Interpreting emerged as a profession at the end of World War I, after President Woodrow Wilson and British prime minister Lloyd George insisted, in a break with precedent, that the Treaty of Versailles be negotiated and written in both French and English. (Since the Treaty of Rastatt, in 1714, French had enjoyed a monopoly as the language of high European diplomacy.) The Treaty of Versailles established the League of Nations. Its official languages were English, French, and Spanish, creating a permanent need for interpreters. At first, their techniques were limited to consecutive interpretation, in which the speaker stops periodically so that the interpreter can render his words into another language, and chuchotage, or “whispering translation,” in which the interpreter sits or stands next to the listener and delivers a running commentary.
Chuchotage, clearly, was not going to work for the Nuremberg trials. And consecutive interpretation took so long that the proceedings would have gone on for years. The dilemma of convening the court in such a way that all of its participants—and, crucially, the world—could follow bedeviled its administrators. Robert H. Jackson, the chief US prosecutor at Nuremberg, wrote, “I think that there is no problem that has given me as much trouble and as much discouragement as this problem of trying to conduct a trial in four languages.”
Eventually Jackson and his cohorts decided to take a gamble on a new method, simultaneous interpretation. At Nuremberg, twelve interpreters sat in the “aquarium”—four desks separated by low glass barriers—listening through headphones to the testimony, which they immediately rendered into English, French, Russian, and German, transmitting each, through a microphone, to a dedicated radio channel. IBM had installed the cutting-edge system free of charge, “that all men may understand.” Simultaneous interpretation requires almost superhuman neurological coordination. The task is so demanding that, at the United Nations, an interpreter typically works a shift of no more than twenty minutes.
The annals of diplomacy abound with incidents in which the garbled transmission of messages has had embarrassing, and even fatal, consequences. In July 1945, Allied leaders delivered the Potsdam Declaration to Japan, demanding an unconditional surrender. When reporters in Tokyo pressed Japanese premier Kantaro Suzuki for a response, he replied, using the word mokusatsu, that he was withholding comment. Mokusatsu—a portmanteau word, formed by combining the kanji characters for killing and silence—has several meanings: “to take no notice of; treat with silent contempt; ignore [by keeping silence]; remain in a wise and masterly inactivity.” The press, however, took note only of its more belligerent connotations, and the world came to understand that the premier had deemed the Potsdam ultimatum “not worthy of comment.” According to a report published years later in an NSA technical journal, “U.S. officials, angered by the tone of Suzuki’s statement and obviously seeing it as another typical example of the fanatical Banzai and Kamikaze spirit, decided on stern measures.” Even if mokusatsu was only one of many factors in the decision to drop the bomb, as was likely the case, it has lived on as a cautionary tale—history’s “most tragic translation.”
Eleven years later, at the height of enmity between the United States and the Soviet Union, Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev delivered a speech in which he invoked the Russian phrase “Мы вас похороним.” Idiomatically, the saying means something like “We’ll be here even when you’re gone,” but Khrushchev’s translator, Viktor Sukhodrev, relayed it literally as “We will bury you”—causing Americans to fear imminent nuclear war. (Sukhodrev said later that Khrushchev, with his fondness for hyperbole and folksy humor, was one of the most difficult people for whom to interpret.) Hillary Clinton returned the favor with her “reset” button of 2009. Intended as an emblem of her desire to improve US-Russian relations, it was emblazoned with the word peregruzka, which actually means “overcharged.”
Mistranslation also wreaks havoc on individual fates. Particularly for immigrants attempting to navigate high-stakes institutions such as courts and hospitals, its consequences can be dire. Santiago Ventura Morales spent four years in prison for having murdered a fellow migrant worker on a strawberry farm in Oregon. Eventually his conviction was overturned—in part because he had gone through the entire trial with a Spanish interpreter, when in fact he spoke Mixtec.
In January 1980 Willie Ramirez, an eighteen-year-old Floridian, was taken by ambulance to the emergency room, having entered a coma after complaining of a headache that “felt like someone was sticking a needle through my head.” He had pinpoint pupils and was breathing heavily. He was accompanied by his mother, his thirteen-year-old sister, his fifteen-year-old girlfriend, and his girlfriend’s mother, all of whom believed that he had fallen ill after eating bad hamburger at a brand-new Wendy’s.
