Literary translators are seldom rewarded for their efforts. One of the perversities of their trade is that when they do their job well they remain mostly unnoticed. Invisibility is the successful translator’s badge of honour. Only when a translation strikes a false note is it remembered - and then it is usually to have scorn poured on it for standing between the reader and the original text.
There is an old Italian saying that equates the translator’s craft with treason: “Traduttore, traditore”. A French version, laced with misogyny, suggests that a translation’s fidelity to the original is inversely proportional to its aesthetic value: “Les traductions sont comme les femmes, ou belles ou fideles.”
Despite this notion that something valuable is always lost in the transit between languages, translation at its best mixes scholarship, a deep understanding of the original context and literary inventiveness in the target language. In the case of recently retranslated works of literature it can act as a salvage operation, recovering nuances and meanings that a previous translator may have obscured, deliberately or by omission.
At an event marking last year’s launch of a new translation of War and Peace, an audience member asked translator Anthony Briggs if modernising Leo Tolstoy’s novel about Russia in the Napoleonic era was really necessary. After all, nobody would consider updating Jane Austen’s novels, or revising Charles Dickens’ English for today’s public. Why, then, must existing versions of foreign books be periodically refreshed?
“It is not unusual for the great classic to be retranslated every couple of generations,” Briggs writes in the postscript to his translation. “Language changes and, without worshipping modernity for its own sake, publishers recognise the need to accommodate new readers by using phrasing more closely attuned to their way of speaking.” Anachronisms are extricated. Errors of interpretation are corrected. Ambiguities are ironed out.
Above all, says Briggs, it is a matter of achieving a more precise tone. Even the most successful previous translation, by Louise and Aylmer Maude (1923), was, he believes, marred by the fact that they were “of a particular social and cultural background”. They were able to reproduce the polite language of the drawing room, but not of the battle field.
“One doesn’t want to be crude or vulgar about this,” he tells me. “It’s not that they make a hopeless botch out of it. But time after time they use language for peasants and soldiers that is a little too refined. A soldier staggering into camp suffering from frostbite won’t say: ‘Comrades, when one has walked this far one doesn’t feel like walking any further,’ or ‘I say, fellow countrymen... ‘ Can you hear a rather posh voice speaking? You’ve got to find a more natural way of saying that.” His method has been “to think of an ordinary Russian reading War and Peace, and recreate that same experience for an Anglophone.” Even a fleeting comparison of selected passages reveals that Briggs has succeeded in attaining a thrust and directness that the Maude translation lacks.
“Translations can be more-or-less definitive until such a point as they fall far enough behind the living speech of the target language to reveal their own archaism or modishness,” writes Scottish poet Don Paterson in an appendix to his new version of Orpheus, sonnets by Rainer Maria Rilke. “In other words, translations date.” Whereas a text in the source language is “fixed forever in the time and diction in which it was written”, a translated text “can undergo continuous cultural rebirth, in a way denied to the original”. Wary of producing a poem that might wilt into obsolescence, Paterson declares his Orpheus to be not a translation but a version. “A translation tries to remain true to the original words and their relations... versions, however, are trying to be poems in their own right.”
Strictly speaking, translations cannot aspire to be anything other than possible versions. After all, Briggs reminds me, the simplest sentence in War and Peace is only eight words long in Russian, yet more than 2,000 valid permutations are possible when translating it into English.
Yet what Paterson claims is a sort of poetical exception. For never is translation a more creative act than in the transposition of poetry from one language to another. Hemmed in by rhyme and metre and rhythm, poets are often compelled to abandon the original’s blueprint altogether and re-imagine, rather than replicate, its architecture.
This may explain why poetry, more than prose fiction, is subject to constant reinvention. At least 50 different translations of Dante’s Inferno appeared in the 20th century, and this century promises to be equally prolific (the latest version, by Cambridge don Robin Kirkpatrick, follows Belfast bard Ciaran Carson’s very enjoyable 2002 translation). Even as Penguin launches Sir Gawain and the Green Knight in a version by Irish medievalist Bernard O’Donoghue, Yorkshire poet Simon Armitage is preparing to publish his own rendition of the 14th-century tale.
This has also been a good year for Virgil, whose Georgics and The Aeneid were recently revived. Both of Virgil’s latest translators acknowledge that they tread a very fine line. About his version of The Aeneid, Robert Fagles writes: “I have tried to find a middle ground (and not a no-man’s land, if I can help it) between the features of an ancient author and the expectations of a contemporary reader... For the more literal approach would seem to be too little English, and the more ‘literary’, too little Latin.” Meanwhile, in his introduction to the pastoral Georgics, Irish poet Peter Fallon reminds readers that a translator must measure not only the distance between languages but the distance between eras. “Translation is the fruit of various languages: the original author’s, the translator’s and, if it’s a translation from the past, the languages of both times and cultures.”
Often the greatest imperative behind the appearance of a new version is simply the lack of an earlier good one. There is such a thing as a poor translation, as Richard Pevear writes in the introduction to his recent rendering of Alexandre Dumas’ swashbuckling classic, The Three Musketeers. One of the earliest, published in 1846, suffered from the typical Victorian habit of bowdlerisation: “All of the explicit and many of the implicit references to sexuality and the human body... have been removed.” This, he tells us, makes certain key scenes “strangely vague”.
