In conversation

Should the translator attempt to "improve" on the original?
A conversation between Nicholas de Lange and Ros Schwartz

Nicholas and Ros will explore the notion of 'improving', which is closely bound up with how the translator sees his/her role in the first place - humble servant or active participant? How far can the translator go while remaining faithful to the spirit, if not to to the letter of the original? The conversation will be based on a taped discussion, illustrated with examples from their work.

Umberto Eco has said that William Weaver’s English translations of his works are better than the original Italian. The same has been said of Nicholas de Lange’s translations of Amos Oz. Rather than being pleased at the compliment, Nicholas’s response was that the implication is

that he hasn’t done his job as translator properly. He believes that the translator should not attempt to 'edit' the author, but should remain scrupulously faithful to the original – wartsand all. In addition to Amos Oz, he has translated Aharon Appelfeld and A.B. Yehoshua, Hebrew writers who are, or will be part of the canon. Nicholas stresses the importance of not smoothing over the bumps which publishers are all too keen to do in the interests of commercial viability.A cautionary tale is the work of Dostoievsky – new translations are now appearing in English and French that show how his earlier translators 'improved' his somewhat frenetic prose style to make him sound a good deal more 'literary'.

Ros Schwartz translates contemporary fiction and nonfiction from French. Her authors include leading writers such as Andrée Chedid, Sébastien Japrisot and the Belgian novelist Jacqueline Harpman, as well as mass market writers like Régine Deforges and Catherine Clément. She feels that her authors are often let down by their editors who fail to pick up factual errors, contradictions or stylistic problems, such as mixed metaphors piled on top of each other. Ros feels that to do her job conscientiously she needs to alert the publisher to such problems and suggest solutions(ideally referring back to the author if s/he is living). She is aware (perhaps too much so?) that if there are any difficulties with the book it is likely

that they will be blamed on poor translation – a consideration that is more applicable with a language like French which every literary critic claims to know. Nicholas and Ros will explore the notion of "improving", which is closely bound up with how the translator sees his/her role in the first place – humble servant or active participant? How far can the translator go while remaining faithful to the spirit, if not to the letter of the

original? The conversation will be based on a taped discussion, illustrated with examples from their work.

NdL: I translate contemporary Hebrew fiction. First of all, it’s

important to say that the authors I translate are living, and are

accessible if I have problems. In fact I tend to work very closely

with them. I’ve actually spent a lot of time with them. The

principal author I’ve translated is Amos Oz, and I would say that

the whole of our working lives has been fairly interactive. I

started working with him when he’d just published his second

novel, and a collection of short stories. I translated the two novels

and after that I translated the novels almost as soon as they came

out in Israel. Generally we started work before they were

published in Hebrew, when they were still very fresh in his mind.

We spent a great deal of time working together, so that’s quite

important. And Hebrew is a very old language with many layers,

much older than English, with a lot of allusiveness within itself,

but also it’s a language which is a bit exotic, it’s not the same

family of languages as English, which raises linguistic questions.

On the other hand Israel is a country which does belong within

the same sort of family as the English speaking countries. And so

a great deal of the thinking and the daily life is really quite

familiar. There isn’t the problem of explaining and a lot of things

as you might have if you were translating a completely alien

language.

RS: I translate from French. Mainly living authors, and a lot of

authors who are either not so well known, or first-time novelists,

including Algerian writers. And one of the things I’ve come up

against is a feeling that sometimes these writers haven’t had the

benefit of working closely with an editor in France, and there are

sometimes rough edges that could have been eliminated in the

original. I find that sometimes these rough edges are magnified in

the translation process.

I haven’t worked closely with one author over a long period, most

of the books I’ve done have been one-offs. Sometimes I’ve found

authors very reluctant to work with a translator – it’s a sort of

pride thing, as though they feel that you’ve seen them without

their clothes on in a way, and they feel rather vulnerable. That is

certainly true of one of my authors. They haven’t always been

helpful when I have gone back to them with queries, because they

see it as implicit criticism. One author I’ve translated is an

Algerian writer in hiding, so contact is impossible.

RS: We’re confining this discussion to fiction, because non-fiction

faces a whole different set of problems.

NdL: We’re also not talking about poetry, which raises other questions

Still. But in my view, the translation of fiction can be much closer

to the translation of poetry than to the translation of non-fiction,

because if you’re translating non-fiction, whether it’s instructions

for a medicine or a technical manual, you’ve got a responsibility

to the reader and the thing has got to work in a practical way. And

that’s quite a heavy responsibility, and translators have to work

on that accuracy in a particular way. When you’re translating

poetry, you have the same kind of problem as you have with

fiction, which is to create a mood, to transmit an emotion, to

make people feel in a particular way, rather than act in a

particular way. So I believe very strongly that the nature of prose

transcends the words on the page. It’s quite an obvious thing to

say but it’s very important to us when we work as translators,

because we’re aware that our job is not as people sometimes

imagine, to produce dictionary definitions of words and put them

down in the right order, and I’m afraid that when translation is

discussed nowadays, there’s very often the model in people’s

minds of the machine. In fact there are translation machines

which are being developed and are getting better all the time, that

can translate simple texts. I think they started in the Canadian

meteorological service, where you have a limited sort of

vocabulary and a limited sort of message you need to put across,

and two languages which are fairly closely related, and you can

simply translate the weather forecast from French into English or

vice versa in a very mechanical way. That is not what we are

doing. We’re not trying to create that sort of message. We’re

trying to create a mood, and that’s totally difficult. And I think

that a lot of the problems that we have in discussing what we’re

trying to do, arises from this area which is very hard to talk about,

because it is so personal. It’s like authors. I don’t think authors sit

around discussing how they make people laugh, either they can

do it or they can’t do it. I don’t think you could do a course in

how to write humorous prose. Some authors are funny and others

aren’t, and it would be very difficult to train people to be funny.

