Is That a Fish in Your Ear?

Obviously, there are no rational grounds for such kinds of linguistic preference: all languages can be made to serve whatever ends their speakers wish to achieve. But the feeling that a difficult foreign text makes real and proper sense only when it’s been put into the language we prefer to use for thinking hard thoughts can easily ambush an otherwise sensible mind. Years ago I sat in a library in Konstanz trying to make sense of Hegel by reading him very slowly in German, with a pencil in my hand. It was hard going, and I never really got the hang of it. I sneaked a look at what the German student in the next carrel was reading. It was Hegel, too—but in English translation! Well, I thought to myself with relief, if even native speakers use the English translation as a guide to Hegel’s thought … Such experiences can easily lead you into a barely conscious, self-comforting persuasion that your language alone is the one in which real meaning is to be found. But however great the service that a clarifying, explanatory translation of a foreign text may provide, we should always resist the false conclusion that the target language—whatever language it is—is “better” at expressing this or that kind of thought.

Despite their numerical insignificance, translators into English play an important role in the international trade in books. Because it is the most translated language in the world, it is far easier to get a book into any other language if it exists in English already—whatever language its original language was. But English is by no means the only “pivot tongue” in the world.

French continues to play a significant role as a conduit for global translation from less widely spoken languages. France’s proud tradition of openness to other cultures is one of the reasons why this is so. In the twentieth century, many of its leading writers—Romain Gary, Samuel Beckett, Eugène Ionesco, Andreï Makine, and Jorge Semprún, for example—were immigrants who had chosen to write in French. However, a more important reason for the continuing role of French in the circulation of cultural goods is not one that the defenders of French culture really like very much. French has long been the most widely taught foreign language in the English-speaking world, which makes it the main interlanguage for English and American publishers and literary scouts.

German also remains a crossroads for literature from little-studied languages. Jaan Kross, the Estonian author of The Czar’s Madman, Professor Marten’s Departure, and many other wonderful novels, was first translated into German, and that was what brought him to the attention of international literary scouts. The role of German as medium for exophonic writers has actually been growing strongly in recent years. Alongside several Japanese, Bulgarian, and Turkish novelists who have chosen to write in German, a Mongolian shaman called Galsan Tschinag is translated from his German translations into many other European tongues.[130]

In the Middle Ages, Arabic was the pivot language that allowed Greek philosophy to be translated into European tongues—in some cases, written in Hebrew script. In the period from 1880 to 1930, Japanese was the relay language for translations of Russian literature into Chinese.[131] Even in the last fifty years, a handful of international literary careers have emerged from translation into languages outside the top three. They include the works of Bernardo Atxaga, first written in Basque, which reached a wider readership initially through their translation into Spanish, and from Spanish into French; and the Chuvash poetry of Gennady Aigui, translated independently into English and French from its Russian translation. But the use of pivot languages can be a risky affair. The Belarusan novelist Vasil Bykaŭ, for example, was translated into Russian, which provided first entry to the world concert of books. However, Soviet translators did not dare reproduce his meaning too closely. In Alpijskaja Balada (Alpine Ballad; 1963), the hero tries to explain to a naïve foreigner about his country, saying, “It will get better someday. Things cannot go on being lousy forever.” In Russian translation, the sentence reads: “The collective farm is good.” After such distortions, Bykaŭ started to translate his own works into Russian soon after they had been published and also Russianized his name to Vasil Bykov. This allowed the Soviet authorities to present him as a Russian novelist, concealing the fact that his works were originally written in another (related) tongue. In Bykov’s case, translation UP simply absorbed a writer in a “minor” language into the regionally dominant one.[132]