Max Norman for The New Yorker, where you can listen to this story.
Damion Searls, who has translated a Nobel laureate, believes his craft isn’t about transforming or reflecting a text. It’s about conjuring one’s experience of it.
Jon Fosse’s “Septology,” the seven-novel sequence about art and God that helped win its author last year’s Nobel Prize in Literature, stars two men and a dog. The men are both painters, and, confusingly, both named Asle. The dog, however, is quite straightforward: he’s called Bragi. He is the all-comprehending, inky-eyed companion to the first Asle, though he belongs to the other Asle, who’s ill and can’t look after him. The novel’s lazy river of a narrative is punctuated, much in the way of real life, whenever Bragi needs to be let out to do his business, or has licked his water bowl dry, or, with a laughable but also slightly troubling frequency, takes a tumble when Asle stands up without remembering that the dog is lying on his lap. Asle’s gruff love for Bragi, his physical closeness to the little creature, is written with such simple feeling that you can tell Fosse is, among his other distinctions, a dog-lover.
In the original Norwegian, Bragi is spelled Brage (pronounced BROG-eh). Damion Searls, Fosse’s translator, is responsible for the new vowel. Brage is the Norse god of poetry, something Searls didn’t realize until Fosse told him, since the name is traditionally spelled, in English, with an “I.” If he used the Norwegian spelling, Searls reasoned, Anglophone readers might think the word rhymed with “rage” or “page”—distinctly uncute words for a very cute canine. Using the typical English version would let those in the know understand the mythical association, and it had the added advantage of rhyming with “doggie,” if you squint. “I will never know for sure, but I am convinced that English-language readers would not have loved Brage as much as they love Bragi and that changing the name was one of the best translation decisions I made in those books,” Searls writes in his new essay on the craft, “The Philosophy of Translation” (Yale).
Translation is something of the runt of the literary litter, more often perceived as grunt work than art work. Its practitioners have rarely received attention for anything other than screwing up, and many would agree with George Eliot’s pronouncement that “a good translator is infinitely below the man who produces good original works.” (Eliot herself translated from German and Latin.) George Steiner’s chaotic and brilliant “After Babel” was the first comprehensive treatment of the subject when it was published, in 1975. Some translations, and translators, did indeed achieve their own fame—Arthur Golding’s translation of Ovid, Alexander Pope’s Homer, C. K. Scott Moncrieff’s Proust—but Lawrence Venuti’s landmark 1995 treatise “The Translator’s Invisibility” pretty much summed up the history of translation in its title.
In the United States, it’s estimated that about three per cent of books published annually are translations, and less than five per cent of the titles reviewed in the New York Times Book Review, according to one study, were originally written in languages other than English. But translators are increasingly visible in the public sphere. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky have become literary celebrities for their translations of the Russian classics, as has Ann Goldstein for her Elena Ferrante, and Edith Grossman for her “Don Quixote.” Emily Wilson, the first female translator of the Odyssey into English, was profiled in this magazine, and in just about every other media outlet. Translators have become more vocal, too. In 2021, Jennifer Croft, the English-language translator of the Polish Nobelist Olga Tokarczuk, declared that she wouldn’t agree to translate a book unless her name was printed on the cover. “Not only is it disrespectful to me,” she wrote on Twitter, “but it is also a disservice to the reader, who should know who chose the words they’re going to read.”
A new subgenre has emerged of books by translators about translation, including manifestos like Edith Grossman’s “Why Translation Matters” (2010) and Mark Polizzotti’s “Sympathy for the Traitor” (2018), theoretical studies like David Bellos’s “Is That a Fish in Your Ear?” (2011), and memoiristic essays like Kate Briggs’s “This Little Art” (2017), Polly Barton’s “Fifty Sounds” (2021), and Daniel Hahn’s “Catching Fire: A Translation Diary” (2022). Earlier this year, Croft even published “The Extinction of Irena Rey”, a novel about a meeting (a babel?) of literary translators who go in search of the author whose work they each render into different tongues.
Searls, who translates from German, Dutch, and French in addition to Norwegian, gives neither an apology nor a theory nor a history but, rather, a “philosophy” of translation. More precisely, he offers a “phenomenology” of translation, borrowing a term popularized by the French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Phenomenology is the study not of how the world might be perceived in the abstract—think of how René Descartes theorized an absolute gap between the mind and the body—but of our actual experience of the world. For Searls, translation is phenomenological because it is fundamentally about experience: the translator’s experience of reading the original, which is then re-created for a new reader. Translation is “something like moving through the world, not anything like choosing from a list of options.” “There are no rules,” Searls writes, “only decisions.”