Ramirez’s mother didn’t speak English, so his girlfriend’s mother, who didn’t speak English well, dealt with the doctors. “He is intoxicado,” she said, using a Spanish term for any general kind of poisoning. The ER doctor later said, “Healthy, strapping kids don’t come into the ER comatose unless they’ve been in a car accident or had an overdose. I thought my conversation with the family confirmed the diagnosis—that he had taken an overdose of drugs.” It wasn’t until nearly forty-eight hours later that someone, noticing that Ramirez had stopped moving his arms, called in a neurologist, who determined that Ramirez had actually suffered an intracerebellar hemorrhage. Due to the misdiagnosis, he became a quadriplegic. A jury awarded him damages of $71 million.
Translation implies a sense of movement—you translate something out of one language into another. The journey can be straightforward, a run to the dry cleaners, or it can be a grueling road trip across space and time. In mathematics, translation refers to “the movement of a body from one point of space to another such that every point of the body moves in the same direction and over the same distance without any rotation, reflection, and change in size.” But in practice, translation often works more like a chemical reaction, in which one or more substances are converted into something else. The Chevy Nova is famously said to have sold poorly in Spanish-speaking countries, where no va means “doesn’t go.” The Nova actually did fine: the stresses in Nova and no va fall on different syllables, and Spanish speakers are as able to distinguish between them as English speakers are between notable and not able. But the history of marketing is full of linguistic flops. Sticking just with cars, Mitsubishi released a sports-utility vehicle called Pajero in Spain, where pajero means “masturbator.”
Entrusting oneself to a translator, or to a translation, is an act of faith. A person who knows two languages can make fast fools out of those with only half his repertoire. In the mid-1990s Denis Duboule, a postdoctoral student in genetics in Strasbourg, France, came up with a new technique to produce duplications in the chromosomes of mice. Like 98 percent of scientists, he was to publish his findings in English. One Friday afternoon, he and some colleagues got together to decide what to call their discovery. Over beers, they hit upon TAMERE—“targeted meiotic recombination.” In later papers, francophone researchers detailed their advances in sequential targeted recombination-induced genomic approach (STRING) and pangenomic translocation for heterologous enhancer reshuffling (PANTHERE). It wasn’t until 2014 that English-speaking geneticists learned that their French-speaking peers, for the better part of two decades, had been having a laugh at their expense. Ta mère (“your mom”) is shorthand for niquer ta mère (“fuck your mother”). The apotheosis of mère-slagging is Ta mère en string panthère—“Your mom in a leopard G-string.”
The problem of translation is perhaps most acute in literature, to which renderings must be true in spirit as well as letter. Even the most diligent and creative translators find themselves hard-pressed to replicate such techniques as rhythm, assonance, alliteration, idiom, onomatopoeia, and double meaning. (Dr. Seuss books, with their oddball rhymes and invented words, are said to be the Nikita Khrushchevs of the written word.) Sometimes the loss is concrete: tr
anslators of Harry Potter found it impossible to convert the name Tom Marvolo Riddle—an anagram for “I am Lord Voldemort”—into many nonalphabetic East Asian languages, so they just left it out. Other times, it’s ineffable but real. It is difficult to argue with Philip Larkin: “If that glass thing over there is a window, then it isn’t a fenster or a fenêtre or whatever. ‘Hautes Fenêtres,’ my God!”
Vladimir Nabokov spoke Russian, French, and English, all three more masterfully than the overwhelming majority of their respective constituencies. In 1951, when Conclusive Evidence, a memoir of his childhood in Russia, was published in America, he confessed that he had found the task of rendering sensations that he had experienced in one language into another an anguish. “Conclusive Evidence was being written over a long period of time with particularly agonizing difficulties,” he wrote, “because my memory was attuned to one musical key—the musically reticent Russian—but it was forced into another key, English and deliberate.” It wasn’t that Nabokov, as seamless a polyglot as there ever was, couldn’t locate the English words; if they had existed, he would have known them. Rather, English seemed an improper vessel for his Russian memories. It was like trying to put water in a cardboard box.
