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Umm, I really don’t think this is what David Bellos means when he says translation is a creative act in Is That a Fish In Your Ear?:
A Russian friend of mine once tried to improve his English by studying T.S. Eliot’s “Preludes.” He already knew a translation by heart, and he liked to recite, with great reverberating passion, a line about how the streetlamps of London glowed like luminous jellyfish at the bottom of the ocean. When he reached the corresponding passage of the English text, he was shattered. All it said was: “And then the lighting of the lamps.” No jellyfish, no ocean. Evidently the Russian translator had found Eliot’s austere original to be insufficiently poetical and had decided to goose it up. My friend felt doubly betrayed—first by Eliot, because his poem was not so interesting after all; then by the translator, because his beautiful line was a fake. . . .
These are not doubts that would meet with much sympathy from David Bellos. He is a professional translator (mostly of classy Europeans like Georges Perec and Ismail Kadare) and would be briskly dismissive of my Russian friend’s despair. Translation, he argues in “Is That a Fish in Your Ear?,” is an inherently creative act. A strictly literal translation is a mirage—it looks like unadorned accuracy, but that’s really just a stylistic trick, which, Mr. Bellos says, is “unrelated to authenticity, truthfulness, or plainness of expression.” He would celebrate the Russian translator’s gaudy jellyfish, as though they were flowers breaking from the hard ground of Eliot’s original.
There’s a big difference between not wanting to make a strictly literal translation that reads awfully in the new language and transforming a line of Eliot from “And then the lighting of the lamps” to something with jellyfish. Obviously, taking that kind of license with a text is a big no-no for translators, no matter how creative they see their work as translators.
It’s an unfortunate misreading because at the end of the review Lee Sandlin makes the error again, and turns it into an argument that “in any translation something essential might be getting lost.” It would have been nice if the Wall Street Journal gave this book to someone who knew a thing or two about translation.
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From what I gathered in reading his translation notes for Life: A User’s Manual, it seems that Bellos wouldn’t agree with this at all, since it’s not really the same tone or spirit of the original, whereas the tricks and creative steps Bellos takes in Life, are definitely in sync with what Perec was doing (at least judging from the notes).
You’re right—that’s not what I meant (or said) at all. But there is a further mystery in Sandlin’s strange review. To what Russian translation of Eliot’s Preludes is his informant referring? My own Russian informants tell me that the most accessible translation—the one I take to be the standard version— is by Viktor Toporov, and for the last line of the first stanza he has Пробужденье фонарей, that is to say, “the lighting of street lamps”, for Eliot’s “And then the lighting of the lamps”. Either Sandlin’s informant was referring to some way-out translation that hasn’t made much of an impact, or s/he was muddling up Eliot with, for instance, Mandelshtam (who does have jellyfish in front of the Admiralty Square in a famous “Petersburg” poem that could be thought of as an exercise of the same order as Eliot’s evocation of London), or Sandlin misunderstood what he was being told… which is quite likely, since he declares later on in the article, with misplaced pride, that he isn’t going to learn any foreign languages. Or else… this pseudo-example was cooked up from nothing for the sole but alas traditional purpose of disparaging translation itself.
I mainly object to Sandlin changing “luminous” to “gaudy.”