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The Visible Translator | by Tim Parks | The New York Review of Books 2021-04-01, 12:32 PM
The Visible Translator
Tim Parks
March 31, 2021
The task of rendering a writer’s work in a di!erent language used
to be a vocation largely requiring self-e!acement in favor of the
text. That is changing.
How much should we care about the
identity of a translator? For many
years, scholars of translation studies
have called for translators to be more
visible. Lawrence Venuti’s watershed
book, The Translator’s Invisibility
(1995), argued that the practice of
ignoring the identity of the translator,
to the point of being in denial that a
work was even a translation at all,
was part of an unhelpful hierarchical Bridgeman Images
A miniature by Yahya ibn Mahmud al-Wasiti: A Woman Visiting a Scribe,
mindset that erroneously attributed
Persia, 1237
absolute value to the original,
ignoring the fact that each new
translation was itself a new work of art. Venuti saw the vocation of the translator
as both political and progressive, working in such a way as to take “the target
language on…‘a line of escape’ from the cultural and social hierarchies which
that language supports, using translation to ‘deterritorialize’ it.” This might be
done in alliance with the original text, or in resistance to it. The thesis assumes a
broad agreement that it is good to escape from cultural and social hierarchies
and to “deterritorialize” our language, even if the translators’ hierarchies and
language might be quite di!erent from those which gave rise to the book they are
translating.
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The notion of “resistant” translation was taken up by a number of scholars
proposing feminist readings of literary works. Emily Wilson described her 2017
translation of the Odyssey, the first of the entire poem into English by a woman,
as “shining a clear light on the particular forms of sexism and patriarchy that do
exist in the text.” In a case like this, where rather than, or as well as, o!ering a
critique of a literary text in an introduction or footnotes, the translator
consciously seeks to work in such a way as to point out unattractive aspects, a
reader might feel it was useful to know who the translator was and where she
was coming from.
In a review examining three translations of Aeschylus’s Oresteia, Wilson herself
indicated how important it was for her to know the identity of a translator,
remarking that she was plunged into “gloom when I realized that two of [the
translations] are by elderly white men, both emeritus professors, and the other is
by a younger white man, not an academic.” Wilson concedes that it is “quite easy
for anyone, from any social background or identity, to replicate the same tired
old vision of the same old texts,” and “quite possible, in theory, for elderly white
men to o!er original ideas and fresh perspectives.” However, on looking at the
translations in question, “the similarities between them, especially in the
paratextual material, suggest a partial correlation between the translators’ social
positions and their readings of the Oresteia.”
In short, as Wilson sees it, your background a!ects your translation. The
implications are: first, that it is useful to know the identity of the translator; and
second, that the field of classical retranslation would benefit from having more
women and non-white translators. Wilson gives statistics showing white male
dominance in the field of classical translations; when it comes to the translation
world more generally, dominance is no doubt white but hardly male.
Aside from any politically charged considerations, it has been evident over
recent years that more foreign fiction is now being published and translators are
getting more visibility. The International Booker Prize for the best work of
fiction in translation now awards equal amounts of money (£25,000, or about
$35,000) to the author and to the translator. Prizes specifically for translators
have multiplied. There are prizes for young translators and prizes for women
translators. The unusual case of Elena Ferrante, the pseudonym for the
anonymous Italian author whose hugely successful novels have been “fronted,”
as it were, at promotional events by their English-language translator Ann
Goldstein, has also led to the reading public’s becoming more aware of the figure
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of the translator. Similarly, the controversy surrounding Deborah Smith’s
translation of Han Kang’s prizewinning novel The Vegetarian intensified debate
over the kinds of liberties translators might take when translating. (Interestingly,
Goldstein and Smith take quite opposite approaches to their craft—Goldstein
opting for a strict adherence to the letter and syntax of the original, Smith boldly
declaring that “‘faithfulness’ is an outmoded, misleading and unhelpful concept
when it comes to translation.”) In any event, no literary festival is now complete
without discussions of translation, which are usually well attended.
