Forensic Translation

Translation is not the art of failure but the art of the possible.
Benjamin Paloff
April 7, 2015

Tower of Babel, by Lucas van Valckenborch, 1595

The task of the translator, to borrow the title of what is probably the twentieth centurys
single most influential commentary about the goal of translation, is to create a text that
improves upon the original. In all fairness to Walter Benjamin, this is not what he says in
The Task of the Translator. Benjamin proposed that a good translation puts the same kind
of pressure on the target language that the original puts on the source language, and so to
some degree all great texts contain their potential translation between the lines. To claim
that a translator aims to improve the original text flies in the face not only of Benjamins
idealism but also of conventional wisdom, which holds that translation is impossible from the
outset. As John Ciardi once said, translation is the art of failure. That the quote is
frequently misattributed to Umberto Eco seems to back the point.
Yet this clichd wisdom has little bearing on reality. In his marvelous book Is That a Fish in
Your Ear?: Translation and the Meaning of Everything, David Bellos demonstrates many of

the ways that translation is not only possible but ubiquitous, so thoroughly woven into the
fabric of our daily livesfrom classrooms to international financial markets, from instruction
manuals to poemsthat if translation were somehow to become impossible, the world
would descend into the zombie apocalypse faster than you can say je ne sais quoi. The
European Union, for example, has twenty-four official languages; every legal document
within the EU has to be translated into all of them, and every official translation is legally the
original. There is clearly a tension between the varieties of translation happening all
around usevery moment of every day, truly one of the fundamental activities that hold our
world togetherand the persistent recycling of platitudes about how this activity, so basic
and ubiquitous, is impossible. If the platitudes are recalled more often than translations
pervasiveness, it is only because translators are usually invisible, their work mysterious.
One reason translation is superior to the original is the access it grants. Without translation,
Stieg Larsson would have had no appreciable presence on the beaches of the world these
last few years, and Prousts la recherche du temps perdu would only have been a
mesmerizing epic novel to those who could read French. For the rest of us, it could only be
a doorstop. We tend to assume that all the best literature in a given language finds its way
into English, and thatmaking a leap that sounds more sensible than plausibleif its worth
reading, its probably already available in English. But this is simply not true. What gets
translated and published in English in any given year is such a tiny fraction of literature
available in other languages that we Anglophones can never hope to read all the worthwhile
works of literature in other languages. Anyone who knows a foreign literature well would
have little trouble naming titles, including major works by major writers in that language, that
are unavailable in ours. The odds are strong that you will never be able to read what might
have been your favorite book.
That a translation is superior because you can read it without knowing its source language
seems obvious, yet it is a fact easily overlooked. Without that access, most literature might
as well not existand within the range of our own experience, it doesnt. The tasks of the
translator for the most part are to increase the availability of information and to stage that
informations effect in the new language. A funny sentence about cats in Japanese cannot
just be about cats in English: it also has to be funny, because a joke that doesnt make you
laugh is not really a joke. By the same token, the notorious difficulty of translating humor
might be chalked up to the sad fact that so many brilliant translators just arent that funny.
Whether on the stage or on the page, the difference between someone who comes up with
a joke and someone who makes people laugh is entirely in the telling.

The same is true of everything that might be termed style. There are many examples of a
works stylistic features being amplified or augmented by the translator. I once attended a
reading where Joseph Brodsky invited his friend Derek Walcott to read his translation of
Brodskys poem Letters From the Ming Dynasty, because Walcotts English had more
effectively drawn out sonorities that Brodsky had wanted to produce in Russian. (For the
record, both versions are superb.) And the popular Japanese author Haruki Murakami says
quite openly that the style of any of his books in English depends upon which of his three
main translators has taken it on. If Edgar Allan Poe sounds more like Charles Baudelaire in
the latters renditions of Poes writing, it can only be to Poes benefit.
How do translators go about their work? A number liken translation to the theaterJake
Donaghue, the hero of Iris Murdochs Under the Net, describes it as opening ones mouth
and hearing someone elses voice emerge, and this seems apt. Translation can be likened
to forensics, that is, the competitive rhetoric and oratory practiced in our more traditional
high schools and colleges. It, too, is competitive, at least insofar as it produces multiple
versions of the same text, which is itself an invitation to compare. The assumption that an
original is always superior to a translation is just such a comparison, if one that usually has
no basis in actual experience.
Even in stagecraft, though, one has a choice of approaches. Some translators, like some
actors, project the source material through their own indelible style and personality, so that
even in a bravura performance we never lose sight of the person on stage, as it were. We
might call this the Jack Nicholson School of translation. Charles Simic, an excellent poet
and prolific translator, is a member. When he calls translation an actors medium, he is less
interested in transforming himself or imitating someone else than in making himself believe
that hes the one writing the poem in the first place. Translation becomes a way of taking
over the material. While the rare bird with access to both versions may be disappointed
Brodsky objected to what happened to the Russian poet Osip Mandelshtam at the hands of
W.S. Merwin, from whom more should have been expected than a translation of
Mandelstam into MerwinMerwins Mandelstam becomes a performance all its own. Just
because you enjoy reading Shakespeare doesnt mean you cant appreciate Derek Jacobi
as Lear.
Some actors, however, prefer to disappear into the role, and here, too, there is a clear
analogy to translation, which can become its own vanishing act. A translator may spend
hours laboring over a word choice or the placement of a comma, pondering whether an
exclamation point means the same in German (where it appears frequently) that it does in

