Translation is about fidelity of the reader’s experience

Earion

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Edith Grossman
WHY TRANSLATION MATTERS
135pp. Yale University Press.
£16.99 (US $24).
978 0 300 12656 3

According to Edith Grossman, reviewers have no language for discussing translations, and, as a result, tend to fall back on phrases such as “ably” or “seamlessly translated by ....”, or simply to disregard the translator’s contribution. This will ring true to anyone who recognizes Grossman’s diagnosis of “intransigent dilettantism and tenacious amateurism, the menacing two-headed monster that runs rampant through the inhospitable landscape peopled by those who write reviews”. Why Translation Matters is a defence of her craft, the result of twenty years working as a full-time translator, in “an area of literature that is too often ignored, misunderstood, or misrepresented” (Spanish-language). Grossman provides many examples of Philistinism that will have anglophone literary translators nodding their heads as they read.

We need translation in order to read things we couldn’t otherwise read, to gain access to Ibsen, Homer and Goethe. And yes, we still need it even in a market which produces far more English-language books than any of us. could hope to read. But more than merely a defence, Grossman's book is a celebration of the craft (which, among other things, enables a twenty-first-century Anglophone monoglot to lose himself in Don Quixote in just the same way as a seventeenth-century Spaniard did). Grossman’s analysis of textual processes is canny and precise: the work of translating is first a process of close reading -- “we have to probe into layers of purpose and implication, weigh and consider each element within its literary milieu and stylistic environment”; translators then need to recreate in another language “all the characteristics, vagaries, quirks, and stylistic peculiarities of the work [we] are translating”. Fidelity is the aim, but this is not, Grossman stresses, to do with literalism -- the relationship between original text and translation is far more complicated than this suggests. Rather it is about fidelity of the reader’s experience, fidelity of effect.

Grossman writes with passion and clarity, and with a wisdom acquired through decades of practice. And beyond the generalities, her analysis of textual challenges encountered while translating poems, ranging from sixteenth-century Spain to late twentieth-century Colombia, is fascinating. Why Translation Matters is well argued and stylishly written. Or, to put it another way, it is both able and seamless.

DANIEL HAHN
TLS DECEMBER 10, 2010
 
Fidelity is the aim, but this is not, Grossman stresses, to do with literalism -- the relationship between original text and translation is far more complicated than this suggests. Rather it is about fidelity of the reader’s experience, fidelity of effect.
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