Automated reading that requires no readers; the act of reading left to old-fashioned cranks who believe in books not as monsters but as places for dialogue; books transformed into a memory carried about until the mind caves in and the spirit fails … these scenarios suit our new century: the end of books set against the end of time, after the end of the second millennium. At the end of the first, the Adamites burned their libraries before joining their brethren in preparation for the Apocalypse so as not to carry useless wisdom into the promised Kingdom of Heaven.
Our fears are endemic fears, rooted in our time. They do not branch into the unknowable future; they demand a conclusive answer, here and now. “Stupidity,” wrote Flaubert, “consists in a desire to conclude.” Indeed. As every reader knows, the point, the essential quality of the act of reading, now and always, is that it tends to no foreseeable end, to no conclusion. Every reading prolongs another, begun in some afternoon thousands of years ago and of which we know nothing; every reading projects its shadow onto the following page, lending it content and context. In this way the story grows, layer after layer, like the skin of the society whose history the act preserves. In Carpaccio’s painting Augustine sits, as attentive as his dog, pen poised, book shining like a screen, looking straight into the light, listening. The room, the instruments keep changing, the books on the shelf shed their covers, the texts tell stories in voices not yet born.
PART SIX
Books as Business
“I should like to buy an egg, please,” she said timidly.
“How do you sell them?”
“Fivepence farthing for one—twopence for two,” the
Sheep replied.
“Then two are cheaper than one?” Alice said in a surprised
tone, taking out her purse.
“Only you must eat them both, if you buy two,” said the
Sheep.
Through the Looking-Glass, Chapter 5
Reading White for Black
“Do you know Languages? What’s French for fiddle-de-dee?”
“Fiddle-de-dee’s not English,” Alice replied gravely.
“Who ever said it was?” said the Red Queen.
Through the Looking-Glass, Chapter 9
For Christine Le Boeuf
THROUGHOUT PART OF 1992 AND 1993, I worked on the translation of three short stories by Marguerite Yourcenar. The stories, published in French under the title Conte bleu, which I rendered in English as A Blue Tale, are early works by the writer who was to become in later life such an accomplished stylist. Understandably, because they were written with the exuberance and know-all of youth, the stories stray from time to time from sober blue to lurid purple. Since translators, unlike writers and God Himself, have the possibility of amending the faults of the past, it seemed to me that to preserve every glitter and volute of Yourcenar’s young text would have been nothing but a pedantic undertaking, less intended for lovers of literature than for literary archaeologists. Furthermore, the English language is less patient with ebullience than French. And so it was that a few times—mea culpa, mea maxima culpa—I silently clipped an adjective or pruned a simile.
Vladimir Nabokov, criticized by his friend Edmund Wilson for producing a translation of Eugene Onegin “with warts and all,” responded that the translator’s business was not to improve or comment on the original but to give the reader ignorant of one language a text recomposed in all the equivalent words of another. Nabokov apparently believed (though I find it hard to imagine that the master craftsman meant this) that languages are “equivalent” in both sense and sound, and that what is imagined in one language can be reimagined in another—without an entirely new creation taking place. But the truth is (as every translator finds out at the beginning of the first page) that the phoenix imagined in one language is nothing but a barnyard chicken in another, and to invest that singular fowl with the majesty of the bird born from its own ashes, a different language might require the presence of a different creature, plucked from bestiaries that possess their own notions of strangeness. In English, for instance, the word phoenix still has a wild, evocative ring; in Spanish, ave fénix is part of the bombastic rhetoric inherited from the seventeenth century.
In the early Middle Ages, translation (from the past participle of the Latin transferre, “to transfer”) meant conveying the relics of a saint from one place to another. Sometimes these translations were illegal, as when saintly remains were stolen from one town and carried away for the greater glory of another, which is how the body of Saint Mark was transferred from Constantinople to Venice, hidden under a cartful of pork, which the Turkish guards at Constantinople’s gates refused to touch. Carrying away something precious and making it one’s own by whatever means possible: this definition serves the act of literary translation perhaps better than Nabokov’s.
No translation is ever innocent. Every translation implies a reading, a choice both of subject and interpretation, a refusal or suppression of other texts, a redefinition under the terms imposed by the translator, who, for the occasion, usurps the title of author. Since a translation cannot be impartial, any more than a reading can be unbiased, the act of translation carries with it a responsibility that extends far beyond the limits of the translated page, not only from language to language but often within the same language, from genre to genre, or from the shelves of one literature to those of another. In this not all “translations” are acknowledged as such: when Charles and Mary Lamb turned Shakespeare’s plays into prose tales for children, or when Virginia Woolf generously herded Constance Garnett’s versions of Turgenev “into the fold of English Literature,” the displacements of the text into the nursery or into the British Library were not regarded as “translations” in the etymological sense. Lamb or Woolf, every translator disguises the text with another, attractive or detractive meaning.
Were translation a simple act of pure exchange, it would offer no more possibilities for distortion and censorship (or improvement and enlightening) than photocopying or, at most, scriptorium transcription. But that isn’t so. If we acknowledge that every translation, simply by transferring the text to another language, space, and time, alters it for better or for worse, then we must also acknowledge that every translation — transliteration, retelling, relabeling
—adds to the original text a prêt-à-porter reading, an implicit commentary. And that is where the censor comes in.
That a translation may hide, distort, subdue, or even suppress a text is a fact tacitly recognized by the reader who accepts it as a “version” of the original, a process Joachim de Bellay described in 1549, in his Défense et exemple de la langue française: “And what shall I say of those more properly called traitors than translators, since they betray those whom they aim to reveal, tarnishing their glory, and seducing ignorant readers by reading white for black?”
In the index to John Boswell’s groundbreaking book on homosexuality in the Middle Ages, Christianity, Social Tolerance and Homosexuality, the entry for “Translation” reads, “See Mistranslation” — or what Boswell calls “the deliberate falsification of historical records.” The instances of asepticized translations of Greek and Roman classics are too numerous to mention and range from a change of pronoun which willfully conceals the sexual identity of a character to the suppression of an entire text, such as the Amores of the Pseudo-Lucian, which Thomas Francklin in 1781 deleted from his English translation of the author’s works because it included an explicit dialogue among a group of men on whether women or boys were erotically more desirable. “But as this is a point which, at least in this nation, has been long determined in favour of the ladies, it stands in need of no further discussion,” wrote the censorious Francklin.