FB
2005-09-18 19:30:41 UTC
An interesting article by Umberto Eco.
QUOTE
*A Rose by Any Other Name*
*By Umberto Eco*
*Translated by William Weaver*
*Guardian Weekly, January 16, 1994*
There are writers who do not bother about their translations, sometimes
because they lack the linguistic competence; some sometimes because they
have no faith in the literary value of their work and are anxious only to
sell their product in as many countries as possible.
Often the indifference conceals two prejudices, equally despicable: Either
the author considers himself an inimitable genius and so suffers
translation as a painful political process to be borne until the whole
world has learned his language, or else the author harbours an "ethnic"
bias and considers it a waste of time to care about how readers from other
cultures might feel about his work.
People think an author can check his translations only if he knows the
language into I which he is to be translated. Obviously, if he does know
that language, the work proceeds more easily. But it all depends on the
translator's intelligence. For example, I do not know Swedish, Russian, or
Hungarian, and yet I have worked well with my translators into those
languages. They were able to explain to me the kind of difficulties they
faced, and make me understand why what I had written created problems in
their language. In many cases I was able to offer suggestions.
The problem frequently arises from the fact that translations are either
"source-oriented" or "target oriented," as today's books on Translation
Theory put it. A source-oriented translation must do everything possible to
make the B-language reader understand what the writer has thought or said
in language A. Classical Greek affords a typical example: in order to
comprehend it at all, the modern reader must understand what the poets of
that age were like and how they might express themselves. If Homer seems to
repeat "rosy-fingered dawn" too frequently, the translator must not try to
vary the epithet just because today's manuals of style insist we should be
careful about repeating the same adjective. The reader has to understand
that in those days dawn had rosy fingers whenever it was mentioned.
In other cases translation can and should be target-oriented. I will cite
an example from the translation of my novel Foucault's Pendulum whose chief
characters constantly speak in literary quotations. The purpose is to show
that it is impossible for these characters to see the world except through
literary references. Now, in chapter 57, describing an automobile trip in
the hills, the translation reads "the horizon became more vast, at every
curve the peaks grew, some crowned by little villages: we glimpsed endless
vistas." But, after "endless vistas" the Italian text went on: "al di là
della siepe, come osservava Diotallevi." If these words had been
translated, literally "beyond the hedge, as Diotallevi remarked," the
English-language reader would have lost something, for "al di la della
siepe" is a reference to the most beautiful poem of Giacomo Leopardi,
"L'infinito," which every Italian reader knows by heart. The quotation
appears at that point not because I wanted to tell the reader there was a
hedge anywhere nearby, but because I wanted to show how Diotallevi could
experience the landscape only by linking it to his experience of the poem.
I told my translators that the hedge was not important, nor the reference
to Leopardi, but it was important to have a literary reference at any cost.
In fact, William Weaver's translation reads: "We glimpsed endless vistas.
Like Darien," Diotallevi remarked..." This brief allusion to the Keats
sonnet is a good example of target-oriented translation.
A source-oriented translator in a language I do not know may ask me why I
have used a certain expression, or (if he understood it from the start) he
may explain to me why, in his language, such a thing cannot be said. Even
then I try to take part (if only from outside) in a translation that is at
once source and target-oriented.
These are not easy problems. Consider Tolstoy's War And Peace. As many
know, this novel -- written in Russian, of course -- begins with a long
dialogue in French. I have no idea how many Russian readers in Tolstoy's
day understood French; the aristocrats surely did because this French
dialogue is meant, in fact, to depict the customs of aristocratic Russian
society. Perhaps Tolstoy took it for granted that, in his day, those who
did not know French were not even able to read Russian. Or else he wanted
the non-French-speaking reader to understand that the aristocrats of the
Napoleonic period were, in fact, so remote from Russian national life that
they spoke in an incomprehensible fashion. Today if you re-read those
pages, you will realize that it is not important to understand what those
characters are saying, because they speak of trivial things. What is
important is to understand that they are saying those things in French. A
problem that has always fascinated me is this: How would you translate the
first chapter of War And Peace into French? The reader reads a book in
French and in it some of the characters are speaking French; nothing
strange about that. If the translator adds a note to the dialogue saying en
francais dans le text, it is of scant help: the effect is still lost.
