Is That a Fish in Your Ear?

Despite his worldwide fame, Freud’s complete works have been translated in full only into English, Italian, Spanish, and Japanese. Based on the complete works published in German in London in 1942, James Strachey’s English version is regarded by many as a masterwork of translation and by others as a betrayal of Freud. The long-running controversy over what kind of English should represent Freud’s writing turns on the question of the genre to which Freud’s writing should be attached. Does it belong to social science? Or is it more properly thought of as literary work?

Strachey took it for granted that psychoanalysis was a science. Scientific terminology in English traditionally relies on Latin and Greek roots to forge new words for new concepts. However, Freud himself wrote in a language that uses compounds of quite ordinary words in the natural and social sciences. Thus, where in English we use bits of Greek for hydrogen and oxygen, German uses only “plain words”: Wasserstoff is “water stuff,” Sauerstoff is “sour stuff,” but such terms are no less technical and precise than their Greek-based counterparts in English. Consequently, where Freud says Anlehnung (“leaning on”), Strachey coins anaclisis, and for Schaulust (“see-pleasure”), he invents scopophilia. Many now common words of English—ego, id, superego, empathy, and displacement, for example—were all first invented in Strachey’s translation of Freud, to replace the equally technical but less recondite neologisms of the original: Ich, Es, Überich, Einfühlung, and Verschiebung.[170]

Strachey’s approach is quite unexceptionable if Freud’s writings are seen as contributions to social or medical science. We can test that in a back-translation exercise. What could Freud have written had he wanted to coin a term in German for the English neologism scopophilia? The norms of German-language science writing of his era would have led him inevitably toward a compound noun such as Schaulust.

If, on the other hand, works such as The Interpretation of Dreams are assimilated not to science but to literary creation, then Strachey’s English, which gives a version that is tonally and stylistically distant from the original, could easily be seen as a misrepresentation.

In France, a large and coordinated team has been engaged since the 1980s in producing the first “Complete Works” in French. The enterprise aims to restore the German specificity of Freud, treating him less as the inventor of a new science than as a writer of a particular (and rather strange) kind of literary prose. Indeed, the team’s leaders have declared that Freud didn’t write German at all but “Freudish,” “a dialect of German that is not German but a language invented by Freud.” The result is widely regarded as incomprehensible in French—but then, if “Freudish” isn’t German, it wouldn’t have been easy to read in the original, either …[171]

The tangled disputes over Freud in English and French would not arise if it were clear how to categorize the field to which his work belongs. In most social-science translation, the problem does not arise. Because it is believed in many places that the best work in social science is done in the United States, translation of social science from English typically retains some linguistic features of the original, to authenticate the quality of the work. But in literature, there is no such collective agreement about where the “top model” lies. Should a new foreign novel in translation conform to the manner and style of some existing writer of English prose? Some would say, Of course not! What we want is something different from the familiar patterns of Philip Roth. Others would say, Of course it should! We want to read something that matches our existing conception of novelistic style in English prose. The book may have been written in Albanian or Chinese, but if it’s a good novel, then it should sound like one—of the kind we know.

There is no resolution to this squabble. You could say that literary translation is easy because, in the last analysis, you can do what you like. Or you could say that literary translation is impossible, because whatever you do, serious objections can be raised. Literary translation is different from all other kinds. It serves readers in a quite special way. Modestly, often unwittingly, but inevitably, it teaches them on each occasion what translation is.

TWENTY-EIGHT What Translators Do

Speakers of any natural language repeat themselves and others all the time, and to do so they use their natural facility to rephrase together with a well-filled toolbox:

• they can replace one word with another of like meaning (synonymy)

• they can take one part of the expression and replace it with a longer and more elaborate one (expansion)