And it’s the same with translators, I think the translator has to do

that, has to learn to make the reader laugh or cry, and feel a whole

range of emotions, and that’s something that prose has in

common with poetry. Although we’re really not talking about

poetry here, it’s very, very important. So that when we’re

adjusting the text, which we do sometimes, we don’t write exactly

what’s on the page in front of us, sometimes it’s with that in

mind, I think, rather than because we think that the author didn’t

understand enough about what they’re writing about, or didn’t use

the right words, or that their sentences were too short or

something like that. I think that the real objective at the back of

our minds is, this isn’t beautiful enough, or this is too romantic,

and it ought to be a bit tougher, or it’s too harsh and ought to be a

little bit smoother, is that right, is that the sort of thing you have

in mind?

RS: Yes. I think it’s interesting to make that connection between prose

and poetry. Because I see the translation of poetry as the sort of

distillation of the translator’s art, doing exactly what one does in

prose, but within a much tighter framework. I think it is useful to

make that connection, because some people separate the two. And

I think that having a vision of what you’re doing is important,

you’re not just translating the words on the page.

Let’s talk about the process, what do you actually do when you’re

faced with a novel, how do you actually do it? I call the

translation process ‘finding a voice’ – there’s a point in the

translation where I suddenly feel very confident and I know what

the mood should be, I know what the characters should say and I

know what the register of language should be. It can take quite a

while to reach that point sometimes. I usually flounder for a good

half of the book. And then something clicks, it all comes together,

and I know what I should be doing.

This is the way I work: first of all I read the book and try to

absorb it, and get an overall sense of what kind of language I’m

going to be dealing with, what kind of problems, what kind of

things I’m going to need to think about. These concerns sit there,

at the back of my mind. I mull them over constantly, when I swim

my forty lengths at the pool, or when I’m cooking dinner. And

then I dive in, and start the first draft. I need to get my first draft

out of the way as quickly as I can, I tend to work fast, I don’t

worry about the problems. I don’t make decisions choices at this

point. When I hit a tricky patch I sometimes put in the French and

then put three, four, five alternatives, or a note to remind myself

that I’ve got to do some further research. But I crash through, I set

myself a daily number of pages, and I need that structure, I need

to do my five pages, my ten pages, whatever it is. When I’ve done

my first draft, I print out the translation, and I revise it, and at that

point I still have the French close to me, and I double check

everything and make sure that the text is all there, and that it

actually says what the French says. And any things that are

unresolved I go back to the French and try to see if there are clues

that I’ve missed, and very often I find them. I amend the file, and

I print it out again. And then I read the translation through as a

piece of English, knowing that I’ve got it all there, it’s faithful in

terms of saying as closely as possible what the French says, but

this is the point that I call ‘finding a voice’ – it has to stand on its

own as a piece of English, it has to work, the mood has to be

right, and I make quite radical, bold changes at this stage, because

by now I’m much more confident with it, it feels like mine. At

that point. Then I print it out again and probably give it another

read through, to make sure it’s coherent. At proof stage I very

often make some minor changes as well, there are too many

words here or something a bit awkward there. Not a lot, but I do

pick things up, seeing my translation in printed form. My overall

approach is governed by the view that as a translator you are a

reader, and you can only convey your reading of that book, there

is no one, right, objective translation, you’re a reader, you’re

different from any other reader, and what you’re giving the world

is your reading of that author. And I think that’s something that

one has to come to terms with. Your choices are going to be

subjective, your vocabulary is a personal vocabulary, you dredge

it up from all sorts of hidden parts of yourself. It is different from

anybody else’s vocabulary. And you do the best job you can, you

try to be as sensitive as possible to the author’s idiom, choices,

moods, etc., but at the end of the day it’s, it’s one reading of the

book. And it’s not necessarily the only one, or the best one, it’s

your reading, and as a translator I don’t think you can present

anything else.

NdL: I work in a very similar way. I was fascinated because I’d never

thought about it in quite that way, I’d never analysed the stages

by which I work. When I began to translate, I was very fortunate,

I didn’t go to a translation school, my school was working with an

author, in this case Amos Oz, who was a young author already

beginning a successful career, and without any much knowledge

of English. He’d just finished writing a story, and we

experimented to see if we could work together, in the following

way. He read the story to me aloud, and I simply listened to it, I

didn’t take notes, and at that time I didn’t have any expertise at all

in modern Hebrew. And a lot of what he was saying I didn’t

understand, but I listened particularly to the sound of the words,

the music. Then I went away with the text, looked up the words I

didn’t know, consulted some friends, and produced a draft. I then

read back to him and he again didn’t understand everything, it

was a story set in the Middle Ages so there was a lot of technical

vocabulary and the style was borrowed from the Hebrew

Chronicles. In his case, the Hebrew Chronicles in my case

Mediaeval Latin and English … late Mediaeval Chronicles and

other things like Mallory. We talked a little bit about what sort of

literary references there were. But basically we both I think

instinctively listening very attentively to the music. So a great

deal happened off the written page, it was entirely in the voice.

