| Friday, April 27, 2007 11:19AM | | | | The Art of Retranslating | Posted By: Luke Epplin
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At the start of the event Making It New: Retranslating Great Literature, the poet Charles Martin noted that at times he considers himself to be more of a retranslator than a translator. After all, the work that he last translated—Ovid’s Metamorphosis—has had at least twelve translations into English in the twentieth century alone, which raises the question: Does each generation need a new translation of a classic work? Do translations fade over time, or is it that the English becomes dusty, in need of updating in order to speak to a new crop of readers? Or are there such things as “classic” translations, ones that don’t fade over time?
Most panelists agreed that the idea of keeping a text in motion is important. As the US translator Mark Polizzoti remarked, the literary “canon” is never static, and evolves continuously over time depending on what works are being promoted by the academy and, more importantly, which works seem or become relevant to the present day. Polizzoti used the example of the novel that he last translated: Bouvard et Pecuchet, the final novel written by Gustave Flaubert. The novel is about two men who inherit some money and try their hand at a variety of professions: farming, medicine, literature, geology, etc. They embark on each profession with high hopes and optimism, devouring all there is to know about each subject, yet the task always ends in failure, after which they lick their wounds and then plunge headfirst into the next profession. The novel is a satire on the futility of human knowledge and the ubiquity of mediocrity. It’s a repetitive and sparsely written work that reads “almost like a collage of Seinfeld episodes,” and thus feels wholly out of place at the end of the nineteenth century, which was largely dominated by realistic, plot-driven novels. As such, Polizzoti explained that the first English translators of Flaubert’s last novel tried to make it read like the literature of the time instead like what the novel ultimately is: a precursor to modernism, similar to the works by Beckett and Joyce that would gain prominence in the twentieth century. So in this case, after a century had elapsed and we were able to place Flaubert’s novel in its historical context, a retranslation became almost necessary.
The moderator Michael Scammel, a translator of Nabokov and several others, brought up another interesting point: that a translator must have an intimate understanding of two languages to be effective: the original language of the work, and English. In fact, as Edith Grossman pointed out, English is the most important language for the translator, which brought up the question: Should translators also be writers? Is it necessary, for example, for a translator of poetry to also be a poet? Grossman said that the answer is no, that Robert Fagles, to name one, is a classicist, not a poet, yet his translations of the Greek and Roman epics are considered to be among the best of the retranslations. What is required instead, as Grossman noted, is love and desire: “It’s difficult, almost impossible, to translate poetry unless you love it desperately.”
I found the last issue touched upon to be particularly interesting: whether the spate of recent retranslations in this country has to do with the fact that Americans desire translations written in “American English” rather than in “English English.” The example given was the popularity of the Russian works translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, especially their version of Anna Karenina, which became what amounts to every publisher’s dream: an Oprah selection. Scammel believes that these translations are popular because they’re written in a truly American dialect, whereas most of the previous translations were done by the British.
So here’s what we’re left with: works that already have been translated into English perhaps need to be retranslated into a dialect suitable to individual countries. In that case, translators are translating both the original language and the English! With this in mind, it’s easy to see why we would need so many retranslations.
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