What is translation for?

Some thoughts + a truly massive list of suggested reading in footnote 5

Over the last couple of months, I was asked by two different magazines to review two ostensibly quite similar books: Henry Power’s, Homer-Haunted (Bloomsbury) about the afterlife of Homer in English literature and largely in poetry, and Emily Wilson’s Crossing the Wine-Dark Sea (Profile/LRB), a collection of essays about the classics and (in most cases) translation, with an emphasis upon Greek literature. I’m not going to review either of these books here since the reviews are forthcoming¹, but reading them has made me reflect more generally on what makes for a good essay or book about literary translation; and, since I’ve been reading pieces on this topic for about 30 years now, which ones have stayed with me.

I think there are some nuts-and-bolts essentials. The author doesn’t have to be a translator themselves (though it probably helps to have at least had a go), but they have to possess — and, trickier, convey — a rich sense of the particular limits and possibilities of both the source language and the target language (that is, the language of the translation). This is not the same as having a particular feel for any specific form, genre, style or author: it is about the languages themselves and their history as literary languages. I’ve been reading Josephus’ Jewish War in bed recently (I know, I know, it’s an exciting life) and enjoying his Greek a lot — itself apparently translated by him from a Hebrew or Aramaic original — but it has prompted me to wonder why Latin prose, for all the notorious challenges of the Ciceronian period or Tacitean compression, seems much easier to put into good English prose than Greek. (Seems easier now: conversely, pre-Augustan English prose often seems to me to be more like Greek than Latin.)

Obviously you couldn’t begin to answer such a question without a great deal of experience reading English as well as Latin and Greek. But the point is that even a very detailed, scholarly study of a single translation — whether that’s Surrey’s Virgil, or Pope’s Iliad, or contemporary versions of Catullus— won’t be truly convincing if I don’t, as a reader, have the impression that the author would have something to say about the biggest sort of questions about the languages involved. George Steiner’s great book on the topic, After Babel, is subtitled: Aspects of language and translation.

Scholars of a particular language, literature or author aren’t always very good at this. Several of my favourite books in this category are not by scholars at all: C. H. Sisson was a poet who did a lot of translation, and I particularly like his collection of essays called In Two Minds: Guesses at Other Writers. For all that he is sometimes (OK, quite often) curmudgeonly, his remarks are full of good sense and good taste: ‘A successful translation — the concrete embodiment of a reading — does not preclude other attempts, it invites them.’² Sisson is very good on how the making of a translation is the most attentive kind of reading one can do; but that most fully successful importations of a style or tone or form from one language to another are found not in translations themselves, but in imitations of various kinds, even if their success is rooted in the practice of translation.

In this latter category, he mentions both Campion and Catullus, as does Bunting, another poet-translator rather than a scholar, whose remarks-in-passing on translation are reliably astringent: “some people, myself for one, think that a certain translation of Sappho by Catullus is better in Catullus’s version than in Sappho’s original” or, on Chaucer’s borrowing of a verse music derived from French: “[his music] is lighter than the music of most English poetry, less sticky. Chaucer could never have written the kind of noise that Keats rejoiced in: very sticky.”³ You often find the best remarks of this kind hidden away in translators’ prefaces or introductions: when I asked on social media which books or essays about translation had had an impact upon people, quite a few respondents mentioned the introduction to particular editions.⁴ (In fact, this question received so many responses that I have listed them all for the curious in this massive footnote.⁵ If anyone is trying to put together a reading list on the topic, you’re welcome.)

About 15 years ago I reviewed Matthew Reynolds’ book The Poetry of Translation, which — via close readings across several languages structured around various metaphors for translation— advances an argument that certain texts are not just poems in translation but poems of translation.⁶ By this he means poems in which there is a close creative connection between the theory and the practice of poetic translation: that is, between the author’s dominating metaphor of translation (such as ‘opening’, ‘desire’ or ‘transformation’) and the details of the translation itself. The series of metaphors for translation that he discusses includes some of the usual suspects — translation as ‘interpretation’ or ‘metamorphosis’ for example — but also, more unusually, translation as friendship, desire or passion.⁷

The poetry of translation, according to Reynolds, is more than translation in verse: they are poems in which the act of translation, the metaphorical terms in which it is understood and an awareness of the text’s status as a translation are all central to the peculiar power of the final work. Dryden’s sense of the ‘secrecy’ of Virgil, for instance, and the conflicting desire to ‘open’ and not to open the text with translation and interpretation becomes, he argues, a central element in Dryden’s Aeneid and in his characterization of Aeneas. Reynolds summarises his idea as follows: ‘All translations are guided by metaphors; to grasp these metaphors is to abandon the old binaries of ‘free’, ‘literal’, etc. But only in some translations do the metaphors of translation interact with doubles in the source text in such a way that the poetry of translation flowers.’ Perhaps this is not so different from Sisson’s observation that: ‘When we say a translation is free we should consider the ways in which it could be bound.’

