"Roads to Translation: How a novelist relates to his translators"

JM Coetzee
"Roads to Translation: How a novelist relates to his translators"
64(4) Meanjin (2005), www.meanjin.unimelb.edu.au
Rep as Coetzee, JM (2006) "Speaking in
Tongues: Drawing on his experiences with
translators, Nobel laureate JM Coetzee identifies
some of the practical difficulties involved in
the craft of translation." Weekend Australian (28-29 January) Review pp
4-6.


BOOKS of mine have been translated from the
English in which they are written into some 25
other languages, the majority of them European.
Of the 25 I can read two or three moderately
well. Of many of the rest I know not a word; I
have to trust my translators to render fairly what I have written.

Whether that trust is well placed I find out only
rarely, when a bilingual reader who has compared
translation with original happens to report back to me.

Some such reports come as a jolt. In Russia, I
discover, The Master of Petersburg has been
renamed Autumn in Petersburg; in the Italian
version of Dusklands, a man opens a wooden crate
with the help of a bird (what I wrote was that he
used a crow, that is, a crowbar).

Most reports, however, are reassuring. Even in
the money-driven world of modern publishing,
shoddy translations seem to be rare. In the
translation of literary works in particular, the
urge to give of one's best even when it may not
be noticed still seems to reign.

As author I find it gratifying when a translator
contacts me for advice. Among those who regularly
confer with me are my French, German, Swedish,
Dutch, Serbian and Korean translators.

On the other hand, there are some who have never
been in touch, among them my Turkish and Japanese
translators. Given the differences of linguistic
structure and cultural background between Turkish
and English, and between Japanese and English, I
would have thought that these two would find my
texts more troublesome than their European
confreres do. Or perhaps it is out of politeness that they do not
contact me.

ARE my books easy or hard to translate? Sentence
by sentence, my prose is generally lucid, in the
sense that the syntactic relations among words,
and the logical force of constructions, are as clear as I can make them.

On the other hand, I sometimes use words with the
full freight of their history behind them, and
that freight is not easily carried across to
another language. My English does not happen to
be embedded in any particular sociolinguistic
landscape, which relieves the translator of one
vexatious burden; on the other hand, I do tend to
be allusive, and not always to signal the presence of allusion.

Dialogue comes with its own set of problems,
particularly when it is very informal and
incorporates regional usages, contemporary
fashions and allusions, or slang. My dialogue is
rarely of this kind. For the most part its
character is formal, even if its rhythms are more
abrupt than the rhythms of narrative prose. So
hitting the right register ought not to be a problem for the translator.

Where my dialogue is aberrant is when it comes
from the mouths of children or of characters for
whom English is not a first language. In general,
it is best for such speech to be translated not
word for word but by speech typical of children
in the language translated into (hereafter called
the target language), or by the speech of a
foreigner making typical foreign slips.

My novel Waiting for the Barbarians presents an
unusual problem for the translator. It is set in
an unspecified space at an unspecified time in
history; it would be hard to maintain that this
milieu is Western, yet, despite allusions to
barbarians, to an imperial palace, and to such
items as lacquered armour, it is as hard to fit it snugly into the Far
East.

All of its dialogue can be conceived of as
translated by an invisible hand from an
unspecified foreign tongue into English. Its
language is more or less bare of allusion to the
past of the English language and indeed to the history of Western
thought.

Furthermore, within this invented discourse there
are passages of what may be conceived as
translation from a hypothetical barbarian tongue
into the language of the narrator and thence into
English. Such passages are marked by a simplified syntax and lexicon.

The principal character in the novel, and its
narrator, is called simply the Magistrate and is
addressed as "Magistrate." His principal duty is
to officiate over the system of justice in this
part of the frontier, but in the absence of a
bureaucracy he seems to oversee the day-to-day
operation of the neglected frontier town.

Since there is no term in English for someone who
is in effect judge and mayor and town clerk,
since a magistrate in this book would not be a
magistrate in any other book, does it matter what
one calls the man in the target language? Perhaps
not; but there are good approximations and bad
approximations. If magistrate is the authorial
approximation in English, what would be a good
approximation in German, for instance?

The question was raised in correspondence by my
German translator, specifically by my second
German translator, since two translations of
Waiting for the Barbarians have appeared in
German. In modern German, der Magistrat denotes
the magistracy, not a single individual. The
standard translation of the English magistrate is
Friedensrichter. But Friedensrichter translates
back into English as justice of the peace, which
in American usage stands for a quite lowly
office. Hence the translator's decision to
resurrect der Magistrat in its old sense, a sense
still alive in Switzerland, where Magistrat is a title as well as an
office.

