Translated from the Gibberish B. E. Hopkins

In my last post, I argued that translation involves a form of deep reading that can improve your foreign language skills and your writing.

In this post, I discuss a few practical examples as well as how “Translating from the Gibberish” serves as a metaphor for all human experience and expression. (I warned you it would get philosophical, didn’t I?)

Completing the Translation

Once the full literal and figurative meaning of the original is carried over into the target language, there’s still much work to be done. This first draft might capture every nuance of the source text, but it’s almost certainly a stylistic mess. It must be smoothed over to sound, itself, original. (For a translation is no good at all if it still seems borrowed.) The entire text must be recrafted to read as though it was initially written in the target language.*

Again, translating from a foreign language makes us all the more conscious of our own. We learn as much, if not more, about English when using it to re-create a passage in Spanish, Arabic, Swahili, or Mandarin† than we do by writing directly in English. Because if we’re proficient enough in the source language to identify its unique characteristics, this knowledge casts a light on English’s own advantages and shortcomings, strength and weaknesses. Such multilingual awareness, and the perspective it offers, is extremely valuable to the conscientious literary stylist.

* Like the author, the translator is a counterfeiter. Pulling off the details of the forgery is the most challenging part of translation, just as revision is harder than drafting. I struggle through every sentence to make a translation sound true, and yet I usually feel it has too much of a “borrowed” feel to it. But it’s a learning process…

† This presumes the original text is itself well written. Lucas Klein at Paper Republic presents the curious case of a translation that is better than the original.

Translation as a Tool for Writers (Part Deux)

In “A Few Don’ts by an Imagiste,” Ezra Pound points out the benefits to “Rhythm and Rhyme” that translation provides (and what’s true of poetry applies equally to well-crafted prose). He advises the poet to

fill his mind with the finest cadences he can discover, preferably in a foreign language so that the meaning of the words may be less likely to divert his attention from the movement; e.g., Saxon charms, Hebridean Folk Songs, the verse of Dante, and the lyrics of Shakespeare—if he can dissociate the vocabulary from the cadence. Let him dissect the lyrics of Goethe coldly into their component sound values, syllables long and short, stressed and unstressed, into vowels and consonants.

(Sure, Pound was a mentally ill fascist sympathizer, but he still knew a thing or two about poetry.) A little further on in the same essay, he observes that this process of translation works both ways:

Translation is likewise good training, if you find that your original matter “wobbles” when you try to rewrite it. The meaning of the poem to be translated can not “wobble.”

In other words, you can work your own material through a foreign language to determine whether it has the clarity it should in the original.

In a practical sense, translation applies as well to our work within a single language, particularly if we consider that each character in a story speaks his or her own “tongue.”* The author should approach characterization as she would Chinese or Russian… Rather than trying to decipher her scene in the language of her character, she needs to think through his personal idiom. Once the first draft is complete, the real labor begins: the work of editing the “translation” as a conscientious reader of what she’s wrought in her character’s likeness.

All of this further applies to writing exercises such as paraphrase and imitation. Rewriting a passage in your own words or telling your own story in the style of a favorite author involves essentially the same process. Indeed, Saul Bellow suggested that every writer begins with pastiche when he said, “A writer is a reader moved to emulation.”

* Bakhtin shows that the novel is by definition “dialogic”: the author speaks in multiple voices to create realistic characters. “Speaking in tongues,” then, is the most elementary skill of the fiction writer.

Translation (and the World) as a Metaphor

Without consciousness there would, practically speaking, be no world, for the world exists for us only in so far as it is consciously reflected by a psyche.

—Carl Jung

Experience becomes light breaching the event horizon of a black hole, to be annihilated and reconstituted, emerging God knows how or where … As a starburst in another universe perhaps.

—from The Impediments to Joy

“Out there” the world is an undifferentiated mass, an uninterrupted stream of event (no s). Only consciousness is capable of cutting it all up into recognizable, useful pieces and arranging them in meaningful patterns: pictures of “the world.”

Consciousness not only transforms but quite literally makes reality—the world we experience consists in the metaphors we create to stand in for it in our minds. What Jung calls the “world-creating significance of the consciousness manifested in man” is manifested, specifically, in our symbolic representations, whether we’re grunting at each other and pointing into the darkness beyond the campfire, painting scenes from the hunt on a cave wall, singing and dancing in a round, doubting whether we exist while sitting alone in a poêle, composing a symphony, constructing a cathedral, or praying together in a place we collectively deem holy.

