“Performer, Perverter”
AND SO, what about this idea of “being oneself ” when one translates? Is that a legitimate part of the game? Is being oneself allowed for a translator, or is it a taboo no-no? Most translators seem to believe that it is evil and verboten, and that, quite to the contrary, it is their sacred duty to suppress their own selves as much as possible. This, to be sure, is all in the noble aim of serving the author faithfully.
I am reminded of a couple of recordings of preludes and fugues by Dmitri Shostakovich that I purchased in the 1960’s. Over time, I came to love these works very dearly, so much so that in 1969 I even wrote a glowing fan letter to the composer (to which he never replied, to my disappointment). Each of the records contained several preludes and fugues (out of twenty-four in his full Opus 87), and on one of them the performer was Shostakovich himself, while on the other the performer was the famous Soviet pianist Sviatoslav Richter. The two records had a couple of preludes and fugues in common, so in those cases I got to hear the “authentic” version versus an “interpretation” by someone else. Well, I don’t think anyone will be too surprised to hear that I far preferred Richter’s way of playing Shostakovich’s piano music to Shostakovich’s way. Richter made the music flow, made it sing, made it dance, made it come fabulously alive. Shostakovich did an okay job, but on the whole his renditions sounded pretty wooden and flat. Would purists, however, object, saying that Richter had taken impermissible liberties, and that he should instead have paid strict attention to how Shostakovich himself performed every note and that he should have imitated Shostakovich slavishly, in order to be more “authentic”, more “true”, in order not to “betray” the master?
I am also reminded of a famous set of recordings made by Ella Fitzgerald in early 1956 of some thirty or so songs by Cole Porter (still available, incidentally). In each of these songs, Ella takes the original melody as written down and all over the place adds to it highly idiosyncratic, uniquely Ella-ish twists, heightening its beauty with her trills and mordents and swirls and grace notes, turning it into an immortal work of art in which her spirit and that of Cole Porter are magically joined. (By the way, I am neglecting the fantastic contribution of Buddy Bregman and his orchestra, also sui generis, but taking that into account would only make my point even stronger.) Would we want to hear just Cole Porter’s own piano-playing accompanying his own rather lovable but also very squawky voice every last time we listened to “Begin the Beguine”? I think not. Ella’s myriad artistic choices, most of them made spontaneously and unconsciously, make this album a priceless treasure, a landmark in my life and many friends’ lives, and in the lives of thousands of others. It is a magical marriage between Porter and Fitzgerald, and one to cherish forever.
At this juncture, I feel compelled to recall to the reader’s mind the harsh verdict “Translator, traitor”, which prejudges all translators of all works of literature of being guilty of some kind of crime, without even putting them on trial. If we were to apply this same kind of mindless “reasoning” to music, then we would have to declare about both Richter and Fitzgerald, without once having listened to a single note by either, “Performer, perverter.”
“Transistore, Traditore”
HOW IS musical performance any different from translation? Unless you want to entrust everything to a machine, translation requires a human performer. Sometimes I get the impression, though, that many people want the process of translation to yield something that is essentially mechanical — they want (or they seem to want) to read “pure Sagan in English” without any human intermediary, or at least without any subjective human choices getting in the way between them and Sagan’s French.
In fact, to my bafflement, that seems to be the holy grail of many, perhaps even most, of the members of the translating profession. Many of them state explicitly that their dream is to be “invisible”, so that their author will come through perfectly, without any “interference” — a humble stance that is virtually the diametric opposite of that of musical performers, who for the most part aspire to be maximally in the limelight, and often, if at all possible, more so than the composer.
Well, all right then — if neutral mechanicalness is what we want — that is, untouchedness by human hands — then let’s go for it. I have just carried out a little experiment to see what is possible along these lines. I began by opening La Chamade to a random page (page 134 in Chapter 17, if anyone cares) and I copied down the first sentence that my eye lit upon (and I swear this is true — I didn’t choose the most challenging sentence of two or three or ten; I literally chose a totally random sentence from a totally random page of the book). Here it is:Original version: En attendant, ils regardaient, comme fascinés, se dérouler le présent, se lever le jour qui les trouvait réunis dans le même lit, jamais rassasiés l’un de l’autre, descendre le soir qui les voyait marcher dans un Paris tiède, tendre, inégalable.
Then I fed this rather complex sentence into Google’s mechanical translation engine, to see what a wholly disinterested, unbiased party might make of it:Google’s version: While waiting, they looked at, as fascinated, to be held the present, to rise the day which found them joined together in the same bed, ever satisfied one of the other, to descend the evening which saw them going in tepid Paris, tender, incomparable.
There can be no denying that this piece of verbal garbage is a very literal translation (essentially just dictionary lookup plus some grammatical rearrangement). Although it’s “objective” by virtue of being mechanical, it’s hard to imagine anyone who would ever suggest or believe that this untouched-by-human-hands rendition faithfully represents Françoise Sagan in English.