PHRASINGS planted in Waiting for the Barbarians
for their generic Far Eastern associations
naturally aroused the interest of my Chinese
translator. The crucial passage in the book was
the following, spoken by the Magistrate:

I... am no less infected with [the vision of
Empire] than the faithful Colonel Joll as he
tracks the enemies of Empire through the
boundless desert, sword unsheathed to cut down
barbarian after barbarian until at last he finds
and slays the one whose destiny it should be (or
if not he then his son or unborn grandson) to
climb the bronze gateway to the Summer Palace and
topple the globe surmounted by the tiger rampant
that symbolised eternal domination.

"It would be highly appreciated," wrote my
translator, "if you could help clarify what
Summer Palace and globe surmounted by the tiger
rampant... refer to. I wonder if [they] refer to
the Old Summer Palace in Beijing that was
destroyed by British and French allied force in
1848." The question may seem simple, but it holds
surprising depths. It may mean: Are the words
Summer Palace intended to refer to the historical
Summer Palace? It may also mean: Do the words
refer to the historical Summer Palace?

I, as sole author, am the only person able to
answer the first question, and my answer must be
that I did not consciously intend to refer to the
palace in Beijing, and certainly did not intend
to evoke the historical sack of that palace, with
its attendant national humiliations.

At the same time, I did intend that enough of an
association with imperial China should be evoked
to balance and complicate, for instance, the
association with imperial Russia evoked elsewhere
in the book by the phrase Third Bureau, the arm
of the security forces for which Colonel Joll works.

As for whether the words in question do refer to
the palace in Beijing, as author I am powerless
to say. The words are written; I cannot control the associations they
awaken.

But my translator is not so powerless: a nudge
here, a nuance there, and the reader may be
either directed towards or headed off from the Beijing of 1848.

THE necessary imperfection of translation -
brought about in the first place by the
incapacity of any given target language to supply
for each single word in the source language a
corresponding single word that [p R-4/p R-5]
would cover, precisely and without overlap, the
denotation of the original and its major
connotations to boot - is so widely accepted that
the translator becomes accustomed to aiming for
the best possible translation rather than a hypothetical perfect one.

But there are occasions where less than perfect
translation of a key word can have serious consequences.

My novel Foe, if it is about any single subject,
is about authorship: about what it means to be an
author not only in the professional sense (the
profession of author was just beginning to mean
something in Daniel Defoe's day) but also in a
sense that verges, if not on the divine, then at
least on the demiurgic: sole author, sole creator.

Here is an exchange between my Serbian translator
and myself, from the time when she was working on Foe:

AB: Autor, alas, is not a profession in Serbian.
In some places I simply have to say writer
(denotes strictly a literatus)... [She goes on to
caution against too many Latin-sounding words in a Serbian text.]

JMC: The notion that one can be an author as one
can be a baker is fairly fundamental to my
conception of Foe. "Writer" would suffice only if
the distinction between writer and scribe/scrivener were quite marked.

AB: You write: "The notion that one can be an
author as one can be a baker is fairly
fundamental to my conception of Foe." That is
precisely the reason it worries me. The baker
bakes, the author authors, yet our verb [in
Serbian] is makes/creates. The English senses are
better covered by tvorac (maker/creator/founder)
[than by autor]. Defoe is properly the tvorac of
Robinson Crusoe... You also write: "Writer would
suffice only if the distinction between writer
and scribe/scrivener were quite marked." It is,
but the word lacks the symbolical quality of the
English author. I think I will try to use the
maker/creator word, toning it down with writer only when absolutely
necessary.

JMC: That sounds the best solution. Makir (maker)
is the word routinely used for poet in Scottish
poetry of the 14th-15th centuries.

AB: Good to know about makir - such a resonant word.

Working on the Serbian translation of Elizabeth
Costello, AB met an unexpected obstacle when she
transliterated Elizabeth's name into Cyrillic characters.

Elizabeth looks forward to seeing her writings on
the library shelves among such great Cs as
Chaucer, Coleridge and Conrad. Then with dismay
she realises than her nearest neighbour is likely to be Marie Corelli.

The first problem is that in Serbian, Chaucer,
unlike Coleridge, Corelli and Costello, is not spelled with an initial K

AB: Should I drop Chaucer, or replace him with,
say, Keats? Corelli is a K, but the allusion
would be lost on Serbian readers. May I insert an
adjective like "sentimental" or "very minor"?

JMC: Drop Chaucer. Then I suggest you consult a
Serbian-language encyclopedia and pick out a
minor English-language writer near to Kostelo.