Perhaps, to achieve that effect, the aristocrats (in the French
translation) should speak English. I am glad I did not write War And Peace
and am not obliged to argue with my French translator.
As an author, I have learned a great deal from sharing the work of my
translators. I am talking about my "academic" works as well as my novels.
In the case of philosophical and linguistic works, when the translator
cannot understand (and clearly translate) a certain page, it means that my
thinking was murky. Many times, after having faced the job of translation,
I have revised the second Italian edition of my book; not only from the
point of view of its style but also from the point of view of ideas.
Sometimes you write something in your own language A, and the translator
says: "If I translate that into my language B, it will not make sense." He
could be mistaken. But if, after long discussion, you realize that the
passage would not make sense in language B, it will follow that it never
made sense in language A to begin with.
This doesn't mean that, above a text written in language A there hovers a
mysterious entity that is its Sense, which would be the same in any
language, something like an ideal text written in what Walter Benjamin
called Reine Sprache (The Pure language). Too good to be true. In that case
it would only be a matter of isolating this Pure language and the work of
translation (even of a page of Shakespeare) could be done by computer.
The job of translation is a trial and error process, very similar to what
happens in an Oriental bazaar when you are buying a carpet. The merchant
asks 100, you offer 10 and after an hour of bargaining you agree on 50.
Naturally, in order to believe that the negotiation has been a success you
must have fairly precise ideas about this basically imprecise phenomenon
called translation. In theory, different languages are impossible to hold
to one standard; it cannot be said that the English "house" is truly and
completely the synonym of the French "maison." But in theory no form of
perfect communication exists. And yet, for better or worse, ever since the
advent of Homo sapiens, we have managed to communicate. Ninety percent (I
believe) of War And Peace's readers have read the book in translation and
yet if you set a Chinese, an Englishman, and an Italian to discussing War
And Peace, not only will all agree that Prince Andrej dies, but, despite
many interesting and differing nuances of meaning, all will be prepared to
agree on the recognition of certain moral principles expressed by Tolstoy.
I am sure the various interpretations would not exactly coincide, but
neither would the interpretations that three English-speaking readers might
provide of the same Wordsworth poem.
In the course of working with translators, you reread your original text,
you discover its possible interpretations, and it sometimes happens -- as I
have said -- that you want to rewrite it. I have not rewritten my two
novels, but there is one place which, after its translation, I would have
gladly rewritten. It is the dialogue in Foucault's Pendulum in which
Diotallevi says: "God created the world by speaking. He didn't send a
telegram." And Belbo replies:"Fiat lux. Stop."
But in the original Belbo said: "Fiat lux. Stop. Segue lettera" ("Fiat lux.
Stop. Letter follows.") "Letter follows" is a standard expression used in
telegrams (or at least it used to be standard, before the fax machine came
into existence). At that point in the Italian text, Casaubon said: "Ai
Tessalonicesi, immagino." (To the Thessalonians, I suppose.) It was a
sequence of witty remarks, somewhat sophomoric, and the joke lay in the
fact that Casaubon was suggesting that, after having created the world by
telegram, God would send one of Saint Paul's epistles. But the play on
words works only in Italian, in which both the posted letter and the
Saint's epistle are called lettera. In English the text had to be changed.
Belbo says only "Fiat lux. Stop." and Casaubon comments "Epistle follows."
Perhaps the joke becomes a bit more ultraviolet and the reader has to work
a little harder to understand what's going on in the minds of the
characters, but the short circuit between Old and New Testament is more
effective. Here, if I were rewriting the original novel, I would alter that
dialogue.
Sometimes the author can only trust in Divine Providence. I will never be
able to I collaborate fully on a Japanese translation of my work (though I
have tried). It is hard for me to understand the thought processes of my
"target." For that matter I always wonder what I am really reading, when I
look at the translation of a Japanese poem, and I presume Japanese readers
have the same experience when reading me. And yet I know that, when I read
the translation of Japanese poem, I grasp something of that thought process
that is different from mine. If I read a haiku after having read some Zen
Buddhist koans, I can perhaps understand why the simple mention of the moon
high over the lake should give me emotions analogous to and yet different
from those that an English romantic poet conveys to me. Even in these cases
a minimum of collaboration between translator and author can work. I no
longer remember into which Slavic language someone was translating The Name
of the Rose, but we were wondering what the reader would get from the many
passages in Latin. Even an American reader who has not studied Latin still
knows it was the language of the medieval ecclesiastical world and so
catches a whiff of the Middle Ages. And further, if he reads De Pentagono
Salomonis he can recognize pentagon and Solomon. But for a Slavic reader
these Latin phrases and names, transliterated into the Cyrillic alphabet,
suggest nothing.
