The Translator’s Invisibility

In 1978, soon after my translations of Italian poetry began appearing in magazines, I met another American translator of Italian, an older, widely published, and very gifted writer who commented on some of my work and gave me advice about literary translation. Among his many shrewd remarks was the recommendation that I translate an Italian author of my own generation, something which he himself had been doing for many years and with much success. He explained that when author and translator live in the same historical moment, they are more likely to share a common sensibility, and this is highly desirable in translation because it increases the fidelity of the translated text to the original. The translator works better when he and the author are simpatico, said my friend, and by this he meant not just “agreeable,” or “congenial,” meanings which this Italian word is often used to signify, but also “possessing an underlying sympathy.” The translator should not merely get along with the author, not merely find him likeable; there should also be an identity between them.

{274} The ideal situation occurs, my friend believed, when the translator discovers his author at the start of both their careers. In this instance, the translator can closely follow the author’s progress, accumulating exhaustive knowledge of the foreign texts, strengthening and developing the affinity which he already feels with his author’s ideas and tastes, becoming, in effect, of the same mind. When simpatico is present, the translation process can be seen as a veritable recapitulation of the creative process by which the original came into existence; and when the translator is assumed to participate vicariously in the author’s thoughts and feelings, the translated text is read as the transparent expression of authorial psychology or meaning. The voice that the reader hears in any translation made on the basis of simpatico is always recognized as the author’s, never as a translator’s, nor even as some hybrid of the two.

My friend’s ideas about translation still prevail today in Anglo-American culture, although they have dominated English-language translation at least since the seventeenth century. The earl of Roscommon’s Essay on Translated Verse (1684) recommended that the translator

chuse an Author as you chuse a Friend:
United by this Sympathetick Bond,
You grow Familiar, Intimate, and Fond;
Your Thoughts, your Words, your Stiles, your Souls agree,
No longer his Interpreter, but He.

(Steiner 1975:77)

Alexander Tytler’s Essay on the Principles of Translation (1798) asserted that if the translator’s aim is fluency, “he must adopt the very soul of his author” (Tytler 1978:212). John Stuart Blackie’s article on the Victorian translation controversy, “Homer and his translators” (1861), argued that “the successful translator of a poet must not only be a poet himself, but he must be a poet of the same class, and of a kindred inspiration,” “led by a sure instinct to recognise the author who is kindred to himself in taste and spirit, and whom he therefore has a special vocation to translate” (Blackie 1861:269, 271). Burton Raffel’s review of the Zukofskys’ modernist Catullus similarly argued that the optimal conditions for translating the Latin texts include “(a) a poet, (b) an ability to identify with, to almost be Catullus over a protracted period, and (c) great good luck” (Raffel 1969:444).

{275} From this chorus of theorists, critics, and translators it seems clear that the idea of simpatico translation is consistent with ideas about poetry that prevail today in Anglo-American culture, although they too were formulated centuries ago, perhaps most decisively with the emergence of romanticism in England. From William Wordsworth to T.S.Eliot to Robert Lowell and beyond, the dominant aesthetic in English-language poetry has been transparency, the view, as Antony Easthope neatly puts it in his incisive critique, that “poetry expresses experience; experience gives access to personality, and so poetry leads us to personality” (Easthope 1983:4–5). My friend’s notion of simpatico was in fact a development of these assumptions to characterize the practice of translation (it was transparent) and to define the role of the translator (identification with the foreign author’s personality).