Is That a Fish in Your Ear?

These examples could lead us to believe that the translation of style is an exercise in pastiche, the translator’s task being the choice of an existing style in the target culture to serve as a rough match for the “other.” Many literary translators go about their job in just that way. On reading a new work in French, for example, I certainly do run through in my mind the kinds of English style that might fit, and when starting on a new job, I often rifle through the books on my shelf to remind myself of the particularities of the “style match” I have in my head. But this idea of style as a culturally constituted set of linguistic resources characteristic of an author, period, literary genre, or school clashes with another widespread idea of what a “style” is: the irreducible difference of any individual’s unique forms of language. In brief: If style is “inimitable,” how come it can be imitated?

The muddle about what style is began in the gilded halls of the Académie Française, an institution set up by Louis XIV to promote and defend the French language. In 1753, a natural scientist was invited to take his place as one of the forty “immortals,” as members are called. Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon, an eminent botanist, mathematician, and natural historian, gave an extraordinary acceptance speech that has since become known as the “Discourse on Style.” In it he sought to reassure his audience—the thirty-nine academicians who had just elected him—that the promotion of a mere scientist to such elevated rank would not topple rhetoric from its proper place at the pinnacle of French culture. He may even have been sincere—but I wouldn’t count on it. In his much-quoted but mostly misunderstood conclusion, Buffon emphasized that what matter above all are the arts of language. Scientific discoveries, he declared, are really quite easy to make, and will quickly perish unless they are explained with elegance and grace. That is because mere facts are not human achievements—they belong to the natural word and are therefore hors de l’homme, “outside of humankind.” Eloquence, by contrast, is the highest evidence of human agency and genius: le style est l’homme même.

This meaning of style, as a synonym for elegance and distinction, continues to motivate most modern uses of the word and its cognates. Stylish clothes are those considered elegant by some group of people; to ski or to dance or to serve cucumber sandwiches in style is likewise to do these things with fashionable grace. Buffon’s style is a social value. Nobody is free to construct his or her own idea of what is stylish, save by getting other people to agree. Similarly, stylish writing conforms to a shared notion, however vague, of what is fashionable, appropriate, socially elevated, and so on in the way you speak and write.

Matching posh for posh in translating between languages used by cultures with linguistic forms that correspond to hierarchical social structures is no sweat. Where the social structures of the source culture are more elaborate than those of the target, a degree of flattening occurs: the different social implications of Estimado señor and Apreciado señor at the start of a formal letter in Spanish, for example, can’t be represented in English, which can say only “Dear Sir.” To compensate for losses of this kind, which can be far more substantial when translating between cultures as unrelated to each other as Japanese and French, for example, the translator may invent target-language analogues for distinctions that belong to the social world of the original, and be accused variously of quaintness, condescension, or fidelity to the source. But there are even less tractable issues involved when the social register of the language used in the source is low. There is a seemingly inevitable bias against representing forms of language recognized in the source culture as regional, uncouth, ill-educated, or taboo by socially matching forms in the target tongue—presumably because doing so risks identifying the translator as a member of just such a marginal or subordinated class. As a result, translation usually takes the social register of the source up a notch or two. The social dimension of “style” doesn’t flow easily from tongue to tongue.