The fine line between faithfulness and kakozelia
I introduce myself, I'm Corina, "young
virgin woman". At least that's what Greek readers understand when reading my
name, "Corina"; just the same way
they see "the best purpose" in Aristotle
and "supplanters" in the Israelite
people. We may agree that etymological interpretation applied to names is as
absurd as the literal translation of proverbs, idioms and puns.
Following a logical reasoning we may deduce that, except
for such words, there isn't any impediment to literally translate everything.
Nevertheless, more than five hundred years ago, in 1532, Juan Luis Vives
proved us literal translation is impossible: "there isn't any language rich and varied enough so as to have an exact
correspondence with the idioms and proms of even the weakest and poorest" (Vega,
1994: 115). The Valencian philosopher urged us to distrust synonymy, claiming
that the correspondence of a limited range of lexicon with an endless amount of
ideas is utopian. Once he had proved that, he made a distinction between the
only two possible kinds of translation: interpretation and version. The first
one, which sacrifices part of the original meaning, refers to literal
translation. The second one, which changes some phrases, keeps the original
idea transmitted by the author.
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Almost at the same time, in 1540, at the other side of the Pyrenees, Étienne
Dolet published the five essential
requirements to be a good translator (Vega, 1994: 119-121). The French
writer went deeply into the hard decision, between following the original text word by word or respecting its meaning,
every writer must take. He claimed that good translators must be skilful enough
to masterly carry out translation tasks in both ways and it is indispensable to
be proficient in both languages to
be able to do it. On the one hand, if the translator's intention is to reproduce the text word by word, a
command of, above all, the target language must be achieved. On the other hand,
if what he wishes is to cause the same
effect in the readers the author intended to provoke in the original text,
he will have to master the author's language. The other three requirements published
by Dolet compel good translators not to translate literally, not to use learned or infrequent words and, above all, to always
translate in the pursuit of speech
harmony. In conclusion, the French humanist emphasized that, in order to
get a delightful and fruitful translation which gets the reader closer to the
text in a natural way, it's indispensable, moreover, to be proficient in
linguistics.
This same last requirement was claimed by Fray Luis de León in 1561: "uses
give charm, gracefulness and courtesy to what, in another language and to other
people, could seem very coarse" (López García, 1996: 77-79). That is, good
translators must always respect each culture's ways and customs. A western text
together with its ways and customs literally translated into an eastern
language would result in a disastrous translation or, at least, it would imply
a torture to the reader. In 1709, the French translator, father of Les
belles infidèles, Nicolas Perrot d'Ablancourt, retook the concept up,
delighting us with a rather visual comparison: "ambassadors usually dress up according to the fashion which rules in
the countries where they have been sent to because they fear looking ridiculous
to the eyes of the people they want to please" (Vega, 1994: 162).
A century afterwards, in 1813, Friedrich Schleiermacher, got beyond the
division between interpretation and version. Splitting hairs, the German
theologist held that not all versions are equal. He claimed that version is a
movement which can be done in two opposite directions: "you bring either the author to the reader's language or the reader to
the author's" (Ortega y Gasset, 1937: 366).
José Ortega y Gasset followed Schleiermacher's idea. The highly reputed
Spanish linguistic also went deep into translation semantic and, in 1937, he
proved there is one case, that is science, where literal translation is not
only convenient but indispensable. His argument was that scientific language
can't be considered a language but a pseudo-language, which is terminology (Ortega
y Gasset, 1937: 363). We'll draw the same conclusion if we think that the
etymology of scientific lexicon,
which spread from the country of the discovery or the invention to the others,
has nothing to do with the etymology of words regarding tools for eating or cutting, which appeared together with pre-historical
men's needs in different parts of the world at the same time.
The following year, in 1938, Cèsar August Jordana reopened the debate
about the impossibility of literal translation, claiming that a distance from the original is needed to
get an accurate translation (Jordana,
1938: 368). In 1944, another highly regarded Catalan writer, Josep Carner subscribed
to the impossibility of literal translation philosophy and went even further, ranting and raving about some dictionaries,
asserting that those bilingual ignore, at least, one language and that pocket dictionaries
distort not only your pocket (Carner, 1944:193-194). In the context of Catalan
renaissance and post-civil-war hunger many "bilinguals" saw the possibility of
preventing dying from starvation, in translating. Carner considered that both
those sudden and hungry pseudo-translators,
and the basic dictionaries they used for their "work" could only result in mediocre translations. Carner praised
translating which kept meaning and was made by vocational translators, and
condemned those word-by-word ones, written by so-called translators newly
arrived to his profession.
Already in democracy, in 1991, Joaquim Mallafré took up the two ways of
translating and the analysis of their differences between ways and customs again.
He focused on the historical distance between the original and its translation
and distinguished two possible ways of translating: "artistic translation" and
"didactic translation" (Mallafré, 1991: 295-297). On the one hand, the Catalan
philosopher claimed that "artistic translation" emphasises the reader's
language, pursuits provoking the same effect the author achieved and it's the
most convenient translation for close languages and times. On the other hand,
Mallafré held that "didactic translation" stresses the author's language and
it's the most suitable translation to understand a world from remote times and
languages. In other words, the Catalan translator found a new reason to take
into consideration when choosing a translating way. Just like Dolet, Fray Luis
de León and Ablancourt did, Mallafré emphasised on the need of translators'
bilingualism. To be able to choose the most suitable translating method, good
translators must perfectly understand both source and target languages (Mallafré,
1991: 298-303). As we can see, translating meaning instead of words has a
historical origin, which is really far from contemporary linguistics.
