Where the Stress Falls

by Susan Sontag

  In the ethics of translation, what is projected is an ideal servant—one who would be always willing to take more pains, linger longer, revise again. Good, better, best, ideal … however good the translation is, it can always be improved, bettered. Can one translation be the best? Of course. But the perfect (or ideal) translation is an ever receding chimera. Anyway, ideal by what standard?

  (You will have already noted that I am assuming that there is such a thing as an “original” text. Perhaps only now, when ideas utterly devoid of common sense or respect for the practice of writing have great currency in the academy, would this seem to need saying. And not only am I making that assumption, but I am also proposing that the notion of translation not be too broadly extended or metaphorized, which is what allows one to claim, among other follies, that the original should be regarded as itself a translation—the “original translation,” so to speak, of something in the author’s consciousness.)

  The notion of ideal translation is likely to be submitted to two perennially opposed standards of translation. Minimum adaptation is one. It means that the translation will feel like one: it will preserve, even flaunt, the rhythm, syntax, tone, lexical idiosyncrasies of the text in its original language. (The most contentious modern proponent of this literalist idea of translation is Vladimir Nabokov.) Full naturalization is the other. It means that the translator must bring the original text wholly “into” the new language, so that, ideally, one does not ever feel one is reading a translation at all. Inevitably, this work of dispelling all traces of the original lurking behind the translation requires taking liberties with the text: these adjustments or inventions are not only justified but necessary.

  Pedestrian trot versus impertinent rewrite—these are, of course, extremes, well within which lies the actual practice of most dedicated translators. Nevertheless, there are two notions of translation in circulation, and behind the difference lies a larger disagreement about what responsibility one has to the “original” text. Everyone agrees that the translator must serve—the image is a powerful one—the text. But for what end? A translator may feel that the text (or “original”) is best served by taking certain liberties, perhaps in the interest of making it more accessible or gaining for it new members of the potential audience.

  Is it the work to which one is faithful? The writer? Literature? The language? The audience? One might suppose (maybe I mean that I might suppose) it to he self-evident that one be faithful to the work, to the words of the book. But this is not a simple matter, either historically or normatively. Take Saint Jerome himself, father of the Latin Bible, who is called the patron saint of translators. Jerome couldn’t have received this illustrious title because he was the first to advance a theory of translation, for that honor belongs, as we might expect, to Plato. Perhaps it’s because Jerome was the first on record to complain about translations, about their quality: to rail against ignorant, careless copyists and brazen confectioners of interpolated passages; and to campaign for greater exactitude. And yet it was this same Jerome, in his epistle “The Principles of Good Translation,” who said that, except in the case of Scripture, a translator should not feel bound to produce a word-by-word rendering; that it was sufficient to translate the sense.

  That a translation from one language to another ought to be reasonably faithful (whatever that may mean) is now received wisdom. Standards of fidelity to the original are certainly higher now than they were a generation, not to mention a century, ago. For some time now, translating, at least into English (though not, say, into French), has been measured by more literalist—I should say more scrupulous—standards, whatever the actual insufficiencies of most translations. This is partly because translation has itself become a subject for academic reflection, and translations (at least of important books) are likely to come under scholarly scrutiny. As part of what may seem like the coopting by academic standards of the translator’s task, it is more and more likely that any literary work of importance which is not contemporary will be accompanied by the translator’s “notes,” either at the bottom of the page or at the end of the book, explaining references in the text presumed to be obscure. Indeed, less and less do translations presuppose that the reader possesses the most elementary information about history or literature, or any language skills. The recent, much heralded re-translation of The Magic Mountain puts the delirious conversation in the pivotal “Walpurgis Nacht” chapter between Hans Castorp and Clavdia Chauchat, which transpires, crucially to the story, in French (and is in French in the old H. T. Lowe-Porter translation of 1927), into English. English in italics, so the Anglo-American reader (whose ignorance of French is taken for granted) might “feel” that it is in a foreign language.

