Simon Leys - The Hall of Uselessness - Collected Essays

Paradoxically, the translator must know more about the work than the author knows himself, for the author, carried by inspiration, can sometimes yield to the intoxication of words. Such transports are forbidden to the translator, who must forever remain sober and lucid. A cunning writer may bluff his readers, but he can never deceive his translator. The work of translation reveals pitilessly: it turns the work inside out, unpicks its lining, exposes its stitching. Translation is the severest test to which a book can be submitted. In discursive prose, nothing that has a meaning is untranslatable; the corollary being that untranslatable passages generally are found to be meaningless. Translation is an implacable detective of pretentious nonsense, a sonar for measuring false depths. A work may have pleased us on a first read, but if its seduction is not wholesome, it will not withstand the test of translation. To translate a book means living in intimacy with it for months and years, and this when frequenting books can turn out to be much like frequenting people: intimacy is capable of increasing love and respect, just as it is capable of producing disaffection and contempt.

TRANSLATABLE AND UNTRANSLATABLE

Some writers are easy to translate: Simenon, Graham Greene, and in general all novelists whose plots can be disentangled from their language. Some are hard to translate: Chardonne, Evelyn Waugh, and in general any novelist whose narrative is indissociable from its language. It so happens that I read Simenon in English and Greene in French. Some of their novels stay with me after even twenty-five or thirty years, and yet I am curiously unable to tell which I read in the original and which in translation. In the first case, language is a mere instrument of creation; in the second, it constitutes the very stuff of the work. The closer a work approaches the poetic mode, the less it is translatable. The “idea” of a poem is present only as it takes form in words; a poem doesn’t exist outside its verbal incarnation, any more than an individual exists outside his skin. Degas said to Mallarmé that he had heaps of ideas for poems and was dismayed not to be able to write them. Mallarmé responded: “But Degas, it’s not with ideas that we make poetry, it’s with words.” While it isn’t entirely absurd to recount a Tolstoy novel, it would be inconceivable to recount a Baudelaire poem. Hence poetry is by definition untranslatable (whence derives Goethe’s recommendation that verse be translated in prose, to forestall any readerly illusions). However, it does happen that a poem in one language can inspire another poem in another language. Such miracles do happen! But the existence of miracles does not cancel the existence of natural laws; rather it confirms it.

TRANSLATIONS WHICH ARE SUPERIOR TO THEIR ORIGINALS

I believe it was Gide who remarked of a writer he did not care for, “He is much improved by translation.” This happy gibe raises the curious issue of translators who improve on their originals. Examples abound here. Gabriel García Márquez has said that Gregory Rabassa’s translation of One Hundred Years of Solitude is much superior to its original Spanish version. I have spoken above of Lin Shu; not only does La Dame aux camélias gain from being read in Chinese, but — if Arthur Waley is to be believed — the same might be said of Dickens’s novels. But the most noteworthy case is probably that of Baudelaire as translator of Edgar Allan Poe. Anglo-Saxon connoisseurs who read French are practically unanimous in preferring Baudelaire’s translations to Poe’s originals, generally judging Poe to be “boring, vulgar and lacking a good ear”; while the way in which, following Baudelaire, great French poets such as Mallarmé, Claudel and Valéry could worship him and take seriously his indigestible mishmash of pseudoscience and metaphysical fantasy remains for English and American critics a source of infinite perplexity. The fact is that it is often mediocre writers who lend themselves best to the glorious misunderstandings of translation and exportation, whereas writers of genius resist the efforts of translators. Du Fu, the greatest and most perfect of all the Chinese classic poets, becomes grey and arid in translation, whereas his contemporary Hanshan, whose work is flat and vulgar and was, quite rightly, largely ignored in China, enjoyed a huge success in colourful poetic reincarnations in Japan, in America and in France… Translation may serve as a perverse screen serving to occlude instances of true beauty, while conferring a sudden freshness upon worn-out clichés. The poetry of Mao Zedong, for example, owed its fortune not only to the pounding of propaganda and the political myths of a certain era, but also to the fact that it clearly belongs to that category of works which are “improved by translation,” the translation succeeding in concealing their original vulgarity. In that ferociously funny novel Pictures from an Institution , Randall Jarrell says of one of his characters: “He would not like German half so well if he should learn it. There is no such happiness as not to know an idiom from a masterstroke .” And in The Catcher in the Rye the young hero completely muddles up the meaning of a line of Robert Burns (which gives Salinger the title of his novel): this marvellous mistake becoming the source for him of a much purer and deeper poetic delight than would have been drawn from a correct reading of the poem in question… A “homage to the mistake” remains to be written.

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AS YOU may perhaps remember, some time ago the English actor Hugh Grant was arrested by the police in Los Angeles: he was performing a rather private activity in a public place with a lady of the night. For less famous mortals, such a mishap would have been merely embarrassing; but for such a famous film star, the incident proved quite shattering. For a while, it looked as if his professional career might sink — not to mention the damage inflicted upon his personal life. In this distressing circumstance, he was interviewed by an American journalist, who asked him a very American question: “Are you receiving any therapy or counselling?” Grant replied, “No. In England, we read novels.”

Half a century earlier, the great psychologist Carl Gustav Jung developed the other side of this same observation. He phrased it in more technical terms: “Man’s estrangement from the mythical realm and the subsequent shrinking of his existence to the mere factual — that is the major cause of mental illness.” In other words, people who do not read fiction or poetry are in permanent danger of crashing against facts and being crushed by reality. And then, in turn, it is left to Dr. Jung and his colleagues to rush to the rescue and attempt to mend the broken pieces.

Do psychotherapists multiply when novelists and poets become scarce? There may well be a connection between the development of clinical psychology on the one hand and the withering of the inspired imagination on the other — at least, this was the belief of some eminent practitioners. Rainer Maria Rilke once begged Lou Andreas-Salomé to psychoanalyse him. She refused; she explained to him, “If the analysis is successful, you may never write poetry again.” (And just imagine: had a skilful shrink cured Kafka of his existential anxieties, our age — and modern man’s condition — could have been deprived of its most perceptive interpreter.)

Many strong and well-adjusted people seem to experience little need for the imaginative life. Thus, for instance, saints do not write novels, as Cardinal Newman observed (and he ought to have known, since he came quite close to being a saint, and he wrote a couple of novels†).