That conception was first documented in Cicero's legendary The best kind of orator in
46 b.C., (Vega, 1994: 77). A hundred years later, another Roman poet, Horace,
repeated Cicero's precept for intelligent interpreters in his Ars poetica: "Don't try to interpret, accurate
interpreter, word by word" (Vega, 1994: 85). Four hundred years after that,
Saint Jerome of Stridon wrote the same rule in his Letter to Pammachius (Vega,
1994: 82-86), mythical epistle where the father of The Bible defends himself from the accusations of adapting words
and translating sense-by-sense instead of doing it word-by-word "according to the precepts of literality".
Believe it or not, 21st-century
translators suffer from the same kind of criticism as those living at the beginning
of the 5th. You only have to go to the cinema to watch a film with subtitles and
have a language-neophyte neighbour -one of those who attend
a two-hour-a-week linguistic-immersion English course and say they know their way around because they
have taken a low-cost flight to London on a one-weekend trip-. High
chances are that he will sneer at the first "¿Me
puede traer la cuenta?", addressing the translator some derogatory
comment -as if he could listen-. The harsh reality is that
translating has suffered from the harassment of "judges" and "opiniologists" for more than two
thousand years. Sadly, the world is packed with them; just watch a
Madrid-Barcelona in any Spanish "tapas bar"
and you will find out a legion of would-be soccer coaches discussing about how
the performance of first-division footballers could be improved.
Back to the "film critic", he may have realised that the photogram
offers a very small number of characters and he may actually have got indignant
about it because the translated phrase is shorter than the original. However, if he had ventured onto the
winding, steep, rough paths of
translation, he would have noticed that Romance languages don't feel "responsible" for interpersonal actions, whereas
Germanic ones do. "¿Me prestas un
lápiz?" equals "Can I borrow a pencil?", that is, while some people ask to
be lent a pencil -or a 23,465-millon-euro financial rescue (Veloso, 26/0512, abc.es)-, others "borrow" all they need.
Even if incredibly interesting, we will leave the economic-social-linguistic
debate for another post.
I exhort whoever feels capable of translating without making the charm
and the grace of language suffer to translate
Homer into latin word by word. As
a result, whether in verse or in
prose, the
misadventures of the
Phoenician sailors would seem ridiculous and the sense of the Greek genius would end up being concealed. Only then
the profane translator would
experience in his flesh how hard it is to follow others' footprints without
overstepping. "There are so
few first-rate works and the genius, of any type, is such a rare phenomenon
that, if all modern nations were
limited to their own treasures, mankind would always remain poor" claimed
Mme. de Staël in 1816 (Vega, 1994: 236). Actually, the translators
who have been able to fulfill that arduous task have been very rare.
Among them, the inimitable Carles Riba, who wasn't satisfied with his masterful 1919 verse translation of the Odyssey
and wrote a new less-literal
verse version in
1948, considered to be a monument not only in Catalan literature
but also in all western literature. On the one hand, the Catalan poet stated that thirty years were more
than enough to rust a contemporary translation. On the other hand, he said remoteness in time perpetuates immutable classic literature (Riba,
1948: 224-231). From that, we can deduce that all translation is necessarily provisional.
In conclusion, the good translator will have formed
criteria enabling him to respond with the best solution in an almost
instinctive way, before embarking on the delicate task of translation. He will
know when to omit what does not concern
the meaning and when to add what may make it clearer, defending the power
and bea
uty of the target language in order to get a work of creation instead of
a copy. In fact, trying to reproduce the original would not only be
exaggerating the translator's skills, but also the limited possibilities of
language. That is, the translation should never try to be a duplicate of the
work, but rather a way to it. In short, a good translator should never translate word-by-word, but sense-by-sense,
reproducing the effect that the author tried to induce in his readers, now with
words that correspond to the manners and
customs of the time and society in which the new reader is immersed. To this end, the good translator must,
above all, be able to respect the meaning of the original, adapting it to
achieve a fluent and natural harmony
in the target language, because what is called faithfulness by so many, means kakozelia or
bad taste for people like me.
Through this post I have intended to achieve four goals.
The first one is to expose the over-two-thousand-year
thread of thought that led many translators to consider and then prove that one-hundred-per-cent-literal translation
does not exist. The second one
is to emphasize the importance of discerning
the degree of literality that suits each translation best, depending on the
original and its translation -literary, scientific, antique, contemporary,
western, eastern, etc.-. The third one
is to speak out against both fools who think they have the ability
and right to judge translators' profession, and professional intruders, who have been the reason for
the profession to suffer from such a huge loss of prestige. The fourth and final objective is simply to
dump my thoughts on the blog, the
best tool some of us have to stop mulling over a topic which keeps us up awake
at night, and moving to the next.
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