TRADUZIONE

[Uri Burton]

Copio dal supplemento letterario del Guardian di questa mattina un articolo molto bello sulla traduzione firmato dalla scrittrice Jennie Erdal. Penso che piacerà a molti di voi, specie a Marco e a Freelancer, una volta tanto finalmente d'accordo.

Salutoni.

Let There Be Light

Translation is perhaps a metaphor for what is a basic human need: conveying in words our experience of the world. In discussing translation, you often find yourself looking for metaphors, as if translation can't quite be itself and nothing else. Even 400 years ago, the men who translated the King James Bible into the common language of the people relied heavily on metaphor.

Translation it is that openeth the window, to let in the light; that breaketh the shell, that we may eat the kernel; that putteth aside the curtain, that we may look into the most Holy place; that removeth the cover of the well, that we may come by the water.

In more recent times, practitioners of the art have talked in terms of "transplanting" - taking something living from one soil and setting it in another - or, more prosaically, "importing foreign goods". Others have compared it to a musical or theatrical performance, with the translator as conductor or stage director, working with the original score or script. Umberto Eco, in an image that will strike a chord with those working at the sharp end, describes translation as "a process of negotiation" - a three-way transaction "with the ghost of a distant author, with the disturbing presence of the foreign text, and with the phantom of the reader".

Anthea Bell (who has given us Max Sebald, ETA Hoffmann and Asterix the Gaul in English) has plumped for a different image: the translator as tightrope walker. And when you read her translations, you can sense her cool nerve, her skill and courage during what is sometimes a precarious balancing act that could go wrong at any moment. Bell has also talked of "spinning an illusion", the illusion being that the reader is reading the real thing - that is to say, the author's original work, not some imitation of it. This is the ideal: that the translated work should read as easily as the original, while still remaining true to the author's vision and the spirit of the writing. Yet this is no easy task, particularly between languages that belong to different groups.

Translation is sometimes thought of as an imitative process, but in fact it is much more inventive and imaginative. Quite often there is no exact equivalence between languages, and sometimes English simply cannot tolerate certain aspects of the original, at least not without irony or some other modifying factor. Humour is a notoriously difficult area - what is funny in one language can look simply inept or embarrassing in another. Puns, double entendres, malapropisms, indeed any kind of wordplay - these are all hard to transport safely.

Certain languages are also much richer in sound than our own. In Japanese, the sound of a word often imitates its meaning, but this (so I am told) goes way beyond the onomatopoeic miaows, cuckoos and kerplunks that we have in English. In Japanese, practically the whole of the natural world - the changing seasons, the different kinds of rain and wind, the clouds, the sun and the stars - are all represented by sound. Thus hyu-hyu is a light wind, pyu-pyu blows a bit stronger and byu-byu stronger still. The English translator is able to get round this with the help of breezes and gales, but the music is lost. More strikingly still, the Japanese also use sound patterns to express their emotional lives: they smile niko-niko, they weep shiku-shiku and they retch muka-muka. Even the best translators will struggle to render this subtlety into English.

In Russian, the problems are different. It is such a dense, elliptical language that sometimes what is only implied in a tightly packed phrase has to be made more explicit in a longer English sentence. A single verb in Russian can be a complete sentence, telling us not only who is doing it, and whether the doer is male or female, but also whether the activity has been completed or is still going on. In Anna Karenina, Prince Oblonsky says to a dinner guest: Prikazhetye, krasnovo? - meaning (literally) "Order, red?" From the word endings, we know that Oblonsky is asking: "Will you give me the order to pour out some red wine for you?" This is usually translated as "Will you have some red wine?" - conveying the sense, but in no way matching or retaining the ellipsis.

Does any of this matter? Not hugely, perhaps, but it makes us aware that the architecture of a language goes much deeper than its inflections or other distinctive features. In some mysterious sense, a grammar expresses the culture of its people, their way of thinking, their soul - whatever we mean by that. (And the Russian soul - dusha - has no direct equivalent in English.) All of this is at stake in the translation process.
If literary translation is a kind of miracle, it is one we have been slow to recognise. Until the King James version, translators of the Bible were routinely strangled or burned at the stake. William Tyndale, who coined such phrases as "let there be light" and "the salt of the earth", suffered both fates. In the 17th and 18th centuries, it was quite normal for translations to be anonymous; and well into the 20th century, work was often unattributed. Even today, the name of the translator can often be hidden among the preliminary pages, a tiny intimation tucked away alongside the printer and binder.

