by Kate Briggs
Yes and no, it seems, depending on the pressure you want to put on the word ‘autonomous’.
‘Think of a kitchen table … when you’re not there,’ advised Andrew. He meant this as a way for Lily to ponder the degree to which objects can be said to exist independently of a person being there to observe them – a proposition that Lily finds quite difficult to think. But it reminds me, oddly, of those author photos that are sometimes published in the book pages of the newspaper: the successful and much-translated author sitting at her writing desk; displayed on the shelves behind her are all the different language editions of her best-selling book. The French translation, the German, the Japanese, the Norwegian… All these further books derived from the same single source, now lined up the one alongside the other on her shelves. All these further books that are in some sense – some legal sense, but also, perhaps, in some experiential sense, if one could find and check with a reader capable of reading them all – more or less identifiably the same book. Lined up together on the shelves like this, the same book written again and again in the many languages I am unable to read, published in contexts so distant from, for example, the cosy comfort of the writer’s London study, or indeed of my own living room, as I read the book pages online at home, the translations appear virtual, sort of propositional – that is, fictional: like so many alternative fictions of the original – not, in and of themselves, altogether real.
But they are, of course: each one is (also) a whole book made, written. Each one is a book now acting on its own terms in the world; a thing currently being bought and sold and read and held and dropped and lived with and discussed. Looking at the photograph of the author’s shelves, I feel like I should know this, but thinking it – really thinking about all these different relations produced by and now existing independently of whatever the original context of writing might have been – requires a further and concerted effort of the imagination.
‘Think of a kitchen table … when you’re not there’. In To the Lighthouse, Lily does, indeed, think of it. She often thinks of and pictures a table, ‘a scrubbed kitchen table’ – but she is there, too. Making her way through the garden and down to the beach: ‘It lodged now in the fork of a pear tree, for they had reached the orchard … And with a painful effort of concentration, she focused her mind, not upon the silver-bossed bark of the tree, or upon its fish-shaped leaves, but upon a phantom kitchen table, one of those scrubbed board tables, grained and knotted whose virtue seems to be laid bare by years of muscular integrity, which stuck there, its four legs in the air.’ To see a table, to actually see a kitchen table – not as an example or an abstraction, not as an object existing independently of anyone there to observe or work at or eat at it, uninscribed in anyone’s actual living life – but as scrubbed and grained and knotted. It is easy not to think about kitchen tables. In the same way, holding to my analogy, as it is easy not to think about translation. To do so, to make translation appear as a once-made (a twice-made) whole, a durable and integral and yet un-independent, never quite autonomous whole, takes a painful effort of concentration. It requires something like an effort of defamiliarization – of the order, perhaps, of imagining a kitchen table upside down, lodged now in the fork of a pear tree, its four legs in the air.
When the translator’s sense of her own working process was communicated to the room, everybody laughed. There was, apparently, ‘a general outburst of mirth’.
Can I tell you that when people talk to me about what I do, even when they solicit me to do what I do (to come along and translate a conference paper, someone’s article or someone’s book), I sometimes, often, feel like I am being pressed up against some pre-established agreement of what the work involves, some already decided general sense of how I must think about it and how I must feel? Pressed up against or pressed in by what I realize is a wholly normal, widespread and well-intentioned understanding of the practice of translation. As – what? As generous, typically. As selfless (involving setting my own self, my fascinations and feelings aside). As in-service to the world. Where my service is understood to be a process of conversion, a sort of universal procedure, empty of content. A process abstractable from the materials it is working on, the contexts it is working in, and the bodies of those engaged with it. An all-purpose process that can be set to work and made to fit all occasions because translation is more or less translation everywhere.
An understanding that’s not wrong.
Not at all wrong.
For the fact is, if we are able to point to and talk about translation as we do it or we see it – as it appears and operates in all contexts and directions all the time – it is because these occurrences do indeed have something in common. It is because we have witnessed, or more likely have been told, that the action of changing words from one language into another has occurred, which is the way the dictionary describes it. That, at least, is its first definition (the second proposes the more general conversion from one form or medium to another, in recognition of all the many other ways we use the term). It is because there must indeed be continuity, a commonality, a minimal set of gestures shared between the act of translating Barthes’s lecture notes from French into English, for example, and the act of doing apparently the same but into German this time, or Italian, or live translating them out loud, or tapping them into Google Translate to see what the algorithm throws up, or translating the work of another French writer into English, or working from English into French this time, or trying to make a start with Dutch.
I might confess to feeling pressed in by it, but this general working definition is not wrong.
And nor, as it turns out, is it too narrow, or too small.
What Barthes identifies as a breach of tact is the feeling of being reduced to a category that is too big. A great big class of actors and of activity, a kind of catch-all box. One that holds us all – translation is more or less translation, and translators are more or less translators, everywhere – but for just that reason cannot begin to attend to our different motivations, our specific desires, our peculiar joys and distresses.