And I believe, although we didn’t plan it that way, that that first

experience was very, very influential on me. I think I always now,

although neither of us has the time to work in that way, that was a

long short story, it was a very important step in both of our lives,

so we spent a lot of time on it. Now we can’t afford to spend all

that much time. But I think that the lesson is still there for me, I

still listen very carefully to the sound and if I can, I try to read

things aloud to family, friends, or even just to myself, because the

sound of the words is so important. And if they are, if it is

important to the author, of course, there are other authors who

seem to be completely insensitive to sound. But in this particular

case that was important. And in the case of my last translation,

which was a book called A Journey to the End of the Millennium,

by {???}, which was also set in the Middle Ages, the sound is

incredibly important. This early lesson was very valuable to me.

But the basic stages that you described were exactly the same. I

don’t know whether all translators work in that way, first you

produce a draft which is close to the original language, and at the

end you have to produce a text which is emancipated from the

original language, but what readers notice, when they say: ‘Oh, I

don’t think that was very well translated’. I think what they

notice is when the text hasn’t become emancipated from the

original language. That doesn’t mean that the translator can’t

sometimes deliberately keep a slightly exotic flavour of some of

the cadences of a foreign language, that might be important for a

particular purpose. But that’s part of the tricks – the tools – of

producing a translation which is actually free from the original,

because you have to do it consciously or deliberately. I read a

translation the other day and it shocked me rather, because it had

been published by a reputable publisher, and it was a very, very

successful book, it’s a best seller, and yet in places it seemed to

me to be too close to the German, in terms of word order and

choice of words, and I thought this person has been working

under pressure, perhaps there was a deadline that hadn’t been

properly negotiated, because it is important to have the right

deadline, or it’s just too rushed. And so that stage when you leave

the original aside and move onto your own language, and just

forget about the sound of the other language, that’s vitally

important. But as you rightly say, you can’t afford to sever the

link between the meaning of the words and the text as a whole. I

work in sentences rather than words. If someone says to me look

how you’ve translated that word, I always say well I didn’t

translate that word, a word only has meaning in a context, there

are plenty of words that could mean almost anything, depending

on how they’re used in a sentence, and the sentence is in a

paragraph and the paragraph in a chapter and chapter in a book,

so nothing is quite on its own. I’m not translating words, but what

you say has got to be the same as what the original said. Even if

it’s not expressed in exactly the same words in the same order.

It’s got to be the same, that means the story’s got to be the same

story, the mood has got to be the same sort of mood, which basic

human issues have to be the same in the two cases. Now it may be

that somebody, I don’t know, a woman in Algeria has moments in

her life which are completely untranslatable into the experience of

a woman reader or a male reader in England or America. There

may just be a complete gap of experience. And you have to get

over that, and I think that’s one of the hardest things, where you

have to, because you can’t, I hate footnotes, I don’t use footnotes

unless they’re in the original. Everything for me is in the text, and

if the text talks about something that is unfamiliar to my kind of

ideal reader, that I have in mind, then I slip in an explanation. I

remember talking about this very early on with Amos Oz, because

you have personalities for example, you refer to Hayyim Nahman

Bialik, the great poet of the Hebrew national revival. And every

school child in Israel knows who Bialik was, it’s like

Wordsworth. Where no English reader knows who Bialik is, so

we need something in the text which will help the reader, and

Amos said: ‘Why don’t you write our great national poet Bialik

says…?’ and I thought that looked quite good actually. It was

somebody quoting him and it was the slightly pompous remark

that that character might make, and it fitted in well, and it helped

the reader over that difficulty. So that after that they knew who

Bialik was, and it made sense. That’s just an example. But I think

you can do it in all sorts of ways, and I think a word here or there

can be quite useful.

RS: I also read the text aloud, especially when there are problem areas

– it’s difficult to read a whole novel aloud. But I always read the

first chapter to somebody else, and hearing myself read it, I

usually discover whether it works or not. Music, voice… we’re

using a lot of ‘audio’ terms, and I think, as regards the translator’s

role, what you’re talking about really is being faithful to the spirit

rather than the letter. You don’t translate every single word by its

dictionary definition, but you’re conveying what you perceive is

the author’s intention. I’ll give you an example of something that

one often comes up against in French, where you have the ‘vous’

and the ‘tu’, which both carry an enormous weight in defining

relationships and signalling shifts in those relationships. If

somebody is using the vous form and they suddenly slip into the

tu, for a French person that can mean an intimacy that might or

might not be welcome, it can denote contempt, you can’t just

translate it as ‘you’. Especially when it’s a turning point in a

relationship. So like your example, one has to flag that.

NdL: What do you do with ‘you’?

RS: In one instance, Orlanda, by Jacqueline Harpman, there was a

situation between a young man and an older woman and they

always used ‘vous’. Suddenly the young man switches to ‘tu’, and

the woman is extremely miffed at this familiarity. To convey that

in English, I had him lean forward and put his hand on her knee.

Because it is a parallel in terms of signalling unwelcome

familiarity. For the English, who tend to shrink from physical

contact, if you’re trying to keep a certain distance from

somebody, and they suddenly put their hand on your knee, it’s an

intrusion that is similar to the intrusion of someone suddenly

saying tu in French. Now somebody picking up the book at

random and looking at that particular passage, would wonder

what on earth the translator was doing here, it doesn’t say he put

his hand on her knee in the French. But I feel that it was

completely justified in terms of indicating a particular shift in a

relationship.

