The Joys of Translating
A lecture given to the Korean Open Cyber University on December 15, 2007. (Slightly shortened)
How, you may wonder, can translating ever be a source of joy? For me,
joy is the hallmark of fulfillment, the sign that our life has found at
least a certain degree of meaning and value. I would say that
translation ought always to be a source of joy, because it is an
activity by which we try to overcome the barriers to communication
which keep people apart; by literary translation, the words of writers
who could never communicate directly with the vast numbers not
understanding their language are made accessible to a wider readership.
Translation aims at communication, a wider comprehension, a more
universal understanding. In that way, if the words translated have any
value making them worth translating, the human family is (however
partially) enriched. To that extent the translator’s activity seeks to
reverse some of the consequences of Babel, the Bible’s symbolic story
of the source of the divisions and frustrations arising from the
multiplicity of our human languages.
It should by now be clear that I am not talking about translating
business letters, emails, or contracts. My focus is on literary
translation, especially poetry, and I believe that what we call
literature has value far beyond the commercial calculations of
publishers who will only publish a book if they think it will make a
profit. The value of literature, whether poetry or fiction or drama, is
immense because it is the way in which writers have sought to express a
vision of what it means to be human. Literature, among many other
things, can be seen as a school of compassion, teaching us ever more
about human sorrows and joys, pains and hopes, and revealing each time
we read a little more of the wonder of the human heart.
It can be argued that it would be far better for everyone to learn to
speak and read several languages, so that they can communicate with
others speaking them and also read the books written in those languages
without relying on translations, that can never be quite the same as
the original. That was what John Milton did, mastering Latin, Greek,
Hebrew, French, Italian, Spanish, German and Dutch while being able to
read several other languages reasonably well. As a result, he was able
to read virtually every book that was available in England in his time,
without needing any translations. It might, of course be argued that he
paid the price, ruining his eyesight reading so many books; he was
completely blind before he was fifty. Today’s world of literary
translation is, certainly, the result of a growth in literacy that has
not been accompanied by increased multi-lingualism. It is the sign that
people feel an urgent need to read works from cultures that use
languages very unlike their own.
Translation in earlier centuries
Translation of texts from one language to another goes back a long way,
of course, and it is surely no accident that the act of written
translation began with sacred, religious texts. One of the first
important acts of translation was accomplished in the second century
BC, when the Jewish scriptures that had originally been written in
Hebrew or Aramaic were translated into Greek. The reason was the
steadily rising number of Jews and others living in Alexandria and
other parts of the Hellenic world who wished to read the scriptures but
could not hope to master Hebrew.
Even in those days, doubts were raised about the possibility of
representing in translation the full meaning of the original
accurately, as they still are today. The response from the Jewish
religious authorities was that all races and all languages were
descended from the three sons of Noah, Shem, Ham, and Japheth. Hebrew
and Aramaic were the language of Shem, Greek the language of Japheth;
since Shem and Japheth were equally blessed by God (unlike Ham, the
originator of Canaan and Africa, who was cursed), there could be no
real difference between the Hebrew and Greek languages. Translation
between them must therefore be possible without loss of the essential
sacred meaning. The result was the Septuagint, the Greek Old Testament
still accepted as the cannon by the Catholic and Orthodox churches,
without which no on would probably have thought to write the record of
the life and teachings of Jesus in Greek, quite soon after the start of
the Christian Church; there would have been no Gospels, no New
Testament! One of the biggest puzzles in the world of translation is
just how the message of Jesus, spoken in Aramaic to small groups of
Jews living in Galilee and Judea, came to exist as Greek texts written
and edited in various parts of the Roman Empire by people who never
heard him speak.
In Asia, a very similar project on an even larger scale, that happened
centuries later, was the translation of the Buddhist scriptures from
Pali into Chinese. At first, Taoist terminology was adopted to
translate Buddhist terms, but as a result people concluded that
Buddhism was simply an exotic form of Chinese Taoist wisdom. It was
only when a new set of translations was made, using other words for the
key Buddhist concepts, that the two teachings diverged in Chinese
history. Only a few highly educated Chinese Buddhists continued to read
the scriptures in their original Indian language. An interesting
parallel can be seen in the paintings in the cave-temples of Mogau in
Dunhuang on the Silk Road. In the earliest paintings, the disciples
gathered around the Buddha are made to look Indian, with large eyes and
noses and dark skins; in later paintings, they have all become Chinese
in appearance and dress!
