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Babel now
Susan Sontag
12/06/2003

The world as India

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To translate means many things, among them: to circulate, to transport, to
disseminate, to explain, to make (more) accessible. By literary translation
we mean, we could mean, the translation of the small percentage of published
books actually worth reading: that is to say, worth rereading. I shall argue
that a proper consideration of the art of literary translation is
essentially a claim for the value of literature itself. Beyond the obvious
need for the translator’s facilitations in creating stock for literature as
a small, prestigious import-export business, beyond the indispensable role
that translation has in the construction of literature as a competitive
sport, played both nationally and internationally (with rivalries, teams and
lucrative prizes) – beyond the mercantile and the agonistic and ludic
incentives for doing translation lies an older, frankly evangelical
incentive, more difficult to avow in these self-consciously impious times.
In what I call the evangelical incentive, the purpose of translation is to
enlarge the readership of a book deemed to be important. It assumes that
some books are discernibly better than other books, that literary merit
exists in a pyramidal shape, and it is imperative for the works near the top
to become available to as many as possible, which means to be widely
translated, and as frequently retranslated as is feasible. Clearly, such a
view of literature assumes that a rough consensus can be reached on which
works are essential. It does not entail thinking the consensus – or canon –
is fixed for all time and cannot be modified.
At the top of the pyramid are the books regarded as scripture: indispensable
or essential exoteric knowledge which, by definition, invites translation.
(Probably the most linguistically influential translations have been
translations of the Bible: St Jerome, Luther, Tyndale, the Authorized
Version). Translation is then first of all making better known what deserves
to be better known – because it is improving, deepening, exalting; because
it is an indispensable legacy from the past; because it is a contribution to
knowledge, sacred or other. In a more secular register, translation was also
thought to bring a benefit to the translator: translating was a valuable
cognitive – and ethical – workout.
In the era when it is proposed that computers – “translating machines” –
will soon be able to perform most translating tasks, what we call literary
translation perpetuates the traditional sense of what translation entails.
The new view is that translation is the finding of equivalents; or, to vary
the metaphor, that a translation is a problem, for which solutions can be
devised. In contrast, the old understanding is that translation is the
making of choices, conscious choices, choices not simply between the stark
dichotomies of good and bad, correct and incorrect, but among a more complex
dispersion of alternatives, such as “good” versus “better” and “better”
versus “best”, not to mention such impure alternatives as “old-fashioned”
versus “trendy”, “vulgar” versus “pretentious”, and “abbreviated” versus
“wordy”.
Translating, which is here seen as an activity of choosing in the larger
sense, was a profession of individuals who were the bearers of a certain
inward culture. To translate thoughtfully, painstakingly, ingeniously,
respectfully, is a measure of the translator’s fealty to the enterprise of
literature itself.
Choices that might be thought of as merely linguistic always imply ethical
standards as well, which has made the activity of translating itself the
vehicle of such values as integrity, responsibility, fidelity, boldness and
humility. The ethical understanding of the task of the translator originated
in the awareness that translation is basically an impossible task, if what
is meant is that the translator is able to take up the text of an author
written in one language, and deliver it, intact, without loss, into another
language. Obviously, this is not what is being stressed by those who await
impatiently the supersession of the dilemmas of the translator by the
equivalencings of better, more ingenious translating machines. Literary
translation is a branch of literature – anything but a mechanical task.
But what makes translation so complex an undertaking is that it responds to
a variety of aims. There are demands which arise from the nature of
literature as a form of communication. There is the mandate, with a work
regarded as essential, to make it known to the widest possible audience.
There is the difficulty of passing from one language to another; and of the
intransigence of certain texts. For there is something inherent in the work
quite outside the intentions or awareness of its author, which emerges as
the cycle of translations begins – a quality that, for want of a better
word, we have to call translatability.
This nest of complex questions is often reduced to the perennial debate
among translators – the debate about literalness – that dates back at least
to ancient Rome, when Greek literature was translated into Latin, and
continues to exercise translators in every country (and with respect to
which there are a variety of national traditions and biases). The oldest
theme of the discussion of translations is the role of accuracy and
fidelity. Surely there must have been translators in the ancient world whose
standard was strict literal fidelity (and damn euphony!), a position
defended with dazzling obstinacy by Vladimir Nabokov in his Englishing of
Eugene Onegin. How else to explain the bold insistence of St Jerome himself
(331–420), the first intellectual (as far as I know) from the ancient world
to reflect extensively on the task of translation, that the inevitable
result of aiming at a faithful reproduction of the author’s words and images
is the sacrifice of meaning and of grace?
This is from the preface Jerome wrote to his translation into Latin of the
Chronicle of Eusebius. (He translated it in 381–2, while he was living in
Constantinople in order to take part in the Council – six years before he
settled in Bethlehem, to improve his knowledge of Hebrew, and almost a
decade before he began the epochal task of translating the Hebrew Bible into
Latin.) Of this early translation from Greek, Jerome wrote:
"It has long been the practice of learned men to exercise their minds by
rendering into Latin the words of Greek writers and, what is more difficult,
to translate poems by illustrious authors though trammelled by the further
requirements of verse. It was thus that our Cicero translated whole books of
Plato . . . and later amused himself with Xenophon. In this latter work the
golden river of eloquence again and again meets with obstacles, around which
its waters break and foam to such an extent that persons unacquainted with
the original would not believe they were reading Cicero’s words. And no
wonder! It is hard to follow another writer’s lines. It is an arduous task
to preserve felicity and grace unimpaired in a translation. A writer has
chosen a word that forcibly expressed a given thought; I have no word of my
own to convey the meaning; and while I am seeking to satisfy the sense I may
go a long way round and accomplish but a small distance of my journey. Then
we must take into account the ins and outs of transposition, the variations
in cases, the diversity of figures, and, lastly, the peculiarities of the
native idiom of the language. A literal translation sounds absurd; if,
however, I am obliged to change either the orders or the words themselves, I
shall appear to have forsaken the duty of a translator."
