“Not Sacrifice the Ease of the French”

“Not Sacrifice the Ease of the French”: Jean de La Fontaine, Marianne Moore, and the Principle of Equivalence (Part I)

by Vincent Kling

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What happened? Why did critics write notably tepid or in one case downright negative reviews when Marianne Moore published the fables of Jean de La Fontaine in her translations in 1954? An anticipated major literary event in the career of a very eminent poet turned into a disappointment at best.

This one instance gives rise to the larger question of how to judge any literary translation fairly. Even well-known practitioners admit a lack of rules or laws, and theory is too abstract to help. As a rough orienting principle, Leopold Federmair proposes “equivalence” (a necessarily flexible measure), while George Saunders encourages readers to trust to their own innate sense of style.

What follows now is an essay in three parts exploring the vast—indeed unending—subject of what makes a literary translation successful or otherwise, and all readers are invited to take active part by making assessments of their own as we go. “Equivalence” presupposes a knowledge of the original language, but Saunders’s measurement does not, meaning that no one is excluded.

Part 1 details the background to Moore’s work on La Fontaine by placing it in the context of her life and work. Then it argues against two prevalent false criteria that can interfere with proper judgment, and finally it offers thoughts on the standards proposed by Federmair and Saunders respectively.

Part 2 offers a scenic detour, a journey through several of the ways for achieving equivalence that the present author has encountered in his work as a literary translator himself. Not surprisingly, equivalence almost never equals identity; accommodation and adaptation are always required, and these can involve surprising strategies of judicious change from the original.

Part 3 returns to Moore and her translations of La Fontaine, examining how she fell short of the standards offered by Federmair and Saunders alike—that is, how her own agenda and her own aesthetic approach precluded any genuine correspondence with La Fontaine’s spirit and created what many critics view as stylistic distractions.

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Unexpected Critical Reception

Three years after her Collected Poems (1951) had won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, Marianne Moore completed a project years in the making when she published all twelve books of Jean de La Fontaine’s fables in her translations. Several points seemed to anticipate the volume as the next triumph in a celebrated poet’s career, an accomplishment that could only ratify the high acclaim she already enjoyed.

In the first place, Moore was an esteemed public presence. Many who seldom read poetry, hers or anyone else’s, were likely to know her as a media star, enjoying fame on a level almost never accorded to writers anymore. She was held in regard for her gentility, old-fashioned even then, outwardly manifested by her cape and her tricorn hat; for her passionate admiration of the Brooklyn Dodgers, about whose players—Jackie Robinson, Roy Campanella, Pee Wee Reese, and Walter Alston—she wrote admiring poems that came “to define her in the public sphere” (Olson); for throwing out the first ball of the season at Yankee Stadium in 1968; for her high-profile interest in boxer Muhammad Ali, for whose spoken-word album she wrote liner notes; and for her whimsical suggestions, like Utopian Turtletop, when commissioned by the Ford Motor Company, to help name the automobile that was eventually christened the Edsel (“Ford”).

As a poet, Moore enjoyed renown, even eminence. Besides the Pulitzer and the National Book Award, her work was recognized through the award of the National Medal for Literature, the Bollingen Prize, the MacDowell Medal, and the Helen Hare Levinson Prize, among many other distinctions. She was frequently praised in glowing terms by fellow poets, among them T. S. Eliot, W. H. Auden, Robert Lowell, and Anthony Hecht, none of them “disciples” in the sense of using similar techniques. On receipt of the National Medal, she was cited as “one of the true inventors of poetry in our time” who “gives us intimations of exquisite perfection” (Gilroy). 

In contrast to her popular appeal, Moore was patrician in her art. It would not be inaccurate to call her a quintessential poet’s poet, for that matter. Her structures were unusually subtle, complex, and fastidious, her craft marked by extraordinary discipline and often unobtrusive elaboration, her allusions teasingly obscure and oblique. Her free verse was stringent and highly organized, her stanzas governed at times by strict adherence to a set number of syllables (like her fellow Brooklyn poet, Louis Zukofsky), her use of slant rhyme, near rhyme, and other echo effects like assonance within and across lines rigorously but so inconspicuously deployed as to be nearly unnoticeable, her diction balanced between highly formal utterance and a flawlessly tasteful and tactful American colloquial. Poet Brad Leithauser writes (296), “Viewed as an architect, Moore seems to me to be, along with Whitman, the most innovative and liberating of all American poets . . . . Originality seemed to come to her, or come upon her, effortlessly.” As we will see, that originality was not always compatible with her practice as a translator, but she makes clear her standards in negative form, as it were, by complaining about the kind of contemporary verse that “whines and wanders and merely ceases, instead of concluding” (Leavell 374).