AB: Minor writers: only the popular ones get into
foreign encyclopedias. Agatha Christie, James Fenimore Cooper, AJ
Cronin?

JMC: Agatha Christie, I think.

HERE are two communications from my French
translator at the time when she was working on
Youth. The first illustrates a situation familiar
to translators, where a phrase that the writer,
in his innocence, regards as perfectly clear is
revealed by the test of translation to be ambiguous.

CduP: You write: "London is full of beautiful
girls. They come from all over the world: as au
pairs, as language students, simply as tourists."
I tend to understand that these girls are in
London to learn English, rather than doing
tertiary studies in languages. I would say: des
filles venues des quatre coins du monde pour
apprendre l'anglais (rather than etudiantes en langues).

The second communication illustrates the reverse:
a word that has complex connotations in the
source language, connotations that cannot
dependably be evoked in the target one. The text
runs: "In a perfect world he would sleep only
with perfect women, women of perfect femininity
yet with a certain darkness at their core that
will respond to his own darker self."

JMC: Dark here is the dark of dark secrets, dark
history, etc. I don't have enough of a feel for
the connotations of sombre in French, but English
sombre has connotations of sad or saddening that we don't want.

CduP: This is not an easy one. The connotations
of dark secrets would be rendered by the French
noir... as in magie noire, messe noire, roman
noir... I am not sure noir will work in this passage.

JMC: Dark, as used here, is a very Lawrentian
word. Is there a standard DH Lawrence translation
in France? If so, you should use the word that
routinely translates dark there. The first book
to check would be The Plumed Serpent, where it occurs all over the
place.

CduP: In the entries [on Lawrence] in Le
Dictionnaire des oeuvres, on Le Serpent a plumes,
there is a quote referring to Cipriano Viedma: Il
possedait un pouvoir magnetique que son education
n'avait pas entame. Cette education s'etendait
comme un leger voile sur le lac sombre de son ame
rude. In the commentary, phrases like sa nature
intime (for Kate) keep cropping up (for core?) - monde primitif also
occurs.

We could think of secret, of tenebreux: Ma
jeunesse ne fut qu'un tenebreux orage -
Baudelaire; Le labyrinthe des consciences les
plus tenebreuses - Balzac; both anachronic, I know.

We had to settle for sombre and abandon the
allusiveness of the original: Femmes qui auraient
au fond d'elles-memes quelque chose de sombre qui
repondait a ce qu'il y a en lui de sombre.

THE heroine of Age of Iron is a classics
professor dying of cancer. The novel follows the
movement of her thoughts, and this creates
certain problems for the Korean translator.

In English, the etymological connection between
nursing and sustenance (nourishment) is present
though somewhat hidden by the drift of sound-change.

The connection is clearer in French: nourrice.
How, without becoming pedantic, does one explain
to the Korean reader why it is the French rather
than the English word that flits through the consciousness of the
heroine?

When Professor Curren's mind wanders to the
West's classical past, should the translator
treat these moments as allusions and footnote
them? Since such allusions are often glancing and
casual, how can he be sure he has picked them all
up? Is a passing reference to a photograph of
Sophie Schliemann worth a long footnote on Troy,
Homer's Iliad, and the excavation of what he
thought was Agamemnon's tomb by Heinrich Schliemann?

The phrase amor matris crosses the professor's
mind. For the benefit of a reader without Latin,
the famous ambiguity of the phrase can be
explained in a quick footnote; but how does one
evoke the atmosphere of rote learning in
classrooms going back six centuries in the West?

In Boyhood, the young hero is obsessed with
cricket. The ball-throwing machine that he
constructs for batting practice in the backyard
is easy enough to picture as long as one has an
idea of the relation of batsman to bowler in
cricket. For the Korean reader, is cricket worth
a long elucidatory note, or should the machine be
left unexplained as a cultural puzzle?

How does one translate "portly Paul Kruger" (in
Youth) into Dutch? The English word portly is in
transition from an older sense of stately, where
port is the same element as in deportment, to a
newer sense of stout. This instability has
certain consequences: a person one calls portly
is a figure of fun in a way that a person one
calls fat is not: he bears his weight with a gravity that is comical.

Dutch offers statig for the older sense, *** for
the newer. There is no word that carries both
senses. *** (English thick, solid, plump, stout)
is not complimentary but lacks the required euphemistic shading.

