Sympathy for the Traitor by Polizzotti Mark;

Author:Polizzotti, Mark;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Language; Linguistics; Literature; literary; translator; translation studies; machine translation; Publishing; Culture; International; Communication; anti-theory; theory; craft; practice; reading; syntax; style; mistranslation; surrealism; wordplay; poetry; Bible; interpretation; retranslation; literal translation; fidelity; representation; MT; Venuti; Walter Benjamin; Augustine; Luther; espionage; Homer; Moncrieff; foreignization; adaptation; Nabokov; Proust; Flaubert; subjectivity; Pound; Edmund White; Roussel; Perec; schizo; Milton
Publisher: MIT Press
Published: 2018-04-27T04:00:00+00:00

Finally, losing patience with Bohannan's “errors,” the tribal elder takes over the narration altogether, concluding, “Sometime you must tell us some more stories of your country. We, who are elders, will instruct you in their true meaning, so that when you return to your own land your elders will see that you have not been sitting in the bush, but among those who know things and who have taught you wisdom.”1

As Bohannan discovered the hard way, even supposedly universal truths get filtered through highly local perspectives, and words resonate differently from one country, one collective, one people, to the next. “A language,” as Noam Chomsky observed, “is not just words. It's a culture, a tradition, a unification of a community, a whole history that creates what a community is.” “Dog,” in whichever idiom, signifies Canis familiaris, but associatively the dog does not mean the same thing to someone who is English, French, or Chinese. Gregory Rabassa has remarked that if you ask a New Yorker what kind of bug Gregor Samsa metamorphosed into, “the inevitable answer will be a giant cockroach, the insect of record in his city,” even though Kafka's term, Ungeziefer, means simply “vermin.” Similarly, the Russian translator Richard Lourie cautioned that the term communal apartment in English “conjures up an image of a Berkeley, California kitchen, where hippies with headbands are cooking brown rice, whereas the Russian term [kommunalka] evokes a series of vast brown rooms with a family living in each, sharing a small kitchen where the atmosphere is dense with everything that cannot be said.”2

At issue here is translation not so much between languages as between cultures, the most recalcitrant text of all, and the most difficult to anticipate. Even a highly representative translation faces the challenge that different readerships read differently. To put it another way: even though readers are not a homogenous block, even within the source culture, at least they share a relatively similar set of associations and secondary meanings, which the author can play upon or take for granted in writing the book. Transpose that set of associations into a culture with its own, dissimilar set of givens, and who knows what will happen? As the writer and translator Tim Parks notes, “However much the writer may prize his individual identity, his book is not the same book in another context.”3

It's true that, to some degree, at least, a great work transcends these disparities. To paraphrase an old ad for Levy's rye bread, you don't have to be Jewish—or Czech—to love Kafka. But can you love him in the same way? Beyond any linguistic acrobatics the work requires or references demanding explication, there are ambient assumptions that refuse to be ferried across. And just as the book changes with the context, so too does the translation strategy.

For instance, a text in French tends to run longer than the same text in English, usually by 10 to 20 percent. (On that score, I once had the humbling experience of finding that my

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