It is into this exciting, sometimes turbulent scene that news came that two
European translators commissioned to translate the work of the young black
American poet Amanda Gorman (who famously read at President Biden’s
inauguration ceremony) had subsequently either renounced the commission or
had it withdrawn over issues of identity. Though both white, the two translators
could hardly be more di!erent. The Dutch writer and would-be translator
Marieke Lucas Rijneveld, aged twenty-nine, won the International Booker Prize
last year for a first novel, The Discomfort of Evening, which, as the New York Times
reviewer put it, “teems…with all the filth of life.” Identifying as nonbinary and
rejecting masculine and feminine pronouns, preferring to be addressed as
they/them, Rijneveld was a highly visible figure to line up with Gorman’s poems,
albeit one without, as far as I have been able to find, any published translations
to their name. They chose to withdraw from the project following criticism by
the journalist Janice Deul, who suggested that an opportunity had been missed
to choose a “spoken-word artist, young, female and unapologetically Black.”
The other translator in this case, Victor Obiols, is an established Catalan poet,
sixty years of age, whose well-respected translations include works by
Shakespeare, Oscar Wilde, and Walter de la Mare, as well as a range of books on
blues, jazz, and rock, graphic novels, children’s novels, and much else. He was
taken o! the job of translating Gorman because, in his words, the publishers, or
perhaps the author’s agent, “were looking for a di!erent profile, which had to be
a woman, young, activist and preferably black.” And he added:
If I cannot translate a poet because she is a woman, young, black, an American of
the twenty-first century, neither can I translate Homer because I am not a Greek
of the eighth century BC. Or could not have translated Shakespeare because I am
not a sixteenth-century Englishman.
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It is not easy to discuss this thorny question without being drawn into a fiercely
polarized debate. Clearly, translation has a vocation to overcome barriers—as
Paul Auster put it, “Translators are…the often forgotten instruments that make it
possible for di!erent cultures to talk to one another, who have enabled us to
understand that we all, from every part of the world, live in one world.” Barriers
of any kind sit uneasily with such aspirations. And yet…
Let me draw on my own experience to o!er a way of thinking about this. Having
arrived in Italy when I was twenty-five, I began translating a couple of years
later, mainly commercial and technical material of every kind. Often, I felt I was
the wrong person for the job: I struggled with the terminology of dentistry and
stone-quarrying, the elaborate syntax of Italian art critics, the purple prose of
tourist brochures, the protocols of legal contracts. When I broke into literary
translation, it was thanks to an issue of identity. A fellow Italian–English
translator, Isabel Quigley, found herself uncomfortable translating some pages of
Alberto Moravia’s La cosa that she regarded as obscene. Not wishing to be
identified with this material, she dropped out. The publishers needed a
translator in a hurry, I was available, and I had no objection to the novel’s sex
scenes.
Later, though, I would turn down books that I felt demanded styles of writing, in
English, which were simply “not me”; I couldn’t do them. There was a novel by
the gay author Aldo Busi, The Standard Life of a Temporary Pantyhose Salesman,
whose intensely camp, baroque Italian I couldn’t imagine reproducing in English.
And there was a wonderful bildungsroman by Enrico Brizzi, Jack Frusciante Has
Left the Band, that would have required me, now long out of Britain, to produce a
couple of hundred pages of teenage urban slang. In each case, I declined the
assignment not over issues of identity but over questions of style. I enjoyed
reading both Busi’s and Brizzi’s Italian, and they conveyed their worlds very
powerfully to me. That is what literature does. I just felt that I hadn’t the right
instruments in English.
On the other hand, I did translate Giuliana Tedeschi’s There Is a Place on Earth: A
Woman in Birkenau. This harrowing memoir of a year in a Nazi concentration
camp focused very much on the female body, the loss of the menstrual cycle, the
fear of never being able to have children, and much else that was painful to
contemplate. I also translated Fleur Jaeggy’s Sweet Days of Discipline, a first-
person account of a thwarted lesbian love in a girls’ boarding school. At no point
was I concerned that I couldn’t deliver faithful versions of these women’s
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stories: however far out of my range of experience, they were written within a
literary tradition I recognized. It was a question of finding the same tones of
voice, the same cadences, the same lexical range in English, after which the
words, I thought, could be trusted to do the rest. The sample translations I sent
to editors, male and female, were immediately approved and eventual reviews of
the finished work were favorable. Jaeggy’s novel in particular would achieve a
certain celebrity.