If, at the beginning of War And Peace, the American reader finds "Eh bien,
mon prince... " he can guess that the person being addressed is a prince.
But if the same dialogue appears at the beginning of a Chinese translation
(in an incomprehensible Latin alphabet or worse expressed in Chinese
ideograms) what will the reader in Peking understand? The Slavic translator
and I decided to use, instead of Latin, the ancient ecclesiastical Slavonic
of the medieval Orthodox church. In that way the reader would feel the same
sense of distance, the same religious atmosphere, though understanding only
vaguely what was being said.
Thank God I am not a poet, because the problem becomes more dramatic in
translating poetry, an art where thought is determined by words, and if you
change the language, you change the thought. And yet there are excellent
examples of translated poetry produced by a collaboration between author
and translator. Often the result is a new creation. One text very close to
poetry because of its linguistic complexity is Joyce's Finnegans Wake. Now,
the Anna Livia Plurabelle chapter - when it was still in the form of an
early draft -- was translated into Italian with Joyce himself
collaborating. The translation is markedly different from the original
English. It is not a translation. It is as if Joyce had rewritten his text
in Italian. And yet one French critic has said that to understand that
chapter properly (in English) it would be advisable to first read that
Italian draft.
Perhaps the Pure Language does not exist, but pitting one language against
another is a splendid adventure, and it is not necessarily true, as the
Italian saying goes, that the translator is always a traitor. Provided that
the author takes part in this admirable treason.
UNQUOTE
Bye, FB
QUOTE
*A Rose by Any Other Name*
*By Umberto Eco*
*Translated by William Weaver*
*Guardian Weekly, January 16, 1994*
There are writers who do not bother about their translations, sometimes
because they lack the linguistic competence; some sometimes because they
have no faith in the literary value of their work and are anxious only to
sell their product in as many countries as possible.
Often the indifference conceals two prejudices, equally despicable: Either
the author considers himself an inimitable genius and so suffers
translation as a painful political process to be borne until the whole
world has learned his language, or else the author harbours an "ethnic"
bias and considers it a waste of time to care about how readers from other
cultures might feel about his work.
People think an author can check his translations only if he knows the
language into I which he is to be translated. Obviously, if he does know
that language, the work proceeds more easily. But it all depends on the
translator's intelligence. For example, I do not know Swedish, Russian, or
Hungarian, and yet I have worked well with my translators into those
languages. They were able to explain to me the kind of difficulties they
faced, and make me understand why what I had written created problems in
their language. In many cases I was able to offer suggestions.
The problem frequently arises from the fact that translations are either
"source-oriented" or "target oriented," as today's books on Translation
Theory put it. A source-oriented translation must do everything possible to
make the B-language reader understand what the writer has thought or said
in language A. Classical Greek affords a typical example: in order to
comprehend it at all, the modern reader must understand what the poets of
that age were like and how they might express themselves. If Homer seems to
repeat "rosy-fingered dawn" too frequently, the translator must not try to
vary the epithet just because today's manuals of style insist we should be
careful about repeating the same adjective. The reader has to understand
that in those days dawn had rosy fingers whenever it was mentioned.
In other cases translation can and should be target-oriented. I will cite
an example from the translation of my novel Foucault's Pendulum whose chief
characters constantly speak in literary quotations. The purpose is to show
that it is impossible for these characters to see the world except through
literary references. Now, in chapter 57, describing an automobile trip in
the hills, the translation reads "the horizon became more vast, at every
curve the peaks grew, some crowned by little villages: we glimpsed endless
vistas." But, after "endless vistas" the Italian text went on: "al di là
della siepe, come osservava Diotallevi." If these words had been
translated, literally "beyond the hedge, as Diotallevi remarked," the
English-language reader would have lost something, for "al di la della
siepe" is a reference to the most beautiful poem of Giacomo Leopardi,
"L'infinito," which every Italian reader knows by heart. The quotation
appears at that point not because I wanted to tell the reader there was a
hedge anywhere nearby, but because I wanted to show how Diotallevi could
experience the landscape only by linking it to his experience of the poem.
