On Translation
Read the original in Spanish here.
Given how much I love Japanese literature, it would be a good idea to learn the language. But for how much it’d cost me to learn it, it’d be difficult to justify the time and monetary costs, as well as the personal struggle. Why spend seven or eight years struggling with a language so different from mine, if I can learn French or German in only one or two?
Though it irks me to have to read translations of the books I like most, in the end, it doesn’t seem so bad. It could be that I couldn’t read them at all, simply because I can’t understand the language and it also hasn’t been translated. I’m very fortunate in the sense that almost everything that I want to read has been translated into a language I can read, either English or Spanish (and in many cases, both). Of course, there are one or two books that either haven’t been translated, or have been out of print for years now.
And of course, in those cases, I wish I could read the book in the original, either in Japanese or Russian, etc. But there are already tons books I have access to, thanks in large part for being both an English and Spanish speaker. A few years ago I talked with a friend about translated literature, and she told me that in India (her home country), it was not common to find literature translated (much less original literature) into smaller regional languages like Telugu or Urdu. According to her, much of the literature that was written was written in English or Hindi, the linguas francas of the country, and if the demand existed, only then would books be translated into less common languages.
But the demand hardly ever existed, and as a result, my friend from Hyderabad still struggles with the inaccessibility of literature. It’s not to say that there is no literature in these languages, but compared to English, or Spanish, or Japanese, or whatever national language, it’s almost laughable how little literature exists in Telugu or Urdu.
As a result, although, yes, my friend does speak English and Hindi, she still longs for a literature in which she can recognize herself. But can you imagine being a person who could only understand (at the level that literature requires) a regional language like Urdu? Or Telugu? How much literature would be inaccessible! Simply for an inability to sustain a cultural literature in the modern world, and for not having sufficient demand for translated literature.
And, for that reason, it doesn’t bug me much not being able to read languages in the original, and it gives me great pleasure to read them any way at all. But even then, many tell me that literature in translation is subpar, that you can never capture all the nuances of literature in a translation. Even Don Quijote, more than four centuries later, doesn’t like translations either. He says (of course, translated here for the convenience of the reader):
Translating from one language to another, unless it is from Greek and Latin, the queens of all languages, is like looking at Flemish tapestries from the wrong side, for although the figures are visible, they are covered by threads that obscure them, and cannot be seen with the smoothness and color of the right side … —Don Quijote, part 2, chapter 62
Which seems to me like a very sensible position, but even then he fails to understand what a translator does while moving a story from one language to another. It’s not to say that a translator becomes lazy and uses the dictionary for every word and sentence. Rather the translator, at the same time she translates, relates the story, just like the author did. She dedicates herself not to the words, but to the sense and the sentiments that the literature evokes in the original.
Without a doubt, much is lost. There are many nuances of a language that can’t be translated without losing others; but that’s not to say that a translation will always be unsatisfactory. In the end, the goal of literature is not to impress people with your linguistic prowess. The literature is, above all, for moving others. (Who among us did not cry, if only a little, at the end of the Quijote?) And the translation, even though it is not perfect, does move one to emotion, and by translating, opens the text, the story and the author to another world, and makes it possible to move everyone else.
For that reason it fills me with joy to be able to read books in translation. Even though I’ll never be able to appreciate all the subtlety of Japanese literature, at least it can move me (even though I see the tapestry from the wrong side).