NdL:Yes, because we’re talking about faithfulness. And I think that we

agree that faithfulness isn’t just faithfulness to the words, you use

the word faithful when describing the point where you read your

text as an English text, you say you have to check that it’s faithful

to what’s in the French, and somebody hearing you might have

misunderstood and just checking that all the words were there.

And here of course it’s nothing to do with the words, it’s a

gesture, you translated a word into a gesture, which might seem

quite bold and almost a betrayal, but in fact that is real fidelity,

real fidelity is where you’re faithful to the author’s intention,

and you’re bold enough not to be faithful to the words on the

page.

NdL: You couldn’t have had a footnote saying at this point he switches

from the less familiar to the more familiar term.

RS: No, you can’t have footnotes in novels. But I do sometimes

compile a glossary. For example, in a novel I translated by an

Algerian writer, the author used a lot of Arabic words, in the

French. Some of these words would be reasonably familiar to a

French reader because of the relationship between France and

Algeria, but they are wholly unfamiliar to an English reader. And

the author had chosen to use these words – quite everyday words

meaning the Mayor, the President, a river – where she could very

easily have used French, but she chose to use the Arabic words.

This gave the book a certain flavour in French, one felt very much

there in Algeria, and it bothered me, just translating those into

English, but knowing that the English reader was unlikely to

know what a oued was, for example, I decided to keep the words

in Arabic (in transliteration), but to have a glossary. I think it’s

perfectly justifiable. I had a bit of a battle with the editor over

this, because it’s quite a difficult book anyway, and they wanted

to make it just a little bit more accessible, but I stood my ground,

and said this is important, the author’s decided to do this, I’m

going to do the same, and there’s a glossary, so there’s no reason

why the English reader should have a problem.

NdL: Do you think that these are expressions that any French reader

would understand, I don’t mean would they use them, but would

they understand what they meant?

RS: I checked them out with French native speakers, and although

some words they didn’t understand, they were fairly easy to grasp

in the context. I don’t think the reader really stumbled. Most of

them I think were familiar to a French person, one or two were

more obscure.

NdL: Anyway, nowadays a lot of dictionaries contain many of these

words, not all, but many of them. Lots of words that if you take

the trouble to look them up, are there. I think that the editors – we

must talk about editors, because they’re a bit of a nuisance

–sometimes assume a reader who isn’t prepared to go to the

dictionary, I had this problem recently when I used a word in this

Mediaeval translation which was the word ‘palmer’, which means

someone who’s been on a pilgrimage to the Holy Land. And the

editor crossed out ‘palmer’ and put ‘crusader’. And I explained

that it wasn’t, that palmer was a pilgrim, somebody, an ordinary

person who went for religious reasons, but not aggressively, but

to accomplish a religious duty. And to be spiritually fulfilled.

Whereas a crusader although it may have a religious aim, and

they may want to be spiritually fulfilled, they do it, we think of

them as being violent. That was completely the wrong image.

Apart from the fact that this book was set before the crusades

began. So it was historically unfaithful. And I found that very

difficult to put across, and they said that nobody knows the word

palmer, and I insisted that if you don’t know a word you can look

it up in the dictionary, and the word palmer is in any dictionary. I

think that vocabulary influences the way you read a book, even if

you don’t understand the words, there are words that I don’t

understand, I know that I’m not very clear about what patchouli

or frangipani are really like. But you see those words on a page

and it gives a flavour, I’m not sure what colour puce is quite

honestly, but I see the word puce and it gives me a certain feeling.

And it doesn’t really matter that I don’t understand what it means.

I think it’s helpful to know what these things are. But I do

think also that editors are much too fussy about their reader

having to know immediately what everything is about.

NdL: I wanted to ask you about editors. Because you said when you

were talking about one of your authors, this author perhaps hadn’t

had much experience of an editor. In the original language. And

you obviously feel that the editor has an important role to play,

because if that author had had a good editor, they might not have

ended up publishing what they did on the page. So the role of the

editor is important, the editor is an important intermediary

between the author and the text and the reader, and that is the

same as a translator, isn’t it? Do we regard editors as villains or as

saints?

RS: I think a good editor … is a saint, they are very few and far

between. I think that everything that I’ve learned as a translator is

from having worked with good editors, at one stage or another.

Actually an editor who only intervenes when it’s important, who

just doesn’t just change things because they think they can find a

better word, but who point out bumpy bits, who ask questions,

who point out inconsistencies, and who is really with you, is

invaluable. But it’s something that’s becoming rarer and rarer,

partly because of pressure of time. I think a lot of things just don’t

get read properly at the publishing house. I’ve been quite

astonished when proofs have come back to me, and I’ve found

mistakes, that really should not have got past an editor. The

villains are the ones who make arbitrary changes.

NdL: And who don’t even consult you.

RS: Let me give you a concrete example of something that I think

would have benefited from better editing in the original. In this

same Algerian novel there is the opening paragraph of one

chapter, one short paragraph, where there are seven metaphors

piled one on top of the other. My feeling was that this didn’t work

very well in French, and in English it was just hopeless. This

author has a tendency to convey a very concrete effect with a

highly abstract image, which sometimes pushes prose into the

realm of poetry. Seven such images in seven sentences, one on

top of the other, to describe evening falling, sounds wonderful if

you read it aloud in French – the music, the poetry – but when

you start asking what on earth it means, it all falls apart. I asked a

French writer whether she felt it worked in French, and that I was

having an uptight ‘Anglo-Saxon’ response. And she felt the

French didn’t really work, that there were too many mixed

metaphors. And that’s the sort of thing where I think it would

have been useful to have an editor go back to the author and

saying: do you want to have another look at this, do you think you

might have just overdone the imagery here? I didn’t feel it would

work if I just translated it into English as it was.

