{3} In Absent Without Leave, a novella gracefully if not always flawlessly translated by Leila Vennewitz, Böll continues his stern and sometimes merciless probing of the conscience, values, and imperfections of his countrymen.
The translation is a pleasantly fluent one: two chapters of it have already appeared in Playboy magazine.
Rabassa’s translation is a triumph of fluent, gravid momentum, all stylishness and commonsensical virtuosity.
His first four books published in English did not speak with the stunning lyrical precision of this one (the invisible translator is Michael Henry Heim).
Helen Lane’s translation of the title of this book is faithful to Mario Vargas Llosa’s—“Elogio de la Madrastra”—but not quite idiomatic.
The Samurai, a transparent roman à clef, fluently translated by Barbara Bray, chronicles Ms Kristeva’s—and Paris’s—intellectual glory days.
In Stuart Hood’s translation, which flows crisply despite its occasionally disconcerting British accent, Mr Celati’s keen sense of language is rendered with precision.
Often wooden, occasionally careless or inaccurate, it shows all the signs of hurried work and inadequate revision. […] The Spanish original here is 10 words shorter and incomparably more elegant.
The critical lexicon of post-World War II literary journalism is filled with so many terms to indicate the presence or absence of a fluent translation discourse: “crisp,” “elegant,” “flows,” “gracefully,” {4} “wooden.” There is even a group of pejorative neologisms designed to criticize translations that lack fluency, but also used, more generally, to signify badly written prose: “translatese,” “translationese,” “translatorese.” In English, fluent translation is recommended for an extremely wide range of foreign texts—contemporary and archaic, religious and scientific, fiction and nonfiction.
Translationese in a version from Hebrew is not always easy to detect, since the idioms have been familiarised through the Authorized Version.
An attempt has been made to use modern English which is lively without being slangy. Above all, an effort has been made to avoid the kind of unthinking “translationese” which has so often in the past imparted to translated Russian literature a distinctive, somehow “doughy,” style of its own with little relation to anything present in the original Russian.
He is solemnly reverential and, to give the thing an authentic classical smack, has couched it in the lukewarm translatese of one of his own more unurgent renderings.
There is even a recognizable variant of pidgin English known as “translatorese” (“transjargonisation” being an American term for a particular form of it).
Paralysing woodenness (“I am concerned to determine”), the dull thud of translatese (“Here is the place to mention Pirandello finally”) are often the price we more or less willingly pay for access to great thoughts.
A gathering of such excerpts indicates which discursive features produce fluency in an English-language translation and which do not.
A fluent translation is written in English that is current (“modern”) instead of archaic, that is widely used instead of specialized (“jargonisation”), and that is standard instead of colloquial (“slangy”). {5} Foreign words (“pidgin”) are avoided, as are Britishisms in American translations and Americanisms in British translations. Fluency also depends on syntax that is not so “faithful” to the foreign text as to be “not quite idiomatic,” that unfolds continuously and easily (not “doughy”) to insure semantic “precision” with some rhythmic definition, a sense of closure (not a “dull thud”). A fluent translation is immediately recognizable and intelligible, “familiarised,” domesticated, not “disconcerting[ly]” foreign, capable of giving the reader unobstructed “access to great thoughts,” to what is “present in the original.” Under the regime of fluent translating, the translator works to make his or her work “invisible,” producing the illusory effect of transparency that simultaneously masks its status as an illusion: the translated text seems “natural,” i.e., not translated.
The dominance of transparency in English-language translation reflects comparable trends in other cultural forms, including other forms of writing. The enormous economic and political power acquired by scientific research during the twentieth century, the postwar innovations in advanced communications technologies to expand the advertising and entertainment industries and support the economic cycle of commodity production and exchange—these developments have affected every medium, both print and electronic, by valorizing a purely instrumental use of language and other means of representation and thus emphasizing immediate intelligibility and the appearance of factuality.[1] The American poet Charles Bernstein, who for many years worked as a “commercial writer” of various kinds of nonfiction—medical, scientific, technical—observes how the dominance of transparency in contemporary writing is enforced by its economic value, which sets up acceptable “limits” for deviation:
the fact that the overwhelming majority of steady paid employment for writing involves using the authoritative plain styles, if it is not explicitly advertising; involves writing, that is, filled with preclusions, is a measure of why this is not simply a matter of stylistic choice but of social governance: we are not free to choose the language of the workplace or of the family we are born into, though we are free, within limits, to rebel against it.
The authority of “plain styles” in English-language writing was of course achieved over several centuries, what Bernstein describes as {6} “the historical movement toward uniform spelling and grammar, with an ideology that emphasizes nonidiosyncratic, smooth transition, elimination of awkwardness, &c.—anything that might concentrate attention on the language itself” (ibid.:27). In contemporary Anglo-American literature, this movement has made realism the most prevalent form of narrative and free, prose-like verse the most prevalent form of poetry:
in contrast to, say, Sterne’s work, where the look & texture—the opacity—of the text is everywhere present, a neutral transparent prose style has developed in certain novels where the words seem meant to be looked through—to the depicted world beyond the page. Likewise, in current middle of the road poetry, we see the elimination of overt rhyme & alliteration, with metric forms retained primarily for their capacity to officialize as “poetry.”
In view of these cultural trends, it seems inevitable that transparency would become the authoritative discourse for translating, whether the foreign text was literary or scientific/technical. The British translator J.M. Cohen noticed this development as early as 1962, when he remarked that “twentieth-century translators, influenced by science-teaching and the growing importance attached to accuracy […] have generally concentrated on prose-meaning and interpretation, and neglected the imitation of form and manner” (Cohen 1962:35). Cohen also noticed the domestication involved here, “the risk of reducing individual authors’ styles and national tricks of speech to a plain prose uniformity,” but he felt that this “danger” was avoided by the “best” translations (ibid.:33). What he failed to see, however, was that the criterion determining the “best” was still radically English. Translating for “prose-meaning and interpretation,” practicing translation as simple communication, rewrites the foreign text according to such English-language values as transparency, but entirely eclipses the translator’s domesticating work—even in the eyes of the translator.
[1]
These cultural and social developments have been described by various commentators. My sense of them is informed especially by Mandel 1975, McLuhan 1964, Horkheimer and Adorno 1972, and Baudrillard 1983. Instrumental conceptions of language are of course not unique to the post-World War II period; they date back to antiquity in the west and have influenced translation theories at least since Augustine (Robinson 1991:50–54).
[2]
Holden 1991: Chap. 1 offers a similar assessment of contemporary American poetry, although from a “centrist” position. For the historical development of transparent discourse in English-language poetry, see Easthope 1983.