Later offerings, he complains, are “textbook examples of bad translation” that create a distorted notion of Dumas’ writing. They are “verbose, periphrastic and dull” whereas the French author’s language was “terse and modern”. Pevear’s aim, in producing this latest variant of the famous adventure yarn, was “to keep as much as possible of the pace, pungency, and wit of the original”.
If retranslating a classic refreshes it for new generations, what justifies the retranslation of a novel first written into English only years earlier, and whose author is very much alive? The Black Book, the richly layered novel by Turkish writer and Nobel prize-winner Orhan Pamuk, made its British debut in the 1995 translation by Guneli Gun. This summer it was reissued in a new version by Maureen Freely, translator of Pamuk’s two latest books. The path from one incarnation to the other sheds some light on the pitfalls that beset translators, on the Turkish language’s idiosyncracies, and even on the meteoric rise of the author’s international notoriety.
The Black Book, the second of Pamuk’s novels to appear in English, confirmed his standing as Turkey’s most disquietingly original author. Despite some reviewers’ misgivings about the awkward translation, it was rapturously received. Eleven years and four books later, however, as Pamuk emerged as a literary heavyweight with a worldwide readership, the writer and his publishers commissioned a new translation.
Freely’s afterword describes the 1995 version as “ebullient and faithful to the original”, though “somewhat opaque”. She concedes that fault does not necessarily lie with Gun’s rendering, but with Turkish literary conventions about sentence structure. Educated authors such as Pamuk are likely to expect that their thought patterns be echoed in a foreign tongue.
There are the language’s peculiarities to consider. “There is no verb to be in Turkish,” Freely explains, “nor is there a verb to have.” Nouns can carry multiple suffixes. The passive voice is common. There is a single pronoun for “he”, “she” and “it”. Word clusters create a string of cascading clauses, whose meaning is often subverted by a verb dangling at the end. “The poet Murat Nemet-Nejat has described Turkish as a language that can evoke a thought unfolding. How do you do the same in English without the thought vanishing into thin air?”
As in her translations of two other books by Pamuk, Snow and Istanbul, Freely’s modus operandi has been to sacrifice Turkish conventions to English clarity. The novel’s first sentence, which describes the protagonist’s final glimpse of his wife, is illustrative. A literal interpretation that followed the original word order might read something like: “Of the bed from the head to its base - the blue-checked quilt - its mountain ranges, shadowy valleys, and soft blue hills - veiled with - in the soft, warm darkness - Ruya facedown stretched-out slept.” In the Gun’s translation this becomes: “Ruya slept on her stomach in the sweet and warm darkness under the blue-chequered quilt which covered the entire bed with its undulating, shadowy valleys and soft blue hills.” This has been sharpened by Freely into: “Ruya was lying facedown on the bed, lost to the sweet warm darkness beneath the billowing folds of the blue-checked quilt.”
“That first paragraph is beautiful in Turkish,” she says. “It sets up so much of the tone of the book. I had a choice of doing a complete and accurate first sentence and breaking the mood he tried to set up, or trying to find a way to rewrite it so it would retain that beauty.”
Must there always be a trade-off between a voice that is distinctly Turkish and a page that is transparent to the reader? “Yes, but I would be unhappy if I could no longer find a voice that remained close to Turkish even when it conveyed things differently.”
As in Briggs’ prescription, the success of Freely’s translation lies in her efforts to reproduce a book’s tone, rather than slavishly replicate its text. This is not, however, a position all translators subscribe to. Those who value literal exactness over interpretation are far from extinct. “Literalists,” Briggs calls them, disdainfully. One of them, in fact, is about to publish yet another translation of War and Peace in the US. That literalist (Briggs doesn’t name names), and others like him, will surely find fault in whoever puts clarity over precision.
In the best literature, form is substance. Similarly with translations. Puritans may take issue, but it is undoubtedly a translation’s beauty - rather than its careful imitation of an original - that finally nudges it across the language barrier and enhances the pleasure it provides. Even if translation is treason, it is a necessary form of treachery on which readers of world literature depend.
WAR AND PEACE
by Leo Tolstoy, translated by Anthony Briggs
Penguin ₤9.99, 1408 pages
FT bookshop price: ₤7.99
ORPHEUS: A Version of Rainer Maria Rilke
by Don Paterson
Faber ₤12.99, 96 pages
FT Bookshop price: ₤10.39
THE DIVINE COMEDY I: INFERNO
by Dante Alighieri, translated by Robin Kirkpatrick
Penguin ₤10.99, 576 pages
FT bookshop price: ₤8.79
THE AENEID
by Virgil translated, by Robert Fagles
Penguin ₤25, 486 pages
FT bookshop price: ₤20
THE THREE MUSKETEERS
by Alexandre Dumas, translated by Richard Pevear
Penguin ₤25, 736 pages
FT bookshop price: ₤20
THE BLACK BOOK
by Orhan Pamuk, translated by Maureen Freely
Faber ₤7.99, 416 pages
FT bookshop price: ₤6.39