English, all to create a text that sounds as if it were written by someone else. This kind of
translation is similar to Method acting. Even off-set, long after the work of translation is
finished and the translator has moved on to another project, another role, he or she will
forever remain in character in the printed book, hidden behind the authors name. In the
early 1960s, Jiri Lev, a Czech theorist whose work has attracted increasing attention in
recent years, developed a practical approach to literary translation based in part on Method
acting. He called his approach Illusionist, by which he meant that the translator would do
everything he could to make the reader forget that he was reading a translation. He likened
it to a totally immersive experience of the theater.
Yet, as we often find when we try to translate theory into practice, principles can be
compromised by reality. How, after all, are we supposed to get into character when that
character is another human being whom we know only through certain movements of
mind, through the traces he or she has left in languageand a non-native language at that,
since there is a strong bias in Anglo-American literary culture that translators be native
speakers of English?
Jorge Luis Borges parodied this predicament brilliantly in his story Pierre Menard, Author of
the Quixote, which just about every student of literary translation encounters early and
refers to frequently thereafter. The title character, a French translator devoted to creating a
new version of Cervantess masterpiece, decides that the only way he can truly come to
inhabit the text is to relive the life of its author, so that his production of the text will mimic
Cervantess. Initially, Borges writes, Menards method was to be relatively simple: Learn
Spanish, return to Catholicism, fight against the Moor or Turk, forget the history of Europe
from 1602 to 1918be Miguel de Cervantes. These kinds of mimetic absurdities are
common in Borges, for whom the artists ambition to fill his work with more and more detail
creates not merely an imitation of life, but a carbon copy of it, a map of the Empire whose
size was that of the Empire, as he once wrote. But Menards ambition comes crashing
against the reality of his time and place. He is a Frenchman of the twentieth century, not a
Spaniard of the seventeenth. No matter what he does to re-enact the life of Cervantes, the
world where this bizarre performance occurs will have long since moved on.
Still, behind Borgess very serious silliness is the idea that an effective approach to
translation is one that reconstructs the composition of the original text. The notions germ is
already contained in the truism that one has to be a poet to translate poetry, which
nevertheless cant account for why some of our best translators of poetryJohn Felstiner
from German, for example, or Allen Mandelbaum from Latinare poets primarily when they

are translating. They create their greatest works as poets when they are collaborating with
the poets (living or dead) whose work they translate. But the idea that translation benefits
from some technical expertise in the material being translated still holds, not least because
the translator would then presumably have a better grasp of the meaning of the original.
This principle of specialization underwrites much of the translation that affects us directly on
a daily basis. Legal or medical or diplomatic translators, to name just three fields where the
absence of translators would be felt most immediately, may not themselves be lawyers,
doctors or diplomats, but they know the jargon specific to those professions, as well as how
members of those professions communicate with one another, in the source language as
well as in English. This is especially evident in technical fields, where most professional
translators happen to be employed. If the person translating the manual to your new
computer has never brought a computer online, youre likely to know. Ikea, the Swedish
housewares firm that has elevated production efficiency to a core part of its corporate ethos,
has almost entirely eliminated the need to retranslate its manuals by rendering most
assembly instructions as illustrations. But as anyone who has assembled Ikea furniture is
aware, even this form of translation is not without ambiguity, confusion and smashed
particleboard.
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With literary translation, this degree of specialization is often developed through the
painstaking, case-by-case process of becoming an expert on an individual text. This is why
several writers have referred to translation as, above all else, an act of interpretation, albeit
one in which the translators act of reading is recorded and reproduced, word by word and
thought by thought, for a new audience. This involves not only having a strong command of
the history and literary traditions of the source culture, which most translators acquire as
part of their language training, but also being at least as proficient in the history and literary
traditions of the target culture. Not only does one have to catch idiomatic expressions and
sly allusions; corresponding idioms and references must leap to mind in English.
Here, another form of forensics comes into play, the kind that is most familiar to us from
television crime procedurals. Think of it this way: the translator breaks down the original text,
then reverse-engineers itin effect figuring out how it happened by relying on evidence at
the scene (the book), questioning witnesses (the author, when available, or the authors
editors and acquaintances) and consulting the various, sometimes conflicting postmortems
produced by scholars. The translation then becomes the reconstruction of an event.

