Lost in Translation

Even sporadic readers have read works in translation. Stieg Larsson, author of the top-selling crime trilogy that began with The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, wrote in Swedish. Japanese author Haruki Murakami is flying off shelves. Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables was long ago taken to Broadway.

But as accustomed as we are to our world’s inter-connectedness, we often take this linguistic access to other cultures for granted. While caught up in reading a book, it can be easy to forget that a single person is largely responsible for the abstract and intimate experience that we enjoy: the translator.
Art necessarily involves many levels of interpretation, ranging from the artist, whose work is an interpretation of his or her world, to the viewer, whose reaction is an interpretation of the work. Translation is yet another moving part, the under-appreciated middleman between author and reader. As an act of interpretation in and of itself and an important medium of communication between cultures, translation can profoundly impact cultural relations by promoting awareness and tolerance of other traditions and breaking down the barrier of “foreignness.”
The Role of the Translator
Often, translation is mistakenly regarded as a neutral act. In an interview with the HPR, translator, translation theorist and professor Lawrence Venuti of Temple University described this attitude to the HPR as “an instrumental model … and by that I mean translation is regarded as a reproduction or transfer of some invariant that is contained in or caused by the source text.” The notion of such an “invariant” gives rise to the exciting possibility that machines could step in and produce translations for us, making it unnecessary for anyone to speak any language other than their own.
But when speaking with the HPR, Professor Michelle Hartman of McGill University, also a translator, explained that this utopia is impossible: “Translation is never an exact equivalent; it’s always some kind of interpretation, filtered through the translator: [it is] mediated.”
Poetry necessarily exaggerates this challenge. Each word is deliberate and the musicality of the language is even more central to the text’s meaning. And so, translations of poetry are notoriously difficult to master. Nevertheless, many attempts have been made to give English language readers access to poets like Charles Baudelaire. Baudelaire’s poetry provides a particularly clear example of just how varied translations can be, depending on how a translator approaches the text. The following two versions of “The Blind” (“Les Aveugles”) convey distinct interpretations of the poem:
Look at them, Soul! They are horrible. Lo! there,
Like shrunk dwarfs, vaguely ludicrous; yet they keep
An aspect strange as those who walk in sleep.
Rolling their darkened orbs one knows not where.
Their eyes, from which the godlike spark has flown,
Stare upward at the sky as though to see
Some far thing; never hang they dreamily
Those eyes toward the barren pavement-stone.
Thus cross they the illimitable dark,
That brother of eternal silence. Mark!
O frenzied city, as thou roarest by.
Drunk with thy song and laughter, I too stray
With crawling feet! but ask, more dull than they,
“What seek they, all these blind men, in the sky?”
— Translated by John Collings Squire, Poems and Baudelaire Flowers (London: The New Age Press, Ltd, 1909)
My soul, survey them, dreadful as they seem.
Like marionettes, ridiculous they stare.
Strange as somnambulists that, in their dream,
Dart shadowy orbs around we know not where.
Their eyes, from which the heavenly spark has flown
Remain uplifted, as in distant quest,
Skyward: but never on the paving stone
Do they pore dreamingly or come to rest.
They traverse thus the illimitable Dark,
Twin of eternal Silence. While the City
May sing around us, bellow, laugh, or bark, —
By pleasure blinded even to horror, I,
Too, drag my way, but, more a thing of pity,
Ask what the Blind are seeking there on high.
— Translated by Roy Campbell, Poems of Baudelaire (New York: Pantheon Books, 1952)
A translator necessarily faces an endless array of choices when working with a text (for example, should “Allah” be translated to “God” or left as is, to emphasize a book’s Arabic origins?). Professor Sherry Simon of Concordia University, author of Cities in Translation and Translating Montreal, pointed out to the HPR that these kinds of decisions are often influenced by “what’s happening in the target culture and what’s happening in the source of culture, and what kind of a connection the translator wants to make.”
When considering the translator’s role, Professor Simon advised, “It’s important to talk about the decision process and the way a translator goes about it, and to give a full margin of understanding to how complex that operation is so that a translator can make different decisions according to what’s happening in a given moment.” This kind of variation based on historical context is exemplified by the two translations of Baudelaire’s “The Blind” that appear above: John Collings Squire’s language is peppered with the more antiquated exclamations of “Lo!” and “Mark!” that would have appealed to the reading public in 1909, while Roy Campbell’s more fluid version is tailored to a modern audience.
The Politics of Translation
Beyond interpretation, translation can carry political implications. Of course, translators themselves may not intend to infuse their work with politics. “Most translators attempt to be neutral, both ideologically and in other dimensions in the text, whether they are aesthetic or in terms of register and diction. The translator is simply trying to get across what the author has been trying to achieve in his own language,” argues Arthur Goldhammer, a professor at Harvard University and the translator, recently, of Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century.
Whether or not bias is intentional, Professor Hartman posited that translation cannot be divorced from politics: “Every choice made for you as a reader of a translation has something behind it, and there aren’t neutral choices—therefore there are always politics attached. Which works get chosen to be translated, from which languages, by whom, with what kind of marketing—all of that plays into the politics of translation.”
For an illustrative example of just how controversial and influential translations can be, look no further than the world’s biggest best-seller: the Bible. As Professor Venuti pointed out, “When you look at the history of Bible translations, you can see how different interpretations of the Bible inscribed theological or doctrinal interpretations, giving rise to different kinds of religious dogma and institutions.” In the 14th, 15th and 16th centuries, the Lollard, Hussite and Lutheran movements, which helped to transform the nature of Christianity, were all based around their own unique translations of the Bible. Different versions of the Bible continue to play a central role in religious conflicts to this day, and are often the basis for different denominations of Christianity.

