“I don’t want to read a book in translation,” my friend declared. “It’s not as good as reading the original.”

I put down my beer with a thud. I couldn’t even reply. The comment seemed to confirm a depressing statistic I had read in The Economist: “When it comes to international literature, English readers are the worst-served in the Western world. Only 3% of the books published annually in America and Britain are translated from another language; fiction’s slice is less than 1%.”

I wanted to pull out a copy of Anna Karenina—sorry, Анна Каренина—and show my friend the Cyrillic text. I ought to have said, “You mean reading a book you can’t understand is better than reading one you can?” Or, “I can barely correct my brother’s Spanish grammar, and I sure can’t read New Finnish Grammar unless it’s in English.”

Fortunately (or not), I had the self-restraint to change the subject.

America, go to our bookstores and look at the “Classics” sections. Homer,Cervantes, Dante, Flaubert, Borges. We owe our literary history to these authors and the intermediaries—Robert Fagles, Edith Grossman, Allen Mandelbaum, Lydia Davis, Andrew Hurley—who have carried the texts to our Anglophone shores.

It doesn’t matter how many MFA programs we have. It doesn’t matter how brilliant our living writers might be. Our own literature would still be barren without those foreign incursions. Even our earliest English classic isBeowulf, and I read it in Seamus Heaney’s resounding, earthy translation. Ask a budding writer if they’ve read Bolaño, and they’ll most likely nod enthusiastically, half-aware that Natasha Wimmer made possible their enjoyment of The Savage Detectives and 2666.

Among the alarmingly low number of publishers who will do books from other countries, we have Open Letter, Europa, Other Press, and a new player: Peirene Press. The wonderful thing about Peirene is that, although it publishes exclusively literature in translation, it focuses first and foremost on sharing a great story with each book. Their novellas take as little time to read as it does to watch a film, and the publisher holds events to discuss each book. She's a salonniere, and she's a success. She’s actually getting people to read something they might avoid if they knew it was “foreign.”

America, there’s a new direction for us. We don’t need relatable authors; we need strange and wonderful and new stories. I’d rather talk about good books than nice authors any day. Let’s skip the usual crop of MFA workshop pieces about the Brooklyn Promenade.

America, let’s publish Icelandic writers (Steinar Bragi!) and Argentinian writers (Pola Oloixarac!) and Mauritanian writers (Ananda Devi!) and make them worth reading. I wouldn’t know where on the map Iran is, or why I’d want to visit, unless I’d read Censoring an Iranian Love Story. I want to read something nobody in America would risk writing. America, let’s open our eyes to the rest of the world.

America, let’s make foreign literature sexy.

image credit: redsurproducciones.blogspot.com

Translators can be any number of things: imaginative remakers, clever conduits. They are invariably people who try to share the sense of the original but do so wrongly, in goodbad faith. Such is Antigonick, Anne Carson's new translation of Sophokles's Antigone, a version for people who don't read Greek, don’t veil themselves in the manner of the ladies of antiquity, are not eligible members of the nonsensible chorus, but have read Hegel’s remarks on unmatched justices and (snotty children) assume some things about matching them right.

Antigone, the character, is a hard target. She’s moved so much that she no longer moves at all, undead but buried and constantly dug up again, a fixture of antiquated academic culture obsessed with dust. There are paintings in Antigonick on nice vellum pages that overlay the text—which seem to be handdrawn by Carson herself. Bianca Stone drew them in fact, while Robert Currie made text and image look nice together.

What information from the Greek source text is relevant? How can we relate to Antigone, who chanted a strange language and opposed her city's laws?

The problem of translation is the problem of meaning is the problem of wanting to share some sense in a world where, oh sweet gnarly luck, sharing said sense is like kissing a salt lick. Understandably, translators translate in distinct ways, but always to differing levels of failure. They can be faithful, trying hard to render, fideliciously, the flesh of the text body they're working. Or they can do as Carson does for Antigone: Paraphrase Beckett. Tell Kreon to fuck himself. Do what’s right. Then, die.

I’m sorry, there was something about justice?

Image: Black and WTF

In Granta, Jaspreet Singh recently described how her mother, in translating the daughter’s book from English to Punjabi, “preserved the emotional impact” of the fourteen stories she had written, up until the final piece, which read very differently.

My mother translated the story I never wrote...This new fourteenth story was my mother’s story and not mine. No translator, no one has a right to change my story, I thought. Not even my mother.

It is a strange and unsettling thought that a translator might deliberately or, worse, unconsciously present us with a story only tangentially related to the original-language text. But what, exactly, do we feel if we realize that we've read a false or unfaithful translation? Loss? Rage? What exactly have we lost, if we cannot read the original, and where should we direct our anger, if we have been given something that otherwise we would not have had at all?

Translation is the last remaining vestige of rewriting; it is a career not unlike that of being a scribe in medieval times or a typist in the twentieth century. “There’s nothing glamorous about it,” my friend said of working as a translator at UNESCO in Paris. “I switch the words from French to English, make sure it sounds logical, and then pass it on to my reviser.” 

Readers (and even editors!) often assume that a fluid translation is accurate, and reviewers consistently declare English-language books from abroad "ably translated," without much thought given to the underlying process. Even when the translation is read and annotated by the publisher, questions about the text are usually posed to the translator, rather than being answered by looking at the original. So rogue translations are all the more discomfiting when their dissemblances are discovered.

If the rewriting Jaspreet Singh’s mother performed feels like theft, then where do you draw the line between transducing something and traducing it? Are all translators thieves?

