Lynne Sharon Schwartz - Crossing borders : stories and essays about translation.

I first got the notion of translating when I was learning Italian by reading Natalia Ginzburg, one of Italys greatest writers of the twentieth century: novelist, essayist, biographer, chronicler of the war years and the stunned, chaotic melancholy of the postwar period. Her essays were marvels of emotional and psychological penetration, written in deceptively simple language, simple enough for a beginner. Although Ginzburg wrote of a kind of suffering I could only imagineher internal exile during the war, the Fascists murder of her husbandI felt an immediate affinity with her idiom. The shape and structure of the sentences felt familiar, almost as if I could have written them myselfthey followed so closely the patterns and syntax my own mind generated. Except I hadnt lived the life and I didnt know the language. Still, I wanted to get close to those sentences, get inside them.

The best way to do this was to translate them, which I did. A labor of love, narcissistic, like communing with myself in a new tongue.

From there I became interested in the process itself. Transferring words, thoughts, sounds from one language to another. A kind of alchemy, and as usual with alchemical experiments, it takes a near miracle to make it yield anything precious. But this near miracle occurs more often than one might expect. Translation has been going on for millennia. There have always been intrepid and willing translators like those who brought Homer and the Trojan War to Western Europe, or the Italian novellas of the Renaissance to Britain, for which Shakespeare was clearly grateful. Not to mention the translators of the King James version of the Bible. The examples are countless, and in recent times have come from every continent and every era. They are the cultural foundation that has shaped us, that we take for granted. The ways we conduct private and public affairs would be quite different without them.

All the while there have been ready detractors. Their disparagements are well known: Chana Bloch refers to several in her essay, Crossing the Border (which suggested the title for this collection). My favorite is by Cervantes, that translation is the other side of the tapestry. Not a bad definition, come to think of it; its provocative and yields a striking visual image, curious in itself, if not something wed want to hang on the wall. And of course theres the often-cited Italian equation: traduttore = traditore, translator means traitor, which has endured not because its true but because its clever.

What I strove to be while translating Ginzburg was the opposite of a traitor. An accomplice. I wanted to work alongside her toward the same endbringing her vision to readers, resounding in my native tongue rather than hers. To manage this I needed to find the places where her sensibility and my own connected, like wires that produce sparks. These points of connection would have nothing to do with biographical similarities; they were not anything that could be named. I imagined her inside my head and gave her my excellent facility with English. At the same time I tried to inhabit her, to feel what it was she felt compelled to find words for, her Italian words. An odd form of intimacy. A neat, if impossible, acrobatic feat. Later I realized I was following along the lines of the seventeenth-century British poet John Drydens definition of translation. When he was translating Virgil, he said, he wanted Virgil to speak as if he were living in the seventeenth century and writing in English.

Translation theorists have taken issue with this definition indeed with every rival definitionon a number of grounds. As the number of translated works has grown, so the theoretical baggage has grown along with them, dragged behind on wheels, as it were. Translation theory is rife with novelty, argument, enthusiasm, and controversyall of which shows that translation itself is alive and well. Some of the controversies are oppositional and unsolvable, like nature versus nurture. Should translations be faithful (to the letter?) or free (to the point of paraphrase?). Even broader is the question of whether translation is possible at all. Can one language ever render all the verbal, intellectual, aural subtleties and connotations of another? The great German critic Walter Benjamin, in his famous, inspiring, and occasionally impenetrable essay, The Task of the Translator, comes down on the side of the possibles. Translation, he writes, expresses the central reciprocal relationship between languages. Since all languages are interrelated in what they hope to express, Benjamin posits a pure language, an abstraction of all of the worlds languages, from which each translation draws and in which each partakes. It is the task of the translator to release in his own language that pure language which is under the spell of another, to liberate the language imprisoned in a work in his re-creation of that work. I especially like the notion of our English being imprisoned in, say, Sophocless Greek, and needing the translators strong hands to release it.

The contemporary critic George Steiner takes a similarly positive view of translations efficacy: the central theme of his great book After Babel is, Inside or between languages, human communication equals translation. In the simplest terms, finding words for an inchoate idea or feeling is a form of translation; giving it shape and voice is another stage of the process; and having it heard and comprehended completes the translation cycle. And that is only the beginning of communication. (Speaking of communication, it is a pity that the United States lags far behind other developed countries in translating major works from all over the world. Visit a bookstore in other urban centers and youll find dozens of translated books, many that of them important American works. Publishers and bookstores here dont reciprocate.)