Twenty-One Pleasures of Translating (and a Silver Lining)
The translation problems that you have struggled with the hardest, perhaps never satisfied with your solutions, will stay with you for a long time—you can count on it. A few years ago, in June, on a trip to France, I was taken by French friends for a wine-tasting in the small Burgundian town of Beaune, south of Dijon. During the wine-tasting, we were at one point instructed to mâchez le vin—I can’t remember now whether this was while we still held the wine in our mouths, or after we had swallowed or spat it out. Now, when this phrase was spoken, I became instantly alert, my translator-antennae going up: using the verb mâcher, “chew,” for something that you can’t actually chew was a problem I had spent several hours on during my translating of Madame Bovary some seven years before. The word occurs in a passage near the beginning of the novel, when Charles Bovary, at least, is still happy in his marriage, and Emma is not yet obviously restless or unhappy. This passage very well illustrates Flaubert’s antiromanticism:
Et alors, sur la grande route qui étendait sans en finir son long ruban de poussière, par les chemins creux où les arbres se courbaient en berceaux, dans les sentiers dont les blés lui montaient jusqu’aux genoux, avec le soleil sur ses épaules et l’air du matin à ses narines, le coeur plein des félicités de la nuit, l’esprit tranquille, la chair contente, il s’en allait ruminant son bonheur, comme ceux qui mâchent encore, après dîner, le goût des truffes qu’ils digèrent.
This was how I translated it:
And then, on the road stretching out before him in an endless ribbon of dust, along sunken lanes over which the trees bent like an arbor, in paths where the wheat rose as high as his knees, with the sun on his shoulders and the morning air in his nostrils, his heart full of the joys of the night, his spirit at peace, his flesh content, he would ride along ruminating on his happiness, like a man continuing to chew, after dinner, the taste of the truffles he is digesting.
I like to reproduce the word order, and the order of ideas, of the original whenever possible. Flaubert ends this otherwise-lyrical paragraph with the words truffes and digèrent—in other words, his rhetorical buildup, in describing the sensuous, placid happiness of a man in love, ends with a reference to digestion and a black, smelly fungus. This is typical of Flaubert, who likes to create a traditional writerly effect, romantic or sentimental, and then, when we are well entranced, bring us back down to reality with a thud by offering us a mundane, preferably earthy image—truffles in this scene, potatoes in a later one.
The problem for me, however, was the word mâchent, which I translated as “chew.” Of course I wanted to retain the idea of chewing, especially since it follows the lovely “ruminating,” which is not only an apt word for Charles’s idle thoughts, as his horse ambles along, but also yet another veiled reference to one of Flaubert’s favorite metaphors—the bovine—which makes regular appearances in his work, even in character names such as Bovary and Bouvard.
But how do you chew a taste?
What I did not do, during the wine-tasting in Beaune— a cause for some lost sleep once I returned home—was ask the professional who was assisting us on our tour just how he translates mâcher into English, for English-speaking visitors, since there must be an accepted translation for this in the wine-tasting world, at least.
Still, the experience answered one question—the word mâcher, unlike “chew,” can be used for something that, in my opinion, you don’t chew.
In translating, you pose yourself a question—or it is posed to you by the text; you have no satisfactory answer, though you put something down on paper, and then years later the answer may turn up. Certainly you never forget the question.
I have had two literary occupations, and preoccupations, all my adult life, both evidently necessary to me, each probably enhancing the other—writing and translating. And this is one of the differences between them: in translation, you are writing, yes, but not only writing—you are also solving, or trying to solve, a set problem not of your own creation. The problem can’t be evaded, as it can in your own writing, and it may haunt you later.
So, here we have the first two pleasures of translating: (1) the pleasure of writing; and (2) the pleasure of solving a puzzle.
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1) In translating, you are forming phrases and sentences that please you at least to some extent and most of the time. You have the pleasure of working with sound, rhythm, image, rhetoric, the shape of a paragraph, tone, voice. And—an important difference—you have this writing pleasure within the island of the given text, within its distinct perimeter. You are not beset by that very uncomfortable anxiety, the anxiety of invention, the commitment to invent a piece of work yourself, one that may succeed but may also fail, and whose success or failure is unpredictable.
I am writing, but not my own work. The words are my choices, but only within limits. I am working very hard at one aspect of writing, but I am not, altogether, the writer of this passage. I can work as hard and as happily as I like at this writing without the more general doubt that might accompany, even if ever so subtly or faintly, any writing wholly my own. Or perhaps it is not so much doubt as the tension that this thing may not even come into existence, or that if it falters its way into existence it may not deserve to survive. Whereas there is no doubt that this French sentence before me must be written, in English, and be written in this way: now I can apply myself to doing it.