‘When I receive one of Dr Mann’s works to translate, what I try to do is read it, not merely to get the sense but the flavour, the mood and tempo, the atmosphere,’ writes Lowe-Porter in the long letter her daughters quoted. ‘Well, then I try to decide whether the book has its peculiar characteristics of style which it would be my duty to represent … And when I got this well into my ear and feeling, I would use it to clothe as meticulous, supple and intuitive a rendering of the original as I possibly could … It is clear that the author of Buddenbrooks, Der Zauberberg, the Joseph series, and Lotte would and did fuse his matter and style into an organic whole. The translations ought to show an effort on the part of the translator to do the same.’
Clearly, observes David Horton, ‘Lowe-Porter felt empowered to intervene in the originals as long as the aesthetic qualities she perceived in the source-language work were reconstituted’ in the target-language text. But the ‘extent to which [she] was in fact aware of Mann’s “larger creative purposes” is open to question.’ He notes how apologetic and self-deprecating her translator’s notes could be; how in her letters she worried over her ‘inadequacy as a linguist, as a speaker of German, as a poet.’ And yet, how she remained ‘fundamentally convinced of her qualities and qualifications as the mediator of Thomas Mann.’ Her interventions were extensive (in the form of ‘reformulations and transpositions, omissions and additions’, all the mistakes that Buck lists). But as both Theo Hermans, in his separate discussion of the TLS controversy, and Horton point out, it was Lowe-Porter’s explicit project to make a translation that would work well in English; to render Mann’s prose in such a way that the books would be readable and on that basis desirable in the new market. And they were: again, her translations were both well-received and commercially successful. Horton concedes that by our current standards, ‘the line between empathetic identification, idiosyncratic assimilation and problema
tic appropriation’ in her approach can seem ‘truly thin’. Yet, as Horton also shows, her practice of extensively excising and adding (in keeping with her own vision of the whole and her concern for her English-speaking readership) was common among her contemporaries. Which is precisely the point that Venuti makes in his letter to the TLS: standards for what makes a good translation, for what the work of translation involves, and for how the translator should think and feel are historically and culturally determined and – they change. In Thomas Mann in English, David Horton takes this seriously. With its detailed discussions of the specific context in which Lowe-Porter was translating, its effort to research and understand her particular approach to her work and the pressures that were put upon her, in its refusal to laugh a bit more at her position and the translations she spent over twenty years of her lifetime writing, considering them instead as carefully written whole but un-autonomous things, written herself but not altogether by herself (in solitude, perhaps, but never exactly alone), Horton’s book reads to me like an exercise in tact.
The word Barthes uses in French is délicatesse – a beautiful sequence of syllables to walk through the mouth. A decisive principle of the oeuvre, writes Tiphaine Samoyault, délicatesse is ‘the contrary of arrogance’ and another name for what Barthes called ‘the neutral’. But where the neutral is imagined as a utopia (in grammar, the neutral or neuter is neither masculine nor feminine, neither active nor passive; in politics, Barthes sees it as a refusal to take sides on complex conflictual questions phrased in such a way as to permit only yes/no answers), délicatesse is the name given to the small-scale, everyday practice of values such as goodwill and attentiveness, what Barthes also calls ‘sweetness’ (la douceur), values in the form of behaviours that parry the already decided, the apparent self-evidence, the all-purpose explanation – and attend instead to those small, fleeting and fragile moments in life where, as Samoyault puts it, ‘individualities truly express themselves in their truth.’
Tact is a brilliant translation by Krauss and Hollier, I think. The same short ah, the hard c and the t; the implication of handling, touching. More agile – nimbler – than ‘consideration’, say, or ‘thoughtfulness’; not quite as strategic or as calculating as ‘diplomacy’; more robust (healthier?) than its cognate, ‘delicacy’.
Although of course their word-choice gains in specificity by way of its relations to these other, presumably considered and rejected possibilities.
I say ‘of course’, but I don’t think I fully grasped Ferdinand de Saussure’s early twentieth-century insight into the way words (or what he calls linguistic signs) work. How, as he puts it in the Course in General Linguistics (which I read in Roy Harris’s translation), they acquire their meanings relationally within what appears to be a closed system, until I started translating. Signs are like chess pieces, I remember reading. Where, say, for example: the rook is missing, and it’s probably down the back of the sofa somewhere or maybe not. But, don’t worry; it doesn’t matter; we can still play anyway, we can use a coin or a piece of Lego or something else instead. And together we’ll observe how the substitute acquires the meaning and the function of a rook, how it starts behaving as a rook, not because of its now-emerging rook-like qualities, but because of the way it takes its place within the system of the board: through not being a queen, a knight, a bishop, or a pawn.
