HOWZAT

Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons is, for me, largely set in a house that seems to be a blend of some stables I once saw in Holland and the photographs of the inside of a Swedish hotel I remember looking at in House & Garden. Meanwhile, a friend tells me that his version of the house is derived from a semidetached near Brighton belonging to the parents of an old girlfriend.

Critics have pointed out that Tolstoy never tells us throughout the course of Anna Karenina what his heroine looks like, but this is perhaps no oversight on the novelist’s part. It enables the reader to operate with a variety of mental images. By contrast, films impose a single vision. It is a rare novel reader who does not leave a screening of the film version of a favourite book without feeling that something has been lost in translation.

Of course, it is easy to become gloomy about translation in all its guises: there are no good translations (if one is feeling the pull of time, one might add “any more”), everything gets distorted, nobody can understand anyone. It’s Babel out there. But the pleasure of Eco’s book is that it shows us that translators are eminently pragmatic bridge-builders. Eco recognises that, at a theoretical level, the pessimists are right. Two languages can never be equivalent — which is why rigorous people should throw words away and plump for algebra and numbers instead. And, yet, what’s striking is how effectively we manage to make ourselves understood across languages despite the litany of obstacles.

It is a tribute to the richness of meaning found in most texts that we can fail to understand a lot, and still get something important out of the experience of reading a translated work. We may not be able to read Tolstoy or Proust in the original, but enough gets through anyway. The psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott once came up with a reassuring formulation for anxious mothers aware of how far they might stray from the ideals of motherhood. All mothers aim to be perfect, but luckily, he said, babies need only “good enough mothers”. Eco’s message is similar. Perfect translations are philosophically impossible, but all we ever need is good enough translators and — http://babelfish.altavista.com aside — it seems we have many of them around.

Alain de Botton’s most recent book is The Art of Travel (Penguin, £7.99)

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Rhymes and misdemeanours

JACKIE KAY

The German translator of my novel Trumpet phoned me one day. There’s a bit in the novel where my character Colman goes to hose off in the toilet of a train. She wanted to check the meaning of “hose off”. She said: “Does it mean to masturbate or does it mean to urinate?” Then she asked me about Ambrosia Creamed Rice . . .

Jackie Kay’s book of stories, Why Don’t You Stop Talking, is published by Picador

LAWRENCE NORFOLK

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