On Translation.

I’ve undertaking the daunting task of reading the 1296 pages of War and Peace as my year end reading comes to a close. On page xiv, the translators provide an incredible portrait of how they approached Tolstoy’s original text. I couldn’t help but think about how we approach the bible. This is so good. Read it a couple of times if you need to.

From the Introduction to War and Peace translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky.

It is often said that a good translation is one that “does not feel like a translation,” one that reads “smoothly” in “idiomatic” English. But who determines the standard of the idiomatic, and why should it be applied to something so idiolectic as a great work of literature? . . . Those who raise the question of the “idiomatic” in translation do not seem to realize that they are imposing their own, often very narrow, limits on the original. A translator who turns a great original into a patchwork of ready made contemporary phrases, with no regard for its particular tone, rhythm, or character, and claims that that is “how Tolstoy would have written today in English,” betrays both English and Tolstoy. Translation is not the transfer of a detachable “meaning” from one language to another, for the simple reason that in literature there is no meaning detachable from the words that express it. Translation is a dialogue between two languages. It occurs in a space between two languages, and most often between two historical moments. Much of the real value of translation as an art comes from that unique situation. It is not exclusively the language of arrival or the time of the translator and reader that should be privileged. We all know, in the case of War and Peace, that we are reading a nineteenth-century Russian novel. That fact allows the twenty-first century translator a different range of possibilities that may exist for a twenty-first century writer. It allows for the enrichment of the translator’s own language, rather than the imposition of his language on the original. To move from the fertile ground towards either extreme – that is, towards interlinear literalness or total accommodation to the new language – is to lose the possibilities that exist only in the space between two times and languages.

Listening: Her Majesty The Decemberist by The Decemberists