On (Not) Reading Translation
May 18, 2006
Of all the books published in America, only 3% are translations. This is an appalling figure, but perhaps not surprising. A few years ago, I listened to a rather well-known writer give a talk to a group of young MFA students. When asked what books she liked to read, she said she read almost everything BUT translations.
It was of great interest to me to attend two PEN/World Voices panels on April 27th, one on translation and the other on languages (for which I served as a panelist.) The panel on translation and globalization consisted of Boris Akunin, a high-profile writer of crime fiction in Russia who used to translate from Japanese to Russian; Roberto Calasso, founder and head of the Italian publishing house Adelphi; Raymond Federman, a bilingual writer who writes in English and French and who serves, interestingly, as his own translator; Amanda Hopkinson, director of the British Centre for Literary Translation; and Richard Howard and Elizabeth Peellaert, both translators from French to English. The event was moderated by Steve Wasserman, former Los Angeles Times Book Review editor. (For audio archives of the PEN/World voices event, please go here.)
Much of the discussion focused on the current trend of re-translating works that have been translated before, such as those of Tolstoy, Thomas Mann and other classics. It is also easier for high-profiled authors to be widely translated into other languages, though translating from other languages into English seems to be limited by the publishing business, especially in the U.S.
What was most interesting to me was a point that Calasso brought up: when translation is not available, the local market would then fall for imitations of the original work. A few weeks ago, I was talking with my friend, Daniel Alarcon, the Peruvian-American author, about writing in English. Daniel thought that American readers were less interested in reading translations about other cultures, but they were more interested in reading the interpretations of other cultures in English. I agreed with him; perhaps, in a sense, it is why we both got published and read (hopefully) in America, though that is far from the reason that we choose to write in English.
I grew up reading translations, first of Russian (or more precisely, Soviet) literature, and later translations of writers from around the world. My coming-of-age coincided with the booming in translation in China between the mid-1980s and early 1990s, and I remember reading Nietzsche, Sartre, Kierkegaard, Camus, Milan Kundera and many other international authors as a teenager. I am not sure how much I understood then, but I remember being absorbing by the books, feeling as though my whole life was opening up to the world that was still largely unavailable to me by images.
The second panel I attended, on the evening of April 27th, was on writers and their different languages. Interestingly, I was the only one on the panel who writes solely in English. The other panelists included Boris Akunin; Raymond Federman; Bernardo Atxaga, who writes in Basque and Spanish; Agi Mishol, a poet writing in Hebrew; Hwang Sok-Yong, a Korean poet who spoke through a translator; and Dubravka Ugresic, a Croatian writer. I enjoyed the readings of the other panelists in their own languages, especially the poetry by Agi Mishol and Hwang Sok-Yong. My friends in the audience said that Mishol's poem was written by inserting modern language into an ancient prayer, and although I do not understand Hebrew, I found the reading extremely musical, as was Hwang Sok-Yong's reading in Korean, which had an urgency that was well conveyed by the musicality of his reading (again for a listener not knowing the language.)
This led me to ponder again on the claim by the American author I mentioned earlier on not reading translation. The reason she gave was that so much would be lost in translation and there would be no point reading the second-hand text. Is this why American readers don't like to read translation? When we read, how much do we read for the enjoyment of the language and how much for the ideas?
