Programming Note: Mark will be hosting Live Around the Planet tomorrow (Wednesday, July 8), so get your questions ready. The whole team at Steyn HQ is grateful to Tal and Laura for hosting these past few weeks. Tal remains on standby as Mark continues to recover and in the meantime, today, Tal launches his new series on the art of translation.
A few positive SteynOnline comments on my last article was all the encouragement I needed to start up a new series on the art of translation.
As I thought about where to start, I remembered one little moment in particular. My petite, high-energy Japanese wife - Koko, the Atomic Chipmunk - and I were traveling by taxi one balmy afternoon outside Puerto Vallarta, Mexico. Spanish being my second language, I was chatting away with the taxi driver, translating for Koko.
The conversation turned to some recent news story, whereupon the driver said: "Pues ya sabes lo que dicen..."
"'Well, you know what they say'", I translated for Koko.
..."el que mal anda, mal acaba".
The old proverb. Every Spanish-speaker knows it. Tidy, snappy, soundbite-ish. Only six words. Nice little rhythm to it. Yet in that moment, it brought me up short: I couldn't for the life of me think of how to precisely or succinctly convey it to the Chipmunk. The use of the broad verb andar was one challenge - it covered everything from walking to going to general ways of proceeding to happening to behaving to operating/functioning to actively being to moving in any which way to making one's way through life, and many more. In any case, I realized instantly I'd need three or four times the English words to explain the six Spanish words; except then, the phonology, the prosody, the meter - the high-speed linguistic delivery system for the distilled life lesson, integral to creating its persuasive psychological force - would disappear. Here was the simplest little bit of wisdom wrapped up in the simplest little parallelism, yet I was drawing a blank.
"So?", she said after a few seconds. "What did he say?"
"He said... umm.... it's an old proverb... it means... well, it means, he who operates overall, like, moves through life... so conducts himself toward the world and others... er... well, it means, he who goes along not doing the right things toward other people will eventually come to a bad end. It's kind of like 'what goes around, comes around', but more pointed and personal". The proverb in Spanish sounded great; my explanation in English sounded ridiculous and tedious. And I'm still not sure there's any great way to translate it succinctly, but adequately, into English.
And then, just as quickly, another memory flitted across my mind: my attempt a few years ago to translate one of the great Spanish-language love songs into English.
The song was "Sabor a Mi", a bolero written by the Mexican songwriter Alvaro Carrillo. I first learned the song years ago off an old Eydie Gorme record (you can see Eydie singing it here). I always loved singing and playing it, and often did after dinner, with my dad playing along. (In fact, I'm such a big fan of the song, I even love all the shameless copies of it, like this one and this one.) And I always lamented that no one in the English-speaking world knew the song - evidently because no one had ever translated it into English. So, one night, I decided to try translating it myself.
You can probably guess where this is going: the lyrics overall (which conjured up such intense passion and vivid images in Spanish) just didn't work in English. Not remotely. Not even the title made it: "sabor a mi" literally means "taste of me". But in Spanish, in that context, "sabor" means something beyond "taste". It means the speaker's essence or spiritual presence; some part of his most irreducible nature. So, how do you romantically convey that exactly? "Essence of Me" sounds like some new shampoo, or a euphemism for unlaundered underclothing, or a perfume for goth narcissists. "Spiritual Presence of Me" sounds like an Edgar Allan Poe back-from-the-dead horror story, or an old Madame Blavatsky lecture. "Taste of Me", the literal translation, is perhaps sexually suggestive in a way the Spanish isn't. The best I could do in the end, trying to fit a phrase into the melody's meter, was "Falling Into You". But I didn't even like that. It sounded like a Three Stooges slapstick routine.
Beyond the title itself were the verse and bridge lyrics. They describe a connection between a man and woman so deep, that the essences of each lover are now forever intertwined. No force, no amount of time - not even her rejection of him, if she ever chooses that - can ever undo them now. At the deepest level, they're fused together forever.
It's all very intense, all very Spanish, even kind of macho in the best way (no matter what you do, I'll always be part of you now... and that means, I'll always be master of part of you). And crucially, all quite impossible to convey with anything like faithful translation (and certainly not within the constraints of the melody's meter).
For an English version to get anywhere close, I realized, I'd have to forego translation altogether and start from scratch. But even then, it wasn't clear that English - rich language though it is - possessed the words necessary for recreating the song's deft mix of smooth romance, visceral passion, and unapologetic machismo. Which means, I finally concluded, its ability to create such powerful resonance in listeners could never fully be brought into English. Everything that made it great in Spanish would remain mostly inaccessible to anyone unfamiliar with what the Latin world, as experienced through Spanish, really feels like.
What makes this little example even more illustrative is that Spanish isn't even all that distant from English. We use (mostly) the same alphabet. We share a common ancestor (Latin, although our language traces back through Norman French). Our two languages share many cognates. Both are living languages. Both are commonly taught in schools. In the United States, most people now regularly interact with native Spanish speakers. You'd think, in other words, that there wouldn't be much of a conceptual or emotional divide. Yet even amongst two fairly similar languages, in America now often moving side by side, unbridgeable gaps remain.
All of which is to say there's a reason for the old Italian saying, traduttore, traditore, or "translator, traitor", at least when it comes to translating anything rich, nuanced, profound, and artistic. Instructions on how to put your new lawn chairs together was one thing - no problem there. But song lyrics, poetry, great novels, great works of philosophy? A different thing altogether. That realm encompasses much deeper cognitive and affective paths; and some of those paths, it must be said, are unique to particular languages.
The German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer was good on this topic. In his 1851 essay, "Über Sprache und Worte" ("On Language and Words"), he wrote:
"A complete mastery of another language has taken place when one is capable of translating not books but oneself into the other language... an infinite number of nuances, similarities, differences, and relationships among objects rise to the level of consciousness as a result of learning the new language, and thus one perceives multiple perspectives of all phenomena. This confirms that one thinks differently in every language, that our thinking is modified and newly tinged through the learning of each foreign language, and that polyglotism is, apart from its many immediate advantages, a direct means of educating the mind by correcting and perfecting our perceptions through the emerging diversity and refinement of concepts."
Anyone who's ever learned another language or two will know just how true this is - and more to the point, will know just how far afield certain translators can stray when trying to bring a rich text into a new language.
Lots more to say on this. We'll pick this up next time.
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