The University of Iowa • International Writing Program – 91° Meridian

Weinberger, page 7

Modernism- at least in English- created extraordinary works in translation because
they were written for modernism: written to be read in the context of modernist
poetry. The cliché that the only good poetry translators are themselves poets is not
necessarily true: the only good translators are avid readers of contemporary poetry
in the translation-language. All the worst translations are done by experts in the
foreign- language who know little or nothing about the poetry alongside which their
translations will be read. Foreign-language academics are largely concerned with
semantical accuracy, rendering supposedly exact meanings into a frequently
colorless or awkward version of the translation-language. They often write as though
the entire twentieth century had not occurred. [This is especially true in the Asian
and Middle Eastern languages.] They champion the best-loved poet of Ruthenia, but
never realize that he sounds in English like bad Tennyson. Poets (or poetry readers)
may be sometimes sloppy in their dictionary-use, but they are preoccupied with what
is different in the foreign author, that which is not already available among writers in
the translation-language, how that difference may be demonstrated, and how the
borders of the possible may be expanded. Bad translations provide examples for
historical surveys; good translations are always a form of advocacy criticism: here is
a writer one ought to be reading and here is the proof.

Translation is an utterly unique genre, but for some reason there is a perennial
tendency to explain it by analogy. A translator is like an actor playing a role, a
musician performing a score, a messenger who sometimes garbles the message. But
translation is such a familiar and intrinsic part of almost any culture that one
wonders why there is this need to resort to analogies: we do not say that baking is
like playing the violin. One analogy, however, is exact: translators are the geeks of
literature.

Translators are invisible people. They are often confused with simultaneous
interpreters- even at bilingual poetry readings. According to a survey of my own
clippings- which I happen to have, but any translator could tell you the same story-
90% of book reviews never mention the translator's name, even when they are
talking about the author's so-called style. When they do, the work is usually summed
up in a single word: excellent, mediocre, energetic, lackluster. Discussions of the
translation longer than one word are nearly always complaints about the translation
of a word or two. When my edition of Jorge Luis Borges' Selected Non-Fictions rather
weirdly won a major award last year- a prize that is normally never given to a
translation or to a dead author- the press releases and news articles did not mention
my name, and even my own publisher took out an ad congratulating Borges, wherever
he is, but not me.

Translators sometimes feel they share in the glory of their famous authors, rather
like the hairdressers of Hollywood stars, but authors tend to find them creepy. As
Isaac Bashevis Singer said:

The translator must be a great editor, a psychologist, a judge of
human taste; if not, his translation will be a nightmare. But why
should a man with such rare qualities become a translator? Why
shouldn't he be a writer himself, or be engaged in a business where
diligent work and high intelligence are well paid? A good translator
must be both a sage and a fool. And where do you get such strange
combinations?

"Why shouldn't he be a writer himself?" is the great and terrible question that hangs
over the head of every translator, and of every author thinking about his translator.
One might say that the avoidance of the question- not the response to it- has been
the recent flood of publications in which translators explain themselves.

Some translators now claim that they are authors (or something like authors), which
strikes me as a Pirandellesque confusion of actor and role (or, closer to our times, a
Reaganesque confusion). It began some twenty-five years ago in the U. S. as a tiny
microcosm of the larger social currents. Translators began to come out of their
isolation and anonymity to form groups, such as the Translation Committee of the
PEN American Center, where they could share the tales of misfortune of their
underpaid, entirely unrecognized, and often exploited occupation. This led to
demands, as a group, for thoroughly justified material concessions: the translator's
name prominently featured on the book and in all notices of the book, a share in the
author's royalties and subsidiary rights (rather than a flat fee- degradingly known as
"work for hire"- with no subsequent rights or income), and some sort of "industry
standard" for translation fees. Simultaneous to the slow acceptance of these
demands was a proliferation of conferences and lectures on translation as an art.
This in turn coincided with the rise of so-called theory in the universities, and there
is, perhaps, no subject in literature more suited for theoretical rumination in its
current modes than translation: the authority of the author, the transformation of the
sign, the tenuousness of signifier and signified, the politics of what is/isn't translated
and how it is translated, the separation of text and author, the crossing (or
impossibility of crossing) cultural barriers, the relativism of the translation as
discourse, the translator as agent of political/cultural hegemony, and so on. All of
which are sometimes interesting in themselves, but generally unhelpful when one
actually translates. [As Borges said, "When I translate Faulkner, I don't think about
the problem of translating Faulkner."]

With this preoccupation with the translator- and the self-evident and now
excessively elaborated corollary that everything is a form of translation- the
translator has suddenly become an important person, and explaining translation a
minor but comfortable academic career and a source of invitations to conferences in
exotic [or not so exotic] climes. Small wonder, then, that the advance guard of
translators and their explainers are now declaring that the translator is an author,
that a translated and original text are essentially indistinguishable (because an
original text is a translation and/or a translation is an original text) and, most
radically, that the sole author of a translation is the translator (who should therefore
have 100% of the rights and royalties to the books).

This strikes me as presumptuous, if not hubristic; and it may well be time to raise
the banner of the translator's essential and endearing anonymity. In the U.S., we can
no longer use the word "craft," which has been taken over by the so-called creative
writing schools, where the "craft" is taught in "workshops." So let us say that
translation is a trade, like cabinet-making or baking or masonry. It is a trade that
any amateur can do, but professionals do better. It is a trade that can be learned,
and should be (though not necessarily institutionally) in order to practice. It is a
trade whose practitioners remain largely unknown to the general public, with the
exception of a few workers of genius. It is a trade that is essential to a literate
society, and-let's raise a banner- whose workers should be better paid.

For me, the translator's anonymity- his role as the Man Without Qualities standing
before the scene, a product of the zeitgeist but not a direct maker of it- is the joy of
translation. One is operating strictly on the level of language, attempting to invent
similar effects, to capture the essential, without the interference of the otherwise
all-consuming ego. It is the greatest education in how to write, as many poets have
learned. It is a prison in the sense that everything is said and must now be re-said,
including all the author's bad moments- the vagaries, the repetitions, the clichés, the
clinkers- while strictly avoiding the temptation to explain or improve. It is a prison,
or a kind of nightmare, because one is in a dialogue with another person whom you
must concede is always right. But it is also a liberation. It is the only time when one
can put words on a page entirely without embarrassment (and embarrassment, it
seems to me, is a greatly underrated force in the creation of literature). The
introspective bookworm happily becomes the voice of Jack London or Jean Genet;
translation is a kind of fantasy life.

Translation is the most anonymous of professions, yet people die for it. It is an
obvious necessity that is considered a problem. (There are never conferences on the
"pleasures of translation.") Yet it is a problem that only arises in the interstices
when one is not casually referring to some translated bit of literature: the Bible,
Homer, Kafka, Proust. . . Could it possibly be that translation essentially has no
problems at all? That it only has successes and failures? There is no text that
cannot be translated; there are only texts that have not yet found their translators. A
translation is not inferior to the original; it is only inferior to other translations,
written or not yet written. There is no definitive translation because a translation
always appears in the context of its contemporary literature, and the realm of the
possible in any contemporary literature is in constant flux- often, it should be
emphasized, altered by the translations that have entered into it. Everything worth
translating should be translated as many times as possible, even by the same
translator, for you can never step into the same original twice. Poetry is that which is
worth translating, and translation is what keeps literature alive. Translation is
change and motion; literature dies when it stays the same, when it has no place to
go.

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