Why Translation Matters (Why X Matters) [Hardcover]

WHY TRANSLATION MATTERS is a superb book, exceedingly rich for its 119 pages of text. Basically, it is a passionate statement of the role, creativity, and duty of translators of literature, written by one of the foremost Spanish-to-English translators working today, having to her credit published translations of Cervantes's "Don Quixote" and many of the major works of García Márquez and Vargas Llosa.

Most of the book is comprised of three lectures given at Yale as the first in a proposed annual series of lectures entitled "Why X Matters". Given her expertise, Edith Grossman addressed translation and why it matters. In addition to the lectures, the book contains a fourth chapter on translating poetry, which in Grossman's professional work has been poetry of the Spanish Renaissance.

Many of us who have not worked as translators, or whose work basically has been limited to classes in a foreign language, tend to think of translation as rather mechanical duplication or word-for-word transcription, i.e., for each word in the original language, substituting the most appropriate word in the target language. WHY TRANSLATION MATTERS certainly will disabuse anyone of that model. Let me quote two excerpts from the book:

"[T]he most fundamental description of what translators do is that we write--or perhaps rewrite--in language B a work of literature originally composed in language A, hoping that readers of the [translation] will perceive the text, emotionally and artistically, in a manner that parallels and corresponds to the esthetic experience of its first readers."

"To my mind, a translator's fidelity is not to lexical pairings but to context--the implications and echoes of the first author's tone, intention, and level of discourse. Good translations are good because they are faithful to this contextual significance. They are not necessarily faithful to words or syntax, * * * because words do not `mean' in isolation. Words `mean' as indispensable parts of a contextual whole that includes the emotional tone and impact, the literary antecedents, the connotative nimbus as well as the denotations of each statement."

Thus, for Grossman, translation is an interpretive art - akin to an actor performing Shakespeare or a pianist performing a Beethoven piano sonata. Indeed, it is almost as if the translator is another author, another creative writer, albeit paradoxically still tethered to the original author's story, tone, intentions, and level of discourse. This attitude is behind Borges's reported instructions to one of his translators to write not what Borges had said but what he had meant to say.

The discussion of the creativity of translation is to me the most interesting part of the book. In addition to that subject, part of the book is devoted more directly to the topic denoted by the title - "why translation matters". What Grossman says on this topic is pretty much what one would anticipate: Translation exponentially expands the audience for classics of literature and the products of foreign perspectives and experience, and it broadens considerably a reader's understanding of the human experience. It also enables the literary tradition of any language to be infused with fresh ideas, both substantively and stylistically, as is illustrated by the profound effect that Faulkner (in translation) had on many Latin American writers, who in turn later influenced (in translation) more contemporary writers in English.

As someone who has been immeasurably enriched by reading foreign literature in translation, I cannot sing highly enough my praise for WHY TRANSLATION MATTERS. I expect that it will prove of similar urgent interest to all who are sensitive to, bewildered by, or in awe of the art of translation.

Edith Grossman, a translator of many important literary works, including Cervantes' Don Quixote, delivered much of this very fine, easy to read, and informative book as lectures at Yale University. She points out that translations make it possible for people to gain knowledge from other cultures and a wide number of thinkers. She deplores that many publishers diminish the value of translators by hardly mentioning them and reviewers who altogether ignore that the volume is a translation. She bewails that while fifty percent of all books in translation published world-wide are translated from English, English-speaking people are deprived of what they should know because only six percent of foreign language books are translated into English.

In chapter 2, Grossman tells us about the two years she took to translate Don Quixote, the things she had to consider and the things she had to do. Should she read all the English translations of the masterpiece? Should she study the scholarly literature about the book? Should she consider the different scholarly views about various passages and add footnotes? Should she approach her translation of this four hundred year old classic as he handled the modern Latin writers that she usually translated?

In chapter 3, she discusses how she and others handle translating poetry, and offers many examples. How does a translator capture the rhyme and rhythm of the original, its emotions, and its images, images from another country and, possibly also, a different time.

Grossman is certainly correct. Good translators make significant contributions to every book they translate. In fact, some translations are a lively duet between the original author and his or her translator. The great philosopher Moses Maimonides (1138-1204), for example, who spent a decade composing his book on philosophy and was careful in selecting every word, told his translator, who rendered his Guide of the Perplexed from its original Arabic to Hebrew, not to translate his philosophical masterpiece literally. He wrote to him:

"The translator who proposes to render each word literally and adhere slavishly to the order of the words and sentences in the original, will meet much difficulty and the result will be doubtful and corrupt. This is not the right method. The translator should first try to grasp the sense of the subject thoroughly, and then state the theme with perfect clarity in the other language. This however, cannot be done without changing the order of words, putting many words for one word, or vice versa, and adding or taking away words, so that the subject be perfectly intelligible in the language into which he translates." (Translated by Leon D. Stitskin in his Letters of Maimonides, Yeshiva University Press, New York, 1977.)