Moore had gained favorable recognition as a translator also. Just as she would later request that Harry Levin, professor of comparative literature at Harvard, “examine the work to ensure a sound equivalent for the French” in her La Fontaine renderings (La Fontaine/Moore ix), she had collaborated with Elizabeth Mayer on a translation of Adalbert Stifter’s novella Bergkristall (Rock Crystal), the first English translation of any work by that Austrian author. Mayer, whose native language was German, would present a lexically literal version in English, and Moore would revise it (Leavell 327). W. H. Auden, himself proficient in German, offered high praise in the New York Times Book Review. “The translation by Elizabeth Mayer and Marianne Moore reads like an original: that they should have managed this with an author who, like Flaubert, worried over every word, is testimony to their patience no less than their skill” (Auden x).

Moore notes in her foreword to the La Fontaine volume (La Fontaine/Moore ix) that the project originated with a recommendation by Auden to a publisher in 1945, the same year as his laudatory review of her work on Stifter. Besides his high evaluation of Moore as a translator, he was also naturally aware of the extensive use both she and La Fontaine made of animals. Moore did not write fables as such, certainly, but the animals with which her poems are so replete often serve as emblems and tokens of human traits. Moreover, Auden had a strongly favorable opinion in particular of Moore’s poem “In Distrust of Merits” (1943), which he called “the only war poem so far that made any sense, and it made a great deal” (qtd. in Leavell 314). As Auden realized and Moore soon discovered, La Fontaine’s fables contain much implicit political content, easy to miss at first, about the power of rulership, war, and government. An essay titled “Marianne Moore’s Postwar Fables and the Politics of Indirection” argues for translation as a political activity in itself. “Translation counted, for wartime writers and readers, as a political act . . . . Moore and other artists and academics in her milieu sought to offset the guilt of spectatorship by reclaiming intellectual labor as a mode of war participation” (Setina 1257). And if La Fontaine is indirect in using his fables as astute “indictments of court politics and absolutist policy,” the transfer of reference in the 1950s to McCarthyism is near at hand and was in fact explicitly made by Elizabeth Bishop and others (Setina 1256).

As noted earlier, all these factors appeared to be predicting accolades upon appearance of the La Fontaine volume, but most reviews were in fact muted at best, often noncommittal and bland. Craig Hill, who published his own translations of La Fontaine’s fables in 2008, was at first captivated by Moore’s versions but came later to find them “oddly wrong” after examining the original French. He notes, too, his discovery on reading Bishop’s letters, that “Moore’s fellow poets had felt as I had at the time but couldn’t bring themselves to tell her” (La Fontaine/Craig xvii). One review, by Arthur Mizener in Kenyon Review, was downright annihilating, and we will return to it later, as also to a review by Richard Wilbur that gently pointed to a consistent fundamental misjudgment in Moore’s renderings.

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The Lack of a Center

The reception of Moore’s La Fontaine would not represent the first case of a strong discrepancy between expectation and actuality, but the discrepancy is large enough in this case to serve as a starting point for fairly wide-ranging questions about operable standards or criteria when a translation is being evaluated. Translators themselves do not offer much guidance; quite the contrary, in fact. Klaus Reichert (298) states emphatically that “there is no method of translation and no theory [trans. VK],” and hence no uniform approach to evaluation. Likewise, David Bellos (9), in reminding readers that “‘translation isn’t the name of a long-established academic discipline,” asks, “How can you have theories and principles about a process that comes up with no determinate results?” These views reflect prevailing opinion, which is dubious about systems or methods of translation, the corollary being that there can be no centrality governing criticism and assessment. There exists no process to ensure consistency or uniformity (which would not be wanted in the first place); after all, if translation were a science allowing empirical verification, then any two translators of equal ability working independently on the same text would produce exactly the same version, which Bellos’s comment implies. Or considered from the related criterion of falsifiability, a principle advanced by Karl Popper, it becomes apparent that the quality of a literary translation is almost never either verifiable or falsifiable in any objective way (McLeod).