Without a lens to focus light, the world is a bright blur… Without consciousness, there is no inherent meaning in the world to be distinguished. Our experience, indeed the world, exists only as a narrative, a metaphor.

Thus, the writer is like a lens. Every word we write, every definition or explanation we offer, every emotion we evoke or irony we expose becomes that one thing, distinct now from all the rest for having been made conscious, for having been thought and reflected upon and shared. Using language, our primary tool for making sense of an otherwise endless series of meaningless details, we translate the meaning of experience from the Gibberish of existence.

Not only is writing a matter of translating an event, an idea, an emotion into images our reader can comprehend and experience as their own—of making that experience meaningful—if we are to write consciously, artfully, then we must do so with the translator’s attention to detail, to nuance, to the multivalent field of associations surrounding each word, with a deep desire to expose the story’s truth, which in turn creates that truth.

This, too, is no simple matter of decoding reality, but of thinking through experience. And just as that first draft of a translation must be revised, so must our initial artistic expression be cut and polished. We must strip it down to its essentials, cut away the meaningless excess to reveal the true form, just as Michelangelo found David in a block of marble. Once we‘ve hewn raw experience from the mass of being-in-the-world, we set it outside ourselves to look at it objectively. From there, we can reshape it with even greater consciousness than before. All the while, the work seems less and less like something we‘ve created and more like a form we have merely cut free.

I use this metaphor several times throughout The Impediments to Joy:

To see himself clearly, one must render foreign again the familiar internal elements that constitute him by projecting them outside himself. He must transform them and read himself in them, like a poem or a prophecy. This is the beginning of art—which has nothing at all to do with paints or pencils, chisels and brushes, instruments or notes. The tools and even the works themselves are irrelevant. What matters most is cultivating consciousness of everything within and without. Why lists and doodles that cover entire notebooks? Why Blue Books and poster boards that create as much as they purport to chronicle? Why journals and poems and stories? Why paintings and novels and song and dance and architecture? Why the entirety of human civilization? Because to close the loop of consciousness we need self-reflection, we must project again and again that show inside us, put what we have internalized back outside ourselves for a time—not only to allow it to be seen but also, and more essentially, to see it for ourselves.

Isn’t this what being human is all about? Isn’t this the human spirit’s highest striving? Whether it be through art or religion or politics, by focusing the world into a stable, meaningful image, we create the world as a metaphor. Not only to express but to expand our consciousness, to be reinvented through our inventions.*

*Invenio in Latin means “to come upon,” “to discover,” “to find.”

(and Some Tools for Translating…)

Les traductions sont comme les femmes. Lorsqu’elles sont belles, elles ne sont pas fidèles, et lorsqu’elles sont fidèles elles ne sont pas belles.
—Edmond Jaloux

Over the past few weeks, I’ve been translating the catalog of an art exhibition organized by the Fondation Zervos at La Goulotte in Vézelay, France. As a result, I’ve also been waxing philosophic about the benefits of translation both as a way to master a foreign language and as a tool for writers.

Here, I’ll begin by sharing a few observations on how translation makes us better foreign language speakers and more attentive critical readers. Then, in a second post, I’ll talk about how translation is a fantastic activity (and metaphor) for writers seeking to improve their work.

Translation as a Tool

First, I want to note that while translation is often used in the classroom, it’s actually a terrible learning method for beginners. When you’re just starting out with a language, the last thing you want to do is treat it as though it were merely a code to decipher into your mother tongue or vice versa. It’s far more effective to try to think through the new language, to rely on context and repetition for understanding, and to confront its idioms and cadences directly. The brilliance of programs like Rosetta Stone, in fact, is that they disallow translation. (The downside of them is that while you might learn, say, basic French, you’re not going to be reading Proust any time soon after completing them.)

Let’s assume you already speak the source language comfortably—meaning you can converse and read a novel with relative ease, even if you don’t sound like a native or write proficiently. (After all, the passive ability to understand a language is far easier to achieve than active mastery of its spoken and written forms.) At this point, once you’ve “gotten into the head” of the language by learning its everyday usage, translation becomes a powerful method for improving your skills and expanding your comprehension of its figurative and conceptual expressiveness—in other words, the way it apprehends the complexity of the world around us.

Understand that translation/interpretation are wholly different skills from understanding/speaking. In fact, there are plenty of polyglots and even bilingual speakers who, despite their deep knowledge of both languages and their ability to switch between them effortlessly, nevertheless find it challenging to translate a text. For translation is, first and foremost, a matter of critically engaging with the original and being able to rewrite it authentically in the target language. Here’s where writing comes in—by way of critical reading.