In contrast, the intellectuals of Rome all learned Greek and saw no
need to translate the writings of Homer, Plato and Aristotle, or of the
great Greek tragedians, into Latin. By a miracle, all the texts of
Plato survived and were finally translated at the time of the
Renaissance; but strangely enough the books that Aristotle wrote,
although they were widely studied in classical Rome, were utterly lost
after that. The texts now studied as the works of Aristotle are in fact
only rough lecture notes found stored in the cellar of his former home.
The survival of Greek medicine and mathematics was due to the
translation of the basic texts into Arabic by the great scholars of the
early Islamic world. The universities of Europe arose on the basis of
the translations into Latin from Greek and Arabic undertaken in the
12th century.
Plato had to wait until the 15th century to be translated into Latin,
the great Greek tragedians until the 16th. Homer, too, was always read
in Roman times in Greek, untranslated, which is why the Latin Middle
Ages knew nothing of his way of telling the story of Troy from the
Greek point of view. England had to wait for Shakespeare’s contemporary
Chapman to publish his translation of Homer, and it was not much read,
although Chapman shares one characteristic with many modern
translators: having failed to get paid the money he had been promised
for his translation, he died after years of poverty and debt. It is
probably only because Keats wrote his first adult poem in praise of
Chapman’s translation of Homer that anyone remembers it, and few if any
follow Keats’ enthusiasm to the point of finding a copy and reading it,
although it is available on the Internet.
The introduction of Christianity to England from 597 saw a remarkable
effort to translate the terminology of the faith from Latin into a
Germanic language, though that was not the first time, since the Goths
and Visigoths were already Christians before 400 and one Gothic bishop,
Ulfilas (also known as Wulfila, 311-382) had translated the entire
Bible into Gothic, though much is lost. England’s first translation
project dates from the years just prior to 900, when King Alfred,
having defeated the Danes and brought them to Christianity, decided
that Latin would never be widely understood in England and set about
learning it, then translating into Old English a number of fundamental
texts including the most translated of all philosophical works,
Boethius’ Consolation of Philosophy, that Geoffrey Chaucer and Queen
Elizabeth I also translated. Alfred’s translation of Boethius is so
different from the original that it is better seen as a free
adaptation, if not an independent work; yet at the same time, Bede’s
History was very faithfully translated, though with quite a lot of
boring material omitted. This was a remarkable enterprise; for the
first time, a ‘barbarian’ language, Old English, was considered capable
of expressing the same level of serious significance as Latin.
The 12th century saw the birth of modern fiction, in the form of what
are known as the Old French ‘chansons de geste’ and ‘romances.’ As a
result of the Norman Conquest of 1066, the aristocrats of England were
French-speaking and needed no translations. Instead, it was into German
that translations were made—above all the Tristan of Gottfried von
Strasburg and the Parzival of Wolfram von Eschenbach. These great works
of German literature, like the versions of French works made in Italy a
little later, show how, for the Middle Ages, translation was not so
much a matter of seeking word-for-word equivalents as of entirely
rewriting a work, creating an only vaguely similar adaptation.
In England, Geoffrey Chaucer is the great example of both approaches.
His translations of Boethius’ Consolation and of the Romance of the
Rose are reasonably precise translations in our modern sense. But when
it came to fiction, he followed quite different strategies, radically
transforming Boccaccio’s epic Tesseida by abbreviating it drastically
to produce the much shorter Knight’s Tale of the ‘love’ of Palamon and
Arcite for Emily; in contrast, it is clear that he was looking at a
copy of Boccaccio’s Il Filocolo as he wrote Troilus and Criseyde, and a
recent edition prints the two works in parallel. Yet here, too, Chaucer
is not simply a translator in our modern literal sense, for he omits
and adds freely at certain points of the story, subtly transforming it
in essential ways. Amusingly, for us, at the point in the story where
young Troilus is trying to understand the emotional turmoil he is
experiencing after first glimpsing Criseyde in a temple, Chaucer turned
aside from Boccaccio’s text and instead introduced a new, lyrical
meditation on the torments caused by love. He gives no sign that in
fact these lines are a very close translation of a sonnet from the Rime
Sparse of Francesco Petrarcha, the first poem by Petrarch to be
translated into English!
The introduction of printing only encouraged a thirst for translations.
