Around Town

The Art of Translation

Translation is a lose-lose situation. If a translation is well-received, praises are lauded upon its author and the translator is all but forgotten. However, if the book is not well-received, many times reviewers, absolving the author of culpability, will blame the translator, claiming that many things were, as trite as it sounds, “lost in translation.” Ironically, most reviewers and readers never read the translated book in its original language which makes comments like “a faithful translation” or “the author’s voice shines through the translation” specious and presumptive. Translation is thankless, tiring, and ultimately a series of losses. Umberto Eco called it “the art of failure.”

Howard Goldblatt, who was a guest last week at the Bookworm’s International Literary Festival, would certainly agree. “Translation is inadequate, but it’s all we have if good writing is to have its life extended, spatially and temporally,” he wrote in a Washington Post article six years ago. Goldblatt, a research professor at Notre Dame, has published over thirty translations and is largely credited for bringing contemporary Chinese fiction to an English-speaking audience. In his hour-long session at the Bookworm, Goldblatt talked about his path to becoming a translator and his philosophy on translation. (For those not present, many of the questions asked during the evening can be found in this interview from Full Tilt)

Like many late-blooming intellectuals, Goldblatt was a “terrible, terrible student” and almost flunked out of college. But he graduated, and after graduation he made the “irredeemably stupid” decision to join the Navy. It was during his first tour that he was sent to Taipei but it wasn’t until he was redeployed to Taiwan after a brief stint in Vietnam that he began to study Chinese and found that he had an ear for the language. After completing an MA at San Francisco State University and a Ph.D at Indiana University, he began his career as a translator.

Although the night was billed as “Contemporary Chinese Fiction,” the moderator, Eric Abrahamsen from the blog Paper Republic, kept the questions strictly to translation after admitting he had a vested interest in the subject, which left little chance for Goldblatt to expound on the state of contemporary Chinese fiction apart from debunking exaggerated criticisms that there was no good fiction coming out of China. The evening proceeded with a careful prodding of what Goldblatt considered was a translator’s role and several anecdotes that illuminated the sometimes-rewarding, sometimes-punishing process of translating a novel.

Goldblatt believes that as a translator he has a duty to three things: the author, the text, and the reader–and the most important of these is the reader, whose understanding of the text trumps all other considerations. Indeed, what good is a translation if no one wants to read it? He acknowledged that translation was a losing game, but it had to be done for people who were unable to read the original text and to allow the text a new life in a new language. In rare cases he admitted he had the chance to breathe new life into the text, adding a pun here or a joke there that wouldn’t have worked in the original language. But his loyalty to the reader has gotten him in trouble, with authors and editors alike. Some authors have been unhappy with his work, claiming that it sounds too foreign, while others (he mentioned Mo Yan specifically) gave him free reign and were happy to answer questions when they arose.

He told a story about a detail in one of Mo Yan’s stories. There was a scene where an automobile was driving down a bumpy road, making a certain sound. Goldblatt felt the detail was extraneous and asked the author whether the fact that the road was bumpy was important. Mo Yan responded, of course it was, because it shows that the villagers by the road are so poor they scrape the road to make it uneven so that when coal trucks pass, the shaking will knock some of the coal off, which they then gather and use to heat their homes. Without a careful translator and a willing author, a minute detail like that surely would have been lost on its way into English.

Another anecdote about translation revolved around a cliché in Su Tong’s My Life as Emperor. Su Tong took the phrase “lick his wounds” and translated it literally into Chinese which Goldblatt then translated directly back into English. This small gaffe (a choice between fidelity to the text and fidelity to the reader) did not escape the practiced eye of John Updike who, in his review in The New Yorker, called the choice of wording “just plain tired.” Updike, of course, could not be expected to read the original Chinese for his review. Goldblatt chuckled as he retold this story, saying that maybe it was an instance where he was too faithful to the text. It seemed to me that, after so many years, he had come to terms with the paradoxical nature of his work.

During the hour-long conversation, Goldblatt shifted effortlessly between English and Chinese and at times he would say whole sentences in Chinese if it better suited his meaning. It made me think that Chinese literature, in the hands of someone who not only spoke, but clearly understood both languages, was safe for years to come, although he called for new translators after admitting that he couldn’t go on translating forever. Other than an apocryphal assertion that Murakami Haruki has had more short stories published in The New Yorker than any other author (he could have been joking because Murakami isn’t even close), Goldblatt was humorous and self-effacing, nothing like I’d imagined a notable scholar would be (a professor in college told me horror stories about Donald Keene).

Goldblatt, who at times seemed beleaguered by his chosen profession, in the end praised his job and said all the choices he made in his youth were worth it if they had brought him here. Many times during the night he would ask rhetorically why anyone would want to be an translator. Oddly enough, it was a question he had answered six years ago:

Because I love it. I love to read Chinese; I love to write in English. I love the challenge, the ambiguity, the uncertainty of the enterprise. I love the tension between creativity and fidelity, even the inevitable compromises. And, every once in a while, I find a work so exciting that I’m possessed by the urge to put it into English. In other words, I translate to stay alive.

© 2008 The Hypermodern.