One can have an unexpectedly amusing time with translation. In a spare moment, navigate to AltaVista’s translating tool, http://babelfish. altavista.com, and try to convert some lines from a famous poem or novel into another language. It is Umberto Eco who suggests this pastime in his new essay on translation, before giving us some favourite examples of the sort of strange things that the computer comes up with as it translates English into Italian and German. “The works of Shakespeare” become “Gli impianti di Shakespeare” (The plants of Shakespeare). “Speaker of the chamber of deputies ” becomes “Altoparlante dell’alloggiamento dei delegati” (Loudspeaker of the lodging of the delegates). And “Studies in the logic of Charles Sanders Peirce” becomes “Studien in der Logik der Charlessandpapierschleifmaschinen Peirce” (Studies in the logic of the Charles of sandpaper grinding machines Peirce).
Obviously, this is especially amusing if you are professor of semiotics at the University of Bologna, but even for the lay person there are fascinating issues lurking beneath the superficially (for me at least) rather offputting field of translation.
If translation can be so funny, it is because the subject is, in essence, all about mistranslation — and the terrible knots we get into when travelling between languages. The reason is simple. In Eco’s phrase, varied cultures handle “semantic space” differently. That is, they don’t apportion words in the same way, or with the same degree of specificity to all the things out there in the world. There are languages in which we are literally speechless before certain phenomena — or where, in order to express a thought that can be crisply conveyed in a foreign tongue, we need to build up an awkward pile of words. No other languages seem to have come up with anything as on-the-nose as the German Schadenfreude or (another favourite) Weltschmertz. The French word sympathique leaves something critical behind when it takes a cross-Channel trip and reappears in English as “likeable” or “ attractive”. Knowing what one means, but not being able to say it, is the perennial sensation to which translators seem doomed.
Eco’s book is an entertaining, fluid tour around the problems that arise from the awkward fit between the world’s languages. He seems to have had more than his share of direct experience of the issues, not just because his own novels have been translated into — apparently — “over 30 languages” (often quite badly, he suggests), but also because he worked for 20 years in a publishing house directing a foreign list and has translated two of the trickier books of the French language into Italian: Exercises de Style, by Raymond Queneau, and Sylvie, by Gérard de Nerval.
Eco begins by explaining the reason a computer is so bad at translating: because it lacks a critical ingredient of any good translator, a feeling for context, which is what allows someone to decide which of a word’s many possible meanings will apply in a given situation. A French person who puts some “glace” into a drink isn’t adding ice-cream, or indeed a mirror, but a computer cannot easily see that ice is at stake. Suppose that in a novel a character says:
“You’re just pulling my leg.” To put this into Italian as stai solo tirandomi la gamba would be literally correct, but ridiculous (mi stai prendendo pe il naso is the answer). Computerisation will, it seems, prove far less devastating for translators than it has been for bank staff.
Languages are also littered with what the French call faux amis, words that have the same or similar form in two languages, but a different meaning in each. So the French “expérience” does not mean “experience”, “actuellement” does not mean “actually”, “achever” is not “to achieve” and so on. I left this book feeling distinctly sorry for the (very underpaid) race of translators, whose daily work it is to have to pick a path through such linguistic minefields.
It is the masterpieces of literature that pose the greatest challenges for translators because here meanings are at their most complex. The Everest of translation has always been poetry. Eco includes a detailed discussion of the traps facing any translator attempting T. S. Eliot’s The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock. Take the famous lines “In the room the women come and go/Talking of Michelangelo.” The problem lies in how to convey the rhyme without losing the meaning. A literal approach will not do, but translators must at the same time weigh up how many liberties they can take with a text before it turns into something else entirely. The French translator Pierre Leyris decided that the word Michelangelo was ultimately less important than Eliot’s rhyme, and so came up with: “Dans la pièce les femmes vont et viennent/ En parlant des maîtres de Sienne.”
A too clever-for-its-own-good Italian translation managed to create both a false rhyme and a bad assonance: “Le donne vanno et vengono nei salotti/Parlando di Michelangelo Buonarroti.”
Marcel Proust is another traditional challenge for translators, particularly English ones. Take the French word “Maman” (of critical importance in the novel), which is neither “mummy” nor “mother”, but suggests at once the intimacy of the former and the seriousness and maturity of the latter. C. K. Scott Moncrieff plumped for “Mamma”, the recent Penguin translation opted for “Mama”. I might have been tempted to go for “Mum” — none of which is, of course, quite appropriate. Then there is Proust’s distinctive use of the French perfect tense, especially in his first sentence: “Longtemps, je me suis couché de bonne heure.” Scott Moncrieff went for: “For a long time I would go to bed early”, Penguin for: “For a long time, I went to bed early.” One might also have: “For a long time I used to go to bed early” , or “Time was when I went to bed early” or “Time and again, I have gone to bed early.”
The difficulties of translation are symbols of the wider woes that we encounter in most attempts at communication. Translation has its sad side — it couldn’t otherwise be so funny. We have all had the experience of feeling mistranslated, of having been unable to convey our intentions to others, or of seeing ourselves mangled in the stories that others tell of us. One of the reasons we may come to value novels is that we often find in them proper articulations of experiences and sensations that ordinary life has failed to grasp — much as as a computer might mangle a piece of text. “That’s what I meant, that’s how I felt,” we may say on coming across emotions of ours that we find, perhaps for the first time, conveyed on a page in an appropriate form.
Eco’s tone darkens when he starts to talk about the translation of books into films. Despite the success of the filmed version of The Name of the Rose, he believes there is something crude about our desire to turn novels into films. Novels have the great advantage of allowing room for multiple interpretations: they are like words which tolerate many meanings. Two people can read the same book and have completely different mental pictures of the décor.