William Caxton, who brought printing to England, translated romances
that he then printed and sold. The Reformation could never have
happened without printing, that allowed the rapid spread of
translations of the Bible to social classes that could not have
afforded hand-copied manuscripts.
Shakespeare benefited enormously from the translations produced in the
later 16th century. He could perhaps read a little Latin and French but
it is obvious that he was deeply influenced by the recent translations
or free adaptations of the comedies of the Roman dramatists Terence and
Plautus, with their frustrated young lovers, unreasonable old fathers,
cunning servants and conniving nurses, as well as by the melodramatic
English adaptations of tragedies by Seneca, themselves psychological
thrillers adapted (not translated) from the Greek. Harrington’s
translation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses provided Shakespeare with his wide
range of mythological references; without Thomas North’s translations
of Plutarch’s Lives, Shakespeare could never have written Julius Caesar
or Antony and Cleopatra, and it was Plutarch’s way of showing how the
analysis of the personalities of ‘great men’ allows us to understand
their actions that underlies the use of soliloquies in Hamlet. Finally,
Shakespeare was so impressed by John Florio’s translations of the
Essays of Michel de Montaigne that he uses quite a number of new words
in King Lear and later plays that he had found there, as well as an
entirely new level of self-analysis.
By the later seventeenth century, English society had developed a kind
of wealthy ‘middle class’ where the women especially had much leisure
and where men and women alike were conscious of a need for ongoing
education in the classics of literature and felt excluded by their
ignorance of classical languages. John Dryden in the late 17th century
and Alexander Pope in the early 18th provided translations for
them—Dryden’s version of Virgil’s Aeneid being followed by Pope’s
translations of Homer’s Illiad and Odyssey. All three of these great
translations, that enjoyed tremendous popularity, are composed in the
rhyming ‘heroic couplets’ which were so popular at this time, though
they completely change the feel of the originals.
More radical still are Pope’s ‘translations’ (or ‘free versions,’
rather) of the Satires of Horace. For in them Pope takes all the
details of the geography and people of ancient Rome that Horace
mentions, and replaces them by the geography and people of contemporary
London. Thus the medieval concept of translation as very free
adaptation, a recreation of a work for and in a totally different
cultural mode or context, continued. We might want to remember that
John Dryden even made translations of works by Geoffrey Chaucer, on the
grounds that Middle English versification and vocabulary could not
satisfy the demands of sophisticated modern taste.
Translation since the 19th century
The 19th century saw the development of generalized literacy in
Britain. Many more translations were published, and in particular the
modern fiction of other European countries began to find an audience.
No one did more to introduce the English-speaking world to Russian
literature than Constance Garnett (1862–1946), who translated into
graceful late-Victorian prose seventy major Russian works, including
seventeen volumes of Turgenev, thirteen volumes of Dostoevsky, six of
Gogol, four of Tolstoy, seventeen of Chekhov, and others. She worked so
fast that when she came across an awkward passage she would simply
leave it out. She also made mistakes. But her stylish prose, which made
the Russian writers so accessible, and seemingly so close to the
English sensibility, ensured that her translations would remain for
many years the authoritative standard of how these writers ought to
sound and feel. For the English-reading public, Russian literature was
what Garnett made of it.
Russians were not so impressed. Nabokov called her Gogol translations
"dry and flat, and always unbearably demure." Kornei Chukovsky accused
her of smoothing out the idiosyncrasies of writers' styles so that
"Dostoevsky comes in some strange way to resemble Turgenev." Joseph
Brodsky sniped that the "reason English-speaking readers can barely
tell the difference between Tolstoy and Dostoevsky is that they aren't
reading the prose of either one. They're reading Constance Garnett." In
his Lectures on Russian Literature Vladimir Nabokov maintains that "the
third, and worst, degree of turpitude" in literary translation, after
"obvious errors" and skipping over awkward passages, “is reached when a
masterpiece is . . . vilely beautified in such a fashion as to
conform to the notions and prejudices of a given public. This is a
crime . . . .”
Whether one agrees or not with Nabokov—whose own translation into
English of Pushkin's Eugene Onegin sacrificed poetic rhythm, rhyme, and
readability for literal word-by-word equivalence—there is no doubt that
the practice of translation is strongly influenced by the literary
tastes and sensibilities of the receiving culture. These comments on
Russian literature in translation are drawn from a recent New York
Review of Books review of a new translation of War and Peace, one that
seeks to represent adequately in English the peculiarities of Tolstoy’s
style. This reflects the postmodern interest in affirming the
‘otherness’ of other cultures and their texts, seeing the Garnett
approach as being a form of colonialist appropriation.
