Translators, Traitors and Tricks of the Trade

In a paper bearing the above title I once described the deplorable state of translation in my field, which was Spanish American prose fiction.  We were at the height of the so-called Boom, in which that literature was influencing the rest of the world (consider Borges’s presence in Italo Calvino’s work, and García Márquez’s in that of Salman Rushdie, for example), rather than playing off the great works of the United States, Europe and Asia.

One abomination I gave as an example was the rendering of a phrase in Carlos Fuentes’s Where the Air Is Clear:  Fuegos artificiales came out as “artificial fires.”  Right out of a cheap Spanish-English dictionary it was, and of course it should have been “fireworks.”  When a colleague of mine, Luis Harss, confronted a well-known translator with some things he had done with Julio Cortázar’s Hopscotch, he retorted, “Yes, I know.  I asked Julio what he thought about the criticism, and do you know what he said?  He said, ‘Gregory, you do whatever you want.’”

There was an even more amateurish translation of a short story in which a woman shouts, “They killed my husband!  Grab him!”  Leaving aside the unappealing thought of grabbing a bloody corpse, anyone at all familiar with Spanish would know that the third person plural of the past tense is often used in place of the passive voice.  The translation should have read, “My husband has been killed!  Stop the murderer!”

There is a Medieval saying in Italian that reads, “Traduttore, traditore” (Translator, traitor).  I recall attending a luncheon session with the great linguist Eugene Nida, who emphatically stated that there is no word in any world language that has an exact equivalent in any other world language.  My thought was that there must be certain very fundamental nouns that have exact equivalents.  Take banana, for example.  Uh, uh.  If you take the cognate in Spanish and use it in Colombia, it designates only one of quite a number of variations, the others being banano, plátano, manzana, etc.  Yes, manzana. It’s called that because it smells like an apple.  Puerto Rico has its own words for the varieties of bananas.  Their guineos are delicious.

On a more important level, as I understand it, support for the League of Nations was already a little shaky when some reporter in New York wrote that France “demands” some concession or other.  That made New Yorkers bristle.  Hey, we just bailed the French out in a world war, and now they’re so arrogant that they’re making demands?  And the League of Nations died.  The problem was that the reporter hadn’t even studied French sufficiently to know that demande should be translated as “requests.”  Gregory, you do whatever you want.

So translation is very important where political issues are concerned, and I often worry about treaties with Arab nations.  Arabic words can vary so wildly in their meanings that another colleague of mine used to bring his lunch to campus in a brown bag and entertain himself by reading his Arabic-English dictionary.  He told me that he ran across one word whose meanings were listed as follows:  (1) The left hind teat of a two-year-old she-camel; (2) A politician.  We’d better have very good scholars of that language when those treaties are written.  The same is true of Chinese.

Nida was first and foremost a Bible translator, and his organization is still struggling with getting portions of the Bible into the languages of the people groups of the world.  One significant problem emerged when translators needed to render passages about sheep (“I am the good shepherd.  The good shepherd gives his life for the sheep”) into the language of the Inuits, who had never heard of sheep.  As I recall, the translator substituted seals.  But that translation becomes a bit weak when the seal herder goes off in search of his lost seal, or “My seals hear my voice and follow me.”

Many centuries earlier, Saint Jerome did some strange things in translating the Bible into Latin.  First, he needed to find an equivalent for the Greek word dikaioo, which we have as “justify.”  The Greek double o ending has to do with declaring something to be so, as a judge declares a defendant guilty or not guilty.  All Jerome had available was justificare, and that -are ending on a Latin verb means to make something so.  That tended to lead the Latin church off into a doctrine of salvation by works.  He also encountered metanoia, which we have in English as “repent.”  In Greek it means a transformation of the mind, but Jerome rendered it into Latin as poenitentia, “penitence.”  Penitence may be a worthy activity, but it is a far cry from a transformation of the mind.

Bible translators are still arguing over how best to translate the Bible.  What does one do, for example, when John quotes Jesus (already coming from Aramaic into Greek in doing so) as telling Nicodemus he must be born—well, the Greek reads anothen, and it can be translated either “again” or “from above.”  It is pretty well agreed that John, who loves to make significant plays on words, means both.  So what do we do, choose one meaning and put the other in one of those onerous footnotes?

We are a nation that has trouble even with our own native language.  I’ve written about that problem on more than one occasion.  But we are even worse at learning the world’s languages in depth.  I’m afraid it may be grossly hypocritical of us to demand a great deal of respect for our understanding of what that world is saying.  Just think of that scene in The Gods Must Be Crazy (admittedly in South Africa, not the United States) in which the male lead tries to convince the female lead that what he has said about rhinoceroses stamping out fires is true by appealing to some native Africans.  They shake their heads from side to side, at which point he must try to convince here that in their culture that means yes.  We’d better learn about those differences, in body language as well as spoken language.