Reynolds’ book is clever, and includes lots of great close readings, though ultimately I’m not sure it is really demonstrating anything significantly different from the point expressed intuitively by poet-translators like Sisson and Bunting: that translation (broadly understood) is essential to the poet’s work, but that translations as such are only quite rarely great poems. I’m not sure that we need the fancy intervening machinery of different translational metaphors and how they are reflected in the text itself to recognise the truth of this point. (Both Sisson and Bunting write unusually well about translation, and they both did a good deal of it, but as it happens neither of them — in my opinion — produced their best work in that form.)

Rereading Reynolds this week, I wondered also about some very common early modern metaphors of translation that he doesn’t discuss, such as the idea of commerce, trade or enrichment. As George Steiner says in After Babel, ‘the translator enriches his tongue by allowing the source language to penetrate and modify it.’ You find this trope a lot in early modern English. Here for example is Jonson on Chapman’s translation not of Homer (for which he’s famous) but of Hesiod:

Whose work, could this be, CHAPMAN, to refine
Old Hesiod’s ore, and give it thus! but thine,
Who hadst before wrought in rich Homer’s mine.
What treasure hast thou brought us! and what store
Still, still, dost thou arrive with at our shore,
To make thy honor, and our wealth the more !
If all the vulgar tongues that speak this day
Were ask’d of thy discoveries; they must say,
To the Greek coast thine only knew the way.
Such passage hast thou found, such returns made,
As now of all men, it is call’d thy trade,
And who make thither else, rob, or invade.

Here Chapman is seen as enriching the language, certainly; but also of a kind of commercial savvy. He has cornered the market so effectively that he has something like a monopoly: ‘As now of all men, it is call’d thy trade, / And who make thither else, rob, or invade.’ Chapman does not seem to have made that much money himself by his translations, so the hint of envy here is perhaps more professional than financial.

Perhaps Reynolds is not so interested in this metaphor because it relates more to the exchange between languages or literatures as a whole than to the relationship between individual texts or authors, which is the focus of his book. Reynolds also strongly defends the claim that literary translations are, with few exceptions, intended as and function as substitutes for the original. This probably seems so obvious to many contemporary readers that it hardly needs stating, but historically speaking it’s not a given, and in early modern England it’s not really true. In bilingual literary cultures like those of early modern Europe, a great deal of translation — in these cases from Latin into the vernacular and vice versa — is not about providing access to a text readers otherwise could not understand. On the contrary, many such translations and versions assume that the reader knows and can recall the original. Something similar was no doubt true also of much early Latin literature, translated from or closely modeled on Greek.

It’s hard for modern readers to get a feel for what this sort of translation is, at a most basic level, for — perhaps the only workable analogy is something like a scriptural paraphrase or re-translation for a religious audience. Although in early modernity most translations were not parodic in the modern sense — I mean they weren’t meant to be funny or to poke fun at the original — possibly the pleasure of a good parody or send-up or pastiche also brings us within striking distance of the effect. In such cases, there is a unique kind of pleasure in the combination of recognition and novelty, of pulling off something rather remarkable.

After making his point about how translation enriches a language, Steiner continues: ‘But [the translator] does far more: he extends his native idiom towards the hidden absolute of meaning.’ Steiner’s surprisingly mystical book returns again and again to a vision of language united, the undoing of Babel: ‘At the ‘messianic end of their history’ . . . all separate languages will return to their source of common life. In the interim, translation has a task of profound philosophic, ethical, and magical import.’⁸

Ultimately, I think the two works that have most influenced my ideas about translation are not any of the many excellent critical books I’ve read, nor even the comments by poet-translators like Bunting and Sisson, but instead two of the most superficially rebarbative works of literature on which I’ve spent my time: Jonson’s translation of Horace’s Ars Poetica, which has been a favoured object for a sly barb about the dead hand of ‘word-for-word’ translation for several centuries now, and Thomas More’s Dialogue Concerning Heresies. (Perhaps the rebarbativeness of both these works is part of the point, if only because one is most shaped by insights you have to work at, and because though both of these works are in English, reading either of them nevertheless involves something like the attention of translation.)