NdL: You’ve plunged into the heart of the real philosophical issue,

when you translate, are you translating a kind of ideal text, which

doesn’t exist on the page. But what you’re saying at that point is,

I looked at the words on the page, and they were not the words

that I wanted to put on my nice clean page and to hand to my

English reader. I didn’t want my English reader to have to

struggle with these clumsy sentences. And so I decided that I

would treat them to something better.

That’s the nub of the question, isn’t it? You’ve given a very

concrete example. You have said, let me see if I can unpack some

of this. A part of it is a bit mechanical, you say that the French

editor would have warned the author that they were doing

something that didn’t work in French, so that’s the first thing.

And you consulted a French reader who felt it didn’t work. That

was one person’s judgement. You did not want someone picking

up your book in English and saying this is utter rubbish. You

want your reader to say: this is absolutely wonderful.

NdL: Now we’re at the heart of the process. And I think it’s quite

complex. It’s to do with your self respect, your conception of

your responsibility to your reader, and the integrity of the

original, because you have said to me, that just now, that editors

sometimes don’t understand what they’re reading. I presume it’s

true that readers, including translators, also sometimes don’t

understand, I’m not criticising your reading of that particular

passage, that’s not the issue. But it’s possible sometimes that we

as the translators reading a text don’t realise why the sentences

are so long, or why a particular vocabulary is being used, or why

the events are being presented in what looks like the wrong order

or something. There may be a reason which we don’t grasp and

we look at them and we say, if I was doing it I wouldn’t do it like

that. I would do it in a more concrete way, I would use shorter

words, shorter sentences, I’d do it differently, I think that’s the

wrong word in that context. So we’re putting ourselves in the

position of the editor. And that’s the issue we want to talk about,

isn’t it. And what’s happening when we do that, and is it

legitimate, and is it serving a beneficial purpose, and who it

benefits. Is it for the benefit of the reader, the benefit of the

translator or the benefit of the author? Now, I think that all at

some point are important to us. I translate established authors.

And I’ve never yet translated – well apart from my very early

word because Amos Oz was already quite well known as a young

author in his own country – I’ve never translated really a

beginning author, someone who didn’t have a certain recognition.

And I think you do. At any rate, we translate people who aren’t

necessarily very well known in English. So we want them to look

good, we want people to say oh, I like that, I’d like to try another

book by that author. So we have our own reputation as translators

to think about. Is there a part of us that wants readers to go to a

library and say I’d like some another book translated by Ros

Schwartz, because I liked the last one. I don’t think we imagine

that readers are as well informed as that, although they ought to

be.

RS: It happens in Russia.

NdL: Emlyn Williams was talking on the radio many years ago,

describing a childhood in Wales and beginning to read, and how

somebody gave him a book which he liked, and not knowing very

much about books and publishing, he went to a bookshop and

said have you got another book published by Faber & Faber. And

innocently, suddenly a whole world of wonderful poetry was

opened to him, simply because he’d asked for another book by the

publisher rather than the poet. We would like people to think

about us as translators at the same time as, we don’t want to be

too obtrusive. Not be unobtrusive but we want to be recognised as

really skilful and wonderful translators. So that’s our

responsibility to ourselves, and then we have a responsibility to

the reader, because we want the reader to have a good time with

this book. And so we say, if this is too clumsy, they’re going to

have a bumpy ride, as you put it. We want them to have a smooth

ride. And I’m afraid that very often the, the editors in English and

also very often the reviewers, think more about the bumpy ride

than about anything else. And how often have we read a review

written by someone who doesn’t know the original language, and

who’s never seen the original book, and who says, the translation

reads very smoothly, I’m always very suspicious when I see that,

because I suspect that translators often succumb to this conscious

or unconscious urge to make something smoother. And the

editors certainly do. I think you’ve implied that. The editors want

to smooth things out, they don’t like books to be difficult.

RS: Dumbing down is the word.

NdL: Dumb down is one thing, because that’s maybe at an intellectual

level. They may be removing allusions and things like that. But

also they don’t want the thing to seem strange. Now if it’s an

English author, I don’t know if anything happens with the

publisher, I’ve never really experienced that, but I think we do

accept that authors sometimes have rather unusual ways of saying

things. They don’t use the expression that we would expect them

to use, sometimes the prose is a bit jerky, whether it’s dialogue or

description, we tolerate that. When it’s a translation, I think

there’s much less tolerance, and people think it ought to be much

smoother, it ought to say what you’d expect it to say, and that’s a

danger. That’s where unfaithfulness can creep in, perhaps through

good intentions, busybody interference, but I think it’s completely

unjustified, and that’s one of the worst sorts of example of where

I think the interference is not legitimate. Very little of the

literature published in this country is translated. We have the

lowest level of translated literature of any European country. It’s

a matter of two or three percent, whereas in some countries, its

twenty or thirty, or even forty.

And when you get to the Scandinavian countries, most of what

they read probably is translated. In the UK we have a sort of

guarded attitude towards translation, and so there’s this desire to

make sure that it doesn’t sort of offend people or make them have

a bad trip, because they won’t want to do it again. You know. So

we’re all on our guard, and that is so dangerous. So to come back

again, to your example, where there are too many metaphors,

clumsy metaphors perhaps…?

RS: No they’re not clumsy metaphors, they are rather difficult,

abstract and obscure. One of them on its own is quite challenging.

