Collaborating with God
Translation is certainly a collaborative enterprise. But
who exactly are the collaborators? And do they collaborate
as equals? I find that the answer to the first question depends
on whether or not I am translating an author who is both alive
and a good reader of English. The answer to the second question
is “no.”
Let me explain. The two writers I’ve translated most
recently, Umberto Eco and Roberto Calasso, both have excellent,
nuanced understandings of English. In both cases, I would
email chapters as I translated them, and they would read them
closely and write back with comments, corrections, and on
a few occasions even changes to their originals. In such relationships,
it is my clear duty to be faithful to the authors’ intentions
even more than to the texts themselves. Thus if I encountered,
say, an ambiguity in the original text, I could easily discover
whether it was an intentional ambiguity, in which case I would
try to create a similar ambiguity in English, or an unintentional
ambiguity, in which case I would, after consulting with the
author, clarify it in English. Similarly, if I discovered
an error in the original, I would (again, after consulting
with the author) correct it. In both these cases I was collaborating
more with the author than with the author’s book.
But in the case of the first book I translated, the author,
Cesare Pavese, was dead. I felt then that I was collaborating
with and trying to be faithful to the poems more than to the
author. Pavese himself seemed excluded from the collaborative
process: if he wanted to revise a line or clarify a passage
(or correct one of my mistakes), too bad. If I encountered
an ambiguity or an error in a Pavese poem, I would likely
try to preserve it, even if I suspected that it was unintentional
(unless I was really sure, as I occasionally was, that I knew
what Pavese had meant to say; in such cases, I might admit
him briefly back into the collaboration…).
It might seem that a translator would have more leeway when
translating a dead author simply because the author is not
around to peer over the translator’s shoulder. No doubt
this is sometimes true. And yet, paradoxically, translators
often grant themselves less leeway in such cases precisely
because dead authors are unable to look over their shoulders,
unable to see what liberties are being taken, and thus unable
to authorize them. In several passages in the Eco novel, for
example, I had to take real liberties with the English in
order to achieve the effects he had created in Italian, and
it was liberating rather than constraining to have him available
to sign off on what I had done. Had he not been available,
my translation might have been more timid, might have hewn
closer to the letter of his text and in so doing strayed further
from its spirit.
Second question: Regardless of whether translators collaborate
with the original text or with the original author, do they
collaborate as equals? The answer, as I have said, is “no”:
there must always be a master. But if you think the translator
is always the apprentice, think again. Translators begin every
translation (or ought to) as apprentices, understudies to
the original authors; the original texts—their masters.
But these apprentices should (and all too often don’t)
complete their apprenticeships before completing their translations.
By this I mean that a translator should, at some point in
the process, come to feel a kind of mastery over the text,
over its manner and matter both, and should feel confident
enough to take the necessary liberties (which may be minor
or major, stylistic or semantic, depending on the text) to
make the text live in English. This holds true even, perhaps
especially, when the original author is not around to authorize
those liberties. Because if the translator merely translates,
slavishly, the “meaning” of the original text,
the translation will lie there on the table like Frankenstein’s
monster before the shock of electricity. What author would
be pleased with that sort of fidelity? The translator, then,
must also coax into existence such things as an appropriate
voice and tone and style—qualities that cannot be achieved
automatically or mechanically, and that are just the ingredients
needed to make the work come alive in its new skin. Translators,
in other words, must at some point, like Dr. Frankenstein,
play God with their recycled creations.
To put it another way entirely: It has been said that writers
translate God and that translators translate translations
of God. If this is true—and it sounds pretty good to
me—then at some point in the process, the translator
must go back to the original—i.e., not to the author
or the author’s text, but, through them, to whatever
god the author was translating. That is collaboration.