"Translation” wasn’t always how you said translation. In Latin, the first Western language into which translations were made wholesale, you might “turn” (vertere) a text, or “render word for word” (verbum pro verbo reddere). The noun translatio referred primarily to a physical transfer, as we still use it to refer to the “translation” of human remains. The modern Latin term traductio, the origin of the French traduction, Italian traduzione, and Spansh traducción, seems to have been given its current meaning by Leonardo Bruni, the author of an influential 1424 treatise on translation. A story has it that the Italian humanist gently misunderstood the meaning of the verb traducere, which, in the ancient Roman text he was reading, signifies something more like “to derive from.” The irony, though fitting, is probably too good to be true.
It’s not just that translation was called something different: it also meant something different. In Searls’s account, which draws heavily on the work of the twentieth-century French theorist Antoine Berman, translation was first a matter of content, and only later a matter of form. Cicero believed that sense should be translated for sense, not “counting out words for the reader,” but “weighing them out.” A few centuries later, St. Jerome, author of the great Latin Vulgate translation of the Bible, argued that translations of the mysteries should be word for word, but everything else should be, like Cicero advocated, sense for sense. There was an easy confidence in antiquity, and all the way up to the Renaissance, that translation was indeed possible—though the more modern language may need to be stretched to accommodate the semantic richness, and classical authority, of the original.
Around the time Columbus discovered the New World, translation began to take on something like its contemporary scope. “Now the object of translation was the work,” Searls writes, “with its indissoluble fusion of content and form, body and soul, and translation became the task of preserving the soul or essence of the original in an entirely new body.” In the Renaissance, translation went into overdrive as humanists rediscovered the ancient Greek language, translated copiously into Latin, and started bringing literature, philosophy, and history into the spoken tongues of Europe. At the same time, religious reformers, like William Tyndale and Martin Luther, and, later, a committee of translators assembled by King James, translated the Bible into the languages of everyday people.
Translation was, then, much riskier than today: a bad review would be the least of a translator’s worries. In 1536, Tyndale was burned at the stake. Ten years later, Étienne Dolet, a French translator and an early theorist of the art, was accused of heresy for his version of Plato; he was hanged and, just in case the point wasn’t clear, also burned at the stake. These are, as Mark Polizzotti points out, translation’s first martyrs. The problem wasn’t that they translated poorly but, rather, that their translations destabilized the Catholic Church’s near monopoly on the reading and interpretation of the holy writ—or directly challenged the Church’s dogmas. At the same time, however, translation—first from provincial languages like Hebrew and Greek into the universal tongue of Latin—helped the Bible spread beyond its local origins. From the start, translation has been something of a Faustian bargain.
Things changed, as they were wont to do, in the spiritual soup of Sturm und Drang, in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Germany. The German Romantics associated the idea of the “mother tongue” with “race” and the burgeoning nation-state. In their thinking, language evolved from a mere means of expression into the means “by which man gives form simultaneously to himself and to the world,” as Wilhelm von Humboldt, the brother of Alexander, and a translator and linguist, put it. The modern ideological stakes of translation—as a fraught operation transposing the utterances of a person enmeshed in a unique cultural fabric—begin here.
So does the basic framework that theorists, and indeed many translators and critics, still use. A key moment came in Friedrich Schleiermacher’s “On the Different Methods of Translating,” a lecture from 1813. Schleiermacher, a German philosopher, stated that “either the translator leaves the author in peace, as much as possible, and moves the reader toward him; or he leaves the reader in peace, as much as possible, and moves the author toward him.” In this view, translation is at best a tug of war, at worst a zero-sum game. Lawrence Venuti glossed these alternatives as “domestication” and “foreignization.” A “foreignizing” translation—one that brings you closer to the text, that never lets you forget that it’s a translation—might productively unsettle readers but maybe also put them off, whereas a “domesticating” translation could do violence to the source.
What this means, practically, can be hard to say. How much cultural literacy can you assume from a reader? “Goulash” doesn’t need to be translated as “paprika meat soup,” Searls notes. On the other hand, I’ve read thousands of pages of Norwegian literature and I still don’t really know what lutefisk is. Style is a harder problem. Clearly the gargantuan single sentence of the “Septology” is intentionally extreme. But how long does a translated sentence of Proust need to be to be Proustian without being perverse? What do you do with dialect, or dirty jokes? How much translation is too much?
Scholars like to remind you that one of the ancient Greek words for translation is metaphora. Translation is metaphor, and it can be trapped by the conceptual frames used to describe it. Take, for instance, the military overtones of the commonly used term “target language.” Or consider the notion of the “faithful” translation, which, as Emily Wilson has written, implies that the translation is gendered female, that it might betray the male original (hence the old Italian phrase, traduttore, traditore, “translator, traitor”). Cervantes, in “Don Quixote,” compares reading a translation to “viewing a piece of Flemish tapestry on the wrong side,” where “the beauty and exactness of the work is obscured.”
