If Tim Parks doesn't speak Korean, Josh Dunn doesn't speak Greek.

Familiar with the idea of Tim Parks’ review thanks to a conversation with Professor Vincent, I am delighted to have now read the text itself.  Previously, I had the sense TP was a kind of zahorí of translation, able to detect via magic or because of some Faustian pact a translation’s embedded defects, even without knowing the original language.  In reality, TP gives, in his trademark bellicose prose, a detailed evaluation of Deborah Smith’s translation, talking about register, levels of diction, narrative logic, and the harmony (or in this case disharmony) of voice.  He fits these examples into a totalizing framework for talking critically about translation and offers a paradigm any sensitive reader could apply.  I wonder, then, if despite his unsympathetic reading o her work, DS would endorse his methodology.  Rather than treating a translation as the output of a math problem and the source text as an answer at the back of the book against which the critic ought to cross reference the translator’s answer in search of errors, TP illuminates the intrinsic discrepancies in Smith’s text, treating it a freestanding work in English.  DS, for her part, seems most irritated by critics who make their living highlighting superficial differences in word choice without proposing a global interpretation of those differences and while forgetting that translation, by its very nature, implies and even requires difference.  TP, again, isn’t criticizing the fact of difference but quibbling over the aesthetic effect those differences achieve.

 

In a similar spirit, KE advances the compelling idea translation doesn’t occur at the level of language.  More interested in capturing atmosphere, tone, or voice, KE seems to be another translator who would willing dispense with a notion of mathematical equivalence in order to render what is most true or captivating about a book.  Any translator worthy of that word writes, as KE puts it, under constraint, constraints which at times facilitate creative solutions.  While the image principally invokes the source text to which any translation is tethered, we might also suppose that a translator is constrained by her/his own accumulated sensibility—the books read, the culture inherited, a personal way of making language come to life.  What’s Left of the Night, as translated by KE, will invariably have something of her style and her voice.  When ES attributed her artistic formation to books read in translation, I recalled the Latin American writers whose literary development was underpinned by their first encounters with Hemingway, Faulkner, Dostoevsky, and Flaubert, all read, of course, in translation.  How many great writers in one language have built their tradition upon books written in another?  Although the translator’s work is necessarily derivative, waiting for an author to do something first, it’s also indispensable.  There are cases—that of ES among them—where the second thing comes first.

 

-Josh