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Last night, I saw Edith Grossman, writer, translator, and critic, speak in conversation with Mary Ann Caws. The talk was fascinating–it was on the occasion of Grossman’s recent book “Why Translation Matters,” a collection of essays on the practice of literary translation. (Grossman has translated “Don Quixote,” many of Gabriel García Márquez’s works, and much more.)
The most interesting conversation of the evening came from a question posed by Kamy Wicoff, author and founder of the website SheWrites.
Wicoff talked about being stumped at how works have many lives–many iterations–in translation, while the original work in the original language doesn’t get revisited or updated for contemporary readers in that original language. Jane Austen will never be translated into contemporary English while there is probably a new Spanish edition every generation.
I think Wicoff has a great point. And one that I can’t quite wrap my head around.
I think it’s awful strange that non-English readers may have a better sense of Shakespeare than I do. They read translated versions that may be written in a contemporary version of their language, one that doesn’t sound foreign to them. I, on the other hand, read Shakespeare in Early Modern English, which means that as a high schooler, it was like reading a foreign language. Perhaps international readers can have a greater appreciation of Shakespeare than I can.
What does it mean that literary works (and plays, and poems, and memoirs for that matter) are resuscitated and revised and revisited only in translation while they only have one form, one life, in their original language? Should we be updating Old English texts into Modern English?
Tanya,
How wonderful to find your blog (thanks to SheWrites! Thanks for the heads up on the Nine Lives of Literature (great title).
Kamie Wicoff does indeed bring an interesting point or even concern to the foreground. It makes me realize how privileged I am as an ESL reader ; )
Indeed, while adaptations of English classics for film or stage productions are created, the books themselves remain locked in the time frame of their conception.
At a recent library function Nancy Pearl related how disgusted a patron had been with a book Pearl had recommended. Why? Already on the first pages the word “ejaculation” had appeared, repeatedly. “I asked you for a book without any reference to sex,” she said.
Imagine her surprise when Pearl explained that “ejaculated” had a different meaning in the author’s times…
Thanks for the comment, Judith! I can only imagine how many misunderstandings occur like the “ejaculation” one…
not Lost in Translation?
You may be interested in reading John McWhorter’s article in the January 2010 issue of American Theater magazine. He makes a similar point about Shakespeare translations in other languages and calls for serious translations of Shakespeare’s plays into more contemporary English. Here is the link to the article: http://tcg.org/publications/at/jan10/shakespeare.cfm
In the late 1990s, I read a similar article by McWhorter and have since complete verse translations of five Shakespeare plays (Romeo and Juliet, King Lear, Macbeth, Twelfth Night, and Much Ado). If interested, you can see excerpts from my translations at http://www.fullmeasurepress.com
Kent Richmond
There are plenty of translations of old and middle English works into modern English, and plenty of Shakespeare translations, adaptations, too.
Beowulf, Morte d’Arthur, Pearl, Gawain, all of Chaucer…
This controversy actually reverberates through many artistic disciplines. It’s most prominent, I think, in opera. Numerous opera “purists” resent operas produced in a modern idiom or even in translation. But it seems to me that allowing for these variations to the art renews its vision. And if its only advantage were that reviving the art for modern ears acts as a gateway into the arts for those who may not have otherwise experienced it, then that is completely worth any “corruption” that may be taking place!
updates would be a very good idea-for example, Beowulf has not suffered
@S.L. Crow I think you make a good point. For the purists, obviously maintaining the purity of the piece, whether opera or Shakespeare, requires maintaining the original language, regardless of whether or not it is easily understood or appreciated in modern times through modern language.
One of the greatest difficulties in the translation process, I think, is maintaining the true form of the work. Shakespeare wrote in iambic pentameter for many of his works, a feat not easily replicated, and made more difficult by the need to maintain his meaning, his wit, and the rhyme using modern vernacular. Another example would be Dante’s Divine Comedy. I have a translated text (unfortunately not in front of me, as I would very much like to name the translator) that juxtaposed the original Italian and the English side by side on each page. Reading the English, you get a very good sense of Dante’s meaning, as seen through the eyes of the translator. But if you read the Italian, it becomes something entirely different. Trying to replicate the rhyming scheme from the original Italian to modern English, or even modern Italian, I imagine would be an extremely difficult, lifelong task.
While modern translations of works by Shakespeare like “Shakespeare for Dummies” (of the _____ for Dummies publications) may make it more accessible to the average person who has difficulty with the nuances of Early Modern English and allow them to appreciate Shakespeare’s charm and his stories, these translations also remove them from appreciating the extraordinary difficulty in must have taken in writing such works as he did. For me, that’s where the greatest appreciation for the piece and the author comes from.