Excerpts from Dudley Fitts’s essay, “The Poetic Nuance,” reprinted by permission from On Translation edited by Reuben A.Brower, Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, copyright © 1959 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College.
Excerpts from Ramon Guthrie’s poetry and translations, used by permission of Dartmouth College. Eugenio Montale’s poem, “Mottetti VI,” is reprinted by permission from Tutte le poesie edited by Giorgio Zampa, copyright © 1984 by Arnoldo Mondadori Editore SpA, Milano.
Excerpts from the works of Ezra Pound: The ABC of Reading, all rights reserved; Literary Essays, copyright © 1918, 1920, 1935 by Ezra Pound; The Letters of Ezra Pound 1907–1941, copyright © 1950 by Ezra Pound; Selected Poems, copyright © 1920, 1934, 1937 by Ezra Pound; The Spirit of Romance, copyright © 1968 by Ezra Pound; Translations, copyright © 1954, 1963 by Ezra Pound. Used by permission of New Directions Publishing Corporation and Faber & Faber Ltd. Previously unpublished material by Ezra Pound, copyright © 1983 and 1995 by the Trustees of the Ezra Pound Literary Property Trust; used by permission of New Directions Publishing Corporation and Faber & Faber Ltd, agents.
The tables, “U.S. Book Exports, 1990,” “U.S. Book Exports to Major Countries, 1989–1990,” and “World Translation Publications: From Selected Languages, 1982–1984.” Reprinted (as Tables 1 and 2) from the {xii} 5 July 1991 issue of Publishers Weekly, published by Cahners Publishing Company, a division of Reed Publishing USA. Copyright © 1991 by Reed Publishing USA.
The Best Seller List for Fiction from The New York Times Book Review, 9 July 1967, copyright © 1967 by The New York Times Company. Reprinted by permission.
Excerpts from the agreement between myself and Farrar, Straus & Giroux for the translation of Delirium by Barbara Alberti, used by permission of Farrar, Straus & Giroux, Inc.
Grateful acknowledgement is made to the following journals, where some of this material appeared in earlier versions: Criticism, Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies, SubStance, Talisman: A Journal of Contemporary Poetry and Poetics, Textual Practice, To: A Journal of Poetry, Prose, and the Visual Arts, and TTR Traduction, Terminologie, Rédaction: Etudes sur le texte et ses transformations. An earlier version of chapter 4 appeared in my anthology, Rethinking Translation: Discourse, Subjectivity, Ideology (Routledge, 1992). My work was supported in part by a Research and Study Leave, a Summer Research Fellowship, and a Grant in Aid from Temple University. My thanks to Nadia Kravchenko, for expertly preparing the typescript and computer disks, and to Don Hartman, for assisting in the production process.
The graphs displaying patterns in translation publishing (Figures 1 and 2) were prepared by Chris Behnam of Key Computer Services, New York City.
All unattributed translations in the following pages are mine.
Come la sposa di ogni uomo non si sottrae a una teoria del tradurre (Milo De Angelis), I am reduced to an inadequate expression of my gratitude to Lindsay Davies, who has taught me much about English, and much about the foreign in translation.
Chapter 1. Invisibility
I see translation as the attempt to produce a text so transparent that it does not seem to be translated. A good translation is like a pane of glass. You only notice that it’s there when there are little imperfections— scratches, bubbles. Ideally, there shouldn’t be any. It should never call attention to itself.
“Invisibility” is the term I will use to describe the translator’s situation and activity in contemporary Anglo-American culture. It refers to two mutually determining phenomena: one is an illusionistic effect of discourse, of the translator’s own manipulation of English; the other is the practice of reading and evaluating translations that has long prevailed in the United Kingdom and the United States, among other cultures, both English and foreign-language. A translated text, whether prose or poetry, fiction or nonfiction, is judged acceptable by most publishers, reviewers, and readers when it reads fluently, when the absence of any linguistic or stylistic peculiarities makes it seem transparent, giving the appearance that it reflects the foreign writer’s personality or intention or the essential meaning of the foreign text—the appearance, in other words, that the translation is not in fact a translation, but the “original.” The illusion of transparency is an effect of fluent discourse, of the translator’s effort to insure easy readability by adhering to current usage, maintaining continuous syntax, fixing a precise meaning. What is so remarkable here is that this illusory effect conceals the numerous conditions under which the translation is made, starting with the translator’s crucial intervention in the foreign text. The more fluent the translation, the {2} more invisible the translator, and, presumably, the more visible the writer or meaning of the foreign text.
The dominance of fluency in English-language translation becomes apparent in a sampling of reviews from newspapers and periodicals. On those rare occasions when reviewers address the translation at all, their brief comments usually focus on its style, neglecting such other possible questions as its accuracy, its intended audience, its economic value in the current book market, its relation to literary trends in English, its place in the translator’s career. And over the past fifty years the comments are amazingly consistent in praising fluent discourse while damning deviations from it, even when the most diverse range of foreign texts is considered.
Take fiction, for instance, the most translated genre worldwide. Limit the choices to European and Latin American writers, the most translated into English, and pick examples with different kinds of narratives—novels and short stories, realistic and fantastic, lyrical and philosophical, psychological and political. Here is one possible list: Albert Camus’s The Stranger (1946), Françoise Sagan’s Bonjour Tristesse (1955), Heinrich Böll’s Absent Without Leave (1965), Italo Calvino’s Cosmicomics (1968), Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude (1970), Milan Kundera’s The Book of Laughter and Forgetting (1980), Mario Vargas Llosa’s In Praise of the Stepmother (1990), Julia Kristeva’s The Samurai (1991), Gianni Celati’s Appearances (1992), Adolfo Bioy Casares’s A Russian Doll (1992). Some of these translations enjoyed considerable critical and commercial success in English; others made an initial splash, then sank into oblivion; still others passed with little or no notice. Yet in the reviews they were all judged by the same criterion—fluency. The following selection of excerpts comes from various British and American periodicals, both literary and mass-audience; some were written by noted critics, novelists, and reviewers:
Stuart Gilbert’s translation seems an absolutely splendid job. It is not easy, in translating French, to render qualities of sharpness or vividness, but the prose of Mr Gilbert is always natural, brilliant, and crisp.
The style is elegant, the prose lovely, and the translation excellent.