There are several moments in Jonson’s supposedly doggedly literal translation where he allows other meanings to seep up, as it were, through the frame of his translation and in the gap between his languages, as here:

All mortall deeds
Shall perish: so farre off it is, the state,
Or grace of speech, should hope a lasting date.

This translates a line-and-a-half of Horace’s Latin:

Mortalia facta peribunt:
Nedum sermonum stet honos, & gratia vivax.

This Latin here is unambiguous. It means: ‘all mortal deeds shall perish: no more can we expect the living grace and glory of words to last.’ He is saying that language changes because everything mortal changes. (This is from a passage about how words change their meaning over time.) But Jonson’s strange and awkward translation conjures just for a moment the opposite idea: the state or (of?) grace of speech should hope a lasting date.

There is an interesting overlap of vocabulary here with what More says about translation. Thomas More, a stout defender of Catholicism and a man quite keen on the burning of Protestant heretics, nevertheless stoutly defends the translation of the Bible into the vernacular:⁹

For as for that oure tonge is called barbarouse, is but a fantasye. For so is, as every learned man knoweth, every strange language to other. And if they would call it barren of words, there is no doubt but it is plenteous enough to express our minds in anything whereof one man hath used to speak with another. Now as touching the difficulty which a translator findeth in expressing well and lively the sentence of his author — which is hard alway to do so surely, but that he shall sometime minish either of the sentence or of the grace that it beareth in the former tongue — that point hath lain in their light that have translated the Scripture already either out of Greek into Latin or out of Hebrew into any of them both, as by many translations which we read already to them that be learned appeareth.¹⁰

More acknowledges the limits of translation. Anyone who translates finds that he or she must sometimes ‘minish [= diminish] either of the sentence or of the grace that it beareth in the former tongue’.

Sentence here doesn’t mean the syntactical unit of a sentence, but its meaning – borrowed from Latin sententia. Usually when More writes about the sentence and something of a text, he uses the phrase sentence and understanding, that is, ‘the meaning and the interpretation’. Here, though, thinking specifically about the challenges of translation, he pairs meaning with grace. In Latin, gratia means (among other things) beauty or elegance; on that basis, we might interpret it here as something like style. As anyone who translates regularly knows, it is indeed very difficult to render both the meaning of a text and its distinctive style or beauty. But grace is of course a theological term too, and a key word in the Dialogue Concerning Heresies. More insists — contra Protestants like Luther — that what we do by our own actions plays a part in the eliciting and receipt of divine grace.

Holbein’s Thomas More

It’s hard to think of a less fashionable English text than More’s Dialogue Concerning Heresies (except, I suppose, possibly Jonson’s Ars Poetica). More’s Dialogue endorses the most dreadful form of execution for unremitting heresy, and it’s written in a conversational form of English as it was spoken in the 1520s — there is no punctuation in the original apart from the virgule (/), which is more like a breath mark than modern punctuation. More than anything else, the dialogue is about speech — the power and danger and beauty of talking to one another — and about language as it is spoken, in the mouth and on the tongue, as it is chammed (‘chewed’, one of his favourite words) and corrupted and turned to wit or wisdom. It is one of the great love poems to the English language.

As he turns to consider the risks of translation into the vernacular, More makes a remarkable comparison between translation and the divine venture of the incarnation:

Whereof I would not, for my mind, withhold the profit that one good, devout unlearned layman might take by the reading [of scripture] — not for the harm that a hundred heretics would fall in by their own willful abusion; no more than our Saviour letted [refused] for the weal [benefit] of such as would be, with his grace, of his little chosen flock, to come into this world and be lapis offensionis, et petra scandali (1 Peter 2), ‘the stone of stumbling, and the stone of falling’ – and ruin to all the wilful wretches in the world beside.

Translating is risky and difficult; it never works perfectly and something is always lost. How far off it is! that state of grace. But on those rare occasions when a translation really works, how close to us it seems.

1. In Portico and the Literary Review.

2. For more on Sisson, see here and also here.

3. Both of these from Basil Bunting, On Poetry, ed. by Peter Makin.

4. Specifically, Wendell Rickets translator’s intro to an English edition of the plays by Natalia Ginzburg; Wilamowitz’ preface to his translation of Euripides, Hippolytus; into by Maria Dahvana Headley to her Beowulf; Robert Alter’s introduction to his translation of the Hebrew Bible; and the Intro to The Oxford Guide to Literature in English Translation.

