Translation Mattering

Although much of the reception to Edith Grossman’s book Why Translation Matters has been mixed, this has been a great “event” for translation in terms of generating a serious discussion about the subject. (And in that respect, it’s probably better that the reviews have been mixed than uniformly positive.) You can read Chad Post’s own contribution to the discussion here in The Quarterly Conversation.

Michael Orthofer is the latest to join in on the conversation:

One of the critical matters that Grossman also fails to address and admit to is that many translations are simply bad, too; there’s something to be learnt from failures and from inadequate renderings, but we also have to face the fact that many foreign texts have been beaten and butchered in translation. Translators may be well-intentioned, but even the ‘best’ translators might not be equipped to deal with certain works or authors; the fact that they take down the original work with them is something that must weigh on at least the conscientious ones, but also something Grossman doesn’t discuss.

Still, there’s something to be said for her enthusiasm and passion for translation, and the most successful parts of this volume are those in which she describes her own experiences of translating, whether with Don Quixote or with poetry. (It’s interesting to see that for the poetic examples she gives she prints both the original and the English version — allowing the reader to see where faithful (as she sees it) diverges from literal; with regards to prose she seems to be far more eager that readers simply take her (and other translators’) words for it.)

I appreciated this point, where he gets into Grossman’s critique of reviewers of translation:

Grossman does single out one reviewer for praise, finding that James Wood “consistently pays attention to the real value of translation, bringing into focus the question of how books under review are translated and what priorities seem to guide translators in their choices”. Wood hardly seems the best example — as best I can tell, he overwhelmingly focuses his review-attention on books originally written in English — but the one example she cites, his discussion (The New Yorker, 26 November 2007) of War and Peace, specifically the Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky translation, certainly does admirably deal with translation-issues. It’s worth pointing out a few facts about the piece however: first, Wood has space for 5775 words at his disposal: that’s about the length of one of the chapters in Grossman’s book, and many times more than any newspaper-review. [By comparison: this review runs just about half that, at 2900 words.] Of course Wood can get into translation-issues when he has so much room to work with; and, indeed, most reviews of translated works that get such essay-length treatment in serious periodicals also deal with translation-issues.

More importantly: Wood is dealing with a work that has been translated before, which makes for particularly fertile discussion-foundation (and, in this case, translation is part of the larger point, as Wood makes a case for what is preferable about this translation over previous ones — not something usually up for debate with most translated works, where there are no alternative-versions): it’s no surprise that even here at the complete review, the reviews that focus most extensively on translation-issues are those of works available in multiple translations. (Interestingly, Grossman doesn’t have much to say about the critical treatment of her Don Quixote-translation, much of which also drew comparisons to previous translations — and hence dealt with the translation-questions at great length.) But this comparative approach also leads to the sort of … if not nit-picking then at least word-focussed criticism that Grossman doesn’t seem to find all the appealing (though in cases such as this seems both useful and interesting).

These are all excellent points, and I’ll add my own critique that Grossman seems to fall prey to a kind of myopia that has infected a lot of discourse about reviewing: namely, ignoring online and “amateur” sources. This was a little more forgivable back in 2006 when Cynthia Ozick penned her paean to James Wood in Harper’s (“What is needed is a thicket–a forest–of Woods.”) and rather cluelessly lumped all online book reviews with the customer reviews at Amazon.com, but now that the online review community has grown substantially and become embraced by most of the mainstream in one way or another, there’s really no reason to ignore it. Especially in Grossman’s case, as it is beyond argument that online sources have been one of the prime movers in increasing literary translation’s profile in the past couple years. Falling back on James Wood as that one worthy reviewer seems much too facile and, frankly, slights the work of others who have taken translated fiction more than seriously over the past few years.

This is particularly ironic, since the places that have generally offered the most lucid and interesting critiques of Grossman’s book have been online sources. Thus, for instance, Orthofer offers up 3,000 words and makes some insightful critiques of Grossman’s work; Chad Post’s own review ran slightly over 3,000 and offered worthwhile critiques, and Krista Ingebretson’s piece in Open Letters Monthly was fantastic as well.

By contrast, Richard Howard’s New York Times piece was shy of 1,000 words and is little more than a collection of quotes from the book rounded off with a dose of translation cliches:

In the end, Grossman warmly (after all) and gratefully rehearses the twofold answer to the question of her title: translation matters because it is an expression and an extension of our humanity, the secret metaphor of all literary communication; and because the creation of any literary translation is (or at least must be) an original writing, not a pathetic shadow or tracing of the inaccessible “original” but the creation, indeed, of a second — and as we have seen, a third and a ninth — but always a new work, in another language.

I personally have no idea of the extent to which Grossman has discovered the online community around literary fiction, and particularly translated fiction, but anyone in the field who is missing out on it at this late date is doing themselves a disservice.

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1. Three Percent’s Politics of Translation Event If you're in Rochester . . . (maybe they'll post video for the rest of us): Next Monday (March 23), we’re hosting a roundtable discussion...
2. Chad Post on What's Wrong with "Why Translation Matters" At The Quarterly Conversation, we’ve got Chad Post’s review/essay of Edith Grossman’s Why Translation Matters. Granted, Chad is sympathetic to a lot of what Grossman...
3. Buddenbrooks and Translation I just wanted to briefly jump into the fray regarding the Buddenbrooks translation discussion. Sacha and John both seem to conclude that Mann in translation...
4. Marian Schwartz on Translation And translation continues to invade mainstream journalism: first Edie Grossman, and now Marian Schwartz. We’ve got the details in The Constant Conversation. ...
5. Josipovici and Translation at TQC Two new reviews this week at The Quarterly Conversation. First is a review of Gabriel Josipovici’s new book of two short novels: I read Two...

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