I detest the Italian adage “traduttore, traditore” ("translator, traitor" would be the most literal rendering). There is something available now in the target language whereas previously there had been nothing. That is no betrayal; indeed, it’s a gift. Sometimes the translation is for the better, as when writers like Paul Auster find themselves more famous abroad than at home. Really, attempting to moralize this recalls the recent (and inconclusive) brouhaha over facts and truth in John D’Agata and Jim Fingal’s The Lifespan of a Fact.

I don’t think a question so polarizing can be answered, and the futility of the thought itself only merits satire—as in this piece from Dezső Kosztolányi’s Kornél Esti, translated by Bernard Adams, about a kleptomaniac translator:

In the course of translation our misguided colleague had, illegally and improperly, appropriated from the English text £1,579,251, together with 177 gold rings, 947 pearl necklaces, 181 pocket watches, 309 earrings, and 435 suitcases...Where did he put these chattels and real estate, which, after all, existed only on paper, in the realm of the imagination, and what was his purpose in stealing them?

image credit: Igor Kopelnitsky, corbisimages.com

Writing a diatribe on my doubts and fears of reading Haruki Murakami's1Q84 in English must've been cathartic, because I read the whole damn thing over the New Year's holiday. 925 pages in seven days. Estimating it took me over 14 months to read 1,650 pages of Japanese text, the time practically flew.

Overall, it's quite similar to Murakami's original, though I find the lack of humor magnified in English. I'm pinning this on the omniscient third-person POV, a departure from his well honed first-person narration. Not to say it reads blandly: both translators, Jay Rubin and Philip Gabriel, have some fun. Like this naughty gem from Book 1 Chapter 22:

Tengo saw admiration in the eyes of several of his female students, and he realized that he was seducing these seventeen- or eighteen-year-olds through mathematics. His eloquence was a kind of intellectual foreplay. Mathematical functions stroked their backs, theorems sent warm breath into their ears. Since meeting Fuka-Eri, however, Tengo no longer felt sexual interest in such girls, nor did he have any urge to smell their pajamas.

Needless to say, I immediately referred to my own translation:

Tengo looked around the classroom, at the 17- and 18-year-old girls staring at him with awe and respect. He realized he could seduce them by channeling mathematics. His speech was a kind of intellectual foreplay. The functions were a stroke on the back, the theorems warm breath in their ears. But when he met Fukaeri, he lost all sexual interest in these girls. He didn't care to think how they smelled in pajamas.

Here's a gem for you language buffs: 知的な前戯 (“intellectual foreplay”). But I gotta give it to Rubin, hooking in action verbs (“functions stroked”, “theorems sent”) that I glossed over. And that last sentence...no comment.

Rubin and Gabriel split translation duties on Murakami's short-story collection Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman. But, as Gabriel tells The Atlantic,1Q84 is their first collaborative effort on a single novel. Which might explain a few funny discrepancies.

Like the name of Tengo's favorite bar. Murakami's characters internalize their thoughts (even in third-person), and drink whilst thinking. When they're not pouring drams into bedside tumblers, they're out at some bar. In 1Q84, Tengo frequents this one joint near a Kinokuniya (paperbacks at the bar, something I'm emulating in 2012) no less than three times. Murakami calls it 「麦頭」(supplied with tiny furigana adjacent to identify its unique pronunciation), which I translated as “Wheat-Head”. If we're getting nitty-gritty, the first character means “wheat” and is used on beer labels, and the latter “head,” so it could signify the frothy foam atop a draft. Rubin calls it “Barleyhead.” Fine, I'll bite.

In Book Three (Gabriel's translation), this becomes “Mugiatama” (the phonetic translation of those characters), which Gabriel derives into “Ears of Wheat”! I checked the Japanese text and my translation and, yeah, same joint. Tengo's even quaffing the same draft (Carlsberg). Next time he visits, midway through Book Three, Gabriel leaves it as “Mugiatama.”

Finally, that whole “cat town” vs. “town of cats” drama that set me off againstreading 1Q84 in English. Rubin's translation flows predictably enough, like this exchange:

“Did you go to a town of cats,” Fuka-Eri asked Tengo, as if pressing him to reveal a truth.
“Me?!”
“You went to your town of cats. Then came back on a train.”

My own translation practically mirrored this:

"you went to cat town" she said to Tengo as if challenging him.
"I did??"
"you went to your cat town. then you took the train back home"

The original Japanese is 「咎めるように言った」; I called it “said as if challenging” and think Rubin's poetic nudge is a tad excessive. Yet several chapters later, Rubin translates:

“You'll be leaving tomorrow,” Fuka-Eri asked.
Tengo nodded. “Tomorrow morning I have to take the train and go to the cat town again.”
“You're going to the cat town,” Fuka-Eri asked without expression.
“You will be waiting here,” Tengo asked. Living with Fuka-Eri, he had become used to asking questions without question marks.

Imagine my surprise! I feel this reads so much more naturally, calling this far-flung location “cat town.” My translation:

“you're going tomorrow” Fukaeri inquired, looking at him.
Tengo nodded. “I'll take a train tomorrow morning. I have to go back to cat town once again.”
“you're gonna go to cat town” Fukaeri replied, expressionlessly.
“You'll wait here,” asked Tengo. Living with Fukaeri, he'd picked up the habit of leaving the question-marks off his questions.

And several dozen pages later, in Book Three, Gabriel dispenses with “town of cats” mentions altogether, utilizing only “cat town” in Tengo's thoughts and in a letter from Fuka-Eri to him. Best I can do for a response is 「当たり前」, which in slangified English might go “obvs.”

Photo: Mr. Fee