Searls seeks a reset, and finds it in phenomenology. In phenomenological terms, there is no boundary between mind and world: the two are intertwined. Searls gives the comfortable example of a chair. When you see one, you’re not “being confronted with ‘sense data,’ as philosophers like to say, which my supercomputer brain then processes.” Rather, you’re simply seeing “a place to sit. That is what seeing a chair is.” You recognize a chair as the thing you sit in. That’s its “affordance,” Searls says, borrowing a term coined by the American psychologist James J. Gibson, who initially conceived it during the Second World War, while studying how fighter pilots perceive their environment. This approach to perception has the benefit of breaking down the distinction between self and world: a chair in all of its chairness doesn’t exist without a perceiver to see it as something to sit in; a chair is the affordance of a place to sit.
What does this have to do with translation? Reading, Searls points out, is a form of perception, and a text is rather like a world. Words and phrases present affordances that readers take up as they go. A translator, then, isn’t just a lexical go-between, interpreting one word at a time. A translator, rather, is a reader who re-creates their own path through the textual world of a book. “All the philosophical dilemmas about whether translation ‘reflects’ or instead ‘transforms’ what’s in the original need to be swept aside,” Searls declares. For Merleau-Ponty, the world is neither found nor created through experience but revealed, developed, Searls writes, as if it were a photograph. He suggests that translation does something similar, “developing” the original as if it were a photographic negative.
Practically, then, the translator reads with an eye to understanding the affordances offered by a text—to re-creating its potentialities, rather than merely offering a lexical equivalent. “We don’t translate words of a language, we translate uses of language,” Searls writes. The point is not to capture merely what a text means but to reproduce how it means in context. One way that Searls describes this, borrowing a term from Gertrude Stein, is as the text’s “force.” “In a translation, even what look like divergences or outright mistakes on the single-word level may well be part of what you need to do to re-create the same force in English,” Searls writes. He points to his retranslation of Max Weber’s “Vocation Lectures,” delivered before general audiences between 1917 and 1919—a work filled with ideas, yes, but also a lot of rhetoric. In one passage, an existing translation read, “We can see very clearly that the latest developments are moving in the same direction as . . .” (Nun können wir . . . mit Deutlichkeit beobachten: daß die neueste Entwicklung . . . in der Richtung der [X] verläuft). Searls sashimied this down to “The clear trend is toward . . .” He believes that his version does what the original does: it gets us from one idea to another in plausible academese. But it does so in the way Weber might have if he were giving the speech in English, today, rather than rendering the early twentieth-century German in English.
Conceiving language as something you flirt and fight with, rather than a dry dictionary’s worth of words, also helps resolve the old cocktail-party question of whether everything can be translated. What do you do with some triple-barreled German compound, or the fabled forty-ninth Eskimo term for snow? Searls relates a story from a talk he gave with the Austrian dramatist Clemens Berger, who told the audience about a word (mamihlapinatapai) from an Indigenous language (Yagán) in southern Patagonia. Berger explained that the word referred to “well, when a man and a woman are in a bar, and he looks at her, and she looks at him, and they look at each other and their looks say okay I’m interested in you but you need to make the first move and come over to me? The word means that.” The audience laughed—and Searls pointed out that, in relating how mamihlapinatapai can’t be translated, the playwright had in fact just translated it: it didn’t fit into a single word, but the term did what it was supposed to do. Thinking this way lets a translator cut through, or simply ignore, a lot of knotty problems.
Searls’s philosophy is ultimately one of freedom— to move beyond mere equivalence, to translate how a text communicates rather than simply what it says. In other words, freedom to do what good literary translators have always done. Some might find this liberty surprising, even alarming, particularly when it comes to texts whose meaning is not merely a product of the reader’s experience but inheres closely in their precise verbal structure. (A philosopher reviewing Searls’s edition of Wittgenstein’s “Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus” observes that the translation’s occasionally revelatory “fluency” could also lead to “sometimes downright misinterpretation.”) But for Searls it’s inevitable that any translation will be deeply subjective. “All translators are faithful,” Searls writes, “but to different things: to whatever they feel is most important to preserve.” It can be something as big as gender politics in the Odyssey, or as small as that “I” wagging like a tail at the end of Bragi’s name.
This is also, then, a philosophy of trust. Readers must take translators on their word that the translated version has anything to do with the original, and authors—well, authors just have to buckle up and hold on. Translators also need to trust themselves, and to commit to rendering their experience of a novel or an essay or a poem, rather than trying to make themselves disappear in the no man’s land between languages. In fact, visibility may be the key to their survival as A.I.-driven translators improve, and transcend the mere equivalence-hunting of tools like Google Translate. As is often the case, A.I. isn’t so much changing the game as exaggerating a dynamic already at work: good translation draws on as much of life and experience and personality as good writing does. Robert Frost is reported to have said that “poetry is what gets lost in translation.” But, Searls might say, that’s only true if the translator gets lost, too. ♦
