That a translation may hide, distort, subdue, or even suppress a text is a fact tacitly recognized by the reader who accepts it as a “version” of the original. In the index to John Boswell’s ground-breaking book on homosexuality in the Middle Ages, the entry for “Translation” says “see Mistranslation”—or what Boswell calls “the deliberate falsification of historical records.” The instances of asepticized translations of Greek and Roman classics are too numerous to mention and range from a change of pronoun which wilfully conceals the sexual identity of a character, to the suppression of an entire text, such as the Amores of the Pseudo-Lucian, which Thomas Francklin in 1781 deleted from his English translation of the author’s works because it included an explicit dialogue among a group of men on whether women or boys were erotically more desirable. “But as this is a point which, at least in this nation, has been long determined in favour of the ladies, it stands in need of no further discussion,” wrote the censorious Francklin.3
Throughout the nineteenth century, the classic Greek and Roman texts were recommended for the moral education of women only when purified in translation. The Reverend J. W. Burgon made this explicit when, in 1884, from the pulpit of New College, Oxford, he preached against allowing women into the university where they would have to study the texts in the original.
If she is to compete successfully with men for ‘honours’, you must needs put the classic writers of antiquity unreservedly into her hands—in other words, must introduce her to the obscenities of Greek and Roman literature. Can you seriously intend it? Is it then a part of your programme to defile that lovely spirit with the filth of old-world civilization, and to acquaint maidens in their flower with a hundred abominable things which women of any age (and men too, if that were possible) would rather a thousand times be without?4
It is possible to censor not only a word or a line of text through translation, but also an entire culture, as has happened time and again throughout the centuries among conquered peoples. Towards the end of the sixteenth century, for instance, the Jesuits were authorized by King Philip II of Spain, champion of the Counter-Reformation, to follow in the steps of the Franciscans and establish themselves in the jungles of what is now Paraguay. From 1609 until their expulsion from the colonies in 1767, the Jesuits created settlements for the native Guaranis, walled communities called reducciones because the men, women and children who inhabited them were “reduced” to the dogmas of Christian civilization. The differences between conquered and conquerors were, however, not easily overcome. “What makes me a pagan in your eyes,” said a Guaraní shaman to one of the missionaries, “is what prevents you from being a Christian in mine.”5 The Jesuits understood that effective conversion required reciprocity and that understanding the other was the key that would allow them to keep the pagans in what was called, borrowing from the vocabulary of Christian mystic literature, “concealed captivity.” The first step to understanding the other was learning and translating their language.
A culture is defined by that which it can name; in order to censor, the invading culture must also possess the vocabulary to name those same things. Therefore, translating into the tongue of the conqueror always carries within the act the danger of assimilation or annihilation; translating into the tongue of the conquered, the danger of overpowering or undermining. These inherent conditions of translation extend to all variations of political imbalance. Guaraní (still the language spoken, albeit in a much altered form, by over a million Paraguayans) had been until the arrival of the Jesuits an oral language. It was then that the Franciscan Fray Luis de Bolaños, whom the natives called “God’s wizard” because of his gift for languages, compiled the first Guaraní dictionary. His work was continued and perfected by the Jesuit Antonio Ruiz de Montoya who after several years’ hard labour gave the completed volume the title of Thesaurus of the Guaraní Tongue. In a preface to a history of the Jesuit missions in South America,6 the Paraguayan novelist Augusto Roa Bastos noted that, in order for the natives to believe in the faith of Christ, they needed, above all, to be able to suspend or revise their ancestral concepts of life and death. Using the Guaranis’ own words, and taking advantage of certain coincidences between the Christian and Guaraní religions, the Jesuits retranslated the Guaraní myths so that they would foretell or announce the truth of Christ. The Last-Last-First-Father, Namandu, who created His own body and the attributes of that body from the primordial mists, became the Christian God from the Book of Genesis; Tupá, the First Parent, a minor divinity in the Guaraní pantheon, became Adam, the first man; the crossed sticks, yvyrá yuasá, which in the Guaraní cosmology sustain the earthly realm, became the Holy Cross. And conveniently, since Ñamandú’s second act was to create the word, the Jesuits were able to infuse the Bible, translated into Guaraní, with the accepted weight of divine authority.
