Matthew Zapruder on Translation

With Wave Books' Poetry In Translation festival set to kickoff this week, Drew Scott Swenhaugen, at the helm of his Small Press Beat post for Tin House checked in with poet and Wave editor Matthew Zapruder to talk about, not surprisingly, translation.

DS: Translation is a highly discussed genre in contemporary poetry. Many small presses have started translation book series, many of them are excellent … amazing poets that haven’t been read in English. Which also means the original content of these books in their native language has never been read. Is the ideal of a translation to capture a “sameness” with its original?

MZ: This issue is at the heart of the whole project of translation. Sameness, or accuracy, is part of the equation, but as Walter Benjamin points out in his seminal essay “The Task of the Translator,” complete sameness is an obvious impossibility. It’s definitely a concern for both the reader and the translator (not to mention the original writer). As Benjamin also points out, different texts are more or less translatable. I think people worry a lot about this, maybe too much. Each translation is a compromise, and should be understood as much.

There is a different reason why, beyond some kind of important, yet ultimately abstract ethical responsibility to an impossible ideal of sameness, it is best to stay as close as possible to the text. A translator must be willing to accept an element of strangeness or unfamiliarity or even infelicity in the new text. The worst thing a translator can do is to unconsciously allow his or her own ego — the desire to be seen as a “good” translator or writer — to begin to control the translation, so that subtle “improvements” are made in the text. This almost always results in clichéd, familiar, boring, language in the translation. If a translator finds him or herself saying something like, “that’s what the original seems to be saying, but it seems weird or unusual in the translation,” that is almost certainly the very place where the particular style of the author, what makes this author interesting and challenging and worthwhile as a creative artist, is manifesting, and to take that away and replace it with “acceptable” language in the translation is a disaster.

I heard Richard Pevear (who along with his partner, Larisa Volkhonskaya, are the preeminent translators of Russian prose) express this idea, one that I have had for a long time as well, in a talk he gave recently at UC Berkeley. So I think I’d like to give him the last word here, from an essay he wrote about translating Tolstoy:

“But then, literature is precisely not the conveying of information. It is the making of an image, and through the image of an experience, using all the resources of language — rhythm, sound, texture, tempo, suggestion, intonation. What’s more, every good writer has a particular way of using those resources. That is what the translator must try to follow as closely as possible. The transposition can never be total, and therefore it is always worth trying anew. In this way translation, which is a dialogue between languages, also becomes a dialogue in time, a fresh response to the ongoing life of the original.”