I still admire Garnett, once aptly described as a woman of Victorian energies and Edwardian prose. I do appreciate all the criticisms leveled against her and her poor translations. As Joseph Brodsky said, “The reason English-speaking readers can barely tell the difference between Tolstoy and Dostoevsky is that they aren’t reading the prose of either one. They’re reading Constance Garnett.”
Who reads translations anymore? Mr. Brodsky misdirected his Russian anger. Instead of attacking Garnett, he should have bashed people who don’t read Russian authors, or German, or Arabic, or Chinese, but choose Westernized imitations instead.
Before she began her missionary work, only the rare English speaker who knew Russian could read those writers. She introduced so many of us, those who can read English but not the original language, to Heaven’s passions. So Joseph and Vladimir can rant, and they do, ever so elegantly and eloquently, but Constance’s zeal has been a blessing.
I can’t tell you how good my translations are since I can’t look at them dispassionately. I am intimately involved. Mine are translations of translations, which by definition means that they are less faithful to the original. Like Constance, I try my best. However, unlike her, I don’t skip over words I don’t know, nor do I cut long passages short. I didn’t and don’t have the intention of translating an entire canon — my ambitions are neither expansive nor comprehensive. I translate for the pleasure it engenders, and I certainly don’t possess Victorian energies. I am an Arab, after all.
Garnett wasn’t the most prolific translator by any means. The Renaissance Venetian Lodovico Dolce translated more than 350 books (Homer, Virgil, Ovid, Dante, Castiglione, to name a few), and I’m not sure he was the most prolific either. Earnestness is a common trait among translators.
If you ask me, though, Garnett’s biggest problem was that she was of her time and place. Her work is a reflection of that; it appealed to the English of her generation, which is as it should be — completely understandable. Unfortunately for everyone, her time and place were maddeningly dull. Old chap and cheap port, that sort of thing.
Using Edwardian prose for Dostoyevsky is like adding milk to good tea. Tfeh! The English like that sort of thing.
She also wasn’t a genius. Now, you know, Marguerite Yourcenar did much worse things when she translated Cavafy’s poems into French. She didn’t simply skip over words she didn’t understand, she invented words. She didn’t speak the language, and used Greek speakers to help her. She changed the poems completely, made them French, made them hers. Brodsky would have said that you weren’t reading Cavafy, you were reading Yourcenar, and he would have been absolutely right. Except that Yourcenar’s translations are interesting on their own. She did a disservice to Cavafy, but I can forgive her. Her poems became something different and new, like champagne.
My translations aren’t champagne, and they’re not milky tea either.
I’m thinking arak.
But wait. Walter Benjamin has something to say about all this. In “The Task of the Translator” he wrote: “No translation would be possible if in its ultimate essence it strove for likeness to the original. For in its afterlife — which could not be called that if it were not a transformation and renewal of something living — the original undergoes a change.”
In his own confounding style, Benjamin is saying that if you translate a work of art by sticking close to the original, you can show the surface content of the original and explain the information contained within, but you miss the ineffable essence of the work. In other words, you’re dealing with inessentials.
Take that, Mr. Brodsky and Mr. Nabokov. A right hook and a sucker punch from good old Mr. Benjamin. Had Constance translated Russian works more faithfully, she would have missed the essential.
All right, all right, Constance may have missed both the essential and the inessential, but we should applaud her effort.
Yourcenar also translated Virginia Woolf’s The Waves. I can’t bring myself to read her translation, though. In Woolf’s case, unlike Cavafy’s, Yourcenar could read the language. Proust couldn’t read anything but French, and before he wrote his masterpiece he translated the apostle of the aesthetic John Ruskin, an incomparable stylist. Read Ruskin, then read Proust, and compare the influence — compare the incomparable stylists.
Walter Benjamin translated Proust into German. In one of his letters, Benjamin wrote that he refused to read more Proust than was absolutely necessary to finish the translation because he was terrified that the translatee’s exquisitely delicate style would forever seep into the translator’s.
I hope that the lepidopterist Nabokov would have approved of my work, but I’m not certain. I’ll never know.
Let me come out and state this, in case you haven’t deduced it yet: I have never published. Once I finish a project, once the rituals of the end are completed, I inter the papers in a box and the box in the bathroom. Putting the project away has become part of the ritual. When I finish my final edit, I lay the manuscript aside for a few days, then read the whole thing one last time. If it is acceptable, I place it in its box, which I tape shut, hoping the seal is airtight, and attach the original books to the outside for easy reference. I store the box in the maid’s room, or now in the maid’s bathroom since the former is filled. After that I’m done with it and hardly think of my translation again. I move on to the next project.
I create and crate!
Jacques Austerlitz awaits burial. It is that time of year.
I understood from the beginning that what I do isn’t publishable. There’s never been a market for it, and I doubt there ever will be. Literature in the Arab world, in and of itself, isn’t sought after. Literature in translation? Translation of a translation? Why bother?
Actually, I should say that when I started I may have deluded myself into believing that my translations might find a home. That didn’t last long. After all, the dozen or so who wish to read Anna Karenina are usually educated enough to do so in English or French. The two or three who might wish to read it in Arabic would choose a translation from the original Russian, not one done through my chosen system. Translating, not publishing, is what I bet my life on.
Now, you may ask why I am so committed to my translations if I don’t care much about them once they’re crated. Well, I’m committed to the process and not the final product. I know this sounds esoteric, and I dislike sounding so, but it’s the act that inspires me, the work itself. Once the book is done, the wonder dissolves and the mystery is solved. It holds little interest after.
That’s not all, though. In The Book of Disquiet, Pessoa writes: “The only attitude worthy of a superior man is to persist in an activity he recognizes is useless, to observe a discipline he knows is sterile, and to apply certain norms of philosophical and metaphysical thought that he considers utterly inconsequential.”
Although I can’t say that I understand all the implications of such a stance, I have recognized that my translation activity is useless. Yet I persist. The world goes on whether I do what I do. Whether we find Walter Benjamin’s lost suitcase, civilization will march forward and backward, people will trot the globe, wars will rage, lunches will be served. Whether anyone reads Pessoa. None of this art business is of any consequence. It is mere folly.
Vanitas vanitatum, omnia vanitas.
I didn’t believe that when I first started. I wanted my work to matter. Early on, I hoped that someday in the future an enthusiastic Mendelssohn would initiate an Aaliya revival. That hope fed this vanity of human wishes, my blameworthy vanity. Luckily, the dream didn’t last long — it sounds so silly and naive now.