In translating the Guaraní language into Spanish, the Jesuits attributed to certain terms that denoted acceptable and even commendable social behaviour among the natives the connotation of that behaviour as perceived by the Catholic Church or the Spanish court. Guaraní concepts of private honour, of silent acknowledgement when accepting a gift, of a specific as opposed to a generalized knowledge, and of a social response to the mutations of the seasons and of age, were translated bluntly and conveniently as “Pride,” “Ingratitude,” “Ignorance” and “Instability.” This vocabulary allowed the traveller Martin Dobrizhoffer of Vienna to reflect, sixteen years after the expulsion of the Jesuits, in 1783, in his Geschichte der Abiponer, on the corrupt nature of the Guaranis: “Their many virtues, which certainly belong to rational beings, capable of culture and learning, serve as frontispiece to very irregular compositions within the works themselves. They seem like automata in whose making have been joined elements of pride, ingratitude, ignorance and instability. From these principal sources flow the brooks of sloth, drunkenness, insolence and distrust, with many other disorders which stultify their moral quality.”7
In spite of Jesuit claims, the new system of beliefs did not contribute to the happiness of the natives. Writing in 1769, the French explorer Louis Antoine de Bougainville described the Guaraní people in these laconic words:
These Indians are a sad lot. Always trembling under the stick of a pedantic and stern master, they possess no property and are subjected to a laborious life whose monotony is enough to kill a man with boredom. That is why, when they die, they don’t feel any regret in leaving this life.8
By the time of the expulsion of the Jesuits from Paraguay, the Spanish chronicler Fernández de Oviedo was able to say of those who had “civilized” the Guaraní people what a Briton, Calgacus, is reported to have said after the Roman occupation of Britain: “The men who have perpetuated these acts call these conquered places ‘peaceful.’ I feel they are more than peaceful—they are destroyed.”9
Throughout history, censorship in translation has also taken place under more subtle guises, and in our time, in certain countries, translation is one of the means by which “dangerous” authors are submitted to cleansing purges. (The Brazilian Nélida Piñón in Cuba, the decadent Oscar Wilde in Russia, Native American chroniclers in the States and Canada, the French enfant terrible George Bataille in Franco’s Spain, have all been published in truncated versions. And, in spite of all my good intentions, could not my version of Yourcenar be considered censorious?) Often, authors whose politics might be read uncomfortably are simply not translated and authors of a difficult style are either passed over in favour of others more easily accessible or are condemned to weak or clumsy translations.
Not all translation, however, is corruption and deceit. Sometimes cultures can be rescued through translation, and translators become justified in their laborious and menial pursuits. In January 1976, the American lexicographer Robert Laughlin sank to his knees in front of the chief magistrate of the town of Zinacantán in southern Mexico and held up a book that had taken Laughlin fourteen years to compile: the great Tzotzil dictionary that rendered into En
glish the Mayan language of 120,000 natives of Chiapas, known also as the “People of the Bat.”10 Offering the dictionary to the Tzotzil elder, Laughlin said, in the language he had so painstakingly recorded, “If any foreigner comes and says that you are stupid, asinine Indians, please show him this book, show him the 30,000 words of your knowledge, your reasoning.”
It should, it must, suffice.
1 Vladimir Nabokov, Strong Opinions, New York: Vintage Books, 1982.
2 Virginia Woolf, The Essays of Virginia Woolf, Vol. I 1912–1918, edited by Andrew McNeillie, London: Hogarth Press, 1987.
3 Quoted in John Boswell, Christianity, Social Tolerance and Homosexuality: Gay People in Western Europe from the Beginning of the Christian Era to the Fourteenth Century, Chicago & London: University of Chicago Press, 1980.
4 Quoted in Jan Morris (ed.), The Oxford Book of Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1978.
5 Quoted in Tentación de la utopía: La República de los jesuitas en el Paraguay, foreword by Augusto Roa Bastos, introduction and selection by Rubén Bareiro Saguier & Jean-Paul Duviols, Barcelona: Tusquets, 1991.
