In Translation

Words Without Borders is an online magazine which seeks “to promote international communication through translation of the world’s best writing—selected and translated by a distinguished group of writers, translators, and publishing professionals—and publishing and promoting these works (or excerpts) on the web,” as well acting as “an advocacy organization for literature in translation.” Their cause is a noble one, and seriously underfunded; you should consider sending them a check.

I say that even though the anthology just published with their imprimatur—Words Without Borders: The World Through the Eyes of Writers (Anchor Books)—is a disaster. The trouble begins right off the bat, with the introduction by Andre Dubus III, who recalls how Americans responded to the 1979 embassy takeover in Tehran and again after 9/11 with orgies of violence against immigrants. (You don’t remember it happening quite that way? Maybe this book isn’t for you.) The publicity material for the anthology features a helpful interview comparing censorship in Iran and North Korea with censorship in the United States. (You always wondered why so many people in airports are toting blockbusters by James Patterson and his ilk, and so few are carrying novels from Iran? Now you know.) Over the project there hovers the notion that reading literature in translation is a quasi-political act. You want to strike a blow against American fascism? Read a novel from the Hungarian and accrue virtue, distinguishing yourself from your dreadfully provincial fellow Americans.

The selections themselves—by 27 writers from all around the world—struck me as largely mediocre, despite the luster of their distinguished “recommenders” (a number of whom are writers I admire). I say that not with satisfaction but with disappointment, as a reader with a healthy appetite for a lot of different kinds of writing. (Of course, this judgment is in part no doubt simply a matter of taste, but taste aside, the batting average is below the Mendoza Line.) The mini-introductions to the selections, done by the recommenders, are uneven: some are shrewd or winsome, others take pratfalls.

Consider novelist Heidi Julavits’ intro to a story by a Norwegian writer, Johan Harstad, which Julavits describes as “so stripped down and steely that it almost reads like the work of Philip K. Dick.” PKD, stripped down and steely? She was thinking perhaps of the passage in Clans of the Alphane Moon when the chatty, telepathic Ganymedean slime mold Lord Running Clam makes its first appearance, flowing under the protagonist’s door and gathering itself “into the heap of small globes which comprised its physical being.” No, that won’t do. Either Heidi Julavits has never actually read a page of Philip K. Dick (she saw the movies, maybe), or she wrote this under the influence of Chew-Z.

But never mind. Let a thousand flowers bloom. May wwb flourish, and translations abound at Costco. Nan Talese, I’m glad to see, under her imprint at Doubleday, has inaugurated a series called International Fiction, with six titles debuting between January and April of this year. (Four of the novels are translated; two were written in English but nevertheless fit the rubric.) And there are, as always, some books by established writers on the way: Peter Handke’s Crossing the Sierra de Gredos, which I have been itching to read, is due in July from Farrar, Straus and Giroux, translated from the German by Krishna Winston. Also coming from fsg, by the late Chilean novelist Roberto Bolano, is The Savage Detectives, translated from the Spanish by Natasha Wimmer, a massive book to set next to the stack of Bolano translations over the last several years from New Directions, one of the publishers most consistently dedicated to literature in translation. University of California Press has just published a magnificent volume, The Complete Poetry of César Vallejo: A Bilingual Edition, edited and translated by Clayton Eshelman. And Harvard University Press (in their Harvard East Asian Monographs series) has issued another volume by the preternaturally gifted scholar Stephen Owen, The Late Tang: Chinese Poetry of the Mid-Ninth Century, a critical study which is chock-full of Owen’s translations from the period. From Transaction, you can get the second volume of John Taylor’s Paths to Contemporary French Literature; Taylor’s short pieces on a huge range of writers are the literary equivalent of a superb travel guide. (Look for more on all of these titles in due course in Books & Culture.)

I could happily prattle on in this vein, but translation is a much bigger subject than these examples suggest. Long before I even possessed a clear concept of “translation,” I was immersed in the stuff, as every child is whose early memories include hearing the Bible read and then beginning to read it. (Andrew Walls and Lamin Sanneh, among others, have rightly emphasized the translatability of Christianity, which is translated into cultures as it is translated into vernacular languages.)

The Bible was the most important text, but there were so many more: tales from the Brothers Grimm, very different tales from China (where my grandparents were missionaries and my mother lived until she was ten years old), and on and on, books that someone had rendered from German or Chinese or French into English, though even when I became aware that they were “translations” the meaning of that was very much in the background. And of course the English into which they were translated was often not the English you’d be likely to hear as a boy growing up in California in the 1950s.

Many years later, when I read George Steiner’s extraordinary After Babel—Wendy and I drove to the old Pickwick’s in Hollywood to get the book as soon as it was available—I came to these sentences in his first chapter, “Understanding as Translation”:

Any thorough reading of a text out of the past of one’s own language and literature is a manifold act of interpretation. In the great majority of cases, this act is hardly performed or even consciously recognized.

I had learned this same lesson, with different emphases, from C. S. Lewis’ Studies in Words and from reading and studying with Hugh Kenner. Understanding itself, Steiner says, is a kind of translation (sometimes a fruitful mistranslation, Kenner added). When, age 12 or so, I found in the Pomona Public Library an illustrated translation of selections from The Thousand and One Nights, rendered from Arabic into a florid English with a curious period flavor, considerable translation was required, though I didn’t think of it in those terms. There was the method of storytelling—fascinating, but different from what I knew: a welcome challenge. There was the culture whose assumptions were implicit in the tales. There was the appalling cruelty of many of the tales, and the eroticism—sometimes enticing, sometimes off-putting. I soldiered on, ignorant, eager to learn, reading Scheherazade’s bedtime stories alongside Perry Mason’s latest adventures in the Saturday Evening Post and Luther’s Small Catechism, itself translated from the text of the magisterial Reformer whose translation of the Bible into German was a landmark in both the spiritual and the literary history of that people. (As a non-Lutheran student at a Lutheran school, I was exempt from catechism class, but I did the work anyway.)

By the time I got to college, I understood more clearly what “translation” in the narrow sense meant. I also began to grasp, to some extent at least, the huge gulf between my reading of Tolstoy, say, and that of a reader fluent in Russian. Indeed, for the first time I encountered people who sneered at the very notion of “literature in translation.” A contradiction in terms, they said. I’ve never been persuaded or even daunted by their claims, though I deeply admire readers who truly master other tongues, and I have learned a great deal from them when reading texts that I can’t myself absorb in the original language—not least from the commentators who devote their attention to biblical texts. But who could take the arguments of the purists too seriously while sitting in the darkness of the theater with those ravishing “foreign” films, which allowed us to hear French (through the pouty lips of Jeanne Moreau) and Swedish and Japanese and Italian and Russian and Czech and Polish spoken in seductively foreign rhythms while taking in the occasionally risible English subtitles.

Yes, translation was everywhere and is everywhere and will be everywhere until the promise implicit in Peter’s Pentecost sermon is fulfilled, and we all speak one heavenly language.