  TRANSLATIONS ARE LIKE buildings. If they’re any good, the patina of time makes them look better: Florio’s Montaigne, North’s Plutarch, Motteux’s Rabelais … (Who was it who said, “The greatest Russian writer of the nineteenth century, Constance Garnett”?) The most admired, and long-lived, are not the most accurate.

  And, like building (the verb), translating produces something increasingly ephemeral now. Few people believe in a definitive translation—that is, one that would not need to be redone. And then there is the force of novelty: a “new” translation, like a new car. Submitted to the laws of industrial society, translations seem to wear out, become obsolete more rapidly. With respect to a few (admittedly a very few) books there is actually a glut of translations. Between 1947 and 1972 there were eleven German translations of The Picture of Dorian Gray, and since the 1950s at least ten new English translations of Madame Bovary . Translation is one of the few cultural practices that still seems ruled by an idea of progress (in contrast to, say, acoustics). The latest is, in principle, the best.

  The new cultural populism, which insists that everything should be available to everyone, carries with it the implication that everything should be translated—or, at least, be translatable. Recall, as a counter-example, that the old New Yorker—call the magazine snobbish or anti-populist, as you will—didn’t, as a matter of policy, print fiction in translation.

  Consider the force of the locution “language barrier”—the barrier which language interposes between one person (or community) and another, the barrier which translation “breaks down.” For language is the enforcer of separateness from other communities (“You don’t speak my language”) as well as the creator of community (“Anyone speak my language around here?”).

  But we live in a society pledged to the ceaseless invention of traditions—which is to say, the destruction of fealty to and knowledge of the specific, local past. Everything is to be recombined, remade—ideally, in the most portable, effortlessly transmissible form.

  A leading feature of our ideology of a unitary, transnational capitalist world culture is the practice of translation. I quote: “Translation today is one of the communicational lifelines of our global village.” In this perspective, translation becomes not merely a useful, desirable practice but an imperative one: linguistic barriers are obstacles to the freest circulation of commodities (“communication” is a euphemism for trade) and therefore must he overcome. Underpinning the ideology of universalism is the ideology of unlimited business. One always wants to reach more people with one’s product. Besides the universalist claims implicit in this goal of unlimited translation, there is another implicit claim: namely, that anything can be translated, if one knew how. Ulysses, Gerard Manley Hopkins, whatever. And there is a good argument for saying this is true. (Perhaps the only important book that can’t be translated is Finnegans Wake, for the reason that it is not written in only one language.)

  The inevitable instrumentation of this idea of the necessity of translation, the “translation machine,” shows us how the ancient dream of a universal language is alive and well. Saint Jerome took it for granted, as did most Christians of the early centuries, that all languages descend from one Ur-language (Hebrew, the original speech of mankind, until the presumptuous building
of the Tower of Babel). The modern idea is that, via the computer, all languages can be turned into one language. We do not need an actually existing universal language as long as we have, or can imagine as feasible, a machine which can “automatically” give us the translation into any foreign language. Of course, the poets and fancy prose writers will instantly weigh in with their old lament about what is, inevitably, “lost in translation” (rhyme, flavor, wordplay, the grit of dialect) even by experienced, individual, “real” translators. Imagine the dimensions of the loss if the translator is not a person but a program! The directions on a Tylenol bottle can be translated without loss into any language. This is hardly the case with a poem by Marina Tsvetaeva or a novel by Carlo Emilio Gadda. But the project of a translation machine proposes quite another idea of language, one which identifies language with the communication of information: statements. In the new Platonic praxis, the poets will not need to be banished from the Republic. It will suffice that they will have been rendered unintelligible, because the artifacts they make with words cannot be processed by a machine.