Three years later, Nabokov translated Conclusive Evidence into Russian, producing Drugie berega. As the linguist Aneta Pavlenko notes in The Bilingual Mind, the book metamorphosed: “The translation for an audience of Russian émigrés made many explanations unnecessary, yet at the same time, the use of the childhood language triggered new memories, akin to the Proustian madeleine.”
Both books contain detailed descriptions of Nabokov’s family home at 47 Bolshaya Morskaya Street in St. Petersburg. Nabokov’s first toilet, as he remembered it in Conclusive Evidence, was “casually situated in a narrow recess between a wicker hamper and the door leading to the nursery bathroom.” The same room appears in Drugie berega, but this time with a sound track: “between a wicker hamper with a lid (how immediately I remember its creaking)!” There are new details: a stained glass window “with ornate designs of two halberdiers constructed from colorful rectangles”; a floating thermometer; a celluloid swan; a toy skiff. In 1966 Nabokov published Speak, Memory, a “re-Englishing of a Russian re-version of what had been an English re-telling of Russian memories in the first place.” The thermometer vanished, but the halberdiers remained. Translation also has its gains.
If translation is a catalyst, the B that turns A to C, sometimes it seems to work in reverse. After translation, C does not revert to A, but rather into A+ (or A–), an entity that has been permanently altered by the transformation. “Dog days” sharpen their teeth as canicules. Bats (les chauves-souris) become bald mice. Learn French, and umbrella is, forever after, an overbroad concept: is it a parapluie (for rain) or a parasol (for sun)?
• • •
ON LABOR DAY—the French one, May 1—Violeta sent me an e-card decorated with a flashing lily-of-the-valley, enfranchising me into the global proletariat, and, I hoped, the family. My birthday came in June, accompanied by a necklace and a note, wishing me a happy day with my “love friend.” Soon after, Olivier and I visited Andernos again. To win over the senior Madame Bovary, Emma endured rounds of dire conversation, “and even pushed deference to the point of asking her for a recipe for pickling gherkins.” All I had to do was go on a bike ride to Le Truc Vert, a local beach. Splayed out on the sand, we made a funny pair—me in a T-shirt and sunscreen, and Violeta covered in oil, seins nus—but I admired her verve, her generosity, her sense of occasion, her femininity, at once steely and coquettish. I came from more pragmatic women. She was a different model, a space heater of a person, emitting warmth in extravagant blasts.
We were going to Andernos for Christmas that year. The holidays, in my parents’ house, had always been an ambivalent time, coming, as they did, on the anniversary of John Zurn’s death, and entailing two of my mother’s least favorite things, cooking and the raising of expectations. Every year she grudgingly spent an afternoon in the kitchen, transforming Colman’s mustard powder into gift jars of homemade mustard. My best friend Helen’s mother, also named Sue, made mayonnaise. Per annual tradition, as soon as we stepped off the plane from New York, the respective Sues would send us out on overlapping delivery routes.
“I’m thinking of watching a foreign film this afternoon!” Sue No. 2 said one year, after a long day of condiment making.
“Which one?” Helen asked.
“It’s called Deuce Bigalow: European Gigolo.”
On Christmas Eve we’d go all out, warming up a HoneyBaked Ham that one of my father’s colleagues sent him every year, as a thank-you for referrals. My father drank Coors Original. My mother would have a glass of wine and then switch to Diet Coke. We’d long since stopped getting out the china, “since it’s just the four of us.” By the time the sun went down, we were usually in fleece. Often, we watched the hockey movie Miracle, chanting “U-S-A” as Mike Eruzione scored the game-winning goal.
In households across France, Christmas Eve was le réveillon de Noël—an elaborate feast meant to be served after Midnight Mass. We would not be going to church. (Olivier, having been baptized, called himself “a Catholic emeritus.”) But I could see from the way the groceries were spilling out of the refrigerator that it was going to be a major affair. Olivier and I drove into Bordeaux to do some last-minute shopping. When we got back, I origamied myself into the bathtub and successfully washed my hair. Getting into the spirit, I put on a silky dress and doused myself with half a dozen more spritzes of Miss Dior Chérie than I’d usually wear.