If you really want to get into the authors head, short of reliving his or her life, you find
yourself reading everything he or she was reading while thinking about and writing the book
you are translating. I sometimes think of this as reading over the authors shoulder. It
became a particularly big part of my life in 2010, when I was working on two books that are
thick with quotations: Krzysztof Michalskis The Flame of Eternity: An Interpretation of
Nietzsches Thought (Princeton; paper $22.95) and Marek Bienczyks Transparency (Dalkey
Archive; paper $14.95), a book-length essay. Bienczyk is a novelist and a specialist in
Romanticism at the Polish Academy of Sciences in Warsaw, as well as a translator of fiction
and philosophy from French. His book, a discursive, novelistic meditation on the theme of
transparency, quotes liberallynearly two hundred instances over the course of the book
from Polish Romantic literature and French philosophy, not to mention just about every
major European text on transparency itself. Michalski, who died of cancer about a year after
his book on Nietzsche appeared in English, was a philosopher based in Vienna. His book
contains over 500 references, many of them to Nietzsche, as well as to ancient and
medieval theology.
The number of quotations in each book has stuck in my head because it fell to me to track
them down. After all, if we were going to be quoting Nietzsche and Roland Barthes, I
wanted to use translations by those people who, for me as a reader, have best captured
what the originals should sound like in English (Walter Kaufmann and Richard Howard,
respectively). Where the text being quoted had never before appeared in English translation
as Ive mentioned, you might be surprised at how much work by major authors remains
invisible to usI wanted to find the original source and render it in a style consistent with
the translations that are available.
Bienczyks and Michalskis books were not very helpful in this endeavor. Both had been
released by Znak, one of Polands most venerable literary publishers, and, despite their
rarefied subject matter, both were presented as literary prose for the general reader, without
any notes. In fact, both authors were somewhat resistant to my intention to include citations
in my translation, preferring instead that I simply work from their prose, despite the
possibility that there would be long passages consisting of translations of translations of
translations. I insisted on weighing their sources with my own ear.
When the stars were properly aligned, this meant reading a quotation in Polish and finding
its corresponding passage in the English translations I was using. In practice, it was rarely
that easy. Michalski and Bienczyk frequently quoted from memory, and there were more
than a few instances where their memories had produced paraphrases instead of quotes.

Sometimes they were working from a translated text that had made troublesome
modifications to the original. Very often they would quote an author without any indication of
their source; having read the quotation in Polish, I would back-translate it into several
versions of what the English, French or German might be. Once I had tracked down the
source, I would either find the best available translation of the passage or produce one
myself.
As in television detective work, one relies on a combination of old-fashioned sleuthing,
technological aids and dumb luck. Witnesses help, but they can be unreliable; never
intending to fact-check or source their literary prose, both authors had forgotten precisely
where several quotations had come from. My own familiarity with some of the sources
helpedliterary translation is almost always served by elective affinities between author and
translator, which in this case meant that we had already been reading a lot of the same stuff
but I still had to become conversant with authors and texts that had never meant much to
me before. Digital searches, which cover millions of texts in a fraction of a second, help a
lot. A typical days work brings all these resources into play and still ends with a note to
ones tomorrow-morning self about where to pick up the thread. After all, most CSI-type
crime dramas mark their entracte with a scene of frustration, that moment when the
investigators hit a wall (literally or figuratively, depending on the quality of the direction
and/or set design), so that after the commercial break (or, for the translator, a good nights
sleep), we can backtrack and re-evaluate. That was my daily life for about a year.
What could possibly motivate someone to perform this kind of labor? Not money. The perhour wage for literary translation in the United States usually works out to cents. The
appeal, what sustains the translator from one jaw-clenching moment to the next, is the
purely poetic activity of matching a word or phrase, of reorchestrating the tonal shifts from
one language to another. But in the end, all you really want to do is to climb inside this text
in order to understand how it works, what it was that sparked the enthusiasm bordering on
obsession that is the sine qua non of labor so generous in its demands and poor in its pay.
Sometimes its only by reconstructing the machine from the inside out, switching it on, and
watching it work that you can move on to something else. If you can outfit it with a new
bibliography or index along the way, mores the better.

Read Next: Animal Education

Benjamin Paloff

April 7, 2015