In Elizabeth Costello, Elizabeth's sister gives a
speech at a graduation ceremony. Her speech ends
as follows: "studia humanitatis are truly on
their deathbed. [Their death] has been brought
about by the monster enthroned by those very
studies as first and animating principle of the
universe: the monster of reason, mechanical
reason. But that is another story for another
day." The text continues: "That is the end of it,
the end of Blanche's oration.."qqqzzzz

In Dutch, unfortunately, the standard word for
reason is rede. Rede is also the standard word
for oration or speech. This double function makes
etymological sense - it parallels the development
of Latin ratio from an arithmetic account, a
reckoning, to accounting or computation in the
abstract, to scheme or system, to systematic
thought - but to use the word twice here would only sow confusion.

The best solution my Dutch translator and I could
come to was to resurrect the Latin word: het
monster van de ratio, de mechanische rede.

The English word highway is rich in connotation.
Via highwayman it carries 18th-century
associations with risk and danger: compared with
a road, a highway is positively glamorous (this
is of course not true in the US, where the word is in everyday use).

In A House in Spain, the house in question lies
in a Catalan village off the highway. But in the
new Europe supervised from Brussels, my Dutch
translator informs me, there is a strict and
exhaustive hierarchy of road types, with
associated maximum speeds. This hierarchy does not include cognates of
highway.

For my Dutch translator, the question was whether
the village is located near an autosnelweg
(express motorway), a snelweg (expressway), or
simply a lowly provinciale weg (provincial road).
If we take the author's intentions into the
reckoning and try to match referent with
referent, the likeliest answer would be the last;
but if we had no author to interrogate, how would we know?

There are two quite different considerations at
work here. One has to do with real-life road
types and their congruence or lack of congruence
with the author's intentions. The other has to do
with the range of historical, social, and
literary associations called forth by the idea of
a village not far from the highway, and the range
called forth by the idea of a dorpje not far from
an autosnelweg, a snelweg, or a provinciale weg. [p R-5/p R-6]

No matter how competent a translator may be in
both languages, and how finely attuned to nuance,
there are texts for which they will simply feel
no sympathy. In an ideal world the thing to do
would be to decline to work on such texts; but in
the real world such rectitude may not always be advisable.

Waiting for the Barbarians was first translated
into German in 1984. By common consent this
translation was not a success, and the book has
since been retranslated. Why was the first
translation a failure? The translator could read
my English perfectly competently, word by word
and sentence by sentence, and turn it into adequate German prose.

Yet as I read the text she produced I felt more
and more disquieted: the world that her pages
evoked was, in subtle and not so subtle respects,
not the world I had imagined; the narrator whose
voice I was hearing was not the narrator I had conceived.

In part this was a matter of word choice: given a
choice between two valid options, the translator
seemed more often than not to choose the one I would not have chosen.

But in the main it was a matter of rhythm of
speech but also rhythm of thought. The
sensibility behind the German text, a sensibility
embodied in particular in the speech of the narrator, felt alien to me.

A passage from Waiting for the Barbarians
illustrates some of the difficulties created for
the English-to-German translator by uses of the
present-participle form of the verb for which
there are no equivalents in German.

If I lived in the magistrate's villa on the
quietest street in town, holding sittings in the
court on Mondays and Thursdays, going hunting
every morning, occupying the evenings in the
classics, closing my ears to the activities of
this upstart policeman [Colonel Joll], if I
resolved to ride out the bad times, keeping my
own counsel, I might cease to feel like a man
who..." Here is the version produced by the first German translator:

Wenn ich in der Richtervilla in der ruhigsten
Stra e der Stadt wohnen wurde, wenn ich montags
und donnerstags im Gericht Sitzungen anberaumen,
jeden Morgen auf die Jagd gehen, meine Abende mit
der Lekture klassischer Schriftsteller ausfullen,
meine Ohren verschlie en wurde vor dem Treiben
dieses arroganten Polizeihengstes, wenn ich den
Entschlu fassen wurde, diese schlechten Zeiten
heil zu uberstehen und den Mund zu halten, wurde
dieses Gefuhl vielleicht nachlassen, ich sei ein Mensch, der...

There are several reasons to be dissatisfied with
this translation. Occupying one's evenings with
der Lekture klassischer Schriftsteller is not the
same as occupying them with the classics; or
rather, the man who would occupy his evenings
with der Lekture klassischer Schriftsteller is
not the same man as the one who occupies his
evenings with the classics: the former sounds
like a pedant who does not look to the classic
texts for solace, and certainly does not seek in
the classical authors friends and companions.

The man who in German dismisses Colonel Joll as
ein arrogante Polizeihengste, an arrogant jackass
policeman, is ruled by a different set of
prejudices from the man who in English dismisses
him as an upstart policeman (in the latter case,
or so it seems to me, it is hard to tell whether
upstart or policeman is meant to be more
insulting to this specialist in state security).

