Parsing some Mysteries of Translation

Although all 4 articles were insightful and thought-provoking, I was particularly taken by "The Mysteries of Translation" by Wendy Lesser and some of the questions she raised. 

Preserving foreignness or granting access to familiarity?

Lesser examines the differences in the translations of Spanish writer, Javier Marías, by Margaret Jull Costa and Esther Allen, and decides that, "If I were pressed, I would say that Allen’s Marías sounds more like a Spaniard, Costa’s more like a native English speaker." 

This issue is one I've been grappling when translating fiction especially, do people read translated texts to be able to peer into the glory of a text's foreignness, viewing it as it were, with their own foreign eyes? Or do they want to step into the skin of a reader, most likely the one originally intended by the author, for whom the story and its setting are familiar and comfortable? And as translators, how are we or who are we to decide which approach to take? I'm torn because what would the point of reading a translated text be if it felt exactly like any other place I've ever inhabited, but if even in reading translations I'm not allowed to be privy to the local experience, could anyone ever show me a world other than my own?

Good, better, best

I was surprised when Lesser unequivocally declares Birnbaum her preference for Birnbaum as a translator of Murakami—in this post-truth age we so often timidly tip-toe around making value judgments, especially in fields as subjective as the arts. She acknowledges the quality of Jay Rubin and Philip Gabriel's translations as well, but she describes her admiration of Birnbaum as a "simmering passion" and says definitively that Birnbaum's version of Norwegian Wood was "better, in exactly the way his opening sentences of The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle were better". 

And indeed the differences between Birnbaum's translation of "The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle" and Jay Rubin's was striking—completely different in texture and the tone they evoke. This drew out for me the appropriateness Lesser’s perceiving of translated work as a collaboration between the author and the translator: in translation, “The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle” can no longer purely be the voice of Murakami but Murakami-Rubin or Murakami-Birnbaum. But it also made me wonder if it would ever be possible to see the original through so thick a veil as a translator's interpretation and if something would forever elude me if I could not dedicate my every waking hour to learning to complete fluency every language in the world. 

The best of both worlds

But I think I needn't despair just yet. Lane said in one of our classes the other day that many of us have this strange inclination that something can be translated once and for all (please correct me if I misquote) when really every new translation smooths out an edge of an infinitely-surfaced whole. This is why there can be so many versions of the Bible in English, for example, and why though many have a preferred version whether for its sound or its literalness, for the most part (huge caveat here) no one disputes their necessity. This is why like William Keats, discovering Chapman’s Homer, we can experience old texts anew when traversing them with new translations as our guides and that in itself seems like quite the literary adventure. 

- Cheryl