Milwaukee Journal Sentinel (http://www.jsonline.com/entertainment/arts/Books-charm-not-lost-in-translation-131336579.html)
Review : Book's charm not lost in translation, 7 October 2011
by Jim Higgins of the Journal Sentinel
In his book subtitled "Translation and the Meaning of Everything," David Bellos writes like a person who chooses his words not only carefully but also confidently and pragmatically. Translation is a challenging enterprise, but one he embraces vigorously and without the gloomy pessimism that leads some to declare that it's impossible.
"Because English is currently the dominant interlanguage of the world, English speakers who aren't involved in translation have a harder time than most others in understanding what translation is," writes Bellos, a professor of French and comparative literature at Princeton. His translations from French into English include Georges Perec's novel "Life: A User's Manual."
Taking a familiar phrase head on, Bellos writes:
"Against the dubious adage that poetry is what is lost in translation we have to set the more easily demonstrable fact that, from many points of view, the history of Western poetry is the history of poetry in translation."
His rich, often playful chapters in "Is That a Fish in Your Ear?" often probe a single question or situation in considerable detail. For example, in "Fictions of the Foreign: The Paradox of 'Foreign-Soundingness'," he explores the tricky task of "making Kafka sound German in English" as the best a translator can do to communicate to the reader an experience of reading the original.
Translation, Bellos writes, tends to happen up toward a language of greater prestige than the source, or down toward a vernacular with a smaller audience than the source, or toward one with less cultural, economic or religious prestige. Translations up, Bellos states, "are characteristically highly adaptive, erasing most of the traces of the text's foreign origin . . . ." Translations down "tend to leave a visible residue of the source, because in those circumstances foreignness itself tends to carry prestige." As an example of the latter, he cites a French publisher after World War II who made sure his French translations of American crime novels used plenty of Americanisms, and even adopted American-sounding pseudonyms.
"The complexity and contradictions of language hierarchies are most richly illustrated by the history of Bible translation," Bellos states. His survey of the challenges of Bible translation leads him into many provocative discussions, such as one about cultural substitution in translation. When a 17th-century trader translated the Gospel of Matthew from Dutch into Malay, the fig tree that Jesus spoke of became a pisang, or banana tree because there were no figs on Sumatra. "The receiving language did not get a new word for a new thing. It got a substitute thing, with its existing word." That's not the only way to handle such a situation, and Bellos explores them all.
Bellos also covers such topics as translating international laws, news, translating machines, simultaneous interpreting and the high-wire act of translating humor.
In his mind, translation arises "when some human group has the bright idea that the kids on the next block or the people on the other side of the hill might be worth talking to. Translating is a first step toward civilization."
(End)