A couple of explanatory notes: se dérouler unfortunately got replaced by “to be held”, which it sometimes indeed means (in the sense of a conference or a concert being held), but certainly not in this context, where it means “to unfold”, and jamais got replaced by “ever”, the exact opposite of what it means here. Well, that’s par for the course when zero intelligence is brought to bear on translation. Zero intelligence yields a freezing-cold, zero-degree, zero-sense translation (and even applying the word “translation” to such output is being overly generous, I think).
By the way, the bulk of this essay having been written in 2005, the garbage shown above was produced by a now-obsolete version of Google’s translation engine. In the past year or so, the engine has been overhauled totally (dictionary lookup has been replaced by a much fancier kind of phrase-level lookup that takes context into account, for anyone who’s interested), and so, in the interests of scientific accuracy and literary honesty, here is the translation that Google produced for me on October 12, 2008:Google’s October 2008 version: Meanwhile, they watched, fascinated as is this place, stand on the day that was gathered in the same bed, never satisfied one of the other, get off the evening which saw them walk in a Paris warm, tender, incomparable.
As you can see, this garbage is quite different from the 2005 garbage (but it’s hardly any better — in fact, it’s probably worse). So much for the idea that a translation done by machine is “neutral” and “pure”. What this shows is that it is very hard indeed to produce a good translation without any thinking — and for better or for worse, thinking is what makes a good translation extremely human, and anything but mechanical.
It seems to me that a helpful, pithy summary of my simple experiments with machine translation is the following brand-new sound bite: Transistore, traditore. If you don’t understand it, then just ask Google to translate it for you. It’ll do a perfect job of it!
Many a Choice Results in a Voice
LET’S GO on with our discussion of the ideal of “pure” or “neutral” translation, devoid of subjectivity. Having explored machine translation and found it wanting, I decided to render the same sentence very literally myself, thus bringing in a modicum of human intelligence (essentially just a bit of common sense in choosing word senses) but trying to avoid any genuine artistry. In my pr
oduct, shown below, I explicitly indicate a fair number of choice points where further choices — judgment calls involving at least a little artistry or personal taste — would be required. If I were to make any of those choices, then of course my own ego — my personal style and taste — would necessarily be intervening, so I stayed out of the picture.
Choice-littered literal version by DRH: [Meanwhile/in the meantime], they [watched/were watching/would watch/used to watch/looked at/were looking at (etc.)], as if fascinated, the present [unrolling/ unfolding], the day [arising/breaking], which [found/was finding] them [reunited/collected/gathered/combined (etc.)] in the same bed, never [satisfied with/having gotten enough of ] [each other/one another], the evening [fall/falling], which [saw/was seeing] them [walk/walking] in a [tepid/lukewarm/warm/balmy], tender, [matchless /unmatchable/incomparable] Paris.
Next, I decided to turn this choice-littered literal translation into a (hopefully) high-quality literal translation by using my own judgment calls, thus trying to get as close to a “pure Sagan” (i.e., untouched-by-human-hands) version of this sentence as I could:
DRH literal version: Meanwhile, they were watching, as if fascinated, the present unfolding, the day breaking, which would find them reunited in the same bed, never having gotten enough of each other, the evening falling, which would see them walk in a warm, tender, incomparable Paris.
To me, the above reads in a very wooden fashion, despite the artistry that I tried to bring to bear in making choices. In fact, it strikes me as hopelessly clunky. The reason is that there is really very little room to maneuver if one begins with a choice-littered literal translation and one’s hands are tied by that fact. The raw material was badly wanting, so that calling the making of such choices “artistic” is really a kind of bad joke.
My next step was simply to copy Robert Westhoff ’s translation of this sentence out of his book:Westhoff’s published version: Meanwhile, they watched, fascinated, the present unfold, the day break to find them together in the same bed, never wearying of each other, the sky darken at twilight to find them walking about a warm, tender, incomparable Paris.
In most of this sentence, Westhoff just stays on his usual short leash. In fact, it is striking how close my literal version and Westhoff ’s version are. But there are a couple of spots where he pulls out a little farther from the literal, with phrases like “never wearying of each other” and “the sky darken at twilight”. Those phrases are not “pure Sagan in English”, which is a pipe dream, but Sagan-Westhoff, and it’s precisely where Westhoff starts to exploit his own artistic taste that it starts to sound more like something someone might actually want to read. Arf arf !
Finally, I simply cut-and-pasted my own long-leash final version of this same sentence from Chapter 17 into this essay:DRH final version: And so, in the meantime, they were watching the present with fascination as it unfolded, with each day as it first broke finding them tightly joined in their little bed, never getting enough of one another, and with each evening as it fell finding them walking side by side in the mild, sweet, magical Parisian air.
As advertised, this was done by a much freer dog. The two occurrences of “each”, for example, help make it clear that this is not a one-time scene but an oft-repeated one, a fact that is subtly suggested by the original French (largely by the imperfect tense of the verbs trouvait and voyait), but which a literal translation fails to convey. Other small touches, such as “And so”, “tightly joined in their little bed”, and “the mild, sweet, magical Parisian air”, came purely from my own head — a head that has lived sixty years in the same world that Françoise Sagan had spent thirty years in when she wrote this passage. I think that having lived in the world brings a great deal of life into one’s translation, provided that one allows oneself to dare to admix one’s own life with the life of the author.