5. These are all the suggestions I received of authors / books / essays people have found particularly inspiring or helpful about literary translation, where they are not already mentioned in this essay (Steiner unsurprisingly received several recommendations). I have not checked any of these references. Damion Searls, The Philosophy of Translation; Jean Baudrillard, ‘Simulation and simulacrum’ or ‘Symbolic exchange and death’; Nabokov, ‘On Translating Pushkin Pounding the Clavichord’ (NYRB, 1964); Tim Parks, Translating Style; Douglas Hofstadter, Le Ton Beau de Marot; David Horton, Thomas Mann in English; many articles in the Polish journal Literatura na Świecie, e.g. Andrzej Sosnowski’s essay from 2000 on translating Elizabeth Bishop; Borges, ‘Word-Music and Translation’ in This Craft of Verse; Simon Leys, ‘The Experience of Literary Translation’ in The Hall of Uselessness; Andrés Neuman, ‘Translating Each Other’; Lawrence Venuti, The Translator’s Invisibility; Stephen Owen; Nabokov; D. S. Carne-Ross, Classics and Translation, I would also add Pindar to Pound; Matthew Arnold on Homer; Lotman on the semiosphere; Borges, ‘Averroes’ Search’; Kate Briggs, This Little Art (several recs); Michael Hamburger; Richard Wilbur; H. A. Mason, mostly in The Cambridge Quarterly and the book To Homer Through Pope; Aviya Kushner, The Grammar of God; Dick Davis, ‘On Not Translating Hafez’; Alan Shapiro, ‘Translation as Linguistic Hospitality’; Derek Attridge and Henry Staten, The Craft of Poetry (currently free on kindle! at least in France); Dryden; Eliot Weinberger, ‘Nineteen ways of looking at Wang Wei’, ‘Anonymous Sources’, ‘Inventing China’, ‘Alter and the Psalms’, ‘Beckett/Paz’; Michael Hofmann, ‘Sharp Biscuit: Some Thoughts on Translating’; Rosemarie Waldrop, “The Joy of the Demiurge,” in Translation: Linguistic, Literary, and Philosophical Perspectives; Edith Grossman; essay by Lydia Davis; Eco, ‘Mouse or Rat’; Peter Robinson, Poetry and Translation; Burton Raffel, The Art of Translating Poetry; Peter Szondi, ‘Poetry of Constancy’; Mireille Gansel (tr. Ros Schwartz), Translation as transhumance; David Bellos, Is that a fish in your ear?; Walter Kaufmann, From Shakesepare to Existentialism; Jhumpa Lahiri’s essays; Owen Barfield, Poetic Diction; Stanisław Barańczak’s Ocalone w tłumaczeniu (Saved in Translation), but it hasn’t been translated; Walter Benjamin, The Task of the Translator / Die Aufgabe des Übersetzers; Rosenzweig, Die Schrift und Luther; Henri Meschonnic, Jona ou le signifiant errant; Jenny Croft, ‘The Extinction of Irena Rey’; Gass on Rilke; Hugh Kenner, ‘Cathay’ in The Pound Era; Lydia Davis, ‘Buzzing, Humming or Droning’; W. H. Auden and Chester Kallman, ‘Translating Libretti’.

6. You can read the original review here. The BMCR is a classicists’ review service, so the review is focused on the classical element of the book.

7. That section treats a particularly large number of authors, including Wyatt and Swinburne, relatively briefly. The complete series of metaphors are: translation as ‘interpretation’, ‘paraphrase’ and ‘opening’ (various authors, but dominated by Dryden); translation as ‘friendship’, ‘desire’ and ‘passion’ (a much wider variety of authors from Wyatt to Swinburne, all treated more briefly); translation and the ‘landscape of the past’ (a section founded in Pope, but going on to consider various later poets including Tennyson, Pound, Logue and Heaney) and finally translation as ‘loss’, ‘death’, ‘resurrection’ and ‘metamorphosis’ (more focused discussions of Pound, FitzGerald and Golding).

8. This statement, like many similar comments in After Babel, is not exactly in Steiner’s own voice, but it’s not not either.

9. I’ve written about More’s Dialogue before, at the end of this piece, from which today’s comments are partly borrowed. That essay, published originally in PN Review, is about the failures and difficulties of translation, both in speech and writing.

10. Dialogue Concerning Heresies (1530), 3.16. Spelling and punctuation modernised.