Is That a Fish in Your Ear?

Traditional mistrust of oral interpreters in the Middle East affected Western tourists when visits to the region became practical and prestigious for individuals in the nineteenth century. Tourists had to rely on local intermediaries for contact with the authorities, and hereditary dragoman families turned themselves into guides, guesthouse brokers, and go-betweens for the purchase of antiquities and other delights. As they performed their tasks according to their own traditions of highly adaptive translation, they were despised and scorned. “Dragomania,” the fear and loathing of the intermediaries who ran rings around all but the most canny Western travelers, made a major contribution to the stereotype of the “wily Oriental gentleman” of colonial-era travelogues.[77]

The tropes of “fidelity” and “betrayal” in translation commentary do not come to us only from a vanished Ottoman past. In seventeenth-century France, several translators of the Greek and Latin classics thought it best to amend the originals to make them correspond more closely to the standards of politeness that ruled behavior and writing at the Court of Versailles. Swearwords and references to bodily functions were simply cut out, as were whole passages referring to drinking, homosexuality, or the sharing of partners. Confident in the absolute rightness of the courtly manners of France, these translators tried to produce translations that were fitter for their target audience, and also (in their view) better and more beautiful works. They were saving the Greeks from themselves by editing out all those primitive blemishes. Purposefully and intentionally adaptive, these many classical texts refashioned for courtiers (or for children) were dubbed les belles infidèles, literally, “beautiful unfaithful [ones] [feminine].”

These two adjectives juxtaposed imply a missing noun between them, and the absent word is obviously traductions, “translations.” At bottom, the phrase les belles infidèles says only “beautiful free translations.” However, French adjectives preceded by an article (a, the) can also be taken as nouns, just like “the poor” or “the unwashed” in English. So because its form is feminine and plural, les belles can also mean “[the] beautiful women,” and the whole phrase, les belles infidèles, read that way around, may be taken to say “beautiful women who cheat.” This construction of the phrase allowed for the invention of another adage that has burdened translation commentary ever since. Translations, this saying goes, are like women. Si elles sont belles, elles sont infidèles, mais si elles sont fidèles, elles ne sont pas belles—“If they are good-looking, you can’t trust them to be faithful, and if they stick by their mates, it’s because they’re old frumps.” That’s a fairly free translation by conventional standards, but it is exactly what the adage implies (while also being translatable in its other dimension as “Aesthetically pleasing ones are adaptive, and nonadaptive ones are just plain”). The shadow of such sexist nonsense falls even today upon a French publishing house with an otherwise admirable list of translated works—Les Belles Infidèles.

Sexist language has been the object of long and mostly successful campaigns in France as in the English-speaking world, but only rarely has it been observed that outside the context of politeness as it was understood in the French seventeenth century, les belles infidèles, whether used as a three-word catchphrase or in the longer adage that was built from it, is an insult to women. Most people let it pass because they think it is a statement about translation. It is not. It’s about male anxiety—to the point of misogyny. It applies to translation, I suspect, only because, like other versions of the betrayal motif, it says just how frightening translation can seem.