Croft, “Why Translators Should be Named on Book Covers”

My take is that in her haste to elucidate the ways the translator is not like a ninja, Croft overlooks those in which the able translator does indeed function as such.  That is, while we may, as she does, challenge the suggestion the translator is a kind of dubious, shifty character, practicing his art with subterfuge or deceit, I think we can also recall that a translation often succeeds because it doesn’t read like translation (customarily a pejorative expression), because the translator has achieved in the target language a transparency in the prose, clarity in the tone, or in a word, aesthetic excellence.  In this respect—that of a translator delivering almost invisibly the effects and the product or of his craft without manifesting the leavings or the labor—I think the analogy holds.

 

One other note.  Accustomed to considering a work in translation a surrogate or next-best substitute for the original, I like the idea that the reader of translation is actually in the privileged position of having two guides, as if both Virgil and Homer showed Dante the way…

 

 

G. Patel, N. Youssef, “All the Violence It May Carry on Its Back”

Fascinated as I am by the thrust and the format of this piece, I nevertheless must quibble with one flat, categorical statement: “English is a colonial language.”  That English, along with Spanish, French, and Portuguese, was the mother tongue of Europeans who imposed a foreign culture upon the lands they forcibly inhabited and that this model of ransacking or of conquest operates as a paradigm for how translation into English has been and continues to be practiced is beyond dispute.  But making such an act a descriptive feature or an intrinsic element of the language itself overlooks the variety of Englishes that are spoken, the multiplicity of their use, and the possibility a translation into English could stem from admiration and humility.  Colonialism, diagnosing an inequity in interpersonal power, defines a political relationship, not a linguistic feature.

 

 

J. Lahiri, “The Book that Taught Me what Translation Was”

The assertion that the translator’s work consists in “evaluat[ing], acutely, each word an author chooses” bifurcates into a twofold process, the translator being a careful reader of the source language and an adept writer in the target language.  One other observation: using “acutely” where “accurately” may have been expected, Lahiri not only better captures the care, the sympathy, and the imagination with which the translator plies his trade; she also, in an essay which traces substitutions, effects one more.

 

If the idealist in me is ready to suppose that any book worth reading leaves the reader different at the last page than he’d been at the first, I’d add that good translation, necessarily underpinned by a close reading, transforms the translator along with the book.  We could thus say the process of translation is, amongst other things, the translator’s metamorphosis into a clearer, more distinctive, and less narrow version of himself.

G. Page-Fort, “Why Do Americans Read so Few Books in Translation?”

Maybe prior to advocating for reading in translation we need to talk about the habit of reading in and of itself.  I can safely say that the numbers of persons in my circle, both friends and family, who read literature is decidedly smaller than the number of person who don’t.  And at the risk of finding a & pattern in my personal, provincial circumstances, I wonder: if the pool of American readers grew, the number of published translations could increase commensurately, although still representing the same diminutive percentage of the whole.  To use Page-Fort’s statistics, 633 translations out of 300,000 could signify 1,266 in 600,000, not a percentage or a structural change but a commendable place to start…

Josh