its mediator. Narcissus, representing the pride and excessive self-reflection that might capture a writer (or a whole culture, even), turns into a flower. But Echo’s voice ‘resonates and remains’:
Her story and her resilience remind us that translation — which simultaneously repeats, converts, reflects, and restores — is central to the production of literature, not an accessory to it […] Translation will open up entire realms of possibilities, unforeseen pathways that will newly guide and inspire the writer’s work, and possibly even transform it. For to translate is to look into a mirror and see someone other than oneself.
Over the last few months, my reading has been rejuvenated by prioritising translated books and tracing writers’ thoughts on translation. Translators write about their work with endearing tenderness, showing the great care involved in evaluating the potential of every single word. Books begin to feel like a roundtable (or a ‘festival of conviviality’ as Tim Curry says in Muppet Treasure Island), bringing together the creativity of many minds. Translators’ need to interpret empowers a reader’s own interpretations. I feel a renewed appreciation of the way books become beachcombers, accumulating meaning, perhaps carrying a pebble or shell in their pocket some way before dropping it again in favour of another special, portable thing.
Lahiri writes in Translating Myself and Others (2022): ‘No words are “my words” — I merely arrange and use them in a certain way’. Ultimately, we are all translators. Translators like Wang, Briggs and Lahiri create translations of translations. Language is the needle’s eye through which we must thread our thoughts, feelings and experiences in order to write or communicate at all. Its constraints mean that something always slips the net. Try to recount a dream and the word-sequence of narrative irrevocably alters its essential form, how it really felt. Within the ambiguities and experiments of communication, as a reader I have the choice to cultivate a temperament of generosity: do I focus on what is lost or what might be created?
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If you want to read more
Words Without Borders has created an online anthology called ‘Against Silence: A Palestinian Writing Series’. In her introduction, Lena Khalaf Tuffaha writes of the need to dispel long-standing biases in English-language writing about Palestine that ‘thrives in silence, and in fragmentation’. She urges readers to engage with a ‘thriving literature, with its range of voices who each maintain their distinctly Palestinian struggle, and always claim the sanctity and joy of the dream.’
Palestinian author Adania Shibli discusses (among other things) the challenges of translating her novel Minor Detail (2020) in an interview with Mireille Juchau:
I know Arabic, English, Hebrew, French, Korean, and German. I speak some better than the others, and sometimes one is weakened or strengthened by another. But yes, I only write fiction in Arabic because this language is a witch—an amazing, funny, crazy, generous, and forgiving witch. It has allowed me everything. It is the space of the most intimate freedom I have ever experienced in my life. The translation process was challenging. The text came with an added burden for the translator because the language had been formulated by a specific experience—in this case, the ways it was violated by colonization and oppression. In Arabic, this linguistic experience needed a lot of space and precision—attention to what is written and what is intentionally not written.
You can buy Translating Myself and Others by Jhumpa Lahiri here (UK) and This Little Art by Kate Briggs here (UK), or, alternatively, check out your local library.