Or, words less like objects now, with a bit more heat and air: the two of us trying to get comfortable on a blow-up mattress, and this shared awareness that if I roll over too heavily over here it will push up a part of you over there.
The point being that when a translator chooses this over that it is not only because of what this is and does, the particular history of the word, its sedimented etymology, but also because of it not being or doing this or that within the range of possibilities offered to her in her own language, each one of them determining – lifting, depressing, wobbling – the other. It is this awareness of what is always the unbounded whole, the loosely demarcated bed of the translation she is making, both as a volume in and of itself and as it opens out relationally onto and is written into the language and culture of the translation more generally (what Venuti terms a process of ‘domestic inscription’) that will inform how each one of her local decisions get made and how, in the best-case scenario, they will come to feel necessary. Sometimes, often, because that will be needed later. To serve, maybe, as the translation for the second term in a comparison that the translator knows will be made pages ahead, for example when Barthes talks of discretion (pointing to the roots it shares with ‘to discern’, ‘to differentiate’, ‘to separate out’) as a further manifestation of tact, or of politeness being to one side of both (too codified, too inflexible). Sometimes, often, because of an awareness – insofar as it is possible to be fully aware, within the limits of her reading time, her lifetime – of all the other phrases and word-choices that the text-to-be-translated is speaking to, or might come, eventually, to speak to.
Here is a verb, and it appears to be one that I know well; a verb like faire. I have seen it translated elsewhere, so many times, in these common-sensical, wholly appropriate ways. Yes, but (the translator asks herself – some years after the fact is still asking herself): What if in this case the case were different?
Tact: the art of not treating all things in the same way. Of treating what appears to be the same as though different. ‘A fine responsiveness to the concrete,’ as philosopher Martha Nussbaum defines it in her readings of Henry James; that is, ‘the ability to discern, acutely and responsively, the salient features of one’s particular situation.’ For example, notes Barthes: Do not (you wouldn’t) attack an antique with the zeal of a Dutch housewife (would you?). All those eighteenth-century paintings I think Barthes must have had in mind: the smiling maids, creamy forearms and thick fingers, scouring at whatever comes to hand.
‘A little art,’ Helen Lowe-Porter called it. The writing of translations: this little art. I accept her little for as long as I can oppose it to trivial, to minor, to young. To the extent that I can hear it – that I can make it – speak of an art of attending to all the small differences. The example Barthes offers, as a counter to the Dutch housewife, comes from The Book of Tea by Okakura Kakuzō, the chapter on flowers: the ancient art of floriculture. In the Tang and Sung dynasties, Barthes part-quotes, ‘a special attendant was detailed to wait upon each flower and to wash its leaves with soft brushes made of rabbit hair. It has been written that the peony should be bathed by a handsome maiden in full costume, that a winter plum should be watered by a pale, slender monk.’
To each flower its own special attendant.
Le cours, c’est comme une fleur, noted Barthes. A lecture course is like a flower – a note provisonally written down only ever to be spoken aloud. In the sense that its life-span is short. That it belongs to the share of a life’s work that is ephemeral. In the sense that it will, it must – the verb Barthes uses is passer. A word left to shimmer at the end of the sentence, whose meaning is not yet altogether determined by the syntax, nor indeed by the object of the sentence. Still caught up in my long effort to translate this line, I look up passer in the French dictionary. I find, among all the many definitions: ‘to be animated by a movement’; ‘to visit for a short time with no intention of staying’; ‘to traverse a substance, a material, a place’; ‘to leave one place to go to another’; ‘to change state, or status’; ‘(in relation to time) to go by’; ‘to disappear, to cease being’. Towards the very bottom of the list I find: to lose colour, in the way a fabric can fade, bleaching out from having been left too long in the sun.
In the account I’m offering, the translator adjusts her manner of handling, the form of her care, in response to what is being held (to each flower its own attendant).
But – it is worth stressing again – this is not to say that her efforts will keep her from doing harm, or giving offence.
She may fail to recognize the winter plum, and treat it as something
else.
She may recognize the plum for what it is and what it needs but can do nothing to change the fact that she is not the pale, slender monk capable of addressing it properly. Dorothy Bussy to Gide, in a letter dated 11 May 1946: ‘And now I am going to say something very serious. I realise at last that I have been one of the great disappointments of your life. You would have liked (for sentimental not rational reasons) to be translated into English by a young man – especially Les Nourritures, especially Si le Grain ne meurt, especially Thésée.’ Gide had written of his preference for what he called a ‘deep-voiced’ translator. Then, in the next paragraph: ‘How can you, who pride yourself particularly in imitating a woman’s, a young girl’s voice, think that the opposite impersonation is impossible?’.