In the first half of the 20th century, the West (meaning mainly the
United States and Western Europe including Britain) discovered through
translations the ancient religious writings of India (the Upanishads,
the Bhagavad Gita etc), the poetry of the medieval Provencal
Troubadours, and the classical poetry of China and Japan; the poetry of
China was translated by scholars such as James Legge and Arthur Waley
but it mainly owes its popularity to the work of Ezra Pound, who at
first knew no Chinese, and simply recast scholars’ literal translations
into his own poetic voice, though later he learned enough Chinese to be
able to work with the originals when he wished to. Pound’s
“translations” in Cathay (1915) and the Cantos should not be seen as
academic exercises designed to provide readers with precise renderings
of Chinese poems. Hugh Kenner, in a chapter entitled "The Invention of
China" in his The Pound Era contends that Cathay should be read
primarily as a book about World War I, not as an attempt at accurately
translating ancient Eastern poems. The real achievement of the book,
Kenner argues, is in how it combines meditations on violence and
friendship with an effort to "rethink the nature of an English poem".
These ostensible translations of ancient Eastern texts are actually
experiments in English poetics and compelling elegies for a warring
West. (Wikipedia). That can be considered as the highest form of
literary translation.
The second half of the 20th century saw a growing interest across the
West in “world literature” with the growth of departments of
Comparative Literature in American universities and the publication of
English translations of an increasingly wide range of works from many
different cultures. In England, the Harvill Press, a publishing house
specializing in translated literature, came into being just after the
2nd World War and for 60 years introduced English readers to the work
of such noted writers as Yourcenar, Solzhenitsyn, Calvino, and Yi
Mun-Yol. Still, until 1960, at least, ordinary British readers would
never even have thought of reading translations of novels written in
Latin America, Eastern Europe (apart from Russia), or Turkey. They
mostly never wondered what was being written in the former colonies of
Africa; even Indian writers writing in English were hardly familiar
names.
One exception exists, and for a particular reason: Japanese literature
became popular in the U.S and Britain in the 1950s. The Chinese –
English translator Julia Lovell has written: “The cold war has a lot to
do with it. In the 1950s, as part of the broader US project of
reinventing Japan as an unthreatening regional ally against communist
China, the American publisher Knopf set about marketing a picture of
Japan - through carefully selected and translated works of its modern
fiction - as a non-bellicose land of exotic aestheticism; the very
opposite of Japan's aggressive, jingoistic pre-war image. These were
the years in which authors such as Mishima and Kawabata became the
representative, languishingly melancholic voices who later slipped
comfortably into canon-forming collections in Britain (. . .) Although
the themes and styles of those contemporary Japanese novelists now best
known in the west - Murakami, Banana Yoshimoto - are a far cry from the
taciturn, elusive qualities of Mishima and others, they owe large
swathes of their western audiences to the trails blazed by their
predecessors” (The Guardian, June 11, 2005*). In contrast, as she says,
Chinese writers are still almost completely ignored in the West, to say
nothing of Korean, Indonesian or Vietnamese writers, to name but a few.
Japanese literature, like Russian literature before it, became popular
for reasons that had more to do with conditions in the receiving
culture than with qualities inherent in the original texts.
Translating Korean literature
It was necessary to start with that long historical survey before
mentioning the translation of Korean literature, because it is
important to realize just what a major role translation has always
played in western culture, providing access to the works, ancient and
modern, that writers and literate society felt were needed to
provide them with renewed vision and wider perspectives. At the
same time, that means that the choice of works to be translated and
published has always depended mainly on choices and conditions in the
receiving cultures.
If we turn now to the translation of Korean literature, it may be a
little easier to see the main obstacle facing us. Briefly, it does not
matter how proud Koreans are of their literary heritage, the fact is
that translations of Korean literature are only going to be published
and read in the West if they correspond to a felt need there.
Unfortunately, the slot in the publishing market that Korean literature
can occupy is one which it has to share with every other country in the
same category: “world literature.” Korean writing, seen from a Europe
or North American perspective, has to compete with Indonesian,
Vietnamese, Uruguayan, Peruvian, Kenyan or Nigerian literatures, among
many others. It is a big challenge and the statistics are daunting.
