Babel : Or the Necessity of Violence: an Arcane History of the Oxford Translators' Revolution (9780063021440)

Victoire shot him a droll look. ‘She’s unbearable sometimes, yes. But she’s not trying to be cruel. She’s scared she isn’t supposed to be here. She’s scared everyone wishes she were her brother, and she’s scared she’ll be sent home if she steps even slightly out of line. Above all, she’s scared that either of you might go down Lincoln’s path. Go easy on her, you two. You don’t know how much of her behaviour is dictated by fear.’

‘Her behaviour,’ said Ramy, ‘is dictated by self-absorption.’

‘Be that as it may, I have to live with her.’ Victoire’s face tightened; she looked very annoyed with the both of them. ‘So do pardon me if I try to keep the peace.’

Letty’s sulks never lasted long, and she soon expressed her tacit forgiveness. When they filed into Professor Playfair’s office the next day, she returned Robin’s tentative smile with her own. Victoire nodded when he glanced her way. They were all on the same page, it seemed; Letty knew that Robin and Ramy knew, she knew they were sorry, and she herself was sorry and more than a bit embarrassed for being so dramatic. There was nothing else to be said.

Meanwhile, there were more exciting debates to be had. In Professor Playfair’s class that term, they were hung up on the idea of fidelity.

‘Translators are always being accused of faithlessness,’ boomed Professor Playfair. ‘So what does that entail, this faithfulness? Fidelity to whom? The text? The audience? The author? Is fidelity separate from style? From beauty? Let us begin with what Dryden wrote about the Aeneid. I have endeavoured to make Virgil speak such English as he would himself have spoken, if he had been born in England, and in this present age.’ He looked around the classroom. ‘Does anyone here think that is fidelity?’

‘I’ll bite,’ said Ramy. ‘No, I don’t think that can possibly be right. Virgil belonged to a particular time and place. Isn’t it more unfaithful to strip all that away, to make him speak like any Englishman you might run into on the street?’

Professor Playfair shrugged. ‘Is it not also unfaithful to make Virgil sound like a stuffy foreigner, rather than a man you would happily carry on a conversation with? Or, as Guthrie did, to cast Cicero as a member of the English Parliament? But I confess, these methods are questionable. You take things too far, and you get something like Pope’s translation of the Iliad.’

‘I thought Pope was one of the greatest poets of his time,’ Letty said.

‘Perhaps in his original work,’ said Professor Playfair. ‘But he injects the text with so many Britishisms that he makes Homer sound like an eighteenth-century English aristocrat. Surely this does not accompany our image of the Greeks and Trojans at war.’

‘Sounds like typical English arrogance,’ said Ramy.

‘It isn’t only the English that do this,’ said Professor Playfair. ‘Recall how Herder attacks the French neoclassicists for making Homer a captive, clad in French clothes, and following French customs, lest he offend. And all the well-known translators in Persia favoured the “spirit” of translation rather than word-for-word accuracy – indeed, they often found it appropriate to change European names into Persian and replace aphorisms in the target languages with Persian verse and proverbs. Was that wrong, do you think? Unfaithful?’

Ramy had no rejoinder.

Professor Playfair ploughed on. ‘There is no right answer, of course. None of the theorists before you have solved it either. This is the ongoing debate of our field. Schleiermacher argued that translations should be sufficiently unnatural that they clearly present themselves as foreign texts. He argued there were two options: either the translator leaves the author in peace and moves the reader towards him; or he leaves the reader in peace and moves the author towards him. Schleiermacher chose the former. Yet the dominant strain in England now is the latter – to make translations sound so natural to the English reader that they do not read as translations at all.

‘Which seems right to you? Do we try our hardest, as translators, to render ourselves invisible? Or do we remind our reader that what they are reading was not written in their native language?’

‘That’s an impossible question,’ said Victoire. ‘Either you situate the text in its time and place, or you bring it to where you are, here and now. You’re always giving something up.’

‘Is faithful translation impossible, then?’ Professor Playfair challenged. ‘Can we never communicate with integrity across time, across space?’

‘I suppose not,’ Victoire said reluctantly.