A few days ago, thanks to ArabLit, I found a very interesting article on the Telegraph, a review of Edith Grossman’s Why Translation Matters by Michael Hofmann.
Hofmann’s take is fairly critical, not of the ideas that Grossman puts forward, but certainly of the form she has chosen. He points out how a translator’s best thinking about translation will be in their translations, and how this kind of book too often ends up being aimed at no one in particular. It’s not for fellow translators, and it’s neither for “the enemies of translations” nor “the generality”.
Tricks from the lecturer’s bag let down the writer: rhetorical questions, bits of academic jargon and waffle, too many quotations from too many “authorities,” sterile listings of the attributes of words, the qualities of style, the glories of authors.
Hofmann is onto something, here. We, as translators, often long for people to be more aware of the importance of our craft, but there are too many cases of our attempts backfiring. Translators often venture into academic writing, but this makes it highly unlikely that the general public will even hear about their book and read it, let alone understand it. On the other hand, though, academia has mostly failed to treat translation seriously. A few months ago, a very interesting article on The Chronicle of Higher Education addressed this problem, while also giving good news about minor progress (last year’s Modern Language Association meeting focused on translation) :
Just as publishers have had an unfortunate tendency not to bother putting translators’ names on book jackets—the idea being that translations are harder to sell—so hiring and tenure-and-promotion committees have preferred not to hear about the translation activities of the candidates whose dossiers they review. It’s almost as though translation is a bad habit, like gambling, that candidates should conceal rather than advertise.
“It actively works against you, which is amazing if you consider that for 3,000 years translation has been at the heart of literary scholarship,” says Esther Allen, an assistant professor in the department of modern languages and comparative literature at Baruch College of the City University of New York
Similarly, Martin Riker wrote, around the same time, and also following the MLA’s meeting:
Although the vast majority of professional-grade translators make their living as university professors, such devotion has hardly been reciprocated by academia itself, which traditionally has failed to treat translation as serious professional work or literary translation as a serious intellectual-artistic discipline.
It seems like we’re caught in between, once again. It is yet another Translation Zone we find ourselves in. We fear that the average reader won’t understand our subtleties or just won’t be interested in knowing what’s behind a translation, as long as it reads well. So we turn to a very small group of people who could understand the minutiae of our process, but the great effort needed to get in and the way that world works won’t really serve us to increase awareness and get recognition.
I have felt this tension in this first couple of months of maintaining this blog. Like two opposing pulls, one towards a no-frills popularisation of why a translator’s work is important and should be better paid and valued, and the other towards a more refined, more authoritative, more elitist approach, somewhat mimicking academic writing. What’s interesting is that I can’t seem to surrender to either of them. I don’t want to just talk casually about case studies, and I certainly don’t want to sound obscure to the very public I am trying to reach and make aware.
But then again, I’m in between countries and in between cultures, in between languages and in between social classes. I might as well just stay in between popularising and philosophising.
Smuggled Words 
For the erstwhile “literary observer” (or critic, if you will) this issue is also quite thorny. How do I write about translation without (an editor warns me) scaring the readers?
I frankly don’t know.
And frankly, who does?
Scaring the readers might just be the way to go, in a way. I guess there are a lot of factors at play, here, but I never have been one to be overly sympathetic towards close-mindedness. After all, one of the tasks of writers (especially non-creative writers) has always been, is and will always be that of educating the readers. So, let them be slightly scared and get over their fear, I say. They’ll thank you in the long run, once they realise there was nothing to be scared about.
P.S. This is the official manifesto in reply to your comment. Find a more pragmatic reply in your inbox! 😉
To misquote the popular maxim, ‘you can’t soothe all the readers all the time’. And it is patronising to the ‘ideal’ reader – I mean simply the imaginary reader you posit in the act of writing – to write down to them. Neither do I think this implies elitism. There is nothing elitist, I think, in grappling with literary minutiae or even in using technical language to do the grappling. Elitism is a kind of literary snobbery, a refusal to explain to the just-arrived reader, as it were, the usage of the terms in play. It’s the ‘club’ mentality taken literary form. I don’t mind prefer someone writing over my head, in this sense, as long as some helpful glossarising is occasionally thrown my way.
So Beppe, I completely agree with you!
Thank you for your support, Iian.
Glad to read that you agree. Although this problem seems to trouble even some of the best translators in the world, so it’s definitely a complicated one. Stay tuned!
