The Hindu Business Line : At peace with translators who war with words

“There’s matter in these sighs, these profound heaves: You must translate: ‘tis fit we understand them,” demands King Claudius of Queen Gertrude in Hamlet. Translation, though, isn’t easy, despite Blanch’s saying “I can with ease translate,” in King John, and Brutus speaking, in Coriolanus, of translating malice into love.

“Without translators, we are left adrift on our various linguistic ice floes, only faintly hearing rumours of masterpieces elsewhere at sea,” writes David Remnick in Reporting ( www.landmarkonthenet.com).

For, it is translation that makes “most English-speaking readers glimpse Homer through the filter of Fitzgerald or Fagles, Dante through Sinclair or Singleton or the Hollanders… and nearly every Russian through Constance Garnett.”

Sadly, translators and their work are rarely appreciated. “Translation is at best an echo,” chides George Borrow. “I want my words to survive translation,” prays Kazuo Ishiguro. Remnick cites Cervantes’ complaint – that reading a translation was “like looking at the Flanders tapestries from behind: you can see the basic shapes but they are so filled with threads that you cannot fathom their original lustre.”

Defiant translators may argue: “What is lost in the good or excellent translation is precisely the best,” as Friedrich Von Schlegel affirms. Or, after a full-scale comparison, they may declare: “The original is unfaithful to the translation,” borrowing a quote of Jorge Luis Borges.

A chapter titled ‘The translation wars’ in Reporting tells the tale of Garnett (1862-1946), who ‘with her pale, watery eyes,’ translated ‘seventy volumes of Russian prose for commercial publication’.

She worked with such speed, with such an eye toward the finish line, that when she came across a word or a phrase that she couldn’t make sense of she would skip it and move on, describes Remnick. “Life is short, ‘The Idiot’ long.” (The Idiot is a novel written by the Russian author Fyodor Dostoevsky and first published in 1869, informs Wikipedia.)

Remnick narrates the story of how, in September 1998, the Pevear-Volokhonsky couple finished translating Anna Karenina – but the editors at Penguin in London were not impressed. Pevear took out some of Tolstoy’s more repetitive and overemphatic passages. But that didn’t solve the problem.

At last, the book was published in 2000, and the UK Penguin sold a few hundred copies in England. Four years later, the duo received a call: that Ophrah Winfrey selected Anna Karenina for her book club.

Viking Penguin in New York printed an additional 8 lakh copies of the translation in a single month.

“Soon the buses, subways, and coffee shops of America were filled with people reading Tolstoy. I asked Richard and Larissa what ‘the Ophrah moment’ meant for them. ‘It means I have an accountant,’ Richard said,” writes Remnick.

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