In the second translator's version, the two
phrases in question are rendered - exactly - as
sich mit den Klassikern beschaftigen and dieser Emporkommling von
Polizisten.

A more general and perhaps more interesting
question to arise from this passage is how a
German translator should deal with a long
sequence of English - ing forms, such as we have
here. The English seems to me to contain a quite subtle ambiguity.

One abbreviated paraphrase might read: "If I were
to live in the villa, if I were to hold sittings,
if I were to go hunting, if I were to occupy
myself in the classics, if I were to close my
ears, then I might cease to feel like a man
who..." An alternative paraphrase might read: "If
I were to live in the villa, all the time I lived
there holding sittings, going hunting, etcetera,
then I might cease to feel like a man who..."

The former implies a set of decisions - whether
to live in the villa, whether to hold sittings,
whether to go hunting, and so on - which, if
taken, will (it is hoped) bring about a certain
result. The latter paraphrase implies a slip into
an enclosed, iterative time-world, an escape from
the difficult and unpleasant historical time in which Colonel Joll
operates.

The first translator's version sets out a number
of conditions, embodied in conditional forms of
the verb (wohnen wurde, anberaumen [wurde]),
which have a hypothetical consequence: wurde
dieses Gefuhl vielleicht nachlassen, ich sei ein Mensch, der...

The second translator's version sets out the same
conditions, embodied in this case in hypothetical
(subjunctive) forms of the verb (in der
Magistratsvilla wohnte,
Gerichtsverhandlungenleitete...), leading to a
comparable hypothetical consequence: wurde ich
mich vielleicht nicht mehr wie ein Mann fuhlen, der...

In neither case is the implication hinted at in
my second paraphrase taken up. In fact, I cannot
see a way in which it can be taken up in German
without considerable expansion of the passage.

French, with its - ant present participle, makes
it easier to follow the syntax of the original:
Si j'occupais la villa du magistrat, en menant
une vie jalonnee par la chasse tous les matins,
les soirees consacrees a la lecture des
classiques, en fermant mes oreilles, si je me
resolvais a attendre, je cesserais peut-etre de
me sentir comme un homme pris...

I HAVE no idea of what translators from English
into Korean do about such rarefied phenomena as
the atemporal tendency of the present participle.

My own Korean translator needs much more
down-to-earth advice. He wants to check on the
meaning of specialised English words such as
thanatophany and off-spin, of unfamiliar English
idioms such as "hug the shadows," of
unrecognisable foreign phrases like dies irae and
stoksielalleen; he wants puzzling references to
Esther Williams, the Isles of the Blest, and the
charge of the Light Brigade to be explained. My
Icelandic translator copes perfectly well with
European languages but needs help with South
African terms like muti, snoek, Kaffraria. My
Hebrew translator asks why the word many is
misspelled "menny" in Disgrace (answer: because
Thomas Hardy, to whom the passage refers, chose to misspell it).

One of the ways in which translators can grow in
competence is by expanding their lexicon. At a
more general level, they also grow in confidence
by confirming that they can identify semantic
nuances in the source and find ways of
representing these, even when the target language proves resistant.

This leads to my final question: Is there a high
road (a highway) to excellence in translation,
and might that high road be provided by a theory
of translation? Would mastery of the theory of
translation make one a better translator? There
is a legitimate branch of aesthetics called the
theory of literature. But I doubt very much that
there is or can be such a thing as a theory of
translation - not one, at any rate - from which
practitioners of translation will have much to learn.

Translation seems to me a craft in a way that
cabinet-making is a craft. There is no
substantial theory of cabinet-making, and no
philosophy of cabinet-making except the ideal of
being a good cabinet-maker, plus a handful of
precepts relating to tools and to types of wood.

For the rest, what there is to be learned must be
learned by observation and practice. The only
book on cabinet-making I can imagine that might
be of use to the practitioner would be a humble handbook.

This essay also appears in the latest edition of
Meanjin (Volume 64.4, Tongues: On Translation),
www.meanjin.unimelb.edu.au and will be included
in a coming book Translation and the Classic
(Oxford University Press). Copyright JM Coetzee.

The master's voice

JOHN Maxwell Coetzee was born in Cape Town in
1940. He was the first novelist to win the Booker
Prize twice, for The Life and Times of Michael K
(1983) and Disgrace (1999) and was awarded the
Nobel Prize in literature in 2003. Since 2002 he
has lived in Adelaide, South Australia, which is the
setting for his latest novel, Slow Man.


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