Since translation is a kind of problem-solving activity (in its most simplistic terms, how to transform something from language A to language B), and since most people don’t know foreign languages, it’s just not something that they can relate to. And if they do, it’s more likely to be about the translatability of words (resulting in the trotting out of rather banal old chestnuts).
I wonder how many people would be interested in the technical challenges of building a bridge or a tall building. This would be very interesting — even rivetting — if you were an engineer, but much less so if you had no understanding of physics. People don’t care about “shear forces”; they just want the engineers to solve the problem and get the bridge built.
Even something as simple as dressmaking and tailoring is fascinating to people who are involved in it, but if you’re a man who wants a suit, all that matters is whether it feels comfortable and looks good.
Similarly with translation. The interface between two languages can be fascinating when you’re working there, but if you’re just an ordinary consumer, it’s just another lot of technical details that you probably don’t care much about.
Thank you, Bathrobe, for your in-depth comment.
You are certainly right in your analysis (average reader doesn’t care about the process as long as the translation “reads well”) and you have a point when using similes like tailoring and music. Nevertheless, I consider this a rather depressing state of affairs, and I have to point out that such an average and careless person will inevitably have a very partial and superficial understanding of an experience (be it a book, a tune, a dress, or else). You can appreciate so much more when you at least have a vague idea of the process that produced whatever you’re enjoying.
One can like Beethoven, but without an idea of how music works, it’ll be a superficial and partial appreciation. The same is true for every human activity, and I am utterly convinced that we should know at least a little bit of everything if we want to understand the world better.
As for the people who don’t care that much about the details of anything they don’t do themselves, I feel sorry for them but I don’t really have time – nor any interest – to cater to them. It’s the lively minds I’d like to engage…
It just struck me that the dressmaking/tailoring analogy is a useful one. People are very interested in things like “fashion” and “use of colour”. They don’t necessarily care which dyes are used to get those colours, how fabrics are produced, what stitches are used to get the look, or how much it costs to produce garments economically. But they DO care if it looks good and fits their image. Some people may even be extremely creative in the way they wear their clothes, but only a minority will be interested in the technical details of how their clothes came to be.
Similarly with translation. People may love the end result, whether it looks and sounds authentic, whether it hits a chord (expanding their awareness, stimulating their imagination, or just fitting in with their aspirations), and perhaps even more. But whatever appeal a general romantic view of foreign literature (say) may have for lovers of literature, delving into the minutiae of sentence structures and word meanings is unlikely to attract more than a small minority of readers.
Music is another example. I must say I love music, but the technicalities of playing instruments and producing the sounds that become music, or the technicalities of chord progressions, etc., are only interesting in a general sort of way. But I’m not going to start delving into technical tomes on music merely because I love music. It’s just not something I want to go into deeply, even though it results in something that I love and could — if presented properly — be quite fascinating. Perhaps the challenge for translators is to do something like Richard Attenborough did for nature: make it interesting and accessible even if you don’t know much about biology.
Thank you, Bathrobe, for your in-depth comment.
You are certainly right in your analysis (average reader doesn’t care about the process as long as the translation “reads well”) and you have a point when using similes like tailoring and music. Nevertheless, I consider this a rather depressing state of affairs, and I have to point out that such an average and careless person will inevitably have a very partial and superficial understanding of an experience (be it a book, a tune, a dress, or else). You can appreciate so much more when you at least have a vague idea of the process that produced whatever you’re enjoying.
One can like Beethoven, but without an idea of how music works, it’ll be a superficial and partial appreciation. The same is true for every human activity, and I am utterly convinced that we should know at least a little bit of everything if we want to understand the world better.
The Attenbourough parallel is nice, and I completely agree that is needed. It’s needed in every field. This blog is humbly trying to go in that direction, by avoiding too many technicalities while still pointing out some fascinating but often overlooked aspects of translation that will certainly stimulate the curious mind.
As for the people who don’t care that much about the details of anything they don’t do themselves, I feel sorry for them but I don’t really have time – nor any interest – to cater to them. It’s the lively minds I’d like to engage…
That should, of course, be David Attenborough.
I’m sure you follow Languagehat, but if you haven’t looked recently, on 3 June it mentions a live translation event to be held on 19 June at the British Museum (http://www.lrbshop.co.uk/product.php?productid=19120&cat=386&page=1).
This is a brilliant idea because it will cause all kinds of people — hopefully gifted, intelligent, and maybe influential people — to focus on what actually happens in translation. It’s not Attenborough, but it looks like an ingenious attempt to make the whole process INTERESTING.