  This universalist model exists side by side with the persistence of language separatism, which asserts the incommensurability of cultures, of identities (political, racial, anatomical). So, in the former Yugoslavia, one language is being turned into many, and there is the farce of a patriotic call for translations. Both models exist simultaneously, perhaps interdependently. Language patriotism may continue to grow as a country pursues economic politics that sap national sovereignty, just as the most lethal myths of national distinctiveness can maintain their hold on a population even as it becomes ever more attached to the cultural paraphernalia of consumer capitalism, which is blandly supranational (made in Japan, made in the U.S.A.), or to computer technologies, which promote inevitably the growth of a world language, English.

  I BEGAN WITH an anecdote that illustrated some of the ideological paradoxes embedded in the practice of translation. I’ll end by evoking another fragment of personal experience: my participation in the transmitting of my own books into other languages. This has been a particularly wrenching task in the case of The Volcano Lover, with its multiplicity of narrative voices and levels of language. Published in 1992, the novel already exists or is about to exist in twenty foreign languages; and I have checked, sentence by sentence, the translations in the four principal Romance languages and made myself available to respond to countless questions from several of the translators in languages I don’t know. You might say I’m obsessed with translations. I think I’m just obsessed with language.

  I don’t have time to tell you any stories about my dialogue with the translators. I’ll end by saying that I wish I could stop wanting to be available to them. I wish I could give up trying to see the words, my own sentences, English, shine through. It’s melancholy as well as enthralling work. I do not translate. I am translated—in the modern sense and in the obsolete sense deployed by Wycliffe. In supervising my translations, I am supervising the death as well as the transposition of my words.

  [1995]

  Continent, city, country, society: the choice is never wide and never free.

  And here, or there … No. Should we have stayed at home, wherever that may be?

  —ELIZABETH BISHOP

  “Questions of Travel”

  BY SUSAN SONTAG

  FICTION

  The Benefactor

  Death Kit

  I, etcetera

  The Way We Live Now

  The Volcano Lover

  In America

  ESSAYS

  Against Interpretation

  Styles of Radical Will

  On Photography

  Illness As Metaphor

  Under the Sign of Saturn

  AIDS and Its Metaphors

  FILM SCRIPTS

  Duet for Cannibals

  Brother Carl

  PLAY

  Alice in Bed

  A Susan Sontag Reader

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  “A Poet’s Prose” was written as an introduction to Marina Tsvetaeva, Captive Spirit: Selected Prose (Virago Press, 1983).

  “Where the Stress Falls” appeared in The New Yorker, June 18, 2001.

  “Afterlives: The Case of Machado de Assis” is the foreword to a reprinting of Epitaph of a Small Winner (Noonday Press, 1990).

  “A Mind in Mourning” appeared in the Times Literary Supplement, February 25, 2000.

  “The Wisdom Project” appeared in The New Republic, March 16, 2001.

  “Writing Itself: On Roland Barthes” is the introduction to A Barthes Reader, ed. Susan Sontag (Hill and Wang, 1982).

  “Walser’s Voice” is the preface to Robert Walser, Selected Stories, ed. Susan Sontag (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1982).

  “Danilo Kiš” is the introduction to Danilo Kiš, Homo Poeticus: Essays and Interviews, ed. Susan Sontag (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1995).

  “Gombrowicz’s Ferdydurke” is the foreword to a new translation of Witold Gombrowicz, Ferdydurke (Yale University Press, 2000).

  “Pedro Páramo” is the foreword to a new translation of Juan Rulfo, Pedro Páramo (Grove Press, 1994).

  “DQ” was published in Spanish translation in a National Tourist Board of Spain catalogue, “España: Todo bajo el sol,” in 1985; it has never before appeared in English.

  “A Letter to Borges,” written on the tenth anniversary of Borges’s death and published in Spanish translation in the Buenos Aires daily Clarin, June 13, 1996, has never before appeared in English.

  “A Century of Cinema” was written for and first published in German translation in Frankfurter Rundschau, December 30, 1995.