6 Ibid., Bastos, Foreword.
7 Martin Dobrizhoffer, Geschichte der Abiponer, eine Berittenen und Kriegerischen Nation in Paraguay, Vienna, 1783.
8 Louis Antoine de Bougainville, Journal du voyage autour du monde, in Bougainville et ses compagnons autour du monde 1766–1769, Paris: Imprimerie Nationale, 1977.
9 Tacitus, Histories & Annals, vol. 1, edited by C. H. Moore & J. Jackson, London: Loeb Classical Library, William Heinemann, 1963.
10 Alexander Cockburn, “The Great Tzotzil Dictionary,” in Soho Square I, edited by Isabel Fonseca, London: Bloomsbury Press, 1988.
The Secret Sharer
It is utterly impossible to persuade an Editor that he is nobody.
WILLIAM HAZLITT,
On Editors, 1819
IN 1969, TIMOTHY FINDLEY travelled to New York to work with his American editor on the galleys of his second novel, The Butterfly Plague. Canadian publishers were still not impressed by the efforts of this actor-turned-writer, but the illustrious American publishing company, Viking, had expressed interest in this budding author. The editor assigned to Findley’s book was Corlies M. Smith, known as “Cork,” who was also the editor of the letters of James Joyce. Smith read The Butterfly Plague, the chronicle of a declining Hollywood family set against the background of Nazi Germany, and, although he liked the book very much, wasn’t satisfied with one aspect of it: he wanted to know the “meaning” of the butterflies in the story, and strongly advised Findley to make it clear. Findley was young, inexperienced, and afraid to upset the publisher he so much wanted, and bowed to Smith’s suggestion. He reworked the book in order to explain the butterflies, and the novel duly appeared under the Viking imprint.
The extraordinary point of this anecdote is that most North American readers would not see it as extraordinary. Even the most inexperienced writers of fiction know that if they are to be published at all, their manuscripts must pass through the hands of professionals known as “editors,” employed by publishing companies to read the books under consideration and recommend changes they think appropriate. (This paragraph you are now reading will not be the paragraph I originally wrote, since it will have to undergo the inquisition of an editor; in fact, when an earlier version of this essay was published in Saturday Night magazine, this sentence was cut out completely.)
Writers, notoriously wary about their craft, are reluctant to speak about this obligatory help except in general terms, or off the record. Contemporary literature abounds in examples of both malpractice and redemption, but writers prefer to keep these interventions secret—and rightly so. In the end a work of fiction is the writer’s own, and should be seen as such. Writers (and their editors agree) need not make public the seams and patches of their collaboration. Writers want to be sole begetters.
However, underlying this coyness is a paradox. The writer who knows himself to be the single author of a text, wondering a little at its very existence and puzzled more than a little by the mysteries it contains, also knows that before the text is published it will be professionally questioned, and that answers will have to be provided or suggestions accepted, thereby relinquishing, in part, the writer’s single-handed authorship. Before going out into the world, every writer of fiction in North America and most of the Commonwealth acquires, as it were, a literary back-seat driver.
Recognition of the profession of editor is not so ancient or widespread as the Anglo-Saxon public might suppose. In the rest of the world it is virtually unknown: even in England it appeared almost two centuries and a half after the introduction of the printing press. The Oxford English Dictionary gives 1712 as the earliest date for the mention of “editor” with the meaning “one who prepares the literary work of another,” but Joseph Addison, in The Spectator, was using it to specify someone working on material the author had either finished or left incomplete. The “editor” understood as “one who works with the author in the fashioning of a work of fiction” didn’t come into history until much later, in the first decades of the twentieth century. Before that there were only scattered references to editorial advice: Erasmus giving Thomas More suggestions regarding Utopia, Charles Dickens, as the editor of Household Words, counselling Wilkie Collins on a plot.
