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The Translation Paradox
(...)
Simply, many readers, many critics, don’t notice. Or if they do, don’t particularly care. They read for content. The clamor of idioms about us has become so loud that we hardly notice when a translation, or indeed any piece of prose, is cluttered with incongruities. In fact, the writer whose work was above all an achievement of style and linguistic density, an exploration of what could be done with the language, directed at a community who could understand the nature of the experiment—Joyce, Woolf, Gadda, Faulkner—is largely a creature of the past.
(...)
I remember in the 1990s a friend at a major Italian publishing house telling me that he and other editors had received a corporate directive instructing them to reduce the price paid for translations, because their market research had shown that the public couldn’t tell the difference between good and bad translators. I was indignant. I was young. These days experience tells me that from the merely commercial point of view they were right. There are many poorly translated books that are highly praised and widely sold, in the US as in Europe.
So does translation matter? Does the choice of translator matter? Some translators’ associations (in Germany for example) insist that a translator ought to be paid a royalty for the translation and share in the commercial success of the work, as if the individual translator had the same impact on the work as the author. This is nonsense. Umberto Eco was better translated by Geoffrey Brock and Richard Dixon than by William Weaver, but The Name of the Rose, which Weaver translated, was an infinitely better book than The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana (Brock) or Numero Zero (Dixon). Why should the one translator grow rich and the others not? J. K. Rowling, Stieg Larsson, and E. L. James are not difficult authors to translate. Would it really make sense to skew translators’ earnings by giving vast amounts of money to those doing work that is immeasurably easier than, say, Jonathan Galassi’s translations of Montale, or Anne Milano Appel’s 2012 translation of Claudio Magris’s impossibly convoluted novel Blindly? To introduce royalties would be to encourage the finest translators to drop literary work altogether and concentrate on genre novels.
Translation matters for those who want to be brought as close as possible to the original inspiration of books that matter (a group that does not necessarily include publishers’ accountants). The choice of translator is crucial when a text is of such a nature that a very special affinity and expertise is required. The problem is that it is hard for the wider public or even the critics really to know whether they have been given a good translation, and not easy even for the editors who have the duty of choosing the translator, fewer and fewer of whom have appropriate second-language skills. So the inclination is to consign the book to a translator who has some reputation, deserved or not, and be done with it. In particular, there is a tendency to privilege those who gravitate around the literary world, as if this were some kind of guarantee of linguistic competence. It is not.
Some years ago, I gave an evening course in Milan for English-language translators working in the city who wanted to move from technical, business, legal, and medical translations to literary translation. I was hugely impressed by their work. One woman in particular, who translated for AGIP, the Italian oil giant, gave excellent renderings of a range of Italian authors. In general, these were all people who knew Italian to a fault and who were daily involved in getting it into English. None of them would have been guilty of the clumsiness I pointed out in my previous pieces on the Levi translations.
Yet these translators were hardly given the time of day when they wrote to English and American publishers asking for work. Perhaps their years of business translations were considered a stigma. All the same, I suspect that Milano Appel is so good, so true in her pitch, because she has done such a wide range of non-literary translations in business, advertising, and marketing, work that obliges one to become aware of how the language is used on a day-to-day basis. If I myself learned how to translate more or less well it was because of the fifteen years spent translating just about every kind of document a society produces, from shoe fashion magazines to instructions for manufacturing diesel filters. My first literary translation, Alberto Moravia’s Erotic Tales, which I was given before I had published any fiction of my own, seemed infinitely easier and more congenial than the daily fare of tourist brochures and quarrying plant manuals.
So why, in her seventies now, is a fine translator like Milano Appel not better known? Because glory, for the translator, is borrowed glory. No book she has translated has captured the public imagination.
This is the third installment of a three-part series examining the state of translation today.
(Tims Parks, The New York Review of Books)
The Translation Paradox
(...)
Simply, many readers, many critics, don’t notice. Or if they do, don’t particularly care. They read for content. The clamor of idioms about us has become so loud that we hardly notice when a translation, or indeed any piece of prose, is cluttered with incongruities. In fact, the writer whose work was above all an achievement of style and linguistic density, an exploration of what could be done with the language, directed at a community who could understand the nature of the experiment—Joyce, Woolf, Gadda, Faulkner—is largely a creature of the past.
(...)
I remember in the 1990s a friend at a major Italian publishing house telling me that he and other editors had received a corporate directive instructing them to reduce the price paid for translations, because their market research had shown that the public couldn’t tell the difference between good and bad translators. I was indignant. I was young. These days experience tells me that from the merely commercial point of view they were right. There are many poorly translated books that are highly praised and widely sold, in the US as in Europe.
So does translation matter? Does the choice of translator matter? Some translators’ associations (in Germany for example) insist that a translator ought to be paid a royalty for the translation and share in the commercial success of the work, as if the individual translator had the same impact on the work as the author. This is nonsense. Umberto Eco was better translated by Geoffrey Brock and Richard Dixon than by William Weaver, but The Name of the Rose, which Weaver translated, was an infinitely better book than The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana (Brock) or Numero Zero (Dixon). Why should the one translator grow rich and the others not? J. K. Rowling, Stieg Larsson, and E. L. James are not difficult authors to translate. Would it really make sense to skew translators’ earnings by giving vast amounts of money to those doing work that is immeasurably easier than, say, Jonathan Galassi’s translations of Montale, or Anne Milano Appel’s 2012 translation of Claudio Magris’s impossibly convoluted novel Blindly? To introduce royalties would be to encourage the finest translators to drop literary work altogether and concentrate on genre novels.
Translation matters for those who want to be brought as close as possible to the original inspiration of books that matter (a group that does not necessarily include publishers’ accountants). The choice of translator is crucial when a text is of such a nature that a very special affinity and expertise is required. The problem is that it is hard for the wider public or even the critics really to know whether they have been given a good translation, and not easy even for the editors who have the duty of choosing the translator, fewer and fewer of whom have appropriate second-language skills. So the inclination is to consign the book to a translator who has some reputation, deserved or not, and be done with it. In particular, there is a tendency to privilege those who gravitate around the literary world, as if this were some kind of guarantee of linguistic competence. It is not.
Some years ago, I gave an evening course in Milan for English-language translators working in the city who wanted to move from technical, business, legal, and medical translations to literary translation. I was hugely impressed by their work. One woman in particular, who translated for AGIP, the Italian oil giant, gave excellent renderings of a range of Italian authors. In general, these were all people who knew Italian to a fault and who were daily involved in getting it into English. None of them would have been guilty of the clumsiness I pointed out in my previous pieces on the Levi translations.
Yet these translators were hardly given the time of day when they wrote to English and American publishers asking for work. Perhaps their years of business translations were considered a stigma. All the same, I suspect that Milano Appel is so good, so true in her pitch, because she has done such a wide range of non-literary translations in business, advertising, and marketing, work that obliges one to become aware of how the language is used on a day-to-day basis. If I myself learned how to translate more or less well it was because of the fifteen years spent translating just about every kind of document a society produces, from shoe fashion magazines to instructions for manufacturing diesel filters. My first literary translation, Alberto Moravia’s Erotic Tales, which I was given before I had published any fiction of my own, seemed infinitely easier and more congenial than the daily fare of tourist brochures and quarrying plant manuals.
So why, in her seventies now, is a fine translator like Milano Appel not better known? Because glory, for the translator, is borrowed glory. No book she has translated has captured the public imagination.
This is the third installment of a three-part series examining the state of translation today.
(Tims Parks, The New York Review of Books)