Does this mean, though, that critical judgment in this area is arbitrary or purely subjective? Is it no more than a matter of “taste” in the sense of someone liking or disliking liver and onions? Or can a translator, no matter how competent otherwise, be rejected, even in advance, for offending against a reader’s identity politics in these ideologically fraught times? A loud hue and cry arose in the German-speaking world, for example, about the qualifications for translating the work of Amanda Gorman, who gained wide recognition as a participant in President Biden’s inauguration (Wurmitzer). It was immediately proclaimed as an axiom that only German-language women of color were acceptable as translators of Gorman, whereupon other groups, like German women of Turkish origin, also claimed identity as women of color. We are clearly far away here from the main issue, the text of the work itself. What can the critic look for, then, who wants to make a fair, informed assessment? In this age of alternative facts and fake news—increasingly referred to as a quickly dawning era of “post-truth”— the basic impulse to establish criteria and standards of some kind is not quixotic. Arbitrary assertion with no reasoning or evidence is now ubiquitous, so a search for accepted general principles, then, emerges as helpful, perhaps even necessary.

In working toward a criterion that takes into account the organic nature of a translation as a living entity, it will help to discuss at illuminating length and then to discard two common measures of judgment that both fail because of their inflexibility or even doctrinaire stance. A process of elimination allows us to set aside unhelpful factors often considered more essential than they are. That elimination could seem at first to be leaving Marianne Moore, our initial subject, stranded on the side of the road, and indeed we will now ask her to wait patiently for a while. To consider her case on its own, measuring the gap between expectation and actuality here and here only, could offer helpful insights in an individual instance, but Moore’s case points toward alternate scenic routes, ones that will help us configure the overall terrain more accurately and allow us better to appreciate our passenger and be better companions on her journey when we stop back for her after a time. The most direct way is often the quickest, and meandering will carry us afield but not astray; instead, we will return to our starting point with a wider vista. A logical place to begin our detour, then, is to point out and avoid those roadblocks to judging a translation that prove dead ends when followed too closely.

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False Measure 1: Lexical Errors

Guided by informed scholars and practitioners, it is important to rule out the presence of errors as an automatic disqualifier. No one sanctions or invites mistakes, but we are frequently reminded that they have to be assessed in full context. Moore was taxed by some reviewers with errors, but the inadequacy of that standard as the sole measure is aptly illustrated at first by considering the reputations of two translators who came in for much more harsh and protracted rejection.

Constance Garnett was a prolific translator of Russian literature into English (Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, Goncharov, Chekhov, Ostrovsky, and Turgenev, among others) starting early in the twentieth century. She was deeply respected, her versions considered well-nigh magisterial for over half a century, but then critics began piling on in a campaign of disparagement. This belittlement set in, perhaps not coincidentally, just after several publishers announced newer renderings of Russian authors into English. Garnett became strongly overshadowed by next-generation translators, allegedly more skilled, who gained recognition as her fame declined. It took a scholar of unusual eminence to restore a fair balance. Ralph E. Matlaw, choosing the Garnett translation of The Brothers Karamazov (as revised by himself) for the Norton Critical Edition of the novel, calls his predecessor’s version “excellent.” While Garnett is “deficient in certain respects,” “no single person has rendered greater service to Russian literature than Mrs. Garnett . . . and, indeed, she thereby becomes a major figure in literary history” (Matlaw 736). In 2011, Irish novelist Edna O’Brien wrote an emphatic appreciation, and the discussion has again become timely thanks to a recent address titled “Constance Garnett: A Rehabilitation,” given by Emily Wittman at Princeton University.

