Is That a Fish in Your Ear? (41 page)

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Authors: David Bellos

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Style and Translation
 
Translations typically alter numerous features of the source in order to produce matches for those of its dimensions that count in the context it has. But there is one traditionally perceived quality of written and spoken language that is identified not with any particular dimension of an utterance but with the overall relationship between them—its style.
Style is more than genre. Kitchen recipes are typically translated not into something as vague and undifferentiated as “English” but into “kitchen recipese,” the genre constituted by the conventional features that kitchen recipes have in our tongue.
In like manner, you don’t translate French poetry into “English” but into poetry, as the American poet and translator C. K. Williams insists. Poetry is a characteristic social and cultural use of language and can therefore count as a genre in our sense, but it comes in many different forms. Beyond the genre, a poetry translator has to choose the particular style that he is going to use.
Twenty years ago, Eliot Weinberger and Octavio Paz brought out a curious essay-cum-anthology titled
Nineteen Ways of Looking at Wang Wei
—nineteen different English translations of a poem by a Chinese poet of the eighth century C.E.,
. Setting aside all their arguments about which of these “ways of Wei” is to be preferred, what is quite obvious is that they represent
nineteen different ways of writing poetry in English, nineteen “styles” of fairly recognizable kinds (Eliot-ish, Ashbery-ish, free verse–ish, and so forth). Ten years later, Hiroaki Sato brought out
One Hundred Frogs
, a compilation of actually rather more than a hundred already published English versions of a famous haiku by Matsuo Bash
:
 
Furu ike ya
kawazu tobikomu
mizu no oto
I
The old pond
A frog jumped in,
Kerplunk!
 
II
pond
frog
plop!
 
III
A lonely pond in age-old stillness sleeps …
Apart, unstirred by sound or motion … till
Suddenly into it a lithe frog leaps.
 
If “style” is the term that names the principal means of distinguishing the differences among these three versions of Bash
’s haiku, then it means something that is not an individual property of, say, the poetry of Allen Ginsberg, John Masefield, and Ogden Nash but a collective property of poetry written in that style—in
Ginsberg-ish, Masefield-ish, and Nash-ish, so to speak (one of them
was
written by Ginsberg, in fact). Style in this sense is eminently imitable, and not just for comic effect. Students of musical composition develop their skills by writing in the manner of Mozart or Bach, and writers also practice at writing like Flaubert,
1
or writing like Proust.
2
The following pieces are
not
by William Wordsworth, T. S. Eliot, or J. D. Salinger—but it does not take much more than vague memories of school to know which among them is Eliot-ish, Salinger-ish, and Lake Poet–ish, respectively:
There is a river clear and fair
’Tis neither broad nor narrow
It winds a little here and there—
It winds about like any hare;
And then it holds as straight a course
As, on the turnpike road, a horse,
Or, through the air an arrow
 
and
Sunday is the dullest day, treating
Laughter as a profane sound, mixing
Worship and despair, killing
New thought with dead forms.
Weekdays give us hope, tempering
Work with reviving play, promising
A future life within this one
 
and
Boy, when I saw old Eve I thought I was going to flip. I mean it isn’t that Eve is good-looking or anything like that, it’s just that she’s different. I don’t know what the hell it is exactly—but you always know when she’s around. All of a sudden I knew there was something wrong with old Eve the minute I saw her. She looked nervous as hell. I kinda felt sorry for her—even though she’s got one of my goddam ribs, so I went over to talk to old Eve.
“You look very,
very
nice, Adam,” she said to me in a funny way, like she was ashamed of something. “Why don’t you join me in some apple?”
 
These examples could lead us to believe that the translation of style is an exercise in pastiche, the translator’s task being the choice of an existing style in the target culture to serve as a rough match for the “other.” Many literary translators go about their job in just that way. On reading a new work in French, for example, I certainly do run through in my mind the kinds of English style that might fit, and when starting on a new job, I often rifle through the books on my shelf to remind myself of the particularities of the “style match” I have in my head. But this idea of style as a culturally constituted set of linguistic resources characteristic of an author, period, literary genre, or school clashes with another widespread idea of what a “style” is: the irreducible difference of any individual’s unique forms of language. In brief: If style is “inimitable,” how come it can be imitated?
The muddle about what style is began in the gilded halls of the Académie Française, an institution set up by Louis XIV to promote and defend the French language. In 1753, a natural scientist was invited to take his place as one of the forty “immortals,” as members are called. Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon, an eminent botanist, mathematician, and natural historian, gave an extraordinary acceptance speech that has since become known as the “Discourse on Style.” In it he sought to reassure his audience—the thirty-nine academicians who had just elected him—that the promotion of a mere scientist to such elevated rank would not topple rhetoric from its proper place at the pinnacle of French culture. He may even have been sincere—but I wouldn’t count on it. In his much-quoted but mostly misunderstood conclusion, Buffon emphasized that what matter above all are the arts of language. Scientific discoveries, he declared, are really quite easy to make, and will quickly perish unless they are explained with elegance and grace. That is because mere facts are not human achievements—they belong to the natural word and are therefore
hors de l’homme
, “outside of humankind.” Eloquence, by contrast, is the highest evidence of human agency and genius:
le style est l’homme même
.
This meaning of
style
, as a synonym for elegance and distinction, continues to motivate most modern uses of the word and its cognates. Stylish clothes are those considered elegant by some group of people; to ski or to dance or to serve cucumber sandwiches in style is likewise to do these things with fashionable grace. Buffon’s style is a social value. Nobody is free to construct his or her own idea of what is stylish, save by getting other people to agree. Similarly, stylish writing conforms to a shared notion, however vague, of what is fashionable, appropriate, socially elevated, and so on in the way you speak and write.
Matching posh for posh in translating between languages used by cultures with linguistic forms that correspond to hierarchical social structures is no sweat. Where the social structures of the source culture are more elaborate than those of the target, a degree of flattening occurs: the different social implications of
Estimado señor
and
Apreciado señor
at the start of a formal letter in Spanish, for example, can’t be represented in English, which can say only “Dear Sir.” To compensate for losses of this kind, which can be far more substantial when translating between cultures as unrelated to each other as Japanese and French, for example, the translator may invent target-language analogues for distinctions that belong to the social world of the original, and be accused variously of quaintness, condescension, or fidelity to the source. But there are even less tractable issues involved when the social register of the language used in the source is low. There is a seemingly inevitable bias against representing forms of language recognized in the source culture as regional, uncouth, ill-educated, or taboo by socially matching forms in the target tongue—presumably because doing so risks identifying the translator as a member of just such a marginal or subordinated class. As a result, translation usually takes the social register of the source up a notch or two. The social dimension of “style” doesn’t flow easily from tongue to tongue.
The novelist Adam Thirlwell has argued that the meaning of the word
style
changed in 1857.
3
In the convincing story he tells,
style
flipped over, almost in one go, from being a description of the elegance of a whole manner of expression to being about just one subelement in the composition of prose—the sentence. The culprits for this radical reduction of style were Gustave Flaubert, his novel
Madame Bovary
, and the many comments Flaubert made about sentences in his partly teasing letters to his girlfriend, Louise Colet. Since 1857 or thereabouts, Thirlwell argues, critics and readers have needlessly restricted their idea of a writer’s style to those low-level features of grammar and prosody that can be exhaustively identified between a capital letter and a period. Henri Godin, writing about “the stylistic resources of French” just after the Second World War, was quite certain that style and syntax are the same thing and reach their point of perfect harmony in the writing of … Flaubert.
4

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