A Lot Is Lost in Translation

 

To readers of Anthea Bell's English translation of René Goscinny and Albert Uderzo's Asterix comic series, the character of an old man with a long flowing white beard is instantly recognisable as Getafix - the village druid and soothsayer who provides a 'fix' of magic potion to the Gaul warriors around whom the series revolves. The village chief, on the other hand, is a paunchy redheaded man named Vitalstatistix, whose name clearly refers to his large measurements.

On the other hand, the original French editions refer to the druid's character as Panoramix, he who knows everything, while the village chief is better known as Abraracourcix, a person who is à bras reccourcis, or ready to fight. The variance is, of course, because phrases and puns in one language cannot be translated into another without losing their meaning; certainly the English versions of Asterix would be much less enjoyable, or even become meaningless, if the French puns were translated directly.

However, this raises the larger question of how far a translation of a book can be faithful to the original, and how much the translator interposes between a reader and the original author of a work of literature. The value of translation in the literary field is immense, as it enables the free flow of ideas and cultural expression from speakers of one language to those of others. However, every language has certain thoughts, ideas and turns of phrase that cannot be translated into other languages without losing their essential meaning. 

For example, in José Saramago's The Cave, the surnames of the main character, Cipriano Algor, and his son-in-law, Marçal Gacho, are keys to the personalities of both men. The Portuguese word algor means the tense cold one feels in the body before a fever sets in, referring to the character Cipriano's situation at the start of the book, as he is about to be put out of his work as a traditional potter by the feverish capitalism and commerce in his city. The word gacho refers to the part of the ox's neck where the yoke rests, symbolising the character Marçal's strength and sturdiness. However, both these clues would be lost in translation into English if not for the translator, Margaret Jull Costa, explaining the meaning of each. This may not, however, be possible in all contexts or languages.

Apart from inadvertent distortions of meaning, translation can also allow for deliberate misinterpretations or erasures from literary works. For example, many English translations of the thirteenth-century Persian poet Jalaluddin Rumi's Masnavi tend to erase the Islamic and Sufi background in which the work was rooted. This dates back to the Victorian era, when Western translators found it hard to reconcile their ideas about Islam as being primitive, and prevailing laws about Muslim immigrants, with the mystical poetry of poets like Rumi and Hafez. 

In the meantime, these poets have become well known in the English canon, but in inaccurate translations that erase Islam and Sufism from their verse. For example, Rumi has been translated by the American author Coleman Barks, who neither knew Persian nor Arabic, but who attempted to fit Rumi's ideas, from a translated version, into the template of popular American poetry. This has been described by Professor Omid Safi as a "spiritual colonialism" of the Islamic world, "bypassing, erasing and occupying a spiritual landscape that has been lived and breathed and internalised by Muslims," and making it a part of a larger market for New Age spirituality and inspirational quotes. 

Through this erasure, translation has become a tool that promotes Orientalism, which Edward Said described in his eponymous book as a "style of thought based upon an ontological and epistemological distinction made between 'the Orient' and (most of the time) 'the Occident'." Only the general import of Rumi's work has been allowed to cross this cultural barrier, but not his specific historical and religious context.

Moreover, idiosyncratic translations, each backed by the translator's own prejudices and background, can make it difficult to really understand what a book is about. For example, an essay by the author Jorge Luis Borges chronicled the plight of the Thousand and One Nights, a story cycle originally written in Arabic, which had been translated so often by so many different people that each version varied dramatically from the rest in terms of content as well as style.

This had implications on how the book was understood and perceived in Europe. For example, Borges writes that Jean Antoine Galland's translation is "the most poorly written of them all, the least faithful, and the weakest, but it was the most widely read," by such notables as Samuel Coleridge, Alfred Lord Tennyson and Stendhal. However, he at least glosses over the more risqué parts of the stories, unlike Sir Richard Burton, who revels in them, or Edward Lane, whose later translation seeks out these vignettes and "persecutes them like an inquisitor." 

Lane's translation is, in fact, more reflective of his own times than the times in which the tales of the Thousand and One Nights were written. He omits certain stories altogether, disdaining them as being "of the most reprehensible sort," "wholly inappropriate for translation," or even incapable of being "purified without destruction." While this has the obvious drawback of making certain stories unavailable to the reader, it also sets up a conflict between Middle Eastern and European ideas of morality, again cementing the idea of Orientalism.

However, these politically and culturally motivated misinterpretations are not representative of the field of translation as a whole. Translating books into different languages makes knowledge more accessible and easy to disseminate, while also promoting intercultural dialogue. A good translator may even share literary awards or other accolades with the authors of a book. They acquire a distinct identity. For example, the International Booker Prize this year was given to Marieke Lucas Rijnveld for the book The Discomfort of Evening, which was originally written in Dutch. The prize was shared with the translator, Michele Robinson, for a translation that the Booker prize judges felt "captures [the book] in all its wild, violent beauty," and which made Rijneveld the first ever Dutch winner of the prize. 

Thus, translation does amplify voices from around the world, bringing in new perspectives and ideas to the canon, but it is important that this be done without perpetuating cultural and linguistic stereotypes or erasing the social and historical context of literature. At the same time, certain words and ideas are difficult to translate fully into another language without removing some of their meaning and beauty. 

The scholar Perry Link, who translated the works of the Chinese Tang Dynasty poet Wang Wei, has discussed some of these difficulties, writing, "The internal structure of Chinese characters has a beauty of its own, and the calligraphy in which classical poems were written is another important but untranslatable dimension" to which the poem owes its inherent order and beauty. Thus, a lot is inevitably lost in translation. So the translation will always be an approximation of a literary work rather than reading in the original language, but it is the best we have in the circumstances. 

"Wall of Books" by benuski is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0