Susan Sontag on Translation

To translate means many things, among them: to circulate, to transport, to disseminate, to explain, to make (more) accessible. By literary translation we mean, we could mean, the translation of the small percentage of published books actually worth reading: that is to say, worth rereading. I shall argue that a proper consideration of the art of literary translation is essentially a claim for the value of literature itself. Beyond the obvious need for the translator's facilitations in creating stock for literature as a small, prestigious import-export business, beyond the indispensable role that translation has in the construction of literature as a competitive sport, played both nationally and internationally (with rivalries, teams and lucrative prizes) -- beyond the mercantile and the agonistic and ludic incentives for doing translation lies an older, frankly evangelical incentive, more difficult to avow in these self-consciously impious times.

In what I call the evangelical incentive, the purpose of translation is to enlarge the readership of a book deemed to be important. It assumes that some books are discernibly better than other books, that literary merit exists in a pyramidal shape, and it is imperative for the works near the top to become available to as many as possible, which means to be widely translated, and as frequently retranslated as is feasible. Clearly, such a view of literature assumes that a rough consensus can be reached on which works are essential. It does not entail thinking the consensus -- or canon -- is fixed for all time and cannot be modified.

At the top of the pyramid are the books regarded as scripture: indispensable or essential exoteric knowledge which, by definition, invites translation. (Probably the most linguistically influential translations have been translations of the Bible: St Jerome, Luther, Tyndale, the Authorized Version). Translation is then first of all making better known what deserves to be better known -because it is improving, deepening, exalting; because it is an indispensable legacy from the past; because it is a contribution to knowledge, sacred or other. In a more secular register, translation was also thought to bring a benefit to the translator: translating was a valuable cognitive -- and ethical -- workout.

In the era when it is proposed that computers -"translating machines" -will soon be able to perform most translating tasks, what we call literary translation perpetuates the traditional sense of what translation entails. The new view is that translation is the finding of equivalents; or, to vary the metaphor, that a translation is a problem, for which solutions can be devised. In contrast, the old understanding is that translation is the making of choices, conscious choices, choices not simply between the stark dichotomies of good and bad, correct and incorrect, but among a more complex dispersion of alternatives, such as «good» versus «better» and «better» versus «best», not to mention such impure alternatives as «old-fashioned» versus «trendy», «vulgar» versus «pretentious», and «abbreviated» versus «wordy».

Translating, which is here seen as an activity of choosing in the larger sense, was a profession of individuals who were the bearers of a certain inward culture.

To translate thoughtfully, painstakingly, ingeniously, respectfully, is a measure of the translator's fealty to the enterprise of literature itself.

Choices that might be thought of as merely linguistic always imply ethical standards as well, which has made the activity of translating itself the vehicle of such values as integrity, responsibility, fidelity, boldness and humility. The ethical understanding of the task of the translator originated in the awareness that translation is basically an impossible task, if what is meant is that the translator is able to take up the text of an author written in one language, and deliver it, intact, without loss, into another language. Obviously, this is not what is being stressed by those who await impatiently the supersession of the dilemmas of the translator by the equivalencings of better, more ingenious translating machines. Literary translation is a branch of literature -- anything but a mechanical task.

But what makes translation so complex an undertaking is that it responds to a variety of aims. There are demands which arise from the nature of literature as a form of communication. There is the mandate, with a work regarded as essential, to make it known to the widest possible audience. There is the difficulty of passing from one language to another; and of the intransigence of certain texts. For there is something inherent in the work quite outside the intentions or awareness of its author, which emerges as the cycle of translations begins -- a quality that, for want of a better word, we have to call translatability.

This nest of complex questions is often reduced to the perennial debate among translators -- the debate about literalness -- that dates back at least to ancient Rome, when Greek literature was translated into Latin, and continues to exercise translators in every country (and with respect to which there are a variety of national traditions and biases). The oldest theme of the discussion of translations is the role of accuracy and fidelity. Surely there must have been translators in the ancient world whose standard was strict literal fidelity (and damn euphony!), a position defended with dazzling obstinacy by Vladimir Nabokov in his Englishing of Eugene Onegin. How else to explain the bold insistence of St Jerome himself (331-420), the first intellectual (as far as I know) from the ancient world to reflect extensively on the task of translation, that the inevitable result of aiming at a faithful reproduction of the author's words and images is the sacrifice of meaning and of grace?

This is from the preface Jerome wrote to his translation into Latin of the Chronicle of Eusebius. (He translated it in 381-2, while he was living in Constantinople in order to take part in the Council -- six years before he settled in Bethlehem, to improve his knowledge of Hebrew, and almost a decade before he began the epochal task of translating the Hebrew Bible into Latin.) Of this early translation from Greek, Jerome wrote:

It has long been the practice of learned men to exercise their minds by rendering into Latin the words of Greek writers and, what is more difficult, to translate poems by illustrious authors though trammelled by the further requirements of verse. It was thus that our Cicero translated whole books of Plato... and later amused himself with Xenophon. In this latter work the golden river of eloquence again and again meets with obstacles, around which its waters break and foam to such an extent that persons unacquainted with the original would not believe they were reading Cicero's words. And no wonder! It is hard to follow another writer's lines. It is an arduous task to preserve felicity and grace unimpaired in a translation. A writer has chosen a word that forcibly expressed a given thought; I have no word of my own to convey the meaning; and while I am seeking to satisfy the sense I may go a long way round and accomplish but a small distance of my journey. Then we must take into account the ins and outs of transposition, the variations in cases, the diversity of figures, and, lastly, the peculiarities of the native idiom of the language. A literal translation sounds absurd; if, however, I am obliged to change either the orders or the words themselves, I shall appear to have forsaken the duty of a translator.

(Translated by W. H. Fremantle, 1892) What is striking about this self-justifying passage is Jerome's concern that his readers understand just how daunting a task literary translation is...