Is That a Fish in Your Ear?

What we probably meant in the distant past when we asserted that something was “literally true” in order to emphasize that it was really true, true to a higher degree than just being true, was that it was among those rare things that were worthy of being “put into letters,” of being written down. All the uses of literal with respect to meaning and translation implicitly value writtenness more highly than oral speech. They are now among the surviving linguistic traces of the fantastic change in social and cultural hierarchies that the invention of writing brought about. They carry the shadow of the early stages of literacy in the Mediterranean basin between the third and first millennia B.C.E., when alphabetic scripts first arose together with the texts that through translation and retranslation have shaped and fed Western civilization ever since. This is presumably why the same words and the same terms still persist in debates about how best to translate.

Yet even in the modern era we do not always know quite what we mean when we claim that something is literally true, and even less when we call a translation a literal one.

Toward the end of the nineteenth century, a Franco-Egyptian mountebank with a medical degree and a talent for social climbing and free composition in French published a new version of The Arabian Nights. It was a commercial and cultural success, feeding a wave of interest in the Sexy Orient among the elite, and it impressed many writers of the day, including Marcel Proust. The translator, Joseph-Charles Mardrus, knew Arabic, and he used some Arabic texts as the basis of his rewriting of the collection of ancient Eastern tales, which he titled, in a daring Arabism in French, Les Mille Nuits et Une Nuit, with a subtitle as clear as can be: Traduction littérale et complète du texte arabe, “The Thousand Nights and One Night: A Complete and Literal Translation of the Arabic Text.”[58]

The subtitle is less a description than an assertion of status. Calling the work “complete” is obviously intended to give it a higher value than previous versions—but why should “literal” have seemed to Mardrus an effective way of enhancing the status of his work?

It wasn’t a slip: Mardrus’s preface emphasizes and magnifies the meaning of his subtitle:

Only one honest and logical method of translation exists: impersonal, barely modulated literalism … It is the greatest guarantee of truth … The reader will find here a pure, inflexible word-for-word version. The Arabic text has simply changed alphabet: here it is in French writing, that’s all …[59]

Mardrus was not a conventional translation theorist, and scholars of Middle Eastern languages claimed that he was not a translator, either. A professor of Arabic at the Sorbonne demonstrated that there were no textual sources for many passages and stories in Mardrus’s entertaining and readable compilation. But Mardrus was a personage on the Parisian cultural scene and would not suffer such slings and arrows without returning fire. Friends came to his defense: André Gide argued that despite the demonstrations of Professor Gaudefroy-Demombynes, Mardrus’s work was “more authentic than the original.”[60] The translator’s own riposte built on Gide’s extraordinary claim. Academic critics learned Arabic in the classroom, not from living in the Middle East.

To carry out a translation of this kind properly, to give a definitive reflection of the Arabic mind and its genius … you must be born and you must have lived in the Arabic world; … to translate decently the spirit and the letter of stories of this kind, you must have heard them spoken out loud in a local accent, with ethnic gestures and appropriate intonation by storytellers in full possession of their material.[61]