What constitutes a good translation? How do we judge a good translation? These might seem straight forward questions, or questions that could be answered just with a bit of common-sense. But I don’t think the answer is that straightforward. And I ask myself these questions once more, as I see a confessed and unrepentant monolingual English critic praise a recent translation of this or that book1. How could this person know if this is a good translation? But let me be generous here: do we really need to know the source language in order to judge a good translation? And even: does a translator need to know the source language in order to produce a celebrated translation. It depends on who you ask.
“Three grades of evil can be discerned in the queer world of verbal transmigration. The first, and lesser one, comprises obvious errors due to ignorance or misguided knowledge. This is mere human frailty and thus excusable. The next step to Hell is taken by the translator who intentionally skips words or passages that he does not bother to understand or that might seem obscure or obscene to vaguely imagined readers; he accepts the blank look that his dictionary gives him without any qualms; or subjects scholarship to primness: he is as ready to know less than the author as he is to think he knows better. The third, and worst, degree of turpitude is reached when a masterpiece is planished and patted into such a shape, vilely beautified in such a fashion as to conform to the notions and prejudices of a given public. This is a crime, to be punished by the stocks as plagiarists were in the shoebuckle days.”
Nabokov clearly believes in the possibility of faithfulness in translation. And this is is something that can be achieved with a combination of knowledge, attention to (and respect for) detail, and attention to (and respect for) style. A proficient command of both source and target language would be necessary for this, needless to say. Both to produce a good translation and to judge it.
On the other hand, if you asked Borges you’d get a very different answer. In his excellent article “Borges y la traducción” Efraín Kristal sums up Borges’s ideas regarding translation in the following three points2:
1. For Borges translation isn’t a transfer from a language to another, but the modification of a text that preserves certain aspects while it eliminates others: literal translation preserves the details and periphrasis preserves meaning. The translation that preserves the meaning of the original can be more faithful than the translation that preserves the details.
2. For Borges translation can happen within the same language; and it is possible to transcribe from one language to another. Borges uses the word copy to refer to a text that preserves all the details and all the connotations of a text written in another language.
3. According to Borges a translation can be better than an original. If the original contains confusing and obscure details and aspects it can be unfaithful to the work’s idea. This is why Borges says — in an essay about Henley’s very debated English translation of Vathek, that William Beckdford wrote carelessly and fast in French — that “the original is unfaithful to the translation”.
Efraín Kristal then discusses these three points vis-à-vis Borges and Bioy Casares’s translation of Poe’s “The Purloined Letter”. The pair took a lot of liberties in their translation, improving Poe quite liberally, making obscure passages clearer and more readable — a translation that is better than the original, in Borgesian terms3.
So here we are at the opposite extreme. Or perhaps getting closer to the extreme. Because the extreme would perhaps be Lin Shu.
In his article “La experiencia de la traducción literaria”, Simon Leys (translated into Spanish by José Manuel Álvarez-Flórez, himself then translated into English here by yours truly) tells of the fascinating story of Lin Shu:
“[A] central figure in the literary history of modern China. Without knowing a single word of any foreign language, Lin Shu translated almost two-hundred European novels, and this vast body of foreign fiction contributed robustly to the transformation of China’s intellectual horizon towards the end of the Empire. Convalescing after a serious illness, Lin Shu was visited in 1890 by a friend who had just returned from France. His friend told him about a very popular novel in the Europe of the time, The Lady of the Camellias, and suggested he should translate it. They collaborated in the following manner: the friend would narrate the plot and Lin Shu would translate it into classical Chinese. This The Lady of the Camellias was incredibly successful4. It has to be said it is immensely better than the original: even if it is scrupulously faithful to Dumas fils’s narration, which it reproduces paragraph after paragraph, its style is commendable due to its grandeur and conciseness5.
So, to go back to my opening questions: What constitutes a good translation? How do we judge a good translation? The answer still is “it depends on who you ask”. So maybe, these are the wrong questions to ask. Perhaps we need to think of translations as always imperfect versions, produced somewhere within a spectrum of conflicting ideas. And perhaps we need to think of monolingual critics along Borgesian lines — critics who focus on the original that is a translation, and not as sycophants or elbow-patched party poopers6.
A hypothesis: the art of translation is so badly remunerated and recognised that a lot of critics go to the other extreme and demand nothing of a translation. Sycophant is a fantastic word to think about this type.
My translation, more Nabokovian than Borgesian.
I appreciate that this particular aspect of the discussion only makes sense if you understand Spanish AND English, which sort of (at least partly) answers my own question about the possibility or impossibility of judging translations without knowing the source language, but I want to continue with this intellectual game a bit further...
This, albeit as an extreme case, reminds me of a recent book in translation, that after receiving a lot of praise and winning prices, was the target of a controversy regarding its translator’s linguistic liberties, which might have resulted from the aforementioned’s recent acquisition of the source language. I don’t know the outcome of these discussions but I understand at least some of the objections were raised by elbow-patched critics, with less command of the source language than the translator. This type of inter-linguistic party pooper is an interesting inversion of the sycophants praising translations from languages they don’t understand.
My translation here is more Borgesian than Nabokovian. I could have gone for the more literal “its style is admirable due to its nobility and capacity for concision” but I wanted to faithful to spirit of the original (Álvarez-Flórez’s original translation, not Leys’s original write-up, which I haven’t read) by using words and expressions more distant from Spanish. This is becoming like a hall of mirrors. Help.
I’m being extremely generous here.
the other thing here is when a text has three or four different translators, the bible, duras, musil zamityn and proust are pretty obvious examples. How do you read and decide which ?