To find a full-fledged editor in the contemporary sense we have to wait until the 1920s, when a now legendary figure appeared in New York: Maxwell Perkins, editor of Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Erskine Caldwell, and Thomas Wolfe. By all accounts, Perkins was a generous editor, keen to respect what he thought were the author’s intentions—though his Samaritan urge has prevented us from knowing what Thomas Wolfe’s manuscripts were like before Perkins pared them down to publishable form. With Perkins, editors acquired respectability and a patron saint. (Some might say that the patron saint of editors should be the Greek robber Procrustes, who placed his visitors on an iron bed and stretched them or cut off the overhanging parts until they fitted exactly to his liking.)
To the common reader, the precise task of an editor is something of a mystery. In a small pamphlet signed by several hands, Author & Editor: A Working Guide (1983), Rick Arch-bold, a distinguished Canadian freelance editor, attempted to elucidate: “Editors have several functions,” he writes, “which vary in number according to the size and complexity of the publishing house. They may include acquiring rights to publish book projects; selling subsidiary rights; developing plans for promotion and marketing; writing copy for book jackets; … overseeing production; and proofreading. And, of course, editing” This is not much help. Leaving aside specialized areas of publishing such as textbooks, magazines or technical non-fiction, what exactly do editors do when they say that they are “editing”?
At least one part of an editor’s job, sometimes performed by a “copy editor,” involves simply checking facts, spelling, grammar, compliance with the publishing company’s preferred style of punctuation, etc., and asking common-sense questions: are you aware that your character is fifteen years old on page 21 and eighteen on page 34? Whatever salary an editor receives, it is probably not enough to compensate for all the thankless checking and double-checking.
Still, even this workaday aspect of editing, however necessary it may seem, has a pernicious potential. The writer who knows that his text will be inspected by an editor may see fit to leave the finer tuning unattended, because the editor will in any case try to tune the text to what sounds right to his or her own professional ear. Thomas Wolfe, submitting to Perkins’s editing, would simply throw his uncorrected manuscript pages on the floor as he finished them, for the typist to collect and type out and his editor to cut and paste. Gradually the writer runs the danger of seeing himself not so much as carrying his work to where he believes he can go no farther (not finishing but abandoning his text, in Valéry’s brave phrase) but as carrying his text only to the threshold of the classroom where the teacher will check spelling and grammar for
him.
Copy-editing, then, is an accepted part of the editor’s job. But at some point in history, probably even before the days of Maxwell Perkins, the editor bridged the chasm between questioning spelling and questioning sense, and began questioning the meaning of the butterflies. Surreptitiously, the content of fiction became the editor’s responsibility.
In Editors on Editing: An Inside View of What Editors Really Do (compiled by Gerald Gross), editor, bookseller and author William Trag has this to say about what makes an editor an editor:
A working, qualified editor of books must read. He must have read from the earliest days of his childhood. His reading must be unceasing. The lust for printed matter is a biological thing, a visceral and intellectual necessity; the urge must be in the genes.
In short, an editor must be a reader.
True enough. Editors must assume this function or not edit at all. But can anyone read beyond his personal inclinations? Because, to justify intrusions into an author’s virgin text, an editor must surely not be Felix Chuckle who delights in happy endings or Dolores Lachrymose who prefers her endings bitter. The editor must be a sort of Platonic idea of a reader; he must embody “readerness”; he must be a Reader with a capital R.
But can even the ideal Reader help the writer? As every reader knows, literature is an act of shared responsibility. But to suppose that this mutual act allows us to know the goal the writer has set herself, a goal that in most cases is not revealed even to the writer, is either simple-minded or fatuously arrogant. To paraphrase another author, a Book is what It is. Whether the writer achieved what she intended, even knew what she intended to achieve, or in fact intended to achieve anything at all except what appears between two covers, is a mystery that no one, not even the writer, can answer truthfully. The inappropriateness of the question comes from the richness and ambiguity that are, I believe, the true achievements of literature. “I’m not saying that it isn’t in my book,” said the Italian novelist Cesare Pavese in response to a critic who pointed out a metaphysical theme in his work. “I’m only saying that I didn’t put it there.”
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