Is That a Fish in Your Ear?

The dimensions of an utterance where likeness is the relevant criterion of translation are of many different kinds. Register, tone, rhythm, style, and wit can only ever be said to be like one another in respect of something external to the text itself. For example, to judge that writing iambic pentameters in English is like Racine’s use of the twelve-syllable line is to base likeness on the social and cultural values of poetic forms in two different environments. In both English and French verse, these are the commonest, most frequently used forms, and thus like each other in that respect. But they are not like each other in any other way. Writing twelve-syllable lines in English to represent French verse, on the other hand, is like the original only in respect of the number 12, but quite unlike it in respect of the underlying rhythms of English, which is a stress-timed language, and of French, which is not.

By choosing which dimensions to connect in a relationship of likeness and the extent to which the likeness is made visible, a translation hierarchizes the interlocking, overlaying features of the original. To that extent at least, translations always provide an interpretation of the source. It’s more obvious in literary texts with relatively few practical constraints, but the same underlying situation holds for all acts of translation between languages.

The nub of the question is this: Given that a translation preserves the information and the general force of the original, in what respect is it possible to say that its manner or style or tone is like those features of its source?

Georges Perec wrote in a wide variety of styles, but a characteristic feature of all his writing is that important information is placed at the very end, making you realize that up to that point you hadn’t understood the main import of the sentence or paragraph—or even the novel. At the level of sentences and paragraphs it is easier to do this in French than in English literary prose, which typically introduces new information in a different manner. Nonetheless, by exploiting the notorious flexibility of English sentence structure and bending it a fair bit, I respected Perec’s “late release” technique as far as I could. By the very fact of doing so I offered an interpretation of Perec’s style, but the likeness of my prose to his is a tightly focused and fragile thing. Because I had to take greater liberties with English than he did with French, my writing is not “like” Perec’s at all in respect of linguistic norms.

No translation is the same as its source, and no translation can be expected to be like its source in more than a few selected ways. Which dimensions are selected depends on the conventions of the receiving culture, the nature of the field involved, or even the whim of the commissioner of the translation. But any utterance is such a multidimensional and many-faceted thing that no translator is ever short of a little elbow room. To put it the other way around, no set of social, practical, linguistic, or generic constraints ever determines completely how a translation is to be done.

If meaning and force are kept the same and if in a limited set of other respects a translation is seen to be like its source, then we have a match. Translators are matchmakers of a particular kind. It’s not as simple as the marriage of content and form. Just as when we match faces and portraits, we rely on multiple dimensions and qualities to judge when a translation has occurred.

Children’s puzzle books exploit and psychologists study our ability to recognize and manipulate the distinct but overlapping relations I’ve called same, like, and match.

Translators use that ability in the specific fields of speech and writing in a foreign tongue. Not all of them are great at their job, and not many have the time and leisure to wait for the best match to come. But when we say that a translation is an acceptable one, what we name is an overall relationship between source and target that is neither identity, nor equivalence, nor analogy—just that complex thing called a good match.

That’s the truth about translation.

THIRTY-TWO Avatar: A Parable of Translation

On a recent visit to India, where I was trying to learn more about translation, I took an afternoon off to go to the movies and watched a faded copy of what I believe is the most expensive film ever made. To my delight and surprise, Avatar turned out to be a parable about translation, and that’s why I bring it in at the end of this book.