Is That a Fish in Your Ear?

A bilingual reader may have a perfectly trustworthy judgment of whether a translation communicates the same meaning as its source. But can such a person, however smart and subtle, ever reasonably say that this “Baudelaire in German translation” has on her an effect equivalent to the effect that that “Baudelaire poem in French” has? Such an assertion would be radically unverifiable—and in my view it is also a meaningless string of words. “Baudelaire in French” has a whole range of different effects on me at different times, and it surely has an even wider range of effects on the community of readers as a whole. Of which one does the “effect” of a translation aim to be the equivalent?

The truth of literary translation is that translated works are incommensurable with their source, just as literary works are incommensurable with one another, just as individual readings of novels and poems and plays can be “measured” only in discussion with other readers. What translators do is find matches, not equivalences, for the units of which a work is made, in the hope and expectation that their sum will produce a new work that can serve overall as a substitute for the source.

That’s why Douglas Hofstadter’s version of the poem by Clément Marot given here of this book is a translation of it. It matches many (but not all) of the semantic, stylistic, and formal features of the source. You may not like it—that’s your affair. But you cannot claim that it is not a translation on the grounds that its overall effect, or one of its subunits, or some specific feature, is not “equivalent” to the source.

A match may be found through all or any of the means that we have for rephrasing something in our own or any other tongue.

What counts as a satisfactory match is a judgment call, and is never fixed. The only certainty is that a match cannot be the same as the thing that it matches.

If you want the same thing, that’s quite all right. You can read the original.

TWENTY-NINE Beating the Bounds: What Translation Is Not

What translators do includes all the things that speakers normally do when speaking their own tongues. But just because translation involves everything of that kind, not everything of that kind is usefully thought of as translation. Beyond its ability to call on all and any among the resources of natural languages, translation has features that are specific to it. What they are and what they have been is what this book tries to say.

Like language itself, translation has no rigidly fixed limits, and similarly fuzzy borderlines can be found in many other arts. A violinist may add his own cadenza, or modify a cadenza written by someone else, and still without question be the performer of Mendelssohn’s Concerto in E. An actor may modify the lines of his role on some occasions and not others and still be performing the same part. In translation, likewise, the point where a reformulation ceases to count as a match for the source is open to negotiation within frameworks that vary widely among different traditions and genres.

In India, where average West European ideas about translation have no roots, stories, myths, legends, and religious texts have moved for millennia between different languages—under the guise of adaptations or retellings of the source. In the West, poets have frequently taken possession of a source by using it as a springboard for a new creation in the same or another tongue. The lyrics Raymond Queneau wrote for a song that was sung by Juliette Gréco—“Si tu crois, fillette, fillette …”—have a source in a poem by Pierre de Ronsard and could count as a translation from French into French, just as Robert Lowell’s Imitations, explicitly modeled on poems in other tongues, can count as translations, too, without ceasing to be genuinely new things.