A Translator's Imagination
Might as well collect some random thoughts I’ve been having on translation lately. They’re mostly not my thoughts, they’re other people’s, but that’s never stopped me from writing before. Indeed, that’s what translation is, isn’t it? Writing down other people’s thoughts?
To anchor things somewhat: I have been trying to waste my time in more fulfilling ways lately. I turn to YouTube as a way to occupy my mind while cooking, cleaning, etc. I tend to listen to some not so challenging stuff. I think I have gotten something out of some of the "content" I listen to in the background (I’ve learned a lot about basketball this past year, which is neat) but it’s also a lot of zero calorie fluff that just makes me feel bad about myself when it's over. So I’ve gone back to something I used to do when I was much younger, and instead I've been listening to lectures or discussions between intelligent people. One such video I watched recently that I liked was this one: Damion Searle on the philosophy of translation.
I skimmed the introduction of his book and I might just buy it! Some parts that struck me in this discussion (giving up on bullet points because Notion always breaks my formatting in a billion ways):
Translation as reading! Now this is an interesting idea. The analogy he has is this: “how do you decide what word to use in English? Well, when you read Pride and Prejudice, how do you decide what Mr. Darcy looks like?” This highlights the idea that a good chunk of translation is "unconscious", in this way.
I don’t think this is quite right, of course, since translation still involves some sort of conscious monitor. But, fundamentally, that is the instinct behind what's going on, isn't it? I try to decide how to express what I am “seeing” or hearing, sure, but I don’t decide what I see, or hear. Ever try to see the blue dress as white? By the way, apparently this guy wrote a biography of Rorschach and a book about his test... very translator of him...
I love the example he gives of a translation he is proud of. A character in a novel is reading a newspaper whose name refers to a real place that is also a historical and politically relevant area in Norway (the something something times), with a name that is etymologically related to a an archaic word for a strong wind, and the choice of translation is ultimately “The Northern Herald”. Conveying some sense of heraldry and medieval chivalry. I hear “northern wind” or “nor’easter” too, conveying these grand windy cliffs of the Icelandic sagas. It’s a brilliant impressionistic choice, translating all of the “sense” of the original with none of the literal meaning.
The root of translation is translatio, physically ferrying across and bringing something from point A to point B. Whenever I hear things like this, I am reminded of Julian Jaynes, who says that all metaphors in language ultimately are based on movement in space. Using this metaphor, there’s some famous quote from this famous translator guy Schleiermacher about there being two ways to translate. Either: leave the author alone, and bring the reader to them. Or: leave the reader alone, and bring the author to them (and apparently, this is the bad one). It’s a fun and clever idea. But of course, there is no such distance. Because the translator understands both my language and the target language. I can converse with them, and they can converse with the third person. There is no chasm or river. It's a bridge made of links.
Last interesting insight: Damion Searle's idea of there being two kinds of writers. One has an idea inside of them and they want to let it out — an inward to outward motion. The other is a translator (”a translator’s imagination”) who takes something in and tries to share it (outward to outward? a refraction, a reflection?) I always thought, though, that this how I write, and I admire and relate to the artists with a “translator’s imagination" the most.
When I did write more, especially poetry or lyrics, or even melodies and arrangements, the way things came to me naturally was always through allusions, references, outright stealing if you want to call it that. Any art I have ever made is nothing more than a patchwork of quotations in this way. It’s all a giant web in my mind, I myself am simply the network between these nodes, nowhere in particular. That’s how I’ve always felt. Going back to the idea of “translation as reading”, again this is exactly how writing poetry feels to me. I have the thought, and I just need to figure out the right way to say it. You ever listen to a song and close your eyes and see a whole music video? That kinda feeling.
The more I thought about Searle’s idea, though, the more I wonder if it’s a false distinction, are there any artists who really are of the first type? I don’t know, I certainly can’t imagine it. Maybe the long tradition of artists who saw “visions from God”, literally hallucinating a voice in their head telling them what to write, seemingly from nowhere. Milton, Ramanujan. Or the phenomenon of fiction writers including friends of mine often refer to, where the characters are “alive” and have a voice of their own in their head. And I contrast that with, say, Proust, the essential translator in my head. In La Recherche he talks about his love for English pastoral literature and his attempts to translate it. Proust is all senses, nothing but a bundle of nerves. He is constantly trying to translate a steeple, a face, a piece of music. And in my head this is what I’m always doing, it’s how I see the world. It kind of made me feel a bit more inspired to “translate” in a very broad and metaphorical sense of the word, to think of it as a creative act.
Other random stuff I’ve been watching: I loved the video on that same channel by Shadi Bartsch on the Aeneid! She is so charismatic, funny, and interesting, many insightful ideas about translation that, when she points it out, just seem like honesty and being faithful to the text. I’m not familiar with the Aeneid at all but I found the story “about” the work and its reception to be just as interesting as I’m sure the story is. I hesitated to click because of the title about “translating while female”; I can understand the appeal of this kind of discussion, for example about the Emily Wilson Odyssey translation, but I honestly find it boring and not very insightful. Emily Wilson didn’t want her translation to be categorized as just a “feminist” reading simply because she is a woman, and Shadi Bartsch basically says the same thing. It’s a flattening sort of impulse that I don’t like. But the video was great.
And the way I found this channel originally was Keith Bradley’s brilliant video about Yourcenar’s Memoires de Hadrien, which is a book I carried around with me for nearly half a year and just recently finished a couple months back.
Again, I hesitated to click because of the awful title. I imagined some boring historian “debunkng” the by all accounts brilliant novel for getting minor facts wrong, ignoring the psychological dimensions it is able to uncover beyond just pure facts about an emperor very much shrouded in mystery (or is he, any more than anyone else who did two thousand years ago)? But it was quite the opposite. Keith Bradley starts with what I was just talking about, and he talks about the potential of literature in biography, as well as the history of biography sort of as a literary tradition. But it’s getting late, I have more thoughts on that but maybe I’ll write them later.