NdL: Let’s think about the issues that are involved. You said that the

music was probably quite good.

RS: Yes, I think you made an interesting comment about the translator

being pulled in different ways in terms of responsibility to the

author, to the reader, to one’s self respect. And I think that’s

something I’m very aware of. And particularly translating a

language like French. Everybody thinks they know French, so the

critics are going to jump on you. Not many people know Hebrew,

so they don’t feel qualified to criticise.

NdL: But they do, they say the translation reads very well…

RS: What the critics say is another issue.

I suppose I am aware that I need to be on my guard against being

more worried about Ros Schwartz and what people might say. I

do however feel a responsibility for the English text, and I know

that critics are likely to seize on anything that’s a bit odd and

assume it’s the translator’s clumsiness. I think this state of affairs

is partly the fault of translators because we don’t talk about what

we do, we don’t talk about our approach, our ethos, we hope that

the finished translation will be transparent and people will see

from that that we’ve taken a particular stance. And some of the

translations that are criticised for being difficult or whatever, are

perhaps just a translator who’s adopted a particular approach.

Who knows, the original might have been extremely weird,

exotic, bumpy, but nobody asks that question. It is something I’m

very conscious of and I try to be very careful not to give in to the

urge to edit. So in instance of the plethora of metaphors, I asked

myself what the author was trying to do – she was obviously

trying to create a very poetic, musical effect, a magical

atmosphere at the opening of this particular chapter. It’s a habit of

hers, certain chapters she begins with a very lyrical description, in

contrast to the brutal events about to take place. So in the end, I

privileged the sound and the music, I kept the images, but I paid

great attention to the flow, so the reader wouldn’t be brought up

short by something that was clumsy and awkward. I turned things

around a little bit, the English doesn’t quite say what the French

says, but I hope it achieves the same effect.

NdL: You could put these points to the author, saying that French

readers would react differently, but I can tell you that an English

isn’t going to stand for this if I put it straight into English in this

way it’s not going to achieve the effect that you want. Do you

mind if I make a suggestion… would it be all right to cut it up a

little bit, or to drop three of the images or something like that. It’s

a process of negotiation. With an author. Which I find very

helpful. Because, the translator is in some ways an intermediary

between the original author and the new public in the new

country. And if you can help that along by actually consulting the

author and explaining the issues, that’s quite good. Normally

that’s a luxury we just can’t afford.

RS: Yes, working closely with an author is ideal, if you can, I haven’t

often been in that position. Sometimes editors resolve problems

by just ting things out, I translated one author who tended to

throw in gratuitous references which didn’t really help the

narrative along, but got in the way of it. The references were

pretty obscure for a French reader, and absolutely out of reach to

most English readers. I kept them, explanatory notes to the

publisher. And the editor just took some of them out, saying ‘this

is not helpful, this is the author showing off, this is not going to

work in English’.

NdL: That is the editor being an editor, and that’s fine, it does involve

the translator in a way, and I think the editor who’s doing their

job properly should consult the translator. But I also don’t, as I

gain more experience of publishers and more confidence, I don’t

do editors’ jobs for them any more. Editors sometimes address a

whole sheaf of queries to the translator, and some of the queries

are translation queries, but a lot of them are editorial queries.

They might say for example, you’ve used the same word three

times in this paragraph. Now I’m very attentive to repetition,

partly because of the question of language and the way I listen to

the music, as I was saying earlier. And I think repetition’s a very

important part in that. So if there’s repetition in the original, I

keep it. So if the editor says to me you’ve used the same word

three times, I say that’s an editorial matter and you have to ask the

author, not the translator. Just because it’s a translation, there’s no

reason why the editor shouldn’t go back to the author. The author

may say ‘I don’t speak English and I can’t understand this letter

you’ve written’. Or they may say ‘I just don’t know, do whatever

you think is best’, or they may say ‘no I meant it to be…’, or ‘oh

thank you very much I didn’t notice’. But that is their

responsibility, it’s not your responsibility to decide whether the

author meant to repeat themselves. That’s really nothing to do

with your responsibility, but I think it’s very easy for the

translator, getting a letter like that from the publisher, to answer

all the questions. And now I just go through it and star them and

say these are editorial questions and not the translator’s, and I’m

not competent to answer them. I don’t see why I should decide. I

would, if I were translating Lucretius, and he repeated a word, I

think I would have to decide whether that was a deliberate

repetition or whether it was something he hadn’t noticed. So I

would be doing the editor’s job for him. But that’s because of the

attitude we have towards a text by dead authors.

Why should it be different with a living author, I suppose because

you can consult them.

NdL: I think the editors ought to be a little bit clearer about what

they’re doing in that respect. In the example you gave you were

balancing with the demands of the music, against the demands of

the meaning. And that’s quite an interesting choice. Now that is a

translator’s choice, because sometimes you can’t get both, it’s

nice when you can, if the music and the meaning go together, and

I think that’s in a lot of good writing, it does. Whether it’s fiction

or non-fiction, in my view, in good writing the style and the

subject matter are in harmony, or if they’re in conflict, there has

to be a reason. And it happens quite often that people’s writing is

not in harmony, that the words chosen are not the right words for

the meaning that’s being conveyed. Good writing is when they

are in harmony, and it’s a great pleasure to be able to maintain

that in the translation, and I think we’re quite right to worry about

it. I think that’s what you were, partly nervous about.