In this sort of writing, there is no blank page to worry about, when you sit down to write. Someone else has already written what you are about to write, someone else is giving you closely specific “guidelines”—in other words, the original text.
It is also a kind of writing you can do when you are blocked in your own writing. Roland Barthes is quoted by Kate Briggs in her fine book on translation, This Little Art, saying, in his lecture course on the novel: “I would advise a young writer who is having difficulty writing—if it’s friendly to offer advice—that he should stop writing for himself for a while and do translations, that he should translate good literature, and one day he will discover that he is writing with an ease he didn’t have before.” This was, in fact, exactly my situation—blocked in my own writing—when I began translating Maurice Blanchot for the first time.
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2) In translating, then, you are at the same time always solving a problem. It may be a word problem, an ingenious, complicated word problem that requires not only a good deal of craft but some art or artfulness in its solution. And yet, though the problem is embedded in a text of great inherent interest, even importance, it always retains some of the same appeal as those problems posed by much simpler or more intellectually limited word puzzles in the daily or Sunday paper or in a slim book picked up at a train station— a crossword, a Jumble, a code.
Margaret Jull Costa, writing about translating the work of Javier Marías, in one of the Sylph Editions Cahiers series on translation and writing, discusses a particular problem she struggled with, and then concludes: “This, of course, is the kind of nerdy fiddling that all translators spend hours over—and actually enjoy.” Eliot Weinberger, in his contribution to a very useful collection of essays called In Translation, edited by Susan Bernofsky and Esther Allen, calls us translators “the geeks of literature.” Nerd, geek.
Example of nerdy fiddling: Here is not a complicated problem but a simple one. I must translate the final sentence of the passage about the steeples of Martinville and Vieuxvicq in Swann’s Way. After the young narrator, sitting up next to the coachman, has borrowed a piece of paper from the doctor and written his piece about the steeples, he says, in one of Proust’s wonderfully brief, simple sentences: “And then I began to sing.” That was how I translated it. But before making that decision, I considered the alternative: “And then I began singing.” The choice made me think harder than I’d ever had before about the difference between the effect of “to sing” and that of “singing.” Although the two were so close, I had to ask myself in what way they were different, and which was more effective. We commonly use either form—“I began to realize” or “he began digging”—but I decided that if you are about to begin something, “to sing” sounds more like a beginning than the present participle, “singing,” which by its nature implies continuing action. Rhythmically, too, the sentence read better with the closing iambs of “began to sing.”
Further along in the same essay, Jull Costa observes something related but a little different: “What I say here is certainly not intended as a lament about ‘difficult’ writers … because I really enjoy dealing with ‘difficulties.’” Nerdy fiddling with difficulties, or simply with choices.
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3) A third pleasure, or convenience, is that translating is a kind of writing you can do not only when you are fresh, energetic, and in a positive frame of mind, but also when you are tired or cross, for the very reason that you are not under the pressure of invention. You can still be methodical when you are tired. I do not have to summon to this writing all the forces that I would summon to my own. I can puzzle out this one puzzle on a public bus with commotion all around me.
You can consult dictionaries and find alternative words when you are in a bad mood. This activity may even improve your mood.
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4) Then there is the pleasure of company versus solitude: When you are translating, you are working in partnership with the author; you are not as alone as you usually are when writing your own work. You sense the author’s hovering presence, you feel an alliance with him, and a loyalty to him, with all his good and his less good character traits, whether, like Proust, he is neurotic and difficult, and at the same time generous and funny, or, like Flaubert, tender toward his family and at the same time full of contempt for a great many people and types of people. Perhaps it is that you overlook his less admirable qualities in admiration for what he has written; or your judgment of him is tempered by your awareness that you have a degree of power over his work—to do well or ill by him in the small arena of the translation.
You may also have company in the shape of a cotranslator or an informant—the native-language speaker who will guide you away from subtle mistakes.
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5) Related to this is the fifth pleasure: You are to some extent disappearing from yourself for a little while, as you do any time you become wholly absorbed into an activity. You leave yourself behind for hours at a stretch, and this is not only a relief but an adventure. To quote Eliot Weinberger, again, from the same essay: “For me, the translator’s anonymity … is the joy of translation. One is operating strictly on the level of language, attempting to invent similar effects, to capture the essential, without the interference of the otherwise all-consuming ego.” (He does caution, though, at another point, that the ego can assert itself again: “Translators sometimes feel they share in the glory of their famous authors, rather like the hairdressers of Hollywood stars.”)
If you are also a writer, you are all too much involved with your own sensibility, what you will invent, what your mind will turn up unexpectedly, what your vocabulary will be. The source of what you do will be your own self, just as, more physically, the source of a singer’s voice is her own self, her own body, muscles, vocal cords.
