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My last installment wound up as yet another digression (what is wrong with me?), so before returning to Machiavelli's The Prince as a case study in translation, I want to zip back to where I left off two installments ago: Is there some specific set of principles which ought to guide the translation of great books? If so, what might they be? In other words, particularly when it comes to a great work of literature or philosophy, what distinguishes a great translation from an adequate translation from a poor translation?
A lot of big names have weighed in on this topic over the years. One of the biggest in modern times is the Russian novelist, translator, and polyglot, Vladimir Nabokov, author of Lolita. In Nabokov's view, any translation except the strictly literal is a travesty. In a 1955 Paris Review piece entitled "Problems of Translation: Onegin in English", he writes: "The person who desires to turn a literary masterpiece into another language has only one duty to perform, and this is to reproduce with absolute exactitude the whole text, and nothing but the text".
Nabokov adds for good measure that anything smoother than "the clumsiest literal translation...sends me into spasms of helpless fury". Pressing the point even further, he rails against "readable" translations, declaring that "a schoolboy's boner is less of a mockery in regard to the ancient masterpiece than its commercial interpretation".
The only acceptable translation standard, he says, is "literalism, literality, literal interpretation...the absolutely literal sense,", which he equates with "absolute accuracy". If a translator's exclusive fixation on the letter "kills the spirit" of the Source Text, so be it: that only means there was something wrong with that Source Text in the first place. And "this is not really a translator's concern", he says.
In short, for Nabokov, an ideal translation sacrifices the text's "original spirit", its readability and intelligibility, its tone and register and style, even its meaning as it exists independent of the Source Language's specific idiosyncrasies, all for what amounts to word-for-wordism. To make up for the extraordinary losses required by this approach, translators should just include "copious footnotes reaching up like skyscrapers to the top of this or that page".
Even aside from his gratuitous allusion to schoolboy sexuality, this is all very odd. In addition to his native Russian, Nabokov spoke excellent English and French, along with decent German. He therefore must have known that in most cases, languages do not permit anything close to word-for-word interchange. You could get close with Portuguese and Spanish and a few other pairings, but for the most part, languages don't relate to each other that way. Yes, they often contain deep-level structural affinities with each other; but at the same time, each contains its own internal logic, grammar, and conventions; its own unique allusions, idioms, and sayings; its own cultural history and context; its own channels of perception, perception-ordering, and thinking; its own ways of instigating and connecting certain arguments, feelings, and images.
This is all obvious even at the most superficial levels of speech. Imagine, for example, you're translating a short story from French into English. In the opening scene, a police officer has pulled over a motorist and now stands at the driver's window, whereupon the driver says, "Pourquoi tu m'as arrêté?"
A truly literal translation (which Nabokov claims to want) would be, "Why you me have stopped?". A slightly less literal translation would be, "Why did you stop me?" (although in English, drivers would more likely say, "Why did you pull me over?").
But no matter which option we chose, if we stopped there, this hyper-literal approach into English would fail to convey important elements of meaning embedded in just that one simple question. One such element is that, in French, the driver addresses the officer using the informal "you" (tu), as opposed to the formal "you" (vous) (because English nowadays lacks anything but "you" as an equivalent to either word, that distinction would be lost). A related element is that drivers in France would never address a police officer using tu unless they were either ignorant of French language and culture, or expressing deliberate disrespect, even contempt, for the officer.
So if we're reading that opening scene in French, we're already experiencing a dramatic set-up—an initial conflict that will propel the rest of the story: a driver needlessly speaks disrespectfully to a police officer. We would instantly anticipate the officer taking offense at the question, or growing suspicious of wrongdoing, and acting accordingly. We can sense this exchange might well drive the events about to follow. In the Source Language, we're already on the roller coaster ride of the story, so to speak.
Not so if we're reading a strictly literal translation in English. We wouldn't know there was any disrespect at all. And if the officer immediately asks the driver to exit the vehicle, we wouldn't have any idea why. All we've heard so far is what sounds like an innocent question from the driver.
This little example suggests Nabokov's equation of hyper-literalism with "absolute accuracy" is misguided. The absolutely accurate conveyance of a passage can only mean the faithful reproduction in the Target Language of the psychological and emotional effects of the passage's properties and functions in the Source Language. (If the phrase absolutely accurate doesn't mean that, then it means nothing). So if, say, a perfectly intelligible passage becomes unintelligible, or loses important information, due to strict literalism, it has by definition not been conveyed accurately—at least not in any meaningful, human sense. And it would therefore be a poor translation, no matter how literal it might be.
So back to that French sentence. Is there a more faithful way to convey its properties, and its narrative function?
That's a tough one, but a conscientious translator would try. In this case, a footnote might be defensible. But another option would be to try to reflect the tone of disrespect without changing the wording of the question too much. Off the top of my head, and depending on the character's subsequent tone of voice and actions, one of the following might work: "You pulled me over for what?". "What'd you pull me over for?", or "Why ya stopping me, dude?" The point is that the reality of language is such, that judicious departure from strict literalism is often necessary to achieve the accuracy Nabokov wants, but which his own prescriptions would make unattainable.
So when it comes to formulating a set of rules or maxims to guide translation, I'd propose this as the first: A translation is great to the extent it reproduces the overall reader experience while adhering as closely as possible to the original text.
(That wording, I think, covers everything from information transfer to honoring the narrative function of specific words and passages to reproducing the jokes and tone and mood and key words and everything else.)
In any case, one thing my proposal means is that when a passage can be translated strictly literally without degrading transmission of the reader experience (or even optimally conveying it), then surely that's the best option. That's even the case, I would argue, when the translated passage sounds somewhat foreign in the Target Language. Nabokov wasn't wrong to reject specific features like smooth-sounding paraphrase in place of what reads roughly in the original. But he erred in pushing an extreme, dogmatic literalism which inevitably erodes, distorts, and omits the very qualities he says he wants to preserve. Great translations, by contrast, take a different path.
More later.
You can read Parts I, II and III of Tal's The Art of Translation here, here and here. If you are a member of The Mark Steyn Club, please log-in and let Tal know your thoughts in the comment section below.