Over the past few months, as part of judging duties for a literary prize, I have read some 90 novels in translation. While every translator is accredited somewhere, names can still be hard to find, and only two are mentioned on the cover. Perhaps publishers want to maintain the illusion that the book comes to us fresh and first-hand - the word unmediated, as it were. Or maybe they know that readers are seldom interested in translators. Readers prefer authors, and may not want to be reminded that anyone else is involved. Even though much of our own culture has been shaped by translated texts, from the Bible to Homer, from Freud to Dostoevsky, the supremacy of English as a world language has led to a certain complacency in Britain and a chariness of anything "foreign". On the whole, people don't know how to think about translation, or to talk about it. It is slightly mystical, and those who practise it are a little bit suspect - the linguistic equivalent of trainspotters.

Translators are often naturally diffident, used to being in the background. In many cases, they have colluded in their own invisibility - I certainly did at one time. They often display a sense of uncertainty, perhaps because what they do is in some sense provisional. Translation is a process; even when the work is done, it is never finished. Translators know they must never overwhelm or compete with the author, but they know, too, that the author's whole identity is bound up with the way the words are placed on the page. Literary translation, when it is done well, is also therefore a supreme act of empathy.

When it comes to reviews of books in translation, the name of the translator does not automatically appear alongside the author's. Is this neglect? Or indifference? When reviewers praise a literary translation, they call it "smooth" or "unobtrusive", often criticising passages that sound "foreign". It is an odd idea this, judging the translation of a book that started life in another country in another tongue according to its concealment of foreignness. "The author is well served by his translator" is another familiar saw, intended to be kind, but actually exasperating for translators, especially when they know the reviewer is not in a position to judge. "Faithful" is another misleading word. Faithful to what exactly?

There is an element of paradox in the work of a translator -sometimes you have to take liberties, precisely in order to be faithful. Jorge Luis Borges told his translator to translate not what he said, but what he intended to say. Edmond Jaloux, meanwhile, 20th-century novelist and critic, as well as translator and member of the French Academy, compared translations to wives - either plain and faithful or beautiful and treacherous.

During his presentation address in honour of Ismail Kadaré at the Man Booker International Award in 2005, John Carey, chairman of the judges, explained that many writers on the list of 120 contestants had been disqualified on the grounds that they were not generally available in English. In truth, few people in Britain had heard of Ismail Kadaré, or indeed any Albanian writer. Even Carey had discovered him not long before. "It is a sign of the disrespect in which translators have customarily been held, and a sign, too, of the parochialism of the British literary scene, that foreign literature in translation is so neglected," Carey said. The figures tell their own story. Of the 125,000 titles published in Britain every year only about 3% are translations. The blame does not lie wholly with publishers. They have businesses to run, and in Britain we have tended to be an insular lot with literary tastes to match.

But there are hopeful signs that this at last may be changing. The world is getting smaller and publishers (readers, too) are responding. For a long time, Christopher MacLehose (ex-Harvill, now publisher-at-large) was almost a lone crusader, bringing us a wonderful list of translated authors from around 35 languages. MacLehose battled for years against what he called "a catastrophic want of curiosity" to make the titles accessible without compromising on quality. Now other houses - Canongate, Arcadia, Serpent's Tail, Bitter Lemon Press, Marion Boyars - are blazing a second trail.

Cervantes compared translation to looking at the Flanders tapestries from the wrong side: "you can see the basic shapes but they are so filled with threads that you cannot fathom their original lustre". Cervantes was right, but he has not given us a reason not to translate. For even the wrong side of the tapestry, with all its dangling threads, is worth seeing. Translators let us see another way of life, other possibilities, other matters, other manners, increasing the understanding between nations far better than politicians.

· Jennie Erdal is the author of Ghosting: A Double Life, published by Canongate.