RS: Yes, and I think in the romance languages, you can get away with

writing something that sounds absolutely wonderful, but when

you start unpicking it, there’s not actually much content there, and

then when you translate it into English, if you privilege meaning,

you sometimes lose the music, you come out with something

rather prosaic and turgid.

NdL: It’s not true that English writing can’t sound good.

RS: No, I didn’t say that. But sometimes you translate the meaning, –

and I tend to go for sense first – then you reread what you’ve

done, and you think it’s nonsense, it’s not saying very much, so

then you go back to the French and think well, actually, it’s not

saying a lot in French either but it sounds wonderful. You can get

away with more in French, as long as it sounds good. That’s what

I’m saying, you can’t do it so easily in English. I’m thinking

about certain types of writing, art criticism, travel brochures etc.

If you decide to go down the route of placing more importance on

the music, you can sometimes move quite far away from what’s

being said.

NdL: Well I’ve just started translating a novel which is written in a kind

of verse, where the demands of the sound are obviously going to

be bound up quite a lot with the needs of the story, the meaning.

But I don’t know yet how that’s going to work out, so I can’t

really comment on it. But inherently neither the music nor the

meaning has a prior claim.

RS: No, but sometimes we’re forced to make a choice, I mean what

you’re saying is that ideally they should go together, but

sometimes they don’t.

NdL: That means that the music always has to give way to the meaning.

RS: Well I think every book or poem or whatever it is, is an individual

case, I don’t think you can have one line on that, I think you have

to look at each one on its merits, and that goes for non-fiction as

well.

NdL: I’ve been reading The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony I think

it’s called, and I’m sorry to say I haven’t got the translator’s name

in my mind. But this book which was written in Italian, read

extraordinarily well I thought in English. And I would love to go

back to the Italian and see what it is, what are the tricks of the

trade that this translator’s brought to bear. Because so often I

think it’s an experience that books that are intended for general

readership are not particularly well translated, not up to the very

highest standards.

RS: I think a lot of it is to do with pressure of deadlines, and just

ridiculous working conditions. We were saying before that you

need time to put the translation away and come back to it, and

over the last few years, publishers have started making the most

ludicrous demands on translators, it’s like a production line.

NdL: It’s a great mistake. Translation’s not unlike wine in that respect,

if you try and rush it, it doesn’t necessarily get better.

RS: Yes, there are a number of authors who’ve actually been killed at

birth with bad translations, when the publisher’s not used the best

translator but the cheapest or the fastest.

NdL: To get back to intervention… we were talking about how far it’s

your role to adapt what’s written on the page for the reader and

we were beginning to think about some issues like for example,

your estimation of the author’s intention. You may think the

author hasn’t been faithful to himself at this point, because he has

said something which gives the wrong impression. This sentence

is unnecessary, it gets in the way. It would be much better to

remove it. And I said that was like being the editor, putting

yourself in the position of an editor. Are there other reasons

which are more to do with your role as a translator. You might

say well, that’s fine, you gave an example where the young man

put his hand on the older woman’s knee, where you were

intervening as the translator, you had no problem with the original

text, your intervention was purely in your role as translator, as the

intermediary between the two languages, saying well my English

reader needs a bit more help. Rather than give them a footnote on

tu and vous, I’m going to just subtly change the text. So there

you’re intervening, in a slightly different role, not as an editor.

RS: Well, as a mediator then. You’re conveying something that is

culture-bound, language and culture-bound, into another culture,

to achieve an equivalent effect. If you didn’t intervene there, all

you would have is the word ‘you’, so you would have actually

lost something enormously significant. So that’s really the

translator having an understanding of the two cultures, and

mediating between them. I’ll give you another example of

something where I think I would say it was intervention, at the

level of the whole book, and this was a novel that was recounted

in the first person, and the character speaking was somebody who

had no education whatsoever, it was a sort of sci-fi book, and this

character had been born into a futuristic scenario, in a kind of

prison, and had no access to education apart from the women who

were with her, who taught her the rudiments of language. The

author is a very erudite, literary lady and her style is very literary,

even pretentious sometimes. The story is gripping, and in French

it reads wonderfully. It is narrated in the first person, and the

language is quite literary and precious. When I translated it I was

very much influenced by the register of the French language, the

author uses some very sophisticated language and I did the same.

I got as far as the fourth draft, and I started reading the translation

out loud, and it didn’t work, the whole book just didn’t work in

English. And the reason it didn’t work was because the language

coming out of the narrator’s mouth was all wrong for somebody

who had no formal education. There was a credibility gap

between what you knew about the person, about her lack of

access to books, and how she wrote. And it really bothered me

because I felt that the book just fell down in English. So in the

end I made a fairly radical decision. I went through the whole

book and I found a language that worked for this character, to

make her believable. Using much more everyday language, I got

rid of all the Latinate words and consciously substituted Anglo-

Saxon root words. It’s very useful that English has this dual root,

so it was quite easy to find a coherent voice for this character. I

did actually discuss this with the author at one point, and I could

see that she was mortified because I’d put my finger on

something that she hadn’t thought about in the French. Although I

put it to her in terms of the differences between English and

French, she realised that it just hadn’t occurred to her that she was

writing as herself, not as this character. So I suppose that’s a form

of intervention.

NdL: It is. You produce a text that is quite different from what perhaps

another translator might have produced. You mentioned earlier

that translation is your reading, and there could be other readings,

and with the great classics there are of course, with Dostoevsky or

Proust you can actually go to the bookshop and buy several

different versions of the same book, and they could be very

different from each other.

RS: Have you got some examples of where you feel you’ve

intervened, or do you feel that you really don’t.