I told my translators that the hedge was not important, nor the reference
to Leopardi, but it was important to have a literary reference at any cost.
In fact, William Weaver's translation reads: "We glimpsed endless vistas.
Like Darien," Diotallevi remarked..." This brief allusion to the Keats
sonnet is a good example of target-oriented translation.
A source-oriented translator in a language I do not know may ask me why I
have used a certain expression, or (if he understood it from the start) he
may explain to me why, in his language, such a thing cannot be said. Even
then I try to take part (if only from outside) in a translation that is at
once source and target-oriented.
These are not easy problems. Consider Tolstoy's War And Peace. As many
know, this novel -- written in Russian, of course -- begins with a long
dialogue in French. I have no idea how many Russian readers in Tolstoy's
day understood French; the aristocrats surely did because this French
dialogue is meant, in fact, to depict the customs of aristocratic Russian
society. Perhaps Tolstoy took it for granted that, in his day, those who
did not know French were not even able to read Russian. Or else he wanted
the non-French-speaking reader to understand that the aristocrats of the
Napoleonic period were, in fact, so remote from Russian national life that
they spoke in an incomprehensible fashion. Today if you re-read those
pages, you will realize that it is not important to understand what those
characters are saying, because they speak of trivial things. What is
important is to understand that they are saying those things in French. A
problem that has always fascinated me is this: How would you translate the
first chapter of War And Peace into French? The reader reads a book in
French and in it some of the characters are speaking French; nothing
strange about that. If the translator adds a note to the dialogue saying en
francais dans le text, it is of scant help: the effect is still lost.
Perhaps, to achieve that effect, the aristocrats (in the French
translation) should speak English. I am glad I did not write War And Peace
and am not obliged to argue with my French translator.
As an author, I have learned a great deal from sharing the work of my
translators. I am talking about my "academic" works as well as my novels.
In the case of philosophical and linguistic works, when the translator
cannot understand (and clearly translate) a certain page, it means that my
thinking was murky. Many times, after having faced the job of translation,
I have revised the second Italian edition of my book; not only from the
point of view of its style but also from the point of view of ideas.
Sometimes you write something in your own language A, and the translator
says: "If I translate that into my language B, it will not make sense." He
could be mistaken. But if, after long discussion, you realize that the
passage would not make sense in language B, it will follow that it never
made sense in language A to begin with.
This doesn't mean that, above a text written in language A there hovers a
mysterious entity that is its Sense, which would be the same in any
language, something like an ideal text written in what Walter Benjamin
called Reine Sprache (The Pure language). Too good to be true. In that case
it would only be a matter of isolating this Pure language and the work of
translation (even of a page of Shakespeare) could be done by computer.
The job of translation is a trial and error process, very similar to what
happens in an Oriental bazaar when you are buying a carpet. The merchant
asks 100, you offer 10 and after an hour of bargaining you agree on 50.
Naturally, in order to believe that the negotiation has been a success you
must have fairly precise ideas about this basically imprecise phenomenon
called translation. In theory, different languages are impossible to hold
to one standard; it cannot be said that the English "house" is truly and
completely the synonym of the French "maison." But in theory no form of
perfect communication exists. And yet, for better or worse, ever since the
advent of Homo sapiens, we have managed to communicate. Ninety percent (I
believe) of War And Peace's readers have read the book in translation and
yet if you set a Chinese, an Englishman, and an Italian to discussing War
And Peace, not only will all agree that Prince Andrej dies, but, despite
many interesting and differing nuances of meaning, all will be prepared to
agree on the recognition of certain moral principles expressed by Tolstoy.
I am sure the various interpretations would not exactly coincide, but
neither would the interpretations that three English-speaking readers might
provide of the same Wordsworth poem.
