Is That a Fish in Your Ear?

Copyright is a modern invention, dating from 1708, but international copyright is even more recent. First sketched out in bilateral treaties in the 1850s, modern arrangements for the translation of literary works were first codified in the 1920s. The Berne Convention, which has since become the Universal Copyright Convention, doesn’t allow a publisher to put out a translation without purchasing that right from the owner of the original text. But when a publisher does acquire the right to publish a foreign work in translation, he becomes the sole owner of the translated work for as long as the edition remains in print.[169] He has a monopoly in the target language—until the original work falls into the public domain.

International copyright protection is now set at seventy years from the author’s death or from first publication, in the case of posthumous works. Marcel Proust died in 1922, and the last volume of A la recherche du temps perdu was published in 1927. Franz Kafka died in 1924, and his most famous works came out in 1925 (The Trial), 1926 (The Castle), and 1927 (America). English-language publishers of these perennial works lost their monopoly toward the end of the last century. Freud died in 1939, and so his works are now also “free of rights.” Publishers generally seek to retain some part of their market share in these hardy perennials by commissioning retranslations. That’s why over the last twenty years there has been a steady output of “new” Prousts, Kafkas, and Freuds.

The legal constraints on the international circulation of literary texts explain why there is only one translation available for most works first published since the First World War. Retranslation is not a practice that has any application to most of world literature created after the birth of the last generation but two.

A retranslator, whether working with older texts or with ones that have just become available at the seventy-year limit of protection, has to cope with ambiguous and conflicting demands. If the new translation is to be copyrighted as a new text, then it has to be measurably different from any other translation. The easiest way to ensure originality is to not even look at earlier versions, since the chance of any two translators coming up blind with the same target formulation is nil. On the other hand, a retranslator also needs to be able to explain why the new translation is better than the existing one, and to do that you have to read what is already there. The older version may help—it may be very useful indeed—but it always gets in the way of inventing a fresh solution to the trickier parts of the text. I don’t envy retranslators of modern classics one bit. They have to steer a clifftop path between inadvertent plagiarism and gratuitous change.

In some cases, a new translation is amply justified by the discovery or publication of the full or unexpurgated or corrected version of a text that had originally been brought out on the basis of a censored or imperfect manuscript (such is the case of Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita). In the case of work that has been intensively studied over several decades, a new translation may be able to incorporate readings and interpretations that were not available to the first. But the general principle that old translations need redoing “every generation or two” is not well supported by these individual cases. It is supported with arithmetical exactitude by the law of international copyright and the commercial interests it creates.

Yet despite these major differences between translating and retranslating, and between translating into English and into other tongues, the translation of literary works of all kinds has a feature that distinguishes it from all other translation tasks. We like to believe that a literary work, insofar as it really belongs to literature, is unlike all others—it is unique, not routine, and essentially just itself. This creates a real problem.

Translating serious nonfiction calls on skills and knowledge that literary translators don’t need (knowledge of the field, for a start), but there’s no special problem about knowing what linguistic norms the target text should meet. You naturally want to make a book about archaeology resemble other well-regarded books about archaeology in the receiving culture. When translating UP, the norms for nonfiction are those of original work in the same field done by speakers of the receiving language.

But difficult questions arise when the specific field of a nonfiction work is new or not easy to classify. There is perhaps no better example of the uncertain borderline between literary and informational translation than the works of Sigmund Freud.