However, two events suggested that even back then, in the 1990s, identity issues
in translation were becoming important. When I sent a sample translation of
some pages of Le confessioni di una piccola italiana, an anonymous account of a
young girl’s experience under fascism, to the Women’s Press in England,
suggesting they might want to publish the book, I was told they loved what they
had read, but that, as a man, I wasn’t a suitable translator. Conversely, the writer
Oriana Fallaci specifically asked her publisher to invite me to translate her novel
Inshallah. She urgently wanted, I was told, a “very male author” as its translator.
How had she got this impression of me? What di!erence could it make to her
book that I was a man? As it happened, I had already tried reading Inshallah and
given up, finding the style unpleasantly emphatic. We were not made for each
other.
One other anecdote before drawing some conclusions. For twenty or so years, I
taught a translation class at postgrad level in Milan. From time to time, I would
ask my Italian students to translate, among parts of many other books, the
opening pages of Confessions of a Beauty Addict, a charming, unashamedly
“chick-lit” novel by Nadine Haobsh. It begins with a hilarious account of a hair-
dyeing catastrophe. There is much technical detail. My class always comprised at
least 90 percent women. Yet I remember one occasion when it was a quiet boy
who produced the version that had the whole group rocking with laughter and
shouting “Right!” and “Perfect!” “How did you do it?” one young woman
demanded. “I listened,” he said, “in my head, to my sister, in the bathroom.”
So where does this leave us vis-à-vis the European translators of a young black
woman poet? Listening again to Amanda Gorman’s performance at Biden’s
inauguration, one is struck by the broad public sweep of her work. The words
she uses, at least in this poem, are mainstream, the rhetoric recognizably within
an American tradition. The title, “The Hill We Climb,” is immediately familiar as
an analogy. She wants everyone to understand. At the same time, the poem’s
strong slam rhythms, coming in rising and falling waves, with frequent internal
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rhymes, repetitions, and plays of assonance are strong, e!ective, unmistakable. It
would be an interesting experiment to get a group of, say, Italian translators, all
with some experience of writing or translating poetry, but of di!erent ages,
ethnicities, and genders, and invite them to submit versions that the publisher
could then consider without knowing their authors. I suspect it might be hard to
guess who had done what. The success of each version would depend on the
experience—of life, language, and literature—that each translator could bring to
the work. And, of course, on their resourcefulness and creativity in Italian.
Certainly, one could arrive at a strong version that way.
But I’m not sure that this is what the publishers or literary agents want, or what
they’re concerned about. Translators have sought greater visibility, and now they
must live with what they wished for. The Dutch publishers chose a very visible
figure as translator, but the ensuing controversy suggested this was the wrong
kind of visibility, that it might be important to have someone more clearly
aligned, as it were, with Gorman’s particular background and project. That way,
poet and translator—both young, black, female—could present the work
together and no one would think of the poems as having been hijacked or
appropriated, perhaps, by some “resistant” translator with a more privileged
background. There is a persuasive logic to such thinking, not least at a
promotional level, though you have to wonder to what lengths the approach
might be taken. Would it be necessary to find a nonbinary translator for Marieke
Lucas Rijneveld’s work?
I doubt that any employment category is more willing to welcome a broad ethnic
mix than literary translators. But for my part, I do not believe this kind of writer-
translator identity alignment, with all the limitations it would impose, is a
helpful way either of advancing that cause or of giving us the best translations. If
nothing else, it would profoundly skew the nature of the job. When I translate
another writer’s work, I have no desire to stand in for that author, or be part of
the story; I simply do all I can to reconstruct the writing successfully in English.
And when my own novels are translated, usually by women, it never crosses my
mind to ask about those translators’ backgrounds or wonder if there might be
something irreducibly male about my writing that they cannot deliver. They are
professionals, and I trust them to do their job. That is the writer-translator
relationship that o!ers the best way forward for all.
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Tim Parks
Tim Parks is the author of many novels, translations, and works of nonfiction, most recently
Out of My Head: On the Trail of Consciousness and Italian Life: A Modern Fable of Loyalty and
Betrayal. (March 2021)
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