What if the objection is worse than the purported flaw? As Matlaw says of Garnett (736), “In more than fifty volumes there are bound to be mistakes,” and experts rightly warn against “gotcha” verdicts. André Gide protested “that spitefulness that tries to discredit a translation (perhaps excellent in other regards) because here and there slight mistranslations have crept in” (90). Jeffrey L. Sammons notes a built-in susceptibility to error, commenting that “translations are more easily criticized than accomplished, and there is something to be said for charity in evaluating them” (Sammons, Leland 149). He judges further: “Translations . . . are often sitting ducks for the ill-intentioned; hundreds of pages and thousands of words accurately and felicitously rendered are passed over as a matter of course, while scattered faults are picked out and reproved” (Sammons, Francke 71). Renato Poggioli, acclaimed comparatist and translator, also underscores these attitudes. “The reviewer of a translation in print who . . . yields for too long to the nasty self-indulgence of Schadenfreude, endlessly and sneeringly listing all of the occasions on which the poor translator fumbled and stumbled, is a worse sinner than he” (144).

Even a high incidence of error calls for evaluation in the whole context of a translator’s work. For generations, the name of Helen T. Lowe-Porter was inseparable from that of Thomas Mann in the English-speaking world. She made it possible for tens of thousands of readers with no German to become acquainted with almost the whole body of Mann’s work. John C. Thirlwall states, “Without her translations, the name of Thomas Mann might well have been . . . little known in the English-speaking world” (vi). Publisher Alfred A. Knopf wrote of Lowe-Porter in a letter, “Mann’s works were of an exceeding difficulty to render adequately . . .  and as publisher I would not have known whom to turn to to take on her task had anything ever happened to her” (qtd. in Kinkel 98).

Lowe-Porter has fallen into disrepute over the last several decades. Gledhill (2) argues that “her oeuvre has probably been the most controversial in the twentieth century for literary translation from German into English” and judges her work “deeply flawed” (iv). His list of her errors covers a full sixty pages (199-259) (!), and he taxes her with nothing less than obfuscation at best and serious mutilation at worst. Gledhill is not alone, but returning to Knopf’s comment about the “exceeding difficulty” of translating Mann shows a textbook example of missing the forest for the trees. While Lowe-Porter may well have been deficient lexically, readers who know German can testify to her mastery of tone and of structure or architecture. She is always true to the level of diction, replicating with great skill irony or philippic or piquant sexual nuance or prophetic denunciation. Alert to all these tonalities, she also never compromised or simplified blocks of prose, from complex sentences that require a complete sequence of recasting to retain the same suppleness in English as in German, through vast paragraphs that seem at times in danger of never ending, to the careful replication of tempo and rhythm as the energies that give entire chapters their dynamism. It is more common than sometimes recognized for translators to divide structurally complex units into smaller parts; unlike other translators, even fine ones, Lowe-Porter never flattened or compressed or chopped up structures for convenience. Others have no qualms about making four or five sentences out of a single long, convoluted sentence whose length and complexity are congruent with its meaning and indeed, as in a great poem, not only create but also enact that meaning through its very form.

A translator with a less sensitive ear could have turned Doctor Faustus into rhetorical turgidity, easy as it is to overlook the sexual undercurrents and the strategically evasive rhetoric of the narrator; could have made Joseph and His Brothers a pompous mythical and religious contemplation without the nuanced handling of the characters’ voices and the narrator’s dispassion; could have missed the underplayed wit and arch indirection lurking in the stylistic experiments of The Beloved Returns. Going beyond single mistakes shows Lowe-Porter a highly accomplished translator still, even after the outstanding new versions of Mann presented by John E. Woods. The present writer considers this translator as well as her publisher slandered by the following summary judgment: “The botching of the English translation of Mann arose as the result of a powerful publisher’s fiat bringing about the mismatch of an author of world stature with an ambitious, startlingly underqualified translator who did not know her limitations” (Timothy Buck, qtd. in Gledhill 25). Lowe-Porter deserves much better; she certainly achieved much better.

