Is That a Fish in Your Ear?

In German and Russian, of course, Kafka and Dostoyevsky, however unique their manners of expression may be, do not sound foreign to native readers of those languages. Foreignness in a translation is necessarily an addition to the original. In Chaplin’s gibberish as in retranslations of literary classics, foreignness is necessarily constructed inside the receiving tongue. As a result, the “foreign-soundingness” of a translation seeking to give the reader a glimpse of the authentic quality of the source can only reproduce and reinforce what the receiving culture already imagines the foreign to be.

Friedrich Schleiermacher, a distinguished nineteenth-century philosopher and the translator of Plato into German, hovered around this fundamental paradox in his much-quoted paper “The Different Methods of Translating.” He’s usually understood to have taken his distance from fluent, invisible, or “normalizing” translation when he said, “The goal of translating even as the author himself would have written originally in the language of the translation is not only unattainable but is also in itself null and void.”[28] But that famous statement can also be understood the other way around: that it would be just as artificial to make Kafka sound like a “stage German” writing English as it would be to make Gregor Samsa sound as if he had turned into a beetle in a bedroom in Hoboken.

Why should we want or need Kafka to sound German in any case? In German, Kafka doesn’t sound “German”—he sounds like Kafka. But to the ear of an English speaker who has learned German but does not inhabit that language entirely naturally, everything Kafka wrote “sounds German” to some degree, precisely because German is not quite that reader’s home tongue. Making Kafka sound German in English is perhaps the best a translator can do to communicate to the reader his or her own experience of reading the original.

For Schleiermacher, in fact, apart from “those marvelous masters to whom several languages feel as one,” everybody “retains the feeling of foreignness” when reading works not in their home tongue. The translator’s task is “to transmit this feeling of foreignness to his readers.” But this is a peculiarly hard and rather paradoxical thing to do unless you can call on conventions that the target language already possesses for representing the specific “other” associated with the culture of the language from which the source text comes.

Foreign-soundingness is therefore only a real option for a translator when working from a language with which the receiving language and its culture have an established relationship. The longest and most extensive rapport of that kind in the English-speaking world in general is with French. In the United States, Spanish has recently become the most familiar foreign tongue for the majority of younger readers. English therefore has many ways to represent Frenchness, and American English now also has a panoply of devices for representing Spanishness. To a lesser degree, we can represent Germanness, and, to a limited degree, Italianness as well. But what of Yoruba? Marathi? Chuvash? Or any one of the nearly seven thousand other languages of the world? There is no special reason why anything within the devices available to a writer of English should “sound just like Yoruba” or give a more authentic representation of what it feels like to write in Chuvash. We just have no idea. The project of writing translations that preserve in the way they sound some trace of the work’s “authentic foreignness” is really applicable only when the original is not very foreign at all.

On the other hand, translated texts can teach interested and willing readers something about the sound and feel and even the syntactic properties of the original. So can originals—Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart introduces elements of African languages, and Upamanyu Chatterjee’s English, August gives you a good start on Hindi and Bengali vocabulary. But when foreignness is not thematized—not made the explicit subject of the story—some prior knowledge of the original language is essential for a foreign effect to arise. In order to even notice that this sentence from German a foreignizing translation is have you to know that in German subordinate clauses at the end their verbs put. Otherwise it is comical, clumsy, nonsensical, and so forth—not “German” at all.

Modern Times and Adriano Celentano play entertaining games with literal foreign-soundingness in sung and spoken speech sounds. A recent translation of Metamorphosis could of course be sounded out in the reader’s head in a nonnative phonology. Gregor Samsa’s first words in direct speech—

“Oh God,” he thought, “what a gruelling job I’ve picked! Day in, day out—on the road.”

—would then be taken as a written representation of sounds more recognizably transcribed as: