On page 37 of 19 Ways of Looking at Wang Wei, Eliot Weinberger critiques François Cheng’s translation of the poem in writing “The first couplet should be interpreted as…” This caught my attention, as I felt like the phrase “should be interpreted” is itself a bit of an oxymoron. Is interpretation not inherently subjective? Isn’t deciding how something should or should not be interpreted infringing on one’s own ability to read, understand, and interpret literature? I realize that the boundary between interpretation and translation is often blurred and overlapping, yet especially with Tim Parks’ particularly detailed analysis of Smith’s translation of The Vegetarian in mind, I think it’s important to acknowledge that translators are allowed, as humans and readers, to have their own interpretations. It’s what they do with those interpretations that can then be critiqued (constructively, hopefully).
Because of this, I thought Lydia Davis’ essay Loaf or Hot Water Bottle stood out among the rest: she is careful to make clear her own opinions on translation and understanding of Proust’s work, yet she is neither overly apologetic for her own translation choices nor self-congratulatory. Her essay is what I come to look for in reading translator’s notes: a detailed look into the puzzle of close translation (borrowing from her comparison of translation to a crossword puzzle). I loved her description of how she uses etymology and word derivation to find new options still within the bounds of a close translation, and I strongly resonated with her remark that “A translator’s excitement is after all a strangely localized thing – and hard to convey because it arises from minutiae so tedious to explain.” After reading this, Brian Nelson’s translator’s note fell flat: his generic comments about matching the sense of the original in translation seemed obvious, especially in such statements as “Successful translation of Proust is achieved… by making him sound like Proust, by giving him an English voice…” I did appreciate his ideas about the ideal translation conveying respect for the source language and culture, but again, this felt a bit like he was restating an accepted consensus in the translation world.
I also enjoyed Shirley Hazzard’s take, and was drawn to her ideas about some translations becoming “a masterpiece in their own right.” (76) I also was interested in the idea of “translation fatigue” (82) and the idea of precedence in translation. Her piece raises the questions of why we retranslate works, and what we are looking for in retranslations, to which Weingerger, Davis, and Nelson all seem to have different answers.
- Luisa Bocconcelli
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