Translating a text is like solving a complex linguistic puzzle. It requires you to attend to each word the author has written, to examine each conjugation or mood of every verb, to pay attention to the agreement between all parts of speech on a minute level, to investigate the nuance of every bit of vocabulary to ensure that it is aptly expressed in the target language. You must gauge the precise value of each word—not just its meaning, but the sum total of its denotations and connotations, as well as its resonance with a native speaker.

All this demands a talmudically intense study of the limits of each word and how they overlap—never exactly—with those of a foreign “analogue.”* By the time you’re done translating a piece, it’s as if you’ve memorized it. You know each word intimately, and you have delved into every pun, every double sense, every potential ambiguity. And finally, once you’ve identified the parts that cannot be carried over from one language to the other, you often must decide which aspects “lost in translation” you are willing to sacrifice. In short, translating requires you to develop an almost autistic attention to style—both the author’s and your own.

By requiring you to read more deeply than you ever would when passively consuming a text, translation not only opens up new vistas for your understanding of the source language, it also renews your vision (and the “visibility”) of the target language. It is, in short, a way to plumb the depths of your comprehension of a thought and how it is expressed.

Thus, as a way of training your critical reading skills, translation naturally improves your writing.

* Even simple words like pomme and apple are not a pure analogues—for in French, pommes frites means french fries, since a pomme de terre is a potato. The words therefore have different values due to their unrelated associations. There are almost no one-to-one equivalences between languages—just as there are rarely exact synonyms within a single language. Each divides the universe into into slightly different-size pieces (an idea I will talk about at greater length in my next post).

Tools for Translating

Before wrapping up, let’s pause a moment to take a look at four useful translation resources:

Google Translate sounds great… Cut and paste in some text, and Google will spit out an English version for you, right? Well, sometimes… If the text you’re translating is simple enough, the basic sense will be preserved, but the style will surely be lost. And if you plug in something even slightly complicated or poetic, you’ll get back a string of nonsense that sounds like it was written by a first-year ESL student.*

Despite its shortcomings, Google Translate is good for two things. First, it lays down an initial version of a translation that you can then easily rewrite. (Personally, I’d rather feel out the translation as I go through the text, but many translators use Google Translate on longer works to save time.) Second, the best feature of the application is that you you can click on individual words in the translation to get a drop-down list of options to fit the context. These are often useful for puzzling out a tricky construction.

* The system works by exploiting the search engine’s ability to plow through thousands of examples online and come up with a statistically determined translation of the text you’ve entered. Though GT is quite impressive given the complexity of human language, the results are often unusable. The last stanza of Verlaine’s “Chanson d’automne” (Et je m’en vais / Au vent mauvais / Qui m’emporte / Deçà, delà / Pareil à la / Feuille morte”), for example, comes out as “And I’m the ill wind that carries me below, beyond like a dead leaf.” Close, but no cigar…

Google itself can also be a great resource when you use it to cross-reference searches performed under different language settings. Similarly, Wikipedia is a great place to find translations of techical jargon, stock phrases, or obscure terms. For example, one of the pieces I translated involved the terms jardin à la française and fabriques (in the sense of a small building in a French landscape garden). While I understood from context what these were, I was unfamiliar with the English terms for them. Using Wikipedia in French, I was able to find parallel pages in English, which gave me confidence that they should be translated as “Garden à la française” (with the French preserved) and “follies,” respectively. In addition, I learned a lot of background information on the topic, which made translating the piece much easier.

Finally, WordReference.com is my all-time favorite translation tool. Not only is it a great online dictionary of words and phrases in 15 languages, the forums are a boon to translators. Exploring them is a bit like manually processing translation snippets the way Google does. When you have a phrase you just can’t seem to capture, you’ll often find forum posts about its various applications and you can read feedback from native speakers.

Translating as a Tool for Writers

I’ve always defined a “writer” as a person who’s passionate not only about storytelling but about language itself. Even the prose author should be a poet at heart… And so a writer who speaks only one language is, to me, like a painter who’s never enjoyed sculpture, architecture, or dance, much less heard a symphony. Being limited to a single language places an enormous blindspot on your native language skills. (More on this, too, in my second post.)

My advice: If you don’t already speak a foreign language, learn one. Indeed, learn two or three or four—and from different language families. By making you conscious of your mother tongue, foreign languages will transform you into a more conscientious wordsmith.

Continue on to Part Two: Translating from the Gibberish.

Share your reactions and your experiences with foreign languages in a comment!