Is That a Fish in Your Ear?

Having bowed my head in submission and rubbed my slavish brow in utter humility and complete abjection and supplication to the beneficent dust beneath the feet of my mighty, gracious, condescending, compassionate, merciful benefactor, my most generous and open-handed master, I pray that the peerless and almighty provider of remedies may bless your lofty person, the extremity of benefit, protect my benefactor from the vicissitudes and afflictions of time, prolong the days of his life, his might and his splendor …

Also, every scrap of information they gleaned from translating for a foreign embassy was put up for sale. As one English ambassador put it, since these dragomans “with large families live upon a small salary and are used to Oriental luxury, the temptation of money from others is with difficulty withstood by them.”[73]

It’s easy to see why such dragomans should adapt their work to their audience—they were Ottoman subjects and stood to lose far more from displeasing the authorities than from misrepresenting their foreign employers:

Fear tied their tongues: they would much rather risk their employer’s displeasure than the brutal fury of an angry pasha … At times, ingenious interpreters … were known to improvise imaginary dialogues—to substitute speeches of their own inspiration for those really made.[74]

They were suspect in any case for the mere fact of working for a foreign embassy. Why double the risk by failing to address local potentates with the florid servility to which they were accustomed? Adding a few paragraphs of eternal devotion wasn’t mistranslation. It was life insurance. “All things considered, the wonder is not so much that Dragomans fulfilled their perilous task inadequately, as that they dared undertake it at all.”[75]

Fidelity was obviously a major issue for Ottoman dragomans, but it didn’t mean what translation commentators in the West seem to mean by “fidelity to the source.” Dragomans needed to prove that they were faithful to the padishah or to the particular Ottoman grandee they were addressing.

It was the grandest of the Phanariot dragomans who paid the highest price for suspected disloyalty. In 1821, the Greek provinces of the Ottoman Empire rose up in revolt. Because they were Greeks as well as Catholics, Phanariot families in Istanbul came under immediate suspicion. Their leader, Grand Dragoman Stavraki Aristarchi, was hanged for treason. Why? Because, as had long been said in the Ottomans’ international language, Traduttore/traditore! Translators are traitors anyway!

This exotic adage has percolated into all Western languages, in Italian and in translation, and has become one of the most commonly touted pieces of expertise about translation in circulation. But save in quite exceptional cases it is wrong, and always was. The translation practice of the dragomans was generally subservient to an outstanding degree—subservient to the purpose of the original, and subservient to the dragomans’ real masters. Treachery was what the masters feared, not what the translators performed. But even if Phanariots did on occasion make deals for themselves by misrepresenting their commissioners, the connection between “translating” and “treachery” is of no relevance to modern, thoroughly print-based societies. In a world where you can check the translation against the original, even when it has the form of speech (thanks to the sound-recording devices we have used for the past one hundred years), the principal grounds for the fear and mistrust of linguistic intermediaries that is endemic to oral societies no longer exist. Yet people go on saying traduttore/traditore, believing they have said something meaningful about translation. A thoughtful translator such as Douglas Hofstadter still feels he needs to counter it with a pun in the title of an essay, “Trader/Translator.”[76] We may now live in a sophisticated, wealthy, technologically advanced society—but when it comes to translation, some people seem to be stuck in the age of the clepsydra.