  “Novel into Film: Fassbinder’s Berlin Alexanderplatz” appeared in Vanity Fair, September 1983.

  “A Note on Bunraku” was a program note for performances of the Bunraku Puppet Theatre at the Japan Society in New York City on March 12—19, 1983.

  “A Place for Fantasy” appeared in House and Garden, February 1983.

  “The Pleasure of the Image” appeared in Art in America, November 1987.

  “About Hodgkin” was written for Howard Hodgkin Paintings, the catalogue of an exhibition organized by the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Texas, in 1995, and subsequently seen at the Metropolitan Museum in New York. It was first published in Britain by Thames & Hudson in 1995.

  “A Lexicon for Available Light” appeared in Art in America, December 1983.

  “In Memory of Their Feelings” was written for the catalogue Dancers on a Plane: Cage, Cunningham, Johns, which accompanied an exhibit at the Anthony d’Offay Gallery in London from October 31 to December 2, 1989.

  “Dancer and the Dance” first appeared in French Vogue, December 1986, in French translation and in English.

  “On Lincoln Kirstein” is a revision, done in 1997 for a publication by the New York City Ballet, of a tribute to Lincoln Kirstein written ten years earlier, on his eightieth birthday, which appeared in Vanity Fair, May 1987.

  “Wagner’s Fluids” was the program essay for a production of Tristan und Isolde staged by Jonathan Miller at the Los Angeles Opera in December 1987.

  “An Ecstasy of Lament” was the program essay for a production of Pelléas et Mélisande staged by Robert Wilson at the Salzburg Festival in July 1997.

  “One Hundred Years of Italian Photography” is the foreword to Italy: One Hundred Years of Photography (Alinari 1988).

  “On Bellocq” is the introduction to a new edition of E. J. Bellocq, Storyville Portraits (Jonathan Cape and Random House, 1996).

  “Borland’s Babies” is the preface to Polly Borland’s The Babies (power-House Books, 2001).

  “Certain Mapplethorpes” is the preface to Robert Mapplethorpe’s Certain People: A Book of Portraits (Twelvetrees Press, 1985).

  “A Photograph Is Not an Opinion. Or Is It?” was written as an accompanying text to Annie Leibovitz’s Women (Random House, 1999).

  “Homage to Halliburton” was published in Oxford American, Ma
rch/April 2001.

  “Singleness,” one of a group of essays inspired by Borges’s “Borges y yo,” was collected in Who’s Writing This?, ed. Daniel Halpern (Ecco Press, 1995).

  “Writing As Reading,” a contribution to a series called “Writers on Writing” in The New York Times, appeared on December 18, 2000.

  “Thirty Years Later …” is the preface to a new edition of the Spanish translation of Against Interpretation (Alfaguara, 1996). It was first published in English in Threepenny Review (Summer 1996).

  “Questions of Travel” appeared in the Times Literary Supplement, June 22, 1984.

  “The Idea of Europe (One More Elegy)” started as a talk delivered at a conference on Europe held in Berlin in late May 1988. It has never before appeared in English.

  “The Very Comical Lament of Pyramus and Thisbe (An Interlude)” was written for the catalogue of an art exhibition in Berlin and first published there, in German translation, in Die Endlichkeit der Freiheit Berlin 1990, ed. Wulf Herzogenrath, Joachim Sartorius, and Christoph Tannert (Edition Hentrich, 1990). It appeared in English in The New Yorker, March 4, 1991.

  “Answers to a Questionnaire” was written in July 1997, in response to a questionnaire sent by a French literary quarterly. It was published, in French, in “Enquête: Que peuvent les intellectuels? 36 écrivains répondent,” La Règle du Jeu, n.s. 21 (1998), and has never before appeared in English.

  “Waiting for Godot in Sarajevo” was first published in The New York Review of Books, October 21, 1993.

  “‘There’ and ‘Here’” appeared in The Nation, December 25, 1995.