Is That a Fish in Your Ear?

A more recent example of pseudo-translation in French is provided by Andreï Makine, whose first three novels, published between 1990 and 1995, were presented as works translated from Russian by the fictional Françoise Bour. In 1995 Le Monde revealed that they were French originals and thus cleared the way for Makine’s fourth novel, Le Testament français, to win the Prix Goncourt, which is awarded only to writers of French.

Pseudo-translations can be hard to kill off once they have come to life. In Soviet Russia, the poet Emmanuel Lifshitz felt he could express himself more fully by writing as if he were someone else—as James Clifford, an Englishman who did not exist. Originally printed in The Batum Worker, the twenty-three poems purportedly translated from English were reprinted in Moscow with a short biography of the poet, which tried to give the game away in its closing sentence: “Such could have been the biography of this English poet, who grew up in my imagination and who has materialized in the poems whose translation I ask you to consider.”[21] But even clues as big as that can be missed by readers who really want to believe they can tell the difference between originals and translations. Lifshitz did not include the Clifford poems in collections of his own verse, and that is perhaps why James Clifford lived on in literary circles as a well-known English poet for many years. In conversation with Lifshitz, Yevgeny Yevtushenko mentioned how well he remembered the melancholic Englishman—a true eccentric.[22]

Examples of the reverse process, passing off translations as original works, are probably just as numerous. Three novels by the multilingual writer-diplomat Romain Gary that were purportedly composed in French (Lady L., 1963; Les Mangeurs d’étoiles, 1966; and Adieu Gary Cooper, 1969) had actually been written and published in English (as Lady L, 1958; The Talent Scout, 1961; and The Ski Bum, 1965, respectively) then secretly translated by a senior editor at Gary’s French publishing house. How many translations have been misrepresented as originals and never rumbled? It can’t be the case that every deception of the kind has already been unmasked.

Authors have many reasons for wanting to pass off original work as a translation and a translation as an original. Sometimes it helps to get through censorship, sometimes it is to try out a new identity. It can serve individual or collective fantasies about national or linguistic authenticity, and it can be done just to pander to a public taste for the exotic. What all such deceptions underscore is that reading alone simply does not tell you whether a work was originally written in the language you are reading it in. The difference between a translation and an original is not of the same order as the difference between powdered and steamed coffee. It’s more than just an idea. But it is not at all easy to demonstrate.

The idea that a translation is not a substitute for an original work must also be subjected to another critique. If the adage were true, then what would users of a translation get from reading a translation? Not the real thing, obviously. But they would not even get a substitute for it—not even the literary equivalent of powdered coffee. Asserting the irreplaceable nature of a literary original condemns those who cannot read the language in question to the consumption not of Nescafé but of dishwater. No opinions would be worth holding except by those who read works in the original.

Yet the examples of Cervantes (Don Quixote claims to be translated from the Arabic), Walpole, Macpherson, Gary, Guilleragues, Makine, Clifford, and countless others demonstrate that nobody can be certain that what he has read is an original.