(Translated W. H. Fremantle, 1892 )
What is striking about this self-justifying passage is Jerome’s concern that
his readers understand just how daunting a task literary translation is.
Later in the same preface, he voices a lament that anyone who has tried his
or her hand at translation will recognize. At this point he is talking about
the Hebrew Bible, the so-called Old Testament, and – anticipating his future
labours – the greater difficulty (for this we must take Jerome’s word) of
translating Biblical Hebrew into Latin than into Greek:
"What can be more grave than Solomon’s words? What more finished than Job? .
. . When we read these in Greek they have some meaning; when in Latin they
are utterly incoherent. But if any one thinks that the grace of language
does not suffer through translation, let him render Homer word for word into
Latin. I will go farther and say that, if he will translate this author into
the prose of his own language, the order of the words will seem ridiculous
and the most eloquent of poets almost dumb . . . ."
What is the best way to deal with this inherent impossibility of
translation? For Jerome there can be no doubt how to proceed, as he explains
over and over in the prefaces he wrote to his various translations. In the
letter to Pammachius, written in 395, he declares that the only proper way
to translate is
"keeping the sense but altering the form by adapting both the metaphors and
the words to suit our own language. I have not deemed it necessary to render
word for word but I have reproduced the general style and emphasis . . . ."
Later, in the same letter – and one must assume Jerome is replying to
critics, that there were many critics and cavillers – he declares defiantly:
“A literal translation from one language into another obscures the sense”.
If this makes the translator a co-author of the book, so be it. “The truth
is”, Jerome writes in his preface to Eusebius, “that I have partly
discharged the office of a translator and partly that of a writer”.
The matter could hardly be put with greater boldness or relevance to
contemporary reflections. How far is the translator empowered to adapt –
that is, recreate – the text in the language into which the work is being
translated? If word-by-word fidelity and literary excellence in the new
language are incompatible, how “free” can a responsible translation be? Is
it the first task of the translator to efface the foreignness of a text, and
to recast it according to the norms of the new language? There is no serious
translator who does not fret about such problems: like classical ballet,
literary translation is an activity with unrealistic standards, that is,
standards so exacting that they are bound to generate dissatisfaction, a
sense of being rarely up to the mark, among ambitious practitioners. Dancers
are trained to strive for the not entirely chimerical goal of perfection:
exemplary, error-free expressiveness. In a literary translation, there can
only be a superior, never a perfect, performance. Translation, by
definition, always entails some loss of the original substance. All
translations are sooner or later revealed as imperfect, and eventually, even
in the case of the most exemplary performances, come to be regarded as
provisional. So, again like classical ballet, literary translation is an art
of repertory. Works deemed major are regularly redone.
St Jerome was doing translations – from Hebrew and from Greek – into Latin.
The language into which he was translating was, and was to remain for many
centuries, an international language. I am writing in the new international
language, estimated to be the mother tongue of more than 350 million people,
and spoken as a second language by tens of millions of people throughout the
world. This lecture was given and is being published in England, where the
language in which I write was born. I shall take the simple-minded view that
we are not divided by a common language, as the old quip has it. And in my
country, we don’t call the language most of us speak “American” (for all
that the title page of the French translations of my books say “traduit de l
’américain”. Each day I sit down to write I marvel at the richness of the
thousand-year-old language I am privileged to use. But my pride in English
is somewhat at odds with my awareness of another kind of linguistic
privilege: to write in a language that everyone, in principle, is obliged
to – desires to – understand.
Though seemingly identical now with the world dominance of the colossal and
unique superpower of which I am a citizen, the initial ascendancy to
international lingua franca of the tongue in which Shakespeare wrote was
something of a fluke. One of the key moments was the adoption in the 1920s
(I believe) of English as the international language of civilian aviation.
For planes to circulate with safety, those who flew them and those who
directed their flight had to have a language in common. More powerfully, and
I think, decisively, the ubiquity of computers – the vehicle of another form
of transport: mental transport – has required a dominant language. While the
instructions on your interface are likely to be in your native language,
going online and using search engines – that is, circulating internationally
on the computer – requires a knowledge of English.
English has become the common language that unifies linguistic disparities.
India has sixteen “official languages” (actually, many more vernacular
languages are spoken), and there is no way that India, given its present
composition and diversity, which includes 180 million Muslims, is ever going
to agree to, say, the principal official language, Hindi, becoming the
national language. The language that could be a national language would
precisely not be a native one, but the language of the conqueror, of the
colonial era. Just because it is alien, foreign, it can become the unifying
language of a diverse people: the only language that all Indians might have
in common not only is, it has to be, English.
The computer has only reinforced the preeminence of English in our global
India. Surely the most interesting linguistic phenomena of our era are, on
the one hand, the disappearance of many lesser languages – that is,
languages spoken by very small, isolated, impoverished peoples – and the
unique success of English, which now has a status unlike any other language
used on the planet. English is now advancing in every part of the world,
through the dominance of English-speaking media – which means media in which
English is spoken with an American accent – and the need for business people
and scientists to communicate in a common tongue.
We live in a world that is, in several important respects, both mired in the
most banal nationalisms and radically post-national. The trade barriers may
fall, money may become multinational (like the dollar, which is the currency
in several Latin American countries, and, of course, the euro). But there is
one intractable feature of our lives which roots us in the old boundaries
that advanced capitalism, advanced science and technology, and advanced
imperial dominance (American-style) find so encumbering. That is the fact
that we speak so many different languages. Hence, the necessity of an
international language. And what more plausible candidate than English?