Maimonides' use of translations proves Grossman's point about the need for translations to acquire information, for without being able to read translations, Maimonides probably would not have known enough to write his famous philosophical book. Maimonides' Guide of the Perplexed is based in large part upon the Greek Aristotle's philosophy. However, Maimonides did not know Greek, the language Aristotle used. Maimonides' knowledge of Aristotle's philosophy came from the translations of the Greek into Arabic, a language he understood.

Grossman focuses primarily on novels and poetry, and not on philosophical writings, such as those by Maimonides. However, her thoughts, as can be seen in the above quote, apply to all literature. They also apply to the Bible.
Most of the millions of people who read the Bible forget that the Scripture they read is a translation from the Hebrew in regard to the Torah, and the Greek or, according to some scholars, from Aramaic to Greek to English, for the New Testament. They fail to realize that what they are reading frequently, indeed very frequently, is different than what is in the original.

For example, should the opening words of the Torah be translated "In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth," as most translations render the Hebrew words, even though the heaven and earth were not the first creations, as can be seen in the next sentences. Or should the Hebrew be translated "In the beginning when God created the heaven and earth," as the eleventh century French commentator Rashi insisted; the later indicating that heaven and earth were not the first creation.

Or take another example, the noun "Lord" as another name for God is well-known, but the fact is that "Lord" is not the name in the text. The Torah has the Tetragrammaton, the four letter name of God. When the Bible was translated for the first time, from Hebrew into Greek in about 250 BCE for Jews living in Egypt who spoke Greek, in a work called the Septuagint, the translators felt it was inappropriate to render God's name into Greek, so they substituted the word "Lord." Most future translations continued this practice. As a result, readers of the Hebrew Bible in translation are reading what the Bible does not say.

Grossman's book is important. It raises our consciousness to the role and contributions of translators and how we need to respect their efforts and encourage publishers to use them much more frequently.

In the fall of 1986, I was in a Master's program at Washington University in St. Louis, and taking a seminar in "The Latin American Novel." I have to admit that, prior to the course, I was familiar with (but had not read) only one Latin American novel - "One Hundred Years of Solitude" by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. (Yes, I was an Anglo-centric cretin).

We read "100 Years of Solitude," and we read "The Green House" and "The War of the End of the World by Mario Vargas Llosa." And Manuel Puig's "Kiss of the Spider Woman." And "The Death of Artemio Cruz" by Carlos Fuentes. And several other works. I wrote my major paper of the seminar on Vargas Llosa's "Conversations in the Cathedral," which seems to have no narrative structure at all until you understand that it is actually four stories being told simultaneously. Think Faulkner on steroids.

But I didn't read these works, and many more to follow, in the original Spanish. I read them in translation. And so I met names like Alfred MacAdam, Helen Lane, Gregory Rabassa - and Edith Grossman.

"Why Translation Matters" is based upon two lectures Grossman gave at Yale University and an original essay written for this volume. She explains, with all of the artful love of a translator, what the process of translation involves, the challenges it poses (and they are formidable), and why translations are important. And she means translation "not as the weary journeyman of the publishing world but as a living bridge between two realms of discourse, two realms of experience, and two sets of readers."

For the fact is that no good translation can be a literal, word-for-word effort. It's simply not possible. Languages are full of expressions, artifacts, histories, nuances, hidden meanings and all of the other components of culture that may - or may not - translate well. And even if they translate well, they can't really ever be exact, because the experience that shaped Spanish, for example, is not the same that created English. The translator faces the task of remaining true to the author's words and intent, but that dedication can mean, and often does mean, continuing to "write" the work in hand. In that sense, translation means that no literary work is actually ever "finished."

Grossman tackles these issues head on. And it's because of translators like Grossman that we have anything resembling a "world literature" instead of fragmented collections of "national literatures."

Just a few years ago, Grossman translated "Don Quixote" by Miguel de Cervantes. She had first read Don Quixote in English, translated by Samuel Putnam - the same translation of Don Quixote I first read and fell in love with. Her translation has met wide acclaim, and she talks extensively about it in her third essay in "Why Translation Matters."

I knew her work before I met her in this volume. In fact, I've read at least seven novels she has translated, and I learned that I could see "Translated by Edith Grossman" on a book's title page and know that I was holding a novel that would be well worth my time to read.