Today, Professor Venuti explained, translators are held to a stricter standard of equivalence than they once were. “In the 18th century, translators would leave out characters, or parts of the plot, or change the ending—they might interpolate, they might insert new aspects. Today translators often sign contracts that have clauses requiring them to translate everything exactly from the source text, without adding anything.” But a specific translator’s work can still profoundly impact the ways in which readers respond to a text. As Professor Venuti also pointed out, Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky’s 1990 translation of The Brothers Karamazov changed the reception of the novel, giving readers a new sense of Dostoevsky’s humor and strangeness. Emphasizing the “strangeness” of a text can push its foreign origins to the forefront of readers’ minds, encouraging them to think more deeply about the culture from which it originates and how it may differ from their own.
America in Translation
America plays a unique role in the politics of translation. English is the most translated language worldwide, and yet one of the least translated into: Only between 2-4% of books published in the U.S. or Great Britain every year are translations; meanwhile, about 20-25% of new books in Italy are works of translation, of which more than half are from English, 12% are from French, 8% are from German and approximately 3% are from Spanish. This remains true despite the fact that Anglophone countries are responsible for a much greater total volume of books published every year (about 290,000 in the US and 150,000 in the UK in 2011, as compared to about 40,000 in Italy or 82,000 in Germany). These percentages reflect an undeniable imbalance in cultural exchange between Anglophone countries and most other countries around the world. But how significant, qualitatively, is this gap?
Professor Venuti sees this imbalance as indicative of the general dominance of Anglophone cultures, and worries that it reflects a “fundamental insularity in American culture in particular.” While American literature is relatively over-represented around the world—many countries’ bestseller lists mirror that of the United States—Americans do not, in turn, expose themselves to the literature of other cultures to nearly the same extent. For example, in 2012 the U.S. bestseller list was topped by E.L James’s Fifty Shades of Grey, which went on to dominate bestseller lists across the rest of the world. But Indonesia’s all-time bestseller, The Rainbow Troops by Andrea Hirata, is an unknown by most English-language readers.
At the same time, when Americans do consume foreign literature, they often do so in ways that only reinforce cultural stereotypes. Professor Venuti explains, “the impulse to translate originates in most cases in the translating culture, and since decisions are made by publishers who invest in the venture, they will translate works that can be commodified on the book market.” After the announcement that Egyptian writer Naguib Mahfouz had won the 1988 Nobel Prize for Literature, publishers focused on translating Egyptian writers who resembled him in the hopes of appealing to an existing market and maximizing their own profit. The bias created a stereotype of all Egyptian literature as preoccupied with existentialism and the clash between traditional values and an encroaching Western culture.
But prospects may not be so gloomy. As professor David Bellos of Princeton University and author of Is That a Fish in Your Ear? pointed out, “English is a magnet language, meaning that people of many other cultures prefer to write in English rather than in their native tongue. So reading in English alone doesn’t mean that you are restricted to an ‘American’ culture.” Writers like Vladimir Nabokov and Joseph Conrad famously wrote in English, despite having grown up with a different native language. Indeed the notion of “foreignness” itself has become far more complex.
An important function of translation is to make a receiving culture mindful of the differences that divide it from other cultures around the world—but translation can also help to break down the barriers erected by the notion of a “foreign” culture. This can occur on the level of words themselves: as Professor Bellos points out, for example, the word “robot” was introduced to English by the Czech author Karel Capek’s play, “R.U.R.” Professor Sherry Simon, who works especially with duo-lingual cities, elaborated on the paradoxes inherent in the word “foreign”: “The word has lost its traction recently because there are so many strangenesses in our lives that have nothing to do with foreignness. The very distinction between native and foreign that grounds so much translation theory is not as strong when you realize that our societies are built on different degrees of difference.”
Despite the progress of globalization, our degrees of difference do continue to be greatly shaped by issues of race, culture and language. The success of translated works indicates that we are drawn to the exploration of these kinds of cultural differences. And in doing so, translation can also show that even disparate societies can and should come to relate and understand one another. Our degrees of similarity transcend national boundaries. In translation, unfamiliar words can convey ideas that become intimate to any reader, regardless of their mother tongue.