This volume, “brief yet bracing,” to quote the flap, contains the substance of three lectures given in 2008 by Edith Grossman at Yale's Whitney Humanities Center as part of a series entitled “Why X Matters,” the variable being whatever subject area the speaker, as expert, might feel called upon to defend or support.
Grossman is well known for her translations of García Márquez, Vargas Llosa, Fuentes and, most notably, Cervantes. She has won several awards, including, this past January, the first Queen Sofia Spanish Institute Translation Prize. At 74, she would seem to have every reason to feel secure, if not serene.
How odd, then, to encounter, early on, passages in which she sounds anything but -- sounds, rather, as if she were telling us why translators, especially ones named Edith, matter and how they get next to no respect from crass publishers or (oh dear) careless reviewers. The latter are faulted for making mention of translators only to dismiss them with an all too familiar adverb: “ably,” sometimes “seamlessly,” as in “ably (or seamlessly) translated by,” when the criteria for such a judgment are obviously missing, most reviewers not knowing the original language of the book under review. And even if they know it, she says, they tend simply to point out errors and inaccuracies, “a useless enterprise that enlightens no one.”
Why Translation Matters, by Edith Grossman, Yale University Press, 160 pages, $27.95
However peevish these comments may look on the page (spoken aloud, they probably invited sympathetic laughter), they do form a significant part of Grossman's overall argument, which is that literature and translation are “absolutely inseparable” and thus the translator is engaged in the very same activity as her author, is, indeed, a writer herself.
A writer and a critic combined, since no other reader will penetrate the original text as deeply or pay as much attention to its “connotative nimbus.” Translators “translate context.” They “use analogy to recreate significance,” searching for something that is new yet equivalent. This second version of the text, Grossman maintains, is to be considered an original, too.
There is something more to 'a fine piece of writing' than the words that constitute it
As it certainly is for its intended audience. Hence the translator's anxiety about being recognized, an anxiety compounded perhaps by the thought that this original, unlike the first, may eventually be overtaken.
There were, Grossman says, some 20 translations of Don Quixote into English when she began her own. Might there (I think, anxiously), in generations to come, be 20 more yet? The newest is always the most timely and, for that reason alone, the most vulnerable.
Grossman's approach is non-theoretical, as she ranges discursively over the usual concerns raised by (chiefly literary) translation. She describes the enriching effect translations of each other's works have had on American and Latin American writers. She cites Dryden (“he who copies word for word loses all the spirit in the tedious transfusion”), Borges (“Simplify me. Modify me. Make me stark... Make me macho and gaucho and skinny.”), Octavio Paz (“When we learn to speak, we are learning to translate.”). She deplores the enduring influence of the Romantic period on our notions of individuality and uniqueness: Authors themselves, she suggests cannily, could just as well be transmitters as creators. What else, after all, is their overworked muse for?
The final chapter, on translating poetry, is something of an afterthought, more brief than bracing, but no less convincing for that, since it demonstrates the care with which Grossman has attempted to accommodate two entirely different metric traditions, Spanish counting syllables, English counting feet. Not surprisingly, she places particular emphasis on rhythm, which generates “a powerful, frequently subliminal aesthetic pull between the tension of anticipation or expectation and its satisfaction or release,” producing what we commonly refer to as the music of verse. Her translations, printed beside the originals, are admirable.
A couple of years ago, James Wood, a reviewer, it's true, but quoted here with approval, distinguished between two types of translator, originalists and activists: one “honor[s] the original text's quiddities” whereas the other attends to “the transposed musical appeal of the new work.” Any decent translator, he added, “must be a bit of both.”
Grossman, of course, is a very decent translator and could easily assume either type at will. Her preference, though, lies with the activists: There is something more to “a fine piece of writing” than the words that constitute it, she says, something more lurking behind its “mere surface.”
Her role, she believes, is to discover and interpret what that is, to unravel its “esthetic mysteries.” A high calling, some would say, possibly (forgive me) quixotic. On the evidence of this flawed, ultimately disarming little book, however, Grossman appears to be up for the task, as does translation itself.
Bernard Kelly is the editor of the online journal paperplates.