And when you are not writing, you are also inescapably present with yourself, self-involved to a greater or lesser degree.
But when you are translating, your own self is set aside, you are subsumed into the author and the work you are translating.
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6) So that is pleasure number 6, that in this activity you are entering another person—you are speaking in his or her words, you are writing what he or she wrote. You become a sort of shadow person, for a time, insubstantial. In this, you are like an actor. It is restful. When I am translating Proust I am no longer quite myself; I am here, but hidden in the shadow or subsumed within the identity of this other writer. I am only part of the whole of what I usually am. And it is a relief from myself. Weinberger, again: “The introspective bookworm happily becomes the voice of Jack London or Jean Genet.”
You develop the ability, if you did not have this before, to be both yourself and another, or multiple others, at the same time.
Some translators concentrate on one author: more, and less, well-known translators come to mind—Ann Goldstein on Elena Ferrante; Rosmarie Waldrop on Edmond Jabès; Don Bartlett on Karl Ove Knausgaard; Michael Hofmann on, by turns, Joseph Roth and Peter Stamm, with intervals of Franz Kafka, Hans Fallada, and many others; I, for a few years at a time, on Maurice Blanchot, Pierre Jean Jouve, and Michel Leiris, with a number of others interspersed. Other translators translate always a different writer and so identify with many in succession.
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7) You are entering not only the author but another culture for longer or shorter periods of time. Translation is a very deep sort of armchair travel—all your thoughts are taken up with the culture of, say, Normandy of the 1830s; or with Paris high society at the turn of the twentieth century. Don Bartlett, as Knausgaard, studies literature in the Norwegian Hanseatic town of Bergen or, earlier, hides his precious supply of beer on New Year’s Eve behind a bank of snow; Rachel Careau, as the peculiar and inimitable Roger Lewinter, makes a mystical discovery in a Geneva flea market or closely observes a (Swiss) spider; Susan Bernofsky, as Robert Walser, retreats into a mountaintop asylum and writes in a graphite script so small it is for many years taken to be nonsense. You are traveling, and you are, inevitably, always learning—and you have the stimulation of both.
This sojourn in another language, and in another culture and another history, is one I thirst after because it relieves me, for a while, of my own culture and the present; there is no doubt that I like the experience of having my mind engaged in this other place and time and in this other way of thinking for long periods of an ordinary American day.
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8) You not only enter that other culture, but remain to some extent inside it as you return to your own, so that even in your U.S. life, things you experience may jump out at you in French: you may open a can of pois chiches to add to your salad at lunch, or you see deer brouter in a nearby field, or you find that your closet is simply too exigu, or twilight descends and the time of day appears to you to be entre chien et loup. You think, at the Columbia County Fair, that perhaps this farmer, before walking to the exhibits, will knot the corners of his handkerchief and place it on his head, to protect himself from the sun—as do the farmers arriving at the great agricultural fair in Madame Bovary.
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9) As a result of often stepping outside it, or spending long weeks outside it, you come to acquire greater perspective on your own native culture, with its particular history. You are always in it and of it, but you do not take it for granted. You appreciate the individuality of any culture, but you also notice—with no bias, you hope—what is superior about each; your own culture is not superior in every respect. You also like to imagine what it is that the French like about your own country. If I enjoy their sometimes rigid codes of conduct, they probably enjoy our greater casualness and freedom from constraint. I enjoy the impression I receive in France that every acre, even every square meter, is valued and used; they probably enjoy the vastness, and carelessness, of many places in the United States. I relish the history that goes so far back behind every settlement in France; they probably enjoy the relative youth of ours.
You are, in any case, not inhabiting exclusively and constantly your own country and culture, but are looking outward with a wider perspective, more constantly aware of the international.
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10) Because, however, you are always drawing on the resources of your own language for such a variety of different styles and sensibilities, or—if you translate a single author— a style and sensibility and personal history quite different from your own, you become more and more knowledgeable about your own language and its resources as you work—from author to author, or book to book, year to year, decade to decade. Translating continuously feeds my own writing by, among other things, enriching my English and developing my capacities in English. The problems upon problems that pose themselves, in translating, require me to become ever more ingenious in my home language; working within these constraints requires me to become more adept.
I am not quite as much of a Francophile as some translators from the French. My own language is always primary for me, my first and greatest love among languages. French will almost always seem foreign to me. After all these years, I still can’t fully assimilate the fact that one entire word, and a complex one, consists only of the letter y, that insect-like letter, that sort of stick bug or praying mantis. How strange, I continue to think—though it is true that, as I learn other languages, languages entirely new to me, French feels more comfortably familiar, like coming home.
Copyright © 2021 by Lydia Davis