In the course of working with translators, you reread your original text,
you discover its possible interpretations, and it sometimes happens -- as I
have said -- that you want to rewrite it. I have not rewritten my two
novels, but there is one place which, after its translation, I would have
gladly rewritten. It is the dialogue in Foucault's Pendulum in which
Diotallevi says: "God created the world by speaking. He didn't send a
telegram." And Belbo replies:"Fiat lux. Stop."
But in the original Belbo said: "Fiat lux. Stop. Segue lettera" ("Fiat lux.
Stop. Letter follows.") "Letter follows" is a standard expression used in
telegrams (or at least it used to be standard, before the fax machine came
into existence). At that point in the Italian text, Casaubon said: "Ai
Tessalonicesi, immagino." (To the Thessalonians, I suppose.) It was a
sequence of witty remarks, somewhat sophomoric, and the joke lay in the
fact that Casaubon was suggesting that, after having created the world by
telegram, God would send one of Saint Paul's epistles. But the play on
words works only in Italian, in which both the posted letter and the
Saint's epistle are called lettera. In English the text had to be changed.
Belbo says only "Fiat lux. Stop." and Casaubon comments "Epistle follows."
Perhaps the joke becomes a bit more ultraviolet and the reader has to work
a little harder to understand what's going on in the minds of the
characters, but the short circuit between Old and New Testament is more
effective. Here, if I were rewriting the original novel, I would alter that
dialogue.
Sometimes the author can only trust in Divine Providence. I will never be
able to I collaborate fully on a Japanese translation of my work (though I
have tried). It is hard for me to understand the thought processes of my
"target." For that matter I always wonder what I am really reading, when I
look at the translation of a Japanese poem, and I presume Japanese readers
have the same experience when reading me. And yet I know that, when I read
the translation of Japanese poem, I grasp something of that thought process
that is different from mine. If I read a haiku after having read some Zen
Buddhist koans, I can perhaps understand why the simple mention of the moon
high over the lake should give me emotions analogous to and yet different
from those that an English romantic poet conveys to me. Even in these cases
a minimum of collaboration between translator and author can work. I no
longer remember into which Slavic language someone was translating The Name
of the Rose, but we were wondering what the reader would get from the many
passages in Latin. Even an American reader who has not studied Latin still
knows it was the language of the medieval ecclesiastical world and so
catches a whiff of the Middle Ages. And further, if he reads De Pentagono
Salomonis he can recognize pentagon and Solomon. But for a Slavic reader
these Latin phrases and names, transliterated into the Cyrillic alphabet,
suggest nothing.
If, at the beginning of War And Peace, the American reader finds "Eh bien,
mon prince... " he can guess that the person being addressed is a prince.
But if the same dialogue appears at the beginning of a Chinese translation
(in an incomprehensible Latin alphabet or worse expressed in Chinese
ideograms) what will the reader in Peking understand? The Slavic translator
and I decided to use, instead of Latin, the ancient ecclesiastical Slavonic
of the medieval Orthodox church. In that way the reader would feel the same
sense of distance, the same religious atmosphere, though understanding only
vaguely what was being said.
Thank God I am not a poet, because the problem becomes more dramatic in
translating poetry, an art where thought is determined by words, and if you
change the language, you change the thought. And yet there are excellent
examples of translated poetry produced by a collaboration between author
and translator. Often the result is a new creation. One text very close to
poetry because of its linguistic complexity is Joyce's Finnegans Wake. Now,
the Anna Livia Plurabelle chapter - when it was still in the form of an
early draft -- was translated into Italian with Joyce himself
collaborating. The translation is markedly different from the original
English. It is not a translation. It is as if Joyce had rewritten his text
in Italian. And yet one French critic has said that to understand that
chapter properly (in English) it would be advisable to first read that
Italian draft.
Perhaps the Pure Language does not exist, but pitting one language against
another is a splendid adventure, and it is not necessarily true, as the
Italian saying goes, that the translator is always a traitor. Provided that
the author takes part in this admirable treason.
UNQUOTE
Bye, FB
--
"You must have had a most happy childhood there."
"Er, it was terrific."
"I'm so glad."
"No, I didn't mean it that way."
"I'm so sorry."
(The Philadelphia Story)
"You must have had a most happy childhood there."
"Er, it was terrific."
"I'm so glad."
"No, I didn't mean it that way."
"I'm so sorry."
(The Philadelphia Story)