Pandemic isolation is now accompanied by glorious spring sunshine. As I sit outside, I am conscious of the sound of birdsong, children at play, snatches of radio through open windows, and the faint, regular ‘ping’ that was once unknown to me, but is now part of the aural wallpaper of lockdown life. It is the sound of people doing their exercises on Duolingo. Learning a new skill, or refreshing an old one, is a part of how people are trying to give structure and meaning to their days. But there’s something particularly bittersweet about learning a language in these circumstances. To savour the sound, to embrace the idiosyncrasies, the particularities of a culture and a land we are forbidden to visit, tells of a longing. A longing for connections we took for granted, places we could enjoy as tourists, or in which we could settle and make our homes. Brexit, the virus, these are things which have shaken our certainties, and fed our longings for a better past, and a different future. And we need a language for that. The article which follows was written last year by Anthony Ferner, in connection with the publication of his third novel, Life In Translation. It somehow seems appropriate to share it here, now.
Yasmin Ali
Fiction in Translation, Translation in Fiction
I’ve always had an interest in languages, something that perhaps marks me out from the monolingual bulk of my compatriots, particularly in this age of Brexit-fanned suspicion of un-English things. When I was very young my family moved for a while to a another country. Family mythology has it that my twin brother and I became quite fluent in the local language; or, at least, fluent for four-year-olds. This early experience opened me up to languages and language learning. Over time I became intrigued by the fact that other people were able to communicate with each other in whole alternative systems of signs and symbols, gestures and utterances. Different modes of thought and ways of seeing the world were embedded in the very language people used – in moods and cases and verb forms, in syntax, in vocabulary. Though I didn’t study languages formally after secondary school, I came over the years to have a degree of fluency in three or four (though never at any one time).
In many ways, it has never been easier to learn a new language. There are a host of free and effective beginners’ courses online. One of the best-known online platforms offers a couple of dozen languages, from Spanish to Esperanto, from Hindi to Hungarian (and even High Valyrian, the language of Daenerys, Mother of Dragons). Such platforms, harnessing the psychology of digital marketing to keep you interested in learning, function as gateway drugs, getting you hooked and prepared for harder-core language-learning. There is an enormous sense of achievement and pleasure to be had in finding you can read a foreign novel in the original, or can conduct a half-coherent conversation with a person from another culture in their native language, seeing the world through their eyes, having your preconceptions and prejudices shaken.
My interest in languages led me to the subject of my novel, Life in Translation, whose protagonist is a literary translator.* The translator is an intriguing figure, attempting to bridge the gulf – in some ways unbridgeable – between two languages and the kinds of lived experience and worldview that each expresses. I am not of course the first writer to take translation as a subject, or to make a translator the principal character of a novel. For example, Javier Marías, himself a translator of English classics, wrote A Heart So White, set in the milieu of translators and conference interpreters. And, of course, in Douglas Adams’ The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, an important role is played by the Babel fish that slots neatly into the ear and can translate any language in the galaxy into any other, instantaneously.
Naturally, even the most gifted of linguists will not master more than a handful of languages, so in a multilingual universe, translation is a necessary art, lubricating commerce and cultural exchange between countries and linguistic regions. In the book industry, translations of the big names of world literary fiction, the Ferrantes, Murakamis or Knausgårds, have been international publishing phenomena. But translated fiction in the UK remains only a very small percentage of books published: around 3 per cent, according to a 2015 report from the University of Aberystwyth.
Nonetheless, the UK has seen something of an upsurge of interest in foreign literary fiction in recent years, driven by the efforts of a number of small presses including, among others, And Other Stories, Charco, Comma, Fitzcarraldo, Peirene, Pushkin, Tilted Axis, Oneworld and (for translations of Dutch novels as well as the original Dutch versions), Holland Park Press. By beating the drum for a wide range of world literature in English translation, these publishers perform an invaluable role in reducing the parochialism of our reading and hence of our cultural reference points. Important too are prizes specifically for translated literature, such as the Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize, the Translators Association’s various awards, and the Man Booker International Prize.
To the uninitiated, the work of the translator might seem increasingly redundant in the age of Google Translate and of online literary corpuses able to compare millions of words in different languages in the context of their everyday or literary use. It is true there have been huge advances in translation programmes since the early days. Sometime in the early 1990s I was asked by my then boss in a social science research centre to investigate the possibilities of machine translation. I was sceptical that computer programmes would be up to the task. He was persuaded that I was right when the online translation programme rendered ‘picos y bajos’ – ‘peaks and troughs’ – in a piece on the Spanish economy as ‘pricks and bottoms’.
Despite the progress, machine translation programmes – one is named after Douglas Adams’ galactically omnicompetent translating fish – still have far to go. The best may be adequate for first drafts of instruction manuals whose meaning is unambiguous. But they remain unable to compete with human translators, particularly in the field of literary fiction, not only because of inevitable multiple ambiguities and context dependencies in the source text, but because of the subtlety, flexibility and ingenuity needed to bring a work to life in another language. Literary translation involves impressive technical skill, a degree of artistry and elegance of expression, and a dash of low cunning in order to bridge the gulf in modes of expression between source and target language.
