In an essay on Stendhal, Roland Barthes remarked on the disparity between the sparsity of Stendhal’s journals and the richness of his novels: “What happened between the Travel Journal and The Charterhouse of Parma, is writing.” The sentence, translated by Adam Thirlwell, lingers. Kate Briggs, in This Little Art, picks up a similar thread: she asks whether translation is best regarded not as an art, but as a craft, a practiced form, more artisan than artist. Helen Lowe-Porter, translator of The Magic Mountain, was clear: she didn’t write it. But she also insisted, “You see, the job is to some extent an artist job,” and refused to send her work to the publisher until she felt she had written the book herself.
I first read The Magic Mountain twelve years ago. I came late to Mann, misled by Nabokov’s caustic dismissal: Mann as one of those “puffed-up writers” who traded in “great ideas.” I read Lowe-Porter’s translation in a rush, the first time, skimming some of the more extended dialogues between Settembrini and Naphta. But the voice stayed with me. I read it again immediately, more carefully, trying to trace the contours not only of the philosophical arguments but the larger historical tensions those debates refract. By the end, I had spent nearly a quarter of the year in the company of Mann and the echoes he drew in.
In reading around the novel, I found Timothy Buck’s excoriation of Lowe-Porter in the TLS: a forensic dismantling of her version as “pseudo-Mann.” Briggs revisits this controversy, noting that Buck finds little to admire even in John Woods’s later translation. Her tone is more open, less judgement, more inquiry. She reads translation historically, contextually, as a mode of thought shaped by circumstance and necessity.
As an anglophone reader, my French too brittle for Proust, I rely on translators. Briggs quotes Barthes: “Of course I can read the great foreign novels translated into French, like Tolstoy or Dostoevsky or Don Quixote, etc,” then adds: “All those novels? Yes, read them. I’ve read them. I have. Let me insist that I have read them.”
This Little Art gives space for doubt. I began to wonder whether I could insist in the same way. I haven’t read Proust, not truly, nor Mann in the original German. But to refuse translation entirely is to relinquish too much, to cede the work of reading to linguistic exclusion. I am grateful to those who practise this little art: those who make possible the compromises that allow foreign works of art to reshape us in our own languages.
I’m very much the same – and I accept that I’m never likely to learn the languages to read this books in the original, so I’m eternally grateful to translators. I know people who say they won’t read translations and I think that’s their loss. Even if what I’m reading is a version of the original, I’m still able to experience something of the book that I couldn’t otherwise. The Briggs book is excellent and I’m with Barthes! 😀
I have read Proust. I have read Proust. I’ll keep reassuring myself. 😉
The newer Yale edition of Swann’s Way has a great intro essay on translation (as well as useful, though hardly voluminous, footnotes in the margins. Having liked the Kilmartin previously I am enjoying this “amended Moncrieff” a lot so far 🙂
Thanks for the comment and mention of that essay. I found most of it in a preview. The Kilmartin/Enright version is my Proust of choice.
what about Perrault , the Grimm Brothers and the like?
a little girl who only knew Spanish and Yidish and the language of tears and fears
How would I have ever met them?
I love Russian authors, Olga Tokarczuk and Ludmilla Ulitskya—and I´d have never read them as I do not know a word of Russian.
the list is so long!
thanks to the art of translation and all my gratefulness to the ones who do them…
Agreed!
It seems that every time I read a discussion or article on translation, some obnoxious dweeb like Buck or Nabokov claims that all of us uni-lingual plebes have read only “debased versions” of this or that novel. What is the point of such comments?? I read The Magic Mountain in the original Lowe-Porter translation and it absolutely blew me away. If that’s debased, I’ll take it. Same goes for Constance Garnett’s translations from Russian.
Debased is such a strong word. I would not go so far. But inferior in most cases, surely. (In most cases because I’ve heard the argument that Moncrieff’s interpretation of Proust is more beautiful than Proust.) But such arguments interest me only in passing as they are about style. I insist that I’ve read Proust, and Mann, and Dante, and Homer. I insist. But given an infinite amount of time and patience, would we not all read what Mann intended us to read, rather what Lowe-Porter (thankfully) gave us?
I’m not even sure I’d say inferior b/c the only way to properly judge is to be fully immersed in both cultures. Sure I’d love to have infinite time and patience, but how many people can really be in that position? If I went to Germany for a year, I’d probably be able to gain at most an academic appreciation for Mann in German, as opposed to a visceral, life-changing reaction from reading Magic Mountain in English. People like Bush can analyze translations line by line and say this or that about them, but what it really comes down to is the emotional power one feels from reading an entire novel. That’s what the Bushes and Nabokovs of the world seem to misunderstand in their “more erudite than thou” eggheadedness.
WHAT A BARREN EXCHANGE THAT IS! all what has been said about “original language”
I fully agree with Philip
what a loss would have been not to know the works of the immortal!
I learn English and I had to manage with French
BUT THE RUSSIANS! The great Polish writers…the German, etc.etc
If I had never read Shakespeare, Dostoiewsky, Kafka, Proust…my life, our lives would have been poorer, indeed…
give me translations…I want to know the odes by the great Greeks!
Aren´t we lucky? we have master pieces in all the languages of the world!
Lucky indeed. I would not wish to be without the translations that comprise most of my reading life. But still a little voice insists, “Take the time to learn to read Homer,” and not a translation.” There was a time before our attention became degraded when readers would want to know the originals.
“take the time” makes me see a time when there stands a candle and big, huge texts, manuals near by and you, me…could make time because there was no hurry, but still,
you must have had bread in your teeth, some coal in the stove… to sit comfortably by the candle light and toil at the translation of the Great Ones!
in the good old times when there was no gadgets to toy with?.Sorry, English, as you are well aware. is noit my native language…