What translator could fail to be grateful for the reminder that errors are inevitably bound up with the movement from one language to another? The issue is close to home for the present writer, at any rate. As a student I learned the standard language (Bundesdeutsch) spoken throughout the Federal Republic of Germany, the German that downplays local usage, and I therefore had no awareness at first of Austrian German as an entity of its own. The same word can have related but significantly different meanings, and years ago I was simply ignorant of them. Germans would call an upright, unpadded chair a “Stuhl” and an upholstered armchair or club chair a “Sessel,” for example.  But “Sessel” is Austrian for what is in Germany a “Stuhl,” and an armchair or easy chair is called in Austria a “Fauteuil.” So when I was translating a short story by Heimito von Doderer (“Unter schwarzen Sternen” / “Under Black Stars”) in which one military officer asks another to have a seat at his desk, he offers a “Sessel,” which I translated as “armchair,” confused as to what upholstered easy chairs would be doing in a military office. In another story, a character is drinking what he calls a “Mokka,” in Austrian German a strong black coffee, an espresso. But what did I know? I had the man drinking a “mocha,” which is something different (Kling, Asymptote).

Living in Vienna amplified my knowledge of Austrian German, but even native speakers outside Austria are unlikely to know what a “Greißler” is—the word is dying out anyway—and because it sounds like a proper name, that is how it was mistranslated in an otherwise lucid English version of an Austrian novel, Doron Rabinovici’s Suche nach M (The Search for M). In that novel, a young woman of Turkish background who speaks flawless German is always addressed in baby talk or pidgin German by the other patrons of the local small grocery store she frequents. The translator clearly thought that “Greißler” was the name of the store owner and thus said in English that the woman was always talked down to at Greissler’s, but “Greißler” is the generic word in Austrian for that mom-and-pop store on the corner. (It’s called a Tante-Emma-Laden or Aunt-Emma-shop in Germany.) Who would fault a translator versed in the standard language but probably encountering a somewhat obsolescent regionalism for the first time? Knowledge is power, certainly, but relative lack of it does not mean impotence.

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False Measure 2: Perfection

The second doubtful shibboleth for assessing a translation involves the effort to produce a definitive or perfect rendering valid for all time. There is “a quiet canon of excellent translations that go unrecognized,” as Sophie Pinkham notes (28), and extensive, informed studies like George Steiner’s After Babel document and ground the quality of such admirable renderings. Neither Steiner nor any other writer familiar with the subject, however, would make the mistake of arguing for a once-and-for-all perfection that could never be improved. If such a category existed, then Chapman’s Homer, just as one example, would have been the translation for all the ages, and there would have been no impetus for Alexander Pope to prepare his versions a century later. Dryden’s Virgil would, in such a view, have been literally the last word. But if nothing else, the simple fact of language change over time requires new translations, however brilliant earlier ones are; hence renderings of Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy by King Alfred (Old English), Geoffrey Chaucer (Middle English), Queen Elizabeth I (Modern English), and beyond.

Aside from changes in language over time, however, the impossibility of perfection or finality inheres in the act of translation itself. Novelist, critic, and translator Hilde Spiel, fluent in English even before her intermittent exile in England from 1936 to 1963, was hailed throughout the German-speaking world for her idiomatic and ingenious translations of Tom Stoppard, James Saunders, Angus Wilson, Elizabeth Bowen, and other English-language writers. The skill and inventiveness of her renderings in German were judged unsurpassable and earned constant praise for their virtuosic achievement (Rauchbauer 112-114). Yet it was Spiel herself who argued that any translation can be improved because some reader other than the translator, less trammeled or embedded, will be free to think more readily of alternate renderings. Editors, for example, have the advantage of not being immersed in the text from the outset, says Spiel, whereas the translator lacks distance from and perspective on his or her rendering by that very immersion (Rauchbauer 111).

The realization that there can never be a final or perfect version often leads translators to keep refining efforts already deemed outstanding. Why else would Edward Fitzgerald, whose renderings of Omar Khayyám were so extraordinarily beloved for fully a century, have revised his work on the Rubáiyát more than once through five editions? After the first (1859) caught hold a year or so following publication, it was rapturously praised by such figures as Swinburne and Rossetti in addition to achieving virtual best-seller status, and a contemporary critic judges that Fitzgerald’s “phrases reproduce the spirit and manner of his original with a nearer approach to perfection than would appear possible” (Fitzgerald / Gutenberg, “Biographical Note”). Still, Fitzgerald did not rest content but kept refining and revising.