In 2004, 375,000 new books were published in the entire
English-speaking world, of which 14,440 were translations from other
languages (3% of the total). However, at least 75% of those 14,440
translations were in the ‘non-fiction’ category, i.e. not literature.
Just 4,982 of those translations were published in the United States.
By contrast, 4,602 translations into Czech were reported to have been
published in the Czech Republic, almost as many title as in the United
States, although the total Czech population is only 10 million.
The English-speaking world includes some 400 million people. Another
way of expressing the same problem is to say that of the 12,828 works
of fiction and poetry that were published in the United States in 1999,
297 were translations, but that included multiple new editions of
Cevantes, Homer, Balzac, Tolstoy, Dante . . . There is very little room
left for new writers with unfamiliar names from unfamiliar countries.
Many Koreans keep repeating that nobody is translating Korean
literature, that nothing from Korea is being published abroad. It is
not true. In my home page, I have a list of all the published English
translations of Korean literature I know of. 85 volumes have been
published since 2001, most of them in the United States. In view of the
statistics just indicated, I think that is extraordinary! I myself have
published 23 volumes of translated literature since I first began in
1990, mostly poetry, and mostly they were published by small,
non-profit presses in the United States, or by a small press here in
Korea. The only exception was Yi Mun-Yol’s The Poet, published by
Harvill Press in London, a very special event, but without long-term
consequence since the press has now been absorbed by Random House and
is no longer interested in Korean literature.
Young Koreans are often eager to make their country’s literature known
overseas, and many say that they wish to become translators. My first
reaction is a stern warning: it is universally agreed that translators
should translate into their first, mother, language. That is usually
the only language that one masters fully, unless a person has grown up
from infancy to be fully bilingual. The English education that is given
in Korea is so poor that virtually no one, even an A+ English
department graduate from a top university, is able to write a
grammatically and stylistically correct business letter. There is a
very great difference between those who have studied only in Korea and
those who have spent several years of their childhood attending school
in an English-speaking country. But with very rare exceptions, the only
‘native’ Korean-speakers who can translate Korean literature into
English are those who spent almost all their childhood abroad and whose
first language is in fact English. Koreans educated in Korea should
always be translating from foreign languages into Korean.
Very often, Koreans seem to think that translations of Korean poetry
ought to be almost word-for-word / line-for-line equivalents; this is
due to a lack of knowledge of Western translation practice. Very often,
especially today, a translated poem is a very free version of the
original. The challenge is to enable the translation to stand as a poem
in its own right; but of course there is always going to be the
theoretical question of whether or not a translation should so
transform the poetic discourse of the original that the result
assimilates the poem to contemporary American, Irish or British poetic
practices. In other words, for example, should Ko Un in English
translation sound like a Californian beat poet? It is not an easy
question to answer. I rather think that the answer might have to be
yes, but I am fairly sure that he would not agree.
Finally, because people always ask what is my favorite Korean poem, here it is, in Korean and English:
귀천(歸天) : 천상병
나 하늘로 돌아가리라
새벽빛 와 닿으면 스러지는
이슬 더불어 손에 손을 잡고
나 하늘로 돌아가리라
노을빛 함께 단 둘이서
기슭에서 놀다가 구름 손짓하면은
나 하늘로 돌아가리라
아름다운 이 세상 소풍 끝내는 날
가서 아름다웠더라고 말하리라 .
Back to Heaven by Chon Sang-Pyeong (Translated by Br Anthony)
I'll go back to heaven again.
Hand in hand with the dew
that melts at a touch of the dawning day,
I'll go back to heaven again.
With the dusk, together, just we two,
at a sign from a cloud after playing on the slopes
I'll go back to heaven again.
At the end of my outing to this beautiful world
I'll go back and say: That was beautiful. . . .
I would stress that I never simply read that poem; I tell people the
story of the poet’s life, his poverty, his arrest and torture, his
physical weakness, his childlike heart. And I also have to speak of the
times he lived in, the Japanese occupation, the Korean War, the
military dictatorships. It is part of the translator’s task to ensure
that a nation’s literature is carried across together with at least a
minimum of information about the social and personal context in which
works of literature arose. Korean literature is part of Korean history.
It is also part of the universal human experience, with its own unique
voice. I only hope that in translating it, I enable that voice to be
heard clearly. Then people living far away can understand what it is
that makes Korean poetry beautiful, and so worth reading.