Is That a Fish in Your Ear?

Ismail Kadare tells another story about the indistinction of original and translated texts in his memoir-novel, Chronicle in Stone. As a ten-year-old, he was entranced by a book he’d been given by an uncle. With its story of ghosts, castles, murder, and betrayal, it appealed to him immensely, especially as it seemed to explain some of what had been going on around him in the fortress city of Gjirokastër over the preceding years of war and civil strife. The book’s title? Macbeth, by William Shakespeare. Young Ismail could see Lady Macbeth down the street, wringing her hands on the balcony, washing away the terrible things that had happened in her home. He had no idea that the play had originally been written in English. In childish fascination with a text he reread many times, Kadare copied out the unsuspected translation by hand, and nowadays, when asked by interviewers which was the first book he ever wrote, he always answers, with only half a smile, Macbeth. To this day, Kadare has not learned to speak English, but he counts Macbeth as the founding experience of his own life in literature. Whatever the quality of the translation that so inspired him, it clearly did not have the effect of dishwater. It was more like an elixir.

Why then do people still say that a translation is no substitute for an original? The adage might conceivably be of use to people who consciously avoid reading anything in translation, as it would justify and explain their practice. But since there is no reliable way of distinguishing a translation from an original by internal criteria alone, such purists could never be sure they were sticking to their guns. And even if by some stroke of luck they did manage to keep clear of all but original work in their reading, they would end up with a decidedly peculiar view of the world—if they were English readers, they would have no knowledge of the Bible, Tolstoy, or Planet of the Apes. All the adage really does is provide spurious cover for the view that translation is a second-rate kind of thing. That’s what people really mean to say when they assert that a translation is no substitute for original work.

FIVEFictions of the Foreign: The Paradox of “Foreign-Soundingness”

For most of the last century, reviewers and laymen have customarily declared in order to praise a translation to the skies that it sounds as if it had been written in English. This is hollow praise, since the selfsame community of reviewers and laymen has often shown itself unable to tell when an alleged translation was written in English. All the same, the high value placed on naturalness and fluency in the “target,” or “receiving,” language is a strong feature of the culture of translation in the English-speaking world today. But there are contrarian voices. If a detective novel set in Paris makes its characters speak and think in entirely fluent English, even while they plod along the boulevard Saint-Germain, drink Pernod, and scoff a jarret de porc aux lentilles—then something must be wrong. Where’s the bonus in having a French detective novel for bedtime reading unless there is something French about it? Don’t we want our French detectives to sound French? Domesticating translation styles that eradicate the Frenchness of Gallic thugs have been attacked by some critics for committing “ethnocentric violence.”[23] An ethics of translation, such critics say, should restrain translators from erasing all that is foreign about works translated from a foreign tongue.

How then should the foreignness of the foreign best be represented in the receiving language? Jean d’Alembert, a mathematician and philosopher who was also co-editor of Diderot’s Encyclopédie, came up with an ingenious answer in 1763:

The way foreigners speak [French] is the model for a good translation. The original should speak our language not with the superstitious caution we have for our native tongue, but with a noble freedom that allows features of one language to be borrowed in order to embellish another. Done in this way, a translation may possess all the qualities that make it commendable—a natural and easy manner, marked by the genius of the original and alongside that the added flavor of a homeland created by its foreign coloring.[24]