Simon Leys - The Hall of Uselessness - Collected Essays

Q: In one early interview you stated that you were not interested in any period but the present, or in any poetry but that written in English. Did you mean that quite literally? Has your view changed?

A: It has not. I don’t see how one could ever know a foreign language well enough to make reading poems in it worthwhile. Foreigners’ ideas of good English poems are dreadfully crude: Byron and Poe and so on. The Russians liking Burns. But deep down I think foreign languages irrelevant. A writer can have only one language, if language is going to mean anything to him.

By contrast, there are many writers who are inspired, stimulated and fascinated by foreign languages; either they produce literary translations (from Baudelaire to Pasternak, examples abound) or they themselves try to create in the borrowed language (as in the French poems of T.S. Eliot and Rilke, or the English poems of Pessoa). There also exists the phenomenon of bilingual writers: Beckett and Julien Green (even if the latter wrote nothing in his mother tongue and left to others the task of translating his novels into English). Finally and most notably, there is the particularly interesting case of writers who adopt a new language, or who shift languages (Conrad, Nabokov, Cioran, to name but a few).

But the opposition between those who are monolingual and those who are polyglot is perhaps artificial. Deep down, it may be worth asking if the two camps are not in the end motivated by an identical concern. Is it not the selfsame passion which locks Larkin into his language and chases Cioran out of his? For the one and for the other, precisely, “language really matters.”

On this subject, Cioran unwittingly cast a curious light. In the course of a rare interview granted to a Greek journal, he set about excoriating the Romanian language and celebrating French: according to him, Romanian was a soft, oily, sloppy, unkempt language, whereas French possessed stature, rigour, discipline. Whatever the objective characteristics of the two languages may be, it is clear that Cioran, unbeknownst to himself, was simply opposing the distance and marmoreal majesty of a foreign tongue to the damp and creepy intimacy of a tongue familiar to him. A writer can draw his strength from the very resistance offered him by language: Anthony Burgess remarked that Conrad’s English went slack as it became more familiar to him — paradoxically, it was when Conrad knew English less well that he wrote it better. Henri Michaux possesses a unique way of manipulating French: one might think that words were so many foreign bodies to him, which he turns, turns over, sniffs, and which he never ceases to distance himself from. To the amazement of one of his interlocutors, he once confessed the extent of the difficulty he experienced writing in what he said he could never take to be his mother tongue! Before the English language Nabokov stands like a wonder-struck child before a toyshop window: he juggles and plays with words as if with a prodigious parti-coloured spinning top. If, for a writer, losing his or her language is a desperate nightmare, acquiring another can also amount to the most miraculous of gifts.

TRANSLATION: LABOURS OF LOVE AND LUXURY GOODS

To be fair, I should point out that it is not always a lack of culture which lets down modern translations. Many translators work in material conditions which condemn them to producing poor drudge-work, however competent and gifted they may in fact be. It is very hard to produce satisfactory literary translations while trying to live from them. However talented the translator, if he is translating as a means of earning his living, he must constantly be choosing between botching the work and dying of hunger. A good translation is at one and the same time a labour of love and a luxury good. To translate is to pursue a passion (at times a costly one!); it rarely becomes a profitable activity.

Let me cite a personal experience: of all the translations I have done, the one dearest to my heart, in that it cost me the most trouble and gave me the greatest joy, was that of the classic of American literature Two Years Before the Mast by R.H. Dana (1840).

I rewrote my manuscript three times and was eighteen years on the job. Even though my French version— Deux années sur le gaillard d’avant— in the end was well received by critics and public alike, I had fun with a little calculation, placing my royalties alongside the number of hours spent on this work: it’s as clear as day that any street sweeper or night watchman is paid a hundred times better. Arthur Waley, a genius of translation whose renditions of the Chinese exerted a considerable influence over English letters during the first half of the twentieth century, described well the vicissitudes of our task: “Hundreds of times have I sat, for hours on end, before passages whose meaning I understood perfectly , without seeing how to render them into English.” All translators are constantly confronted by this cruel situation, but those among them who are obliged to produce a certain number of lines and pages per day in order to live can barely permit themselves the luxury of pursuing the obsessive search for the single natural and perfect solution; time is pressing, and they may need to cut short and — sick to the soul — fall back on lame compromises.

INVISIBLE MAN

The paradox which the translator encounters while obstinately pursuing his harrowing task inheres in the fact that he is not setting about erecting a monument to commemorate his talent, but on the contrary is endeavouring to efface all trace of his own existence. The translator is spotted only when he has failed; his success lies in ensuring he be forgotten. The search for the natural and proper expression is the search for that which no longer feels like a translation . What is required is to give to the reader the illusion that he has direct access to the original. The ideal translator is an invisible man. His aesthetic is that of the pane of glass. If the glass is perfect, you cease to see it, viewing only the landscape beyond it; it is only in so far as the glass contains flaws that you become conscious of the thickness of the glass which hangs between you and the landscape.

TRANSLATION AS A SUBSTITUTE FOR CREATION (I)

Somewhere, Roland Barthes remarked: “A creative writer is one for whom language is a problem.” As is often the case with Barthes, the brio of the formulation conceals a lack of intellectual rigour.

Barthes’s phrase is both too narrow and too broad. Too narrow in that there exist creative writers for whom, in fact, language is not a problem — from Tolstoy to Simenon, the list is a long one, of inventors of worlds and characters who write in a functional, neutral, lack-lustre language. (Nabokov could not forgive Dostoevsky his flat, loose prose, which he judged suited to serialised romance. Evelyn Waugh reproached his fellow novelist and friend Graham Greene with using words without regard to their specific weight and autonomous life, wielding them as indifferent tools.) One might even claim that, frequently, the capacity for invention and creation is accompanied by a certain indifference to language, whereas an extreme attention to language can inhibit creation. Barthes’s phrase is too broad, however, in that for literary translators language always constitutes the central problem, and this in spite of the fact that translators are not creative per se. Translation is often a substitute for creation, whose procedures it imitates. As Maurice-Edgar Coindreau, the great translator and introducer to France of modern American literature, put it, “The translator is the novelist’s ape. He must make the same grimaces, whether these please him or not.” Translation can mimic creation as much as it likes, but it can never claim the same status; “creative translation” could only ever be a pejorative term, rather as it is said of a corrupt accountant that he practises “creative accounting.”