Translation and Culture

The NY Times has an excellent piece today about the trials of translating. The author rambles on, very positively I must say, with statements of the like:

In my opinion, you don’t have to be mad to translate, but it probably helps. Take, for instance, the case of the late, great Gilbert Adair. He was translating into English the brilliant novel by Georges Perec, “La Disparition” – a lipogram written entirely without the letter “e.” (I had had a tentative go at eliminating the most frequently occurring letter in both English and French and failed utterly.) Adair even succeeded, for a while, in deleting “e” from his vocabulary. I met him for tea in London, while he was in the midst of it, at the Savoy hotel (it had to be the Savoy, not Claridge’s or the Grosvenor, obviously). When a waitress came around and asked if he would like “tea or coffee,” he frowned, gritted his teeth, and replied, “Lapsang souchong.”

But I am reminded of several events in my life of translating.  I have managed about six languages, plus classic Latin and Greek, but they are in varying degrees. I am not too bad in French, that is after a couple of weeks in France, and can manage a bit of Greek, current that is at a Diner or two, and Spanish, yet it is New York Subway Spanish, a language I have found which is truly New York. Then my Italian is just short of the God Father thanks to my being brought up on Staten Island.

But my translating was crowned by two events. In the mid 90s I wanted to create a Term Sheet, about two pages, for a French Canadian company. Thus I sat down and transliterated from English into French and emailed it. Well! I was told that a second grader could do better, but they all got a big laugh out of the document, and when I discussed it with them so did I. You see you just cannot transliterate.

Second, I held a meeting in Prague of my company heads, I believe it was January 2001. I had a new US employee who was to talk and I told the employee many times not to use sports metaphors, football, US that is, and baseball, but since this was the employee's first time out of the US it was hopeless. My other country heads thought that the employee was a typical American of shall we say lesser talents. But then I soon had my chance.

I got frustrated over some issue, cannot recall just what, and in my frustration I declared: "I don't give a rat's ass!".

You should have seen the room. The Russians were transliterating into Russian, the Germans into German, Czechs into Czech, Greeks into Greek and so forth. I saw the process, the contorted faces, trying to word by word make some sense of what I said. They In called a stop and spent a few minutes explaining that it was an outburst of frustration and that I also had no real idea of either what I said or from whence it came. Then I started to collect in about twelve languages similar outbursts, and tons of laughter.

Thus translation is an art, an art which must have the capabilities to transcend both languages and culture. The transcendence is not necessarily one to one, it is not unique, it is a blending of the personal. But the piece in the Times is quite telling. So too was my rat.