This passage, in short, is by no stretch of the imagination “pure Sagan in English” — a pipe dream, I once again repeat — but it is Sagan-Hofstadter, an abstract entity a bit like Porter- Fitzgerald (if I’m allowed to make such a bold analogy). You cannot — I repeat, cannot — get “pure Sagan in English”, and I won’t even add “sad to say”, because the idea is just incoherent. It would be like saying, “You can’t get a square circle, sad to say.” There’s nothing sad about its nonexistence because it’s just a contradiction in terms. What you can get is various people’s styles of rendering Françoise Sagan in English, just as you can get various people’s styles of singing “Begin the Beguine”. Some of them may turn out to be sublime works of art, others may not. But each one will unavoidably bear its performer’s unique stamp.
Flow-words and the Author’s Voice
THAT little word “and” buried two-thirds of ’ the way through my final version above (“never getting enough of one another, and with each evening…”) merits a bit of commentary. To me it helps the sentence flow more smoothly and clearly. Try reading it aloud without the “and” and see if you agree. Perhaps you will agree, perhaps you won’t, but in any case, for a combination of intangible reasons, I myself felt the flow was improved, and so I took the liberty of adding it.
As this shows, one of the characteristics of my style is to try to make the “logic” of what I write flow smoothly. For that reason, I am particularly concerned with “flow-words” like the conjunctions “but”, “so”, “as”, “since”, “although”, “because”, and so forth. Although I usually render Sagan’s rather bland word et by the literal choice “and”, there are spots where, in the interests of smooth, clear flow, I will render et by less bland words, such as “but” or “and so” or “and then”. Indeed, there were a few spots in La Chamade when a sentence with et had such a screamingly “but” feel to it that for me there was no choice at all but to use “but” instead of “and”. You might ask, “Well, if it so blatantly called out for ‘but’, then why didn’t Sagan say mais in French?” Good question. I can only reply, “Beats me!”
Stern and severe purists would say that I should always respect Sagan’s decision to say et instead of mais, and I believe I understand this sentiment very well. Indeed, respect for the original wording is certainly one of the pressures — the many pressures — that I feel asserting themselves and tussling with each other inside my brain whenever I translate. But, though it is always strong, it is often not the winning pressure. Always following the literal route is being too much the dog on the short leash, and leads invariably to a graceless, wooden outcome.
“But what about Sagan’s style?”, I hear some people protest. “Aren’t you killing her style and replacing it with Hofstadter style?” Another excellent question, going right to the heart of the matter, which is, of course, the Wrong-Style Paradox.
I once heard a talk by John Nathan, a gifted translator from Japanese to English, in which he emphasized how crucial it is to preserve the author’s “voice” or “soundprint” in one’s translation. His point was that he doesn’t want his English translations of three different Japanese novelists all to come out sounding like him; he wants them to have three recognizable, individual, unique voices (or soundprints), so that anyone who read a little bit of his translation of a piece by author X would immediately recognize the characteristic “X voice” and would be able to identify the author as X almost instantly. This is certainly a noble aim, I agree — so the question is, am I diluting Françoise Sagan’s personal voice by superimposing on it my own desire for clarity or flow or logic (or whatever you want to call it)?
My answer to this subtle question is that it all depends on the extent to which the “Sagan voice” demands what I would call a “misuse” of flow-words like et, mais, and so forth. If Françoise Sagan consistently used et where I felt something else (such as mais) was called for, and if she did this so frequently and so reliably that people felt that this was really a deep hallmark of her style, then I would surely back away from replacement of et by “but” in English. However, this is not my take on Françoise Sagan. It seems to
me that most of the time, she uses flow-words in a very normal, reasonable fashion, corresponding exactly to my expectations and my own writing style. But once in a while, it seems to me that she carelessly slips up, and I suspect that if an editor had said to her, “Why don’t you switch this et into a mais?”, she would have reread the passage and then said, “Sure! It flows better!” (in French, of course, despite my quote marks). I don’t know this for sure, and of course I can’t prove it, but it is my very strong intuition.
Françoise Sagan was not into surface-level affectations of the sort whereby an author becomes famous for some strange and idiosyncratic way of using common words. To the contrary, she used words in a very straightforward and reasonable way, and in fact that is one of the reasons that her prose appeals to me so much. The special flavor of Sagan’s voice does not in the least depend on a weakened sense of flow or logic, thanks to repeated abuses of words like et and mais; Sagan’s special novelist’s voice comes from a much larger-scale way of portraying people and events through descriptions, dialogues, and especially inner monologues. If I were to betray her at that level, then people could, and people should, complain that the Sagan voice had disappeared in the Hofstadter translation. But I do my very best to respect her at that quintessentially Sagan level.
That Mad Ache Page 23