A complicating factor for the art of translation is the degree to which languages are dynamic, living things that change over time as societies change. Meanings evolve, despite the best efforts of the language Canutes. The vocabulary pool – particularly for spoken expression – borrows constantly from other languages. Dutch, for example, keeps taking in impressive numbers of English loan words, assimilating them into Dutch lexical and grammatical structures so efficiently that they ‘go native’. The internet especially has encouraged new forms of expression to spread across national and linguistic borders at unprecedented speed. All this poses problems for translators. They must prevent their language knowledge from ossifying at the point in time at which they originally acquired it, constantly refreshing their grasp both of the source and the target languages and of the evolving relationship between one and the other.
In researching the translator’s world, I spoke to several practitioners about the art and craft of translation. Some told me they started from the ‘music’ of the text, the very sound of the words, rather than their meanings. As one said, ‘the simplest sentence in one language can look beautiful – and absolutely abominable in the other. It’s the harmonics of the sentence.’ Others sought to capture a ‘tone of voice’; or to replicate in English the emotional impact, rather than the precise meaning, of the original. Some translators would begin at the beginning without even reading the work through first, adjusting their translation as they went. Others would go through the text and make detailed notes before embarking on their first draft, on the look-out for key words, or for opaque allusions to popular songs or to Greek myths, or whatever else. They would even read previous novels by the same author to get a feel for style and themes. Along the way, they would be devising stratagems and workarounds to render aphorisms, puns and wordplay in English, or to capture alliteration or other effects. They were called on to display the inventiveness and lateral thinking of crossword-puzzlers.
Beyond the text, there were the run-ins with editors, authors or publishers, variously wanting to make the text more literal, or less literal, to add explanatory footnotes, or to change word order. The negotiation process could be arduous: as one translator told me with respect to authors, ‘dead is best’. Some still regretted the changes that, as younger, less self-confident translators, they’d had imposed on them by editors or publishers. There was also the ongoing struggle to make a living. Most if not all translators would have to supplement their income with other work, such as teaching (often on university translation courses); literary translation attracts low payment rates relative to more commercial work, deadlines are often tight, and the pipeline of new contracts is unpredictable.
I learned too of some robust, and at times vicious, academic debates within the field – notably around ‘foreignisation’, which concerns how far a translator stays true to the original and its cultural context, or ‘domesticates’ a text for a target-language readership. One renowned translator was apparently in the habit of telling his students, ‘Just say what it says.’ Yet there is a deep tension between being faithful to the source text and having something that reads well in translation. On the one hand, if the work is too close to the original it will sound clunky and forced in English (or whatever language it’s being translated into), because language structures, idioms, and flow differ so much even between related languages. On the other hand, if too far from the original it will sound excessively ‘English’, not ‘foreign’ enough, when its very foreignness is part of its appeal and interest. As one translator told me, his editor didn’t want the finished work to sound too fluent in translation: ‘He said, “No don’t do that, the people who buy this kind of book want it to look French, to reek of Frenchness.”’ There is also much debate over what the ‘original text’ actually is, since readings of it evolve as social structures, power relations, and local cultures change. As for being ‘faithful’ to the source text, as a prominent (fictional) Latin American author observes in my novel, ‘Translation is reinvention. There are a thousand ways to stay true to the original.’ These various controversies sometimes make arguments between Lilliput’s Big-Endians and Little-Endians seem consequential by comparison. They can also be surprisingly vituperative: I attended one lecture by a star of academic translation studies who said – tongue-in-cheek, I’m hoping – that members of the opposing camp should be taken out and shot. However, the debates are also about important issues. It is surely legitimate to argue that societal assumptions about power structures, post-imperialism, patriarchy or race can be built into, and played out through the medium of, translation, and that the translator needs to be aware of this charged context.
I found translation to be a rich metaphor for novelistic purposes, partly because it embodies such conflicts. Some of the difficulties of translation, in selecting among multiple alternative ways of rendering the source text, parallel the arduous process we undertake in constructing identities for ourselves. Thus we may pick and choose aspects of our lives from which to weave a narrative that makes sense of ourselves and that helps create the image that we wish to project to others – friends, lovers, colleagues. It may be close to reality, or represent a very selective version of it, or indeed depart radically from it. It may sound ‘fluent’, or clumsily ‘genuine’. In the same way that interpretations of a fixed original text are said to evolve as society changes, so too do the meanings and narratives we construct from our complex selves, and our variegated experiences acquire new resonances and emphases over time. And the translator’s efforts to bridge the gulf between languages finds an echo in the individual’s struggles to bridge the gulf with other individuals whose ways of seeing, feeling and being in the world are often stubbornly ‘untranslateable’. Understanding other people is, to appropriate John Ciardi’s phrase about translation, ‘the art of failure.’
So the battle cry of translators might well be, ‘Translation is impossible. Let’s do it!’ Just like life.
Anthony Ferner
*Life in Translation was published by Holland Park Press in May 2019. Anthony Ferner is a former academic researcher in the field of international business, and is now a novelist.