Over at Bookslut, Adrienne Martini takes issue with translations:
My shunning of works that have been moved out of their original tongue is based on my deep-seated belief that language is a vast and subtle mistress whose will cannot be tamed just because you have a box of shiny baubles to give her. Language and culture are inextricably intertwined. You can’t separate one from the other and you need to have a solid footing in one to fully grok the other.
Which may very well be the case, but, really, what’s the alternative? Either learning to read in the original languages — no small feat, that, even if it was just one — or not reading the books at all? Personally, I would much rather read a book in translation and possibly miss out on some of the nuances that only a native speaker would catch than not read and miss everything.
Martini goes on to write:
The same holds true to a lesser degree for book that are written by other English speakers with whom I do not share a country. Even with writers like Neil Gaiman and Jo Walton, who are incredibly accessible on infinite levels, I still feel that there are tiny bits of information that I’m not picking up on because I didn’t grow up under a Queen’s rule.
Which, I have to say, sounds fairly ridiculous. I don’t know about her, but part of why I read is so that I can encounter those different perspectives, so that I can see a world that’s different from the one I grew up in. If we start excluding books by writers of different nationalities, why not then also exclude writers of different genders, or centuries, races, sexual persuasions, or whatever category we think we can’t relate to? How could I hope to understand anything a black woman in the 1800s might have to say, for instance? What do I know about gay men living in the 1960s? Victorian England? Aboriginal Australia? Turn-of-the-century China? I just wouldn’t get it; why even try?
I agree with Martini that Andreas Eschbach’s The Carpet Makers is not a perfect book, and I will even concede that some of that may be due to translation. Maybe it is a better book in the original German. But I’m still very glad for the opportunity to read it without needing to be a native German speaker.
That does seem rather extreme. A little dose of Derrida might do wonders for that over-reliance on the accuracy of language. No, wait, she’d probably have to read Derrida in translation. Or she could learn French, but surely learning French as a second language would change her understanding of French…
It occurs to me that there are lots of places you can arbitrarily draw that line. Maybe I should stop trying to listen to Simon and Garfunkel because I’m not a skinny new-yorker from the sixties growing up with vietnam.
Exactly. Unless you actually are Derrida, your appreciation of the text is going to be at least slightly different from what the author intended, no matter what you do.
Oh, for crying out loud. Does that mean that she’s not reading anything BUT literature written in American english? Why close yourself off like that?
I’ve been reading a lot of Jose Saramago lately. It would be years – decades, probably – for me to learn Portuguese and be able to understand his work. And even then, I would be reading it to myself in a kind of translation, because I’d be reading in one language, and thinking about it in another.
The idea that you shouldn’t read in translation is well-meaning, but falls so seriously short of its goal.
Books are wonderful because they’re terrible communicators. No matter how good the author, the message will always be subtly different than what they intended, and, indeed, in great authors, this is often the point. Through this vagueness we are able to examine our own opinions and humanity.
Ugh. I hope this person got the kicking they richly deserve.