The Literary Review

Fall 2006

On Translation
Robert Pinsky

Translation is the only art that is like writing. All of writing’s difficulties, obsessions, challenges, thrills, impulses and second thoughts apply—everything but what to say next. That free sample of content can make working on translation seem like heaven: an appealing illusion of super-charged ability that must be modified by the idea that all writing is translation, converting experience or emotion into language. At a certain point, when the goal is a work of art, the work of the translator and the work of composition are identical. All writing is translation; and conversely translation, after all, is writing.

Translation is also the highest, most intense form of reading. However graceful or clumsy the translation may be, however accurate or not, the translator has read that work, going through its nerves and circulation system like the explorers of the science fiction movie who become microscopic and travel in their tiny craft through a live human body.

In the great first centuries of poetry in English, translation was how people studied literature. What schools now teach under the separate headings of Literary Criticism, Creative Writing, Language Skills or Composition, the children learned by such assignments as translating Latin elegiac couplets into English stanzas, or a bit of Homer into English couplets. Even the slow kids managed it. For Ben Jonson and Philip Sidney, there was not much difference between writing a poem and writing a translation. A poem by Petrarca or Anakreon might be the “model” or the “original” or something in between. Originality was not in the ideas or experiences—anyone, poet or not, might have access to those—but in the actual words, the cadences and phrases: originality in the achieved style. In the same way, Shakespeare might “translate” a prose passage in an etiquette-book into a sonnet, or some of North’s translation of Plutarch into blank verse for a play.

In Genesis 10, the many descendants of Noah’s four sons separate into different regions and nations: “each,” says the English translation, “with his own language.” Then, in Genesis 11, “the earth had one language and few words.” And the Lord comes down to inspect the tower of Babel, and the city built by the sons of men:

And the Lord said, “Behold, they are one people, and they have all one language; and this is only the beginning of what they will do; and nothing that they propose to do will now be impossible for them. Come, let us go down, and there confuse their language, that they may not understand one another’s speech.” So the Lord scattered them abroad over the face of all the earth, and they left off building the city.

In both of these two accounts—the grandsons of Noah in the process of time dividing into multiple nations and languages, in the nature of things; the division created at a stroke from above by divine will—the modern literary translator may choose to read a Fortunate Fall. The punishment of separate languages was also an enrichment.

That is, to compensate for losing that unified city of one language, with its central tower, we descendants of Noah gain the variety of tongues, comparable to the bio-diversity of organic things. Each “strong translation,” in Walter Benjamin’s (translated) phrase demonstrates that richness. Dante Alighieri’s Commedia, in the Italian of his time, is the best translation that will ever be made of some immensely large, intricate set of experiences, ideas, feelings. In Aristotelian terms, the action that Dante’s poem imitates; or call it an original in the mind of God, or in the realm of Platonic forms. No other translation of that “original” will equal Dante’s.

However: the Swedish translation of the Commedia, the Arabic translation, the Japanese, the Navajo, the Hungarian, each—if it is a strong translation, if it is a work of art—by a kind of parallax adds some information about that Platonic original that even the Italian cannot give. The strong translation tells how Swedish or Navajo or Japanese has had to buckle or warp or expand in order to accommodate the new element, the Commedia. The goal, Benjamin suggests, is not to make it seem that the poem was written in the new langage, but to embody how the new language and the poem, both and mutually, are necessarily transformed.

Something of that Fortunate Fall could be read into the Biblical “few words” of the English translation of Genesis 11: before the punitive blow at Babel, we had “one language and few words.” If we had fewer words, did we possibly have fewer meanings? Leonardo da Vinci, who in his notebooks more than once declares verbal art inferior to pictorial art, also offers this surprising meditation on the sounds of human speech:

Consider well how by the movement of the tongue, with the help of the lips and teeth, the pronunciation of all the names of things is known to us; and how the simple and compound words of a language reach our ears by means of this instrument; and how these, if there were a name for all the effects of nature, would approach infinity, together with the countless things which are in action and in the power of nature; and these man does not express in one language only but in a great number, and these also tend to an infinity; because they vary continually from century to century, and from one country to another through the intermingling of the peoples who by wars and other mischances continually mix with one another; and the same languages are liable to pass into oblivion, and they are mortal like all created things; and if we grant that our world is everlasting, we shall say that these languages have been, and still will be, of infinite variety, through the infinite centuries which constitute infinite time. And this is not the case with any other sense; for these are concerned only with such things as nature continually produces; and the ordinary shapes of things created by nature do not change, as from time to time do the things created by man, who is nature’s greatest instrument.

Da Vinci, in this rhapsody on the way our tongues approach and even attain infinity, includes not only language but separate languages, intermingling and dying—dying not only in the sense that Sanskrit or Latin is “dead,” or in the sense that languages continue to die out in our modern world, but including languages that have “passed into oblivion” without record, banished even from memory. The great genius speaks of language as a sense: an organ of perception, produced, as his first words in this passage describe, by specific parts of the human body. And he marvels at it—or rather at them, at the multiple languages living and dead, as the most infinitely various means of that natural instrument, humankind. (Any translator can be amused and humbled by Leonardo’s assumption that languages and peoples encounter one another “by wars and other mischances.”)

Translation is also, almost by definition, the most imperfect of arts. Stock phrases affirm this: the Italian traduttore, traditore; Robert Frost’s definition of poetry as what is lost in translation. In a language with grammatical gender, the earth is “she,” the sun is “he”—period. A translator of that earth and sun into a language (like English) without grammatical gender, is more or less automatically a traitor—doomed to the too-corny explicitness of writing “she” and “he,” or the too-cold explicitness of “it.” Or is there a brilliant, daring solution? . . . let that example stand for the instances of impossibility that are, in keeping with Leonardo’s aria, infinite. Trans-latere: to carry across, as one carries a loaf of bread across the street. In that sense, Frost is correct, and there is no such thing as translation. Bread is bread; but “pane”—with its rhymes, proverbs, etymology, cultural contexts—is not “bread.”

Translation more than any other form of writing risks self-delusion. Every artist risks excessive self-admiration—better, after all, than its extreme opposite, the silence of discouragement—but the translator can be additionally deluded by hearing the original while reading over, caressingly, the newborn version. It is like singing along with recorded music. This is the opposite of the Gorgon Medusa: the translator’s judgment is paralyzed by the beauty of the original, so the defects of the reflection are invisible. An imperfect metaphor because as da Vinci indicates, in this matter the ear, not the eye, provides the crucial test. You must listen hard, and critically, to your own unaccompanied, possibly reedy or croaky, voice. Then the separate, quite likely painful comparison with the original. The rewards include the privilege of collaboration, sometimes with some great master of the past, sometimes with a voice new to your language.