Is That a Fish in Your Ear?

It’s indisputable that every speaker of any language has an idiolect, a characteristic set of (ir)regularities that is not identical to the usage of any other person. Why this should be so is discussed see here of this book, but it should be obvious that there are no intellectual, psychological, or practical obstacles to speaking in the same way as some other person (impersonators and pasticheurs do it all the time). But the fact of linguistic variation at the individual level has some very practical applications—such as catching out forgers. Among the early applications of computers to the humanities were statistical programs for identifying the authorship of suspect documents. The programs themselves rested on rival theories about what “style” was: typical patterns in individuals’ use of verbs, or vocabulary, or other parts of speech, that were unfalsifiable by anyone else; or else that “rare pairs” (two words occurring typically together) could be used to identify and distinguish different authors; or that the position in the sentence of common words was what gives the identity of the writer away. This last guess was called “positional stylometry” and was developed in the 1970s by A. Q. Morton and Sidney Michaelson at Edinburgh University. Results of their computer program were admitted as evidence in court in many cases and also used to make scholarly hypotheses about the provenance of different parts of the Hebrew Bible.

“Style” in this individual sense cannot possibly be the object of translation. It would make no sense to try to simulate in English the statistically irregular positioning of, say, the negative particle pas in some French original.

Two interesting consequences ensue. If “style” is such an individual attribute that it cannot even be controlled by the writer (thus allowing sleuths to catch forgers out), then every translator has a “style” of that kind in his target language, and the style of all his translations must be more like itself than it can ever be like the style of the authors translated. I often wonder, in fact, whether my English versions of Georges Perec, Ismail Kadare, Fred Vargas, Romain Gary, and Hélène Berr—whose characteristic uses of French are manifestly quite different—are all, stylistically speaking, just examples of Bellos. By some accounts, they have to be: computational stylistics gives no quarter on that score. Secretly, though, I am quite happy that it should be so. After all, those translations are my work. But it will be known for sure only by some large computer program.

All the same, style can’t be swept away just like that. Admittedly, we do not mean “elegance,” as Buffon did, when we talk about literature and translation, even if we still do when we talk about clothes or cucumber sandwiches. We do not mean statistical regularities in the way we place the indefinite article, though we do when we gratefully accept a court ruling on the incompatibility of the style of our uncle’s alleged will with its claimed authorship.

We mean something else, not so difficult to express: “style” is the reason a novel by Dickens is just Dickens’s, why a piece of P. G. Wodehouse—even if it were written by somebody else—is still in its essence a piece of Wodehouse. Style is, if not the man, then the thing! It is what makes any work uniquely itself.

I also know a Dickens when I see one. But that’s trivial. The question is: At what level is the Dickensianity of any text by Dickens located? In the words, the sentences, the paragraphs, the digressions, the anecdotes, the construction of character, or the plot? Because I, translator, can give you the plot, the characters, the anecdotes, and the digressions; I can even give you the paragraphs, and most of the time I can give you a fair approximation to the sentences, too. But I cannot give you the words. For that, you have to learn English.

For Thirlwell, novelistic “style” is the name of a holistic entity that comes somewhere between “a writer’s special way of looking at the world” and “a writer’s own way of writing novels.” Characteristic uses of sentence structures and sound patterns are certainly a part of the latter, and maybe of the former, too—but only a part. Style in Thirlwell’s sense—the most usable and purposeful sense—is something much larger. If it were not, it would disappear in translation. The circulation of novels among all the vehicular languages of the world and their incontestable conversations with one another demonstrate without a shadow of doubt that style does survive translation. The means that translators use to ensure this are no more than the common skills used in all translation tasks.

In sum, the widespread notion that style is untranslatable is just a variant of the folkish nostrum that a translation is no substitute for the original. There is no more truth to it than there is in the idea that humor can’t be preserved by rephrasing in the same or another tongue.