NdL: That’s a very difficult question to answer, because all translation

is intervention. So you talk about finding a voice, the moment you

find a voice, and the first translation, the first book that I

translated, My Michael by Amos Oz, has a female narrator living

in Jerusalem in the 1950s and speaking Hebrew in her real life,

insofar as an imaginary character has a real life. And I remember

working very hard on trying to find a voice for this young married

woman in the 1950s, in Jerusalem. I mean talk about intervention,

to pick up a character, a narrator from another book, from another

language, and put it into your book in your language, it’s very

difficult isn’t it. I remember thinking about words, what sort of

words does she use, does she say wireless or radio, does she say

frock or dress, you know, little things like that which make an

enormous difference to the way it reads.

RS: And they’re class things as well, I mean whether you say supper

or dinner or … so you have to be very careful not bringing in

English class.

NdL: Yes, absolutely. And that is terribly difficult. So that’s a kind of

intervention. But it’s a necessary intervention, there isn’t a text,

you see, I think people make a great mistake in thinking about

translation, they imagine that there is a right way and a wrong

way to translate, they imagine that a text in a foreign language

could have a right translation. Now there may be an obvious way

of translating. I sometimes look at texts with students and we talk

about translation, they sometimes say well why didn’t you use

this word, the obvious word to translate that would have been

this, and I have to try and eliminate that there isn’t a right way or

a wrong way, or an obvious way, there may be an obvious way if

you’ve been trained in a certain way, you may think that the

dictionary translation of so and so is such and such. But there

isn’t really one way of translating, it depends entirely who you

are, and what you’re trying to do.

RS: But that’s something that I think that we as translators need to

somehow articulate in a much wider way, because I think there is

this sort of assumption somehow that there is one right

translation, there is one official translation, and it’s quite

interesting that when there’s a translation of something in print of

something, it’s assumed that somehow this is the official

translation and I find quite often if I’m translating something and

there’s a quotation from say a great author, and so you think well

I’m not going to start translating Baudelaire or whatever, I’ll go

and find the official translation, and you get it out of the library

and you find that it’s really, not quite how you would want to

translate it. And maybe what we have to do as translators is claim

our work, more, and say yes, this is my translation, my reading,

my understanding, my interpretation, it’s not the only one, it’s not

necessarily the best one. But this is what I did and I stand by it.

NdL: I was asked some time ago if I could define what the role of the

translator is. And I thought it, the best way to do it would be to

take an example from another artistic milieu, which people would

understand, and I took the role of the performing musician. You

see you don’t see that there’s a right way to perform and a wrong

way to perform a Tchaikovsky symphony. I mean there may be

wrong ways, there may be unsuccessful versions of it, but on the

whole the good orchestras produce good but totally distinctive

renderings of I don’t know a Bach sonata or something. Every

performer, take the soloist, because we’re talking about solo

work, every soloist is performing in a distinctive personal way,

and that performance is signed by the performer. And you might

go to a record shop and you say I would like to have this played

by {B}, or {A} … and that’s what I mean, you might want to go

to a bookshop and say I’d like something translated by Ros

Schwartz. Unfortunately you won’t have the choice of one book

translated by three or four different people, but then you don’t

have that for contemporary music either. But as things become

more established, you do, that responsibility of the performing

musician is analogous to the way I see the responsibility of the

translator. The translator is giving you, as you said very well,

your reading, you give your reading, you give a personal

interpretation, a personal rendition, the text as it exists on the

page in the original language, is like a musical score, and it’s like

the musical score also because it’s locked up, because the English

readers don’t have access to it, just as only the few people that

can actually read music and hear it in their heads, can read the

score. It needs to be performed. So it’s there in a potential, and

the performance is going to be totally unique and distinctive.

RS: I think that’s a very good analogy. And in fact it was brought

home to me just how personal translation is when I collaborated

with a colleague, Steve Cox, on a book, and although it was a

novel, we felt it was a book that lent itself to collaboration

because it was stylistically it wasn’t hugely challenging. And it

had to be done quickly. We thought we could split the work very

efficiently, taking half the book each. We agreed to re-read each

other’s chapters, and, to harmonise the style, just scribble in the

margin where we would have said things slightly differently. We

would then each take the other’s comments, to make the joins

invisible. We’d agreed on the general tone, it was a mass market

book. I don’t think it’s something you can do with a major literary

figure. What astounded both of us, was how differently we wrote,

when we’d thought we were going to be able to mesh fairly

easily.

NdL: Sort of like playing a duet.

RS: Yes. It was an enormously instructive experience. It’s fascinating

where one’s language comes from. We both draw on very

different linguistic sources, probably as a result of our different

social backgrounds, and the age gap between us. It was apparent

in little things, for example one of us had a tendency to say ‘start’

and the other ‘begin’. Just little things like that. Or one of us says

‘a dog’s dinner’ and the other ‘a dog’s breakfast’. It was enriching

for both of us, and the book certainly benefited. I feel the

experience expanded my vocabulary. Steve uses words that are

just not part of my vocabulary, I use words that are just not part of

his vocabulary – not that we don’t know these words, but they’re

just not part of our active pool of language.

NdL: That’s what you were saying earlier on. You said that you had

your vocabulary which would be different from someone else’s

vocabulary, but also your approach to writing and your approach

to translating must also be distinct and personal.

RS: But it was still quite a shock to me, because I’m constantly

questioning myself and trying to extend my vocabulary, I’m in

the dictionary all the

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