Simon Leys - The Hall of Uselessness - Collected Essays

As to what concerns us here, what the fascinating case of Lin Shu illustrates is the importance of style: the literary art of the translator can even compensate for profound linguistic incompetence — though this is, of course, an extreme example. As a general rule it would be fair to say that if the translator is truly a writer, even the occasional mistaken meaning cannot spoil his work. By contrast, all the resources of philology will be of no use to him if he writes without literary ear. From which it emerges also that the best translators are normally those who translate from a foreign language into their mother tongue, and not vice versa. One example will serve: in English, the two most authoritative translations of Confucius’s Analects were for a long time those of Arthur Waley and D.C. Lau. The relatively old translation by Waley contains some rather flagrant mistakes and several debatable interpretations, but it is written in an admirable English. The more recent translation by Lau is more reliable philologically, but from a literary point of view it seems to have been composed on a computer, by a computer. An English-speaker who knows nothing of Confucius would do better to start by passing through Waley: even if he is led astray on certain points of detail, at least he will discover that Confucius’s Analects constitute a beautiful book, whereas there is a risk that this essential aspect will escape readers of Lau’s more accurate translation. Equally, French scholars of German have severely criticised the translations of Kafka by Alexandre Vialatte. While accepting that Vialatte did make numerous errors, when I read the new, rigorously correct versions which are now replacing the old ones, it seems to me that what Vialatte still offers, and which is more fundamental than philological exactitude, is literary truth. Even if his knowledge of German can often be found wanting, his understanding of the genius of Kafka — of the essentially comic nature of this genius — is in the end the yardstick of a truer sense of the text; a sense which, in turn, is served in French by Vialatte’s incomparable artistic abilities. What we encounter here is an illustration of the primordial axiom established by St. Jerome, the patron saint of our fellowship: “ non verbum e verbo, sed sensum exprimere de senso ”—render the sense rather than the words of the text.

VERBUM E VERBO

When rendering the words of the text, it happens to all translators to go astray here and there, but such accidents are remediable, as are basic spelling errors and typos. The recipe for success is simply to use good dictionaries, preferably of the monolingual variety. The easiest to render are difficult expressions; the hardest are easy expressions. By this I mean that abstruse expressions and rare terms declare themselves, can be spotted from afar; they are hazards clearly marked that can be negotiated with prudence, dictionary in hand. The danger arises with words of simple and everyday appearance that one believes one grasps perfectly, whereas in their context they may in fact be drawing on quite different technical or specialised vocabulary, or on a non-codified use of spoken language. I had intended to offer some examples of surprising blunders committed by excellent translators in order to demonstrate how profoundly knowledgeable translators, expert at unravelling the most complex linguistic puzzles from within the enclave of their libraries, far from the street and its life, managed to fall into very basic traps. But what’s the use in nitpicking? I am sure my meaning is clear, being at root nothing but an illustration of the old principle of navigation: it is dangerous not to know one’s position, but not to know that one does not know is much worse.

Let me mention again the particular problem posed by obscure or corrupt passages in ancient texts. Certain translators err here by an excess of ingenuity: they create meaning in passages which no longer possess any; and where the original is hermetic and bumpy, their translation gives a deceptive impression of lucidity and fluidity. Jean Paulhan highlighted this phenomenon ( à propos of a translation of Lao Zi ): “The best translators are in this case the stupidest ones, who respect obscurity and don’t seek to make sense of the matter to hand.”

SENSUM EXPRIMERE DE SENSO

The errors committed of the order of “ verbum e verbo ” are venial and easily spotted. But in the domain of “ sensum exprimere de senso ,” all errors are fatal. Mistakes of meaning can be made, and inevitably are, but what are unpardonable are mistakes of judgement and tone. The way in which a translator chooses to convey the title of a work he is translating clearly indicates this, with Coindreau again supplying interesting examples. The title of William Styron’s novel, Set This House on Fire (which, with its biblical resonance, offers a challenge which Coindreau rises to magnificently with La Proie des flammes ), were it to be translated by Fous le feu à la baraque , would instantly become the title of a cheap thriller. Steinbeck’s title The Grapes of Wrath is awkwardly rendered by Les Raisins de la colère , a title belonging to a pirate Belgian edition of the novel which gained notoriety during the Second World War, obliging Coindreau to let go of the brilliant solution he had envisaged: Le Ciel en sa fureur . In English, grapes possesses a solemn biblical ring, where the classic allusion to La Fontaine’s verse gives in the end the best possible equivalent, whereas the French connotation of “grapes” (think of “ vignes du Seigneur ”) evokes rather a Bacchic and Rabelaisian universe. Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë became, in the translation by F. Delebecque, Les Hauts de Hurlevent— a masterstroke. Coindreau explains why he translated God’s Little Acre (by E. Caldwell) as Le Petit arpent du bon Dieu : “ Le Petit arpent de Dieu ” sounded bad, he says, like some sort of Canadian swearword! “ Bon Dieu” corresponds to the way in which one imagines the protagonist, an old peasant, smutty and sly, might naturally express himself. As for me, when it came to the narrative by Dana, Two Years Before the Mast , the expression “before the mast” would literally turn into “ devant le mât ” or “ en avant du mât ,” neither of which means much in French. In English, sailing “before the mast” means sailing as an ordinary seaman, since on tall ships the crew’s quarters were in the forecastle, and the sailors, unless on duty, were strictly confined to the space “before the fore mast” (the aft section of the ship being reserved for the exclusive use of officers and passengers). To translate the title as “ Deux ans de la vie d’un matelot ” would have been too explicit, where what was required was an echo of the nautical jargon which Dana employs to such superb effect. As what was required was, moreover, avoidance of the infelicitous assonance of “deux ans ”—“gaillard d’avant ,” what I finally opted for was Deux années sur le gaillard d’avant.

THE TEST OF THE TRANSLATION

It is possible to be creative in a language that one knows only imperfectly: Conrad was still far from mastering English at the time he wrote Almayer’s Folly . It is impossible to translate into a language which one knows only imperfectly. No other literary activity demands so total a mastery of the language in which one is working; one must possess every register, one must be capable of playing in every key and on every scale. When one is composing, if one comes up against an obstacle, one has at one’s disposal numerous sidesteps: one can always tackle the subject from another angle, or if it comes to it one can even invent something else. When translating, by contrast, problems are immutable, and there is no question of avoiding or side-stepping them; they must all be confronted and resolved, one by one, wherever they present themselves. Translation not only deploys every resource of writing, it is also the supreme form of reading . In order to appreciate a text, re-reading is better than reading, learning by heart is better than re-reading; but one possesses only what one translates. First, translating implies total comprehension. When we’ve read a text with interest, with pleasure, with emotion, we naturally presume that we’ve entirely understood it… until the moment comes when we try to translate it. Then, what we usually discover is that rather than understanding, what we’ve been left with is the imprint of the text’s movement on our imagination and sensibility; sufficient to sustain a reader’s attention — but the translator, for his part, requires firmer foundations on which to base his work. Certainly, vague passages must be rendered in a vague manner; obscure passages must be rendered obscurely. But in order to produce an adequate obscurity and vagueness, the translator must previously have penetrated the fog to capture whatever is hiding behind it.