Is That a Fish in Your Ear?

But as soon as the manuscript of The Travels got into circulation, other scribes did what any copy editor would do in the modern world—they tidied it up, subjected it to what French publishers call the toilette du manuscrit, and put it into what was considered, respectively, “proper French,” “proper Tuscan,” and, for purposes of wider distribution and retranslation, “proper Latin,” too. By the end of the fourteenth century, there were versions in Czech, Gaelic, German, Tuscan, and Venetian, as well as French, all of them retranslated from the Latin translation, which had itself been done from an early version in the Italian dialect of Venice, based on a source that was either the text of the first known manuscript or something very close to it.[124] These progressive emendations of Marco Polo’s narrative mostly suppressed the voice switches of the original translation and turned it into a more situationally consistent narrative. That’s because those later scribes were not translating the traveler’s speech but a story that already was a written text. You could say that something very important was lost; you could also say that The Travels became a classic of exploration literature precisely because, like many modern novels, it was rewritten by professionals. Then as now, the borderline between translating and improving a text—between “helping the reader” and “trashing the source”—is not at all clear-cut.

The borderline between translating and rewriting is in fact no more wiggly than the one between source and target language in the case of many extended texts. Tolstoy’s War and Peace is an oft-quoted example of this. In the Russian original, parts of the novel are in French. This reflects the language practice of its characters—Russian aristocrats of the early nineteenth century used French for much of their social and intellectual lives. Indeed, when challenged by a Freemason to speak of his hopes and desires, Pierre Bezukhov found himself unsure of how to answer, “being unaccustomed to speak of abstract matters in Russian.”[125]

Translating War and Peace into French is both impossible and easy. Reproduced without alteration in French, the French speech of Russian aristocrats loses all its meaning as a marker of class, and there is no way of indicating by linguistic means alone that a sentence spoken in French is different from the other sentences that are (by force of translation) in French as well. The title page of the French translation may well say Traduit du russe, but that is only partly true. It is “translated” from French as well.

Identical translation problems arise in a vast array of European fiction. The first page of Balzac’s Le Père Goriot contains a sentence in English (“All is true!”) that has an entirely different environment and force when reproduced in an English translation of the text. But what can you do? Translate “All is true!” back into French? Or alter the spelling to “Oll eez troo” to indicate it having been thought by a Frenchman with an atrocious accent? Balzac had no qualms about altering the orthography of French to represent the regional accent of Nucingen, a Jewish banker from Alsace, who also appears in Le Père Goriot. Current conventions don’t allow translators to do that to the diction of narrators—but there’s no strictly logical reason for withholding a lousy accent from Balzac’s narrator, too.