Nine o’clock came and went. So did ten. Around ten thirty, the doorbell rang. Jacques, Marie, and Hugo came in, shaking off coats and scarves. They were carrying a trash bag full of presents. At some point Fabrice materialized, fresh off the plane from Paris. We all crowded into the living room, into which Teddy brought a lacquered tray that held a half dozen bowls—pistachios, cashews, potato chips, bugles, olives, cherry tomatoes—and a bottle of Champagne. He popped the cork and carefully poured eight flutes. Réveillon was under way.
To me, this was a storybook Christmas. There was jazz on the stereo. A fire crackled. I fancied myself at last at home among people who appreciated good food, good wine, the art of conversation. I didn’t know what anyone was talking about, but I was content to occupy the role of armchair anthropologist.
My main research interests were how French people were able to remain so quiet in large groups and why, in multigenerational social settings, it was okay to step out for a cigarette (as Fabrice had just done) but not to ask for a refill of one’s wine (in an attempt at pacing, I was making myself eat a cherry tomato before every sip). Eventually the finger food dwindled, and the rest of the group’s glasses ran as dry as mine. At midnight, we toasted Hugo’s birthday. There he was, a newly minted adolescent, stuck with a bunch of adults whose age surpassed his by a collective 317 years. He drank his Champagne slowly, made charming conversation without being precocious. I never saw his phone. Before every visit, Olivier and I said to each other, “Okay, he’s totally going to be a brat this time.” Every time he was delightful, playing James Blunt songs on the piano.
Teddy returned to the kitchen. A few minutes later, a tea party’s worth of small cups appeared. They were filled with fanciful concoctions like salmon mousse, topped with chives that had been curled like ribbons. These were the cold appetizers. Hot ones followed: spring rolls, cod croquettes, skewers of chicken satay. It was almost one o’clock, and we were still on the snacks portion of the evening.
“À table!” Teddy said as the clock struck one thirty.
We sat down to a proliferation of gold and glass. Oysters came first, on plates of ice. Then slabs of foie gras the size of pieces of toast, surrounded by hillocks of salt. I was starting to feel like a human foie gras as Teddy emerged with stacks of blinis, glistening with caviar. He scurried back to the kitchen.
“Prost!�
� he said, the door swinging open. He was brandishing a platter of vodka shots—the trou normand, or “Norman hole,” a mid-meal liquor break that was claimed to aid digestion.
Réveillon, it was becoming clear, was an endurance event. I had trained for a sprint. As chapon farci aux fruits blurred into coquilles Saint-Jacques à l’ancienne, I could barely keep my eyes open. Under the table, I kicked off my shoes, trying to jump-start my circulation. The night wore on. I kept pretending to sneeze so that I could turn away from the table, stealing glances at a digital clock that sat on the buffet. The red display barely seemed to budge. Two thirty-seven a.m.: salad. Two fifty-one: cheese course. I perked up momentarily when Violeta asked who wanted coffee, assuming that the offer was a euphemism for “Everybody go home.”
“Oui!” Olivier responded.
“Moi!”
“Moi aussi!”
“Absolument!”
We packed back into the living room, where Teddy brought out a bûche de Noël, accompanied by another bottle of Champagne (and a mango ice cream cake for good measure). We ate the cake, we drank the wine. Several people had a second espresso. At last Violeta made an announcement: it was time to open presents.
• • •
CHRISTMAS—the house was as dead as a college dorm on a Sunday morning. Because breakfast, in a French family, cannot be skipped, we sat down at two and ate croissants and jam. This time I took some tea. Because lunch, in a French family, also cannot be skipped, even if you have just eaten breakfast, we returned to the table forty-five minutes later. Fortunately, lunch was soup.
It was a gray day, wood smoke choking the sky. We’d already stuffed our faces and torn through our presents: to an American, bred on hectic Christmas mornings, it felt a little anticlimactic. Jacques, Marie, and Hugo had dispersed. Fabrice had gone back to Paris. I suggested—well, sort of insisted—that the rest of us go to the movies, which was what my family always did on Christmas afternoon.
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