Emily Warner
Our personal language is shaped by a vibrant catalogue of categories: culture, education, family, geography, and many others.
Communication = Translation
What is ‘pavement’ to me is ‘sidewalk’ to you. Maybe you picture something different to me when I say ‘pavement,’ or maybe you come from a place where that word doesn’t exist at all.
The continual act of receiving communication is a continual act of translating it; as George Steiner describes, “human communication equals translation.”
A Beautiful Mess
Language is a way of treading the delicate no man’s land between people, navigating the grey area where ‘you’ meets ‘me’ and where a beautifully diverse array of contexts collide. Similarly, literature occupies the same space. Reading is complex. The meaning of a book is shaped by the reader as much as it is by the author, and there is a moment (both exciting and terrifying) when the cover of a book is opened for the first time, when private language is exposed to the world and the act of translation begins.
Now, add different languages into the mix, a sprinkling of metaphor, a dash of idiom, and some translators – what you get is a mess. A beautiful, productive one, but undeniably still a mess. ‘Human communication’ gets a lot more complicated and the bridge between writer and reader yawns ever wider.
“Literature brings us into conversation with the personal language of hundreds of authors from hundreds of countries.”
Saving The World
Olga Tokarczuk, a Polish writer, eloquently explores this in her article How Translators are Saving the World. She argues that the worst thing is the loss of someone’s personal language and that the remedy for this is literature. Literature brings us into conversation with the personal language of hundreds of authors from hundreds of countries, reminding us that, “our world is only one of many possible worlds” contained within a novel. Perhaps, her essay should have been called How Translators are Saving the Worlds, each and every one of them.
One way of viewing translated texts is as something unfamiliar, daunting and strange. Another option is to see it as a new world, a new perspective that you can access, via the incredible work of translators.
Haruki Murakami
Haruki Murakami is a popular, widely translated, Japanese author. You’ve probably heard of his Norwegian Wood or Kafka on the Shore, both raw, unadorned yet beautifully heartbreaking novels. Maybe you recognise the titles After Dark or Sputnik Sweetheart, and perhaps some of you have read his most recent piece of nonfiction, Novelist as a Vocation. This is an avuncular series of essays which shed an illuminating light on Murakami’s writing process and career.
He expresses similar ideas to both Tokarczuk and Steiner when he writes about the value of reading: “I experienced all the emotions depicted in books almost as if they were my own; in my imagination I traveled freely through time and space, saw all kinds of amazing sights, and let all kinds of words pass right through my very body. Through all this, my perspective on life became a more composite view.”
Reading offered him a panoramic view of the world. In addition, Murakami conceptualised writing as an expression of the self and a deeply personal language. He says: “For the most part, novelists are trying to convert something present in their consciousness into a story.”
His literature is communication of the private and as such, a translation. That is, before it is translated from the original Japanese into English (or any other language).
Murakami also writes: “Tell people in America that your novel sold a million copies in Japan or won some literary prize and they’re basically unimpressed, but get published in The New Yorker and they start treating you very differently.”
In this, Murakami presents a problem. To reach global fame, break the barriers between countries, and share your writing with everyone, you need more than originality and a unique style. You need a global market, you need interest from readers and you need a publisher.
Barriers
Sadly, these towering heights are unattainable for many, particularly in the Anglo-American world, where the percentage of translated books in the marketplace is shockingly low. Admittedly, these figures are more promising than they were five or ten years ago, but still lamentable in comparison to other book markets such as France and Spain. Murakami was lucky, as were the likes of Elena Ferrante, Paulo Coelho and Yasunari Kawabata. Publishing companies are businesses, and no business is going to accept a job it can’t profit from. This means that reading translated fiction often requires you to desperately grope behind a dusty bookshelf, or scour the internet for some undiscovered PDF, sunk to the depths of Google by SEO.
Even when we do read translations in the Anglo-American world, we often don’t realise we are. In his groundbreaking essay, The Translator’s Invisibility, Lawrence Venuti discusses the value we place on fluency in translated texts. This means erasing the difference between an original and its translation, domesticating the text and making it seem as if it was always written in English. “The more fluent the translation, the more invisible the translator”, he says.
Murakami is a visceral example of this phenomenon, with not one, but four different translators of his work- Alfred Birnbaum, Jay Rubin, Philip Gabriel and Ted Goossen.
Translator Jay Rubin told Roland Kelts in an interview that, “when you read Haruki Murakami, you’re reading me at least ninety-five percent of the time,” much to the distress of Anglo-American readers, who like to believe in an author’s individualism. As a culture, we would prefer to allow the translator to fade into obscurity.
“We are creators; we are artists too.”
The Paradox Of Translation
Translated fiction is a minority in our book market and that which does exist, silently and invisibly brings a text closer to its reader, rather than its author. This is the paradox of translation; a paradox which is perpetuated by the publishing industry, the economic status of the translator, and the Anglo-American desire for readability in their fiction. As a result, we are experiencing a gaping loss, which cannot be addressed until translators assert their significance. Until they stand up and admit that “we are creators; we are artists too.”
Featured image courtesy of Skitterphoto via Pexels. Image license found here. No changes were made to this image.
Emily Warner
I'm a second year English Literature student and Arts Editor for my student newspaper. I am many things, aspirationally; an aspirational writer, journalist, artist, author and editor. Other days, I think I just want to move to Italy and open a bookshop. I enjoy writing about art, literature, film, music, lifestyle and travel. It's also important for me to raise awareness for Type 1 Diabetes, the LGBTQIA+ community and issues of diversity.