The same impetus to revise can be noted even when the author is his own translator, like Samuel Beckett, who initially believed he had produced a “definitive” version of En attendant Godot / Waiting for Godot. But he soon realized that his play was a script and that the exigencies of stage production required complex, ongoing revision, which in his view only strengthened a translation he had at first considered pristine. There is, then, “not a single Godot but multiple Godots, at least one for every decade in the second half of the twentieth century” (Roche). Not only the requirements of performance, but a more intrinsically motivated quest for improvement led Beckett to recast and adapt his own work like the living artifact it is.

Consider as an especially clear example the struggles poet Anthony Hecht underwent as a translator throughout his working life. As he wrote in a letter (303), “Once you acknowledge that no translation is going to be perfect, the overwhelming problem that remains is: if perfection is impossible, what can be conveyed with the greatest fidelity?” (“Fidelity” is an elastic standard, not always related to literal meaning; further discussion will follow.) Far from claiming to have produced the definitive translation, he allows perceived imperfection to guide his search for a better version, aware that he will necessarily fall short. “As to translations, they are often things I dwell with for the longest time. I can fall in love with a poem in another tongue, and yearn to get it into some kind of English, and experiment year after year, almost always—no, always, with a sense of defeat, since no matter what I do, it will lack important elements that made the original what it is” (Letters 329).

Accordingly, Hecht worked and reworked more than one poem several times. He draws attention in his letters (329), for example, to a translation he published in 2001, in The Darkness and the Light, of Charles d’Orléans’s poem “Le temps a laissé son manteau,” “which I had tried at the outset to do in a version that appeared in my first book [A Summoning of Stones], published in 1954.” Readers may wish to ponder the elements that would go into a judgment of their own by comparing the first stanza of the earlier version to the corresponding stanza of the later one.

My work in the Hecht Archive at Emory University turned up an earlier version of a Baudelaire poem that the author revised for publication in his last volume, The Darkness and the Light. The earlier refrain from “The Fountain” is given here with the final version.

There exist as well no fewer than three earlier versions (Hecht Archive, Box 86, Folder 2) of the Baudelaire poem whose final rendering by Hecht appeared as “The Ashen Light of Dawn” (Collected Poems 482). In addition, I had occasion to study and write about his earlier translations of a poem by Goethe whose final rendering emerged as “The Plastic and the Poetic Form” (Collected Poems 483) (Kling, “Griefs” 51-68).

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A Criterion with Limits

Removing the false criteria of errors and perfection leaves the distrustful comments of Reichert and Bellos, which do not point the way to a workable standard. Before we propose one, it would be wise to note the full dimensions of the problem by reviewing how skeptical translators themselves are about defining or delimiting their craft. Friedrich Schlegel, early nineteenth-century philosopher who helped pioneer the discipline of linguistics and was himself an exceptional translator, noted that “whether such a thing as translation is even possible to begin with has never occupied anyone’s mind” (trans. VK) (qtd. in Reichert 7). William Frost even pointed out decades ago, for that matter, that the basic principles of literary criticism prove translation to be impossible (9), given that a work of literature consists only of its unique form in language, with all the original sound patterns, vocabulary, syntax, and other elements. Change them, and we have departed significantly, perhaps even fatally, from the original. A translation is therefore a compromise, if not a drastic alteration. Frost’s insight gives strong impetus to categorical adversaries of translation, who claim that nothing should ever be read except in the original. That absurd view would seal off comparative and world literature almost entirely and would go against the entire drift of literary practice since ancient times. At the least, it would reinforce the witty but unhelpful platitude that a translator is essentially a traitor (tradittore traditore).

At this point, however, common sense comes to the rescue and reinstates access to Homer and the Bible, to Gilgamesh and Beowulf, to Broch and Baudelaire, to Cavafy and Pessoa, to Undset and Hamsun, to the Upanishads and the Psalms. With flawless logic, Zeno proved in theory that it is impossible for an arrow ever to reach the target, but archery did not come to an end as a result. Translation continues despite its alleged impossibility; compromise, approximation, and slippage are acknowledged and confronted as intrinsic occupational hazards. To negotiate this slippage, Austrian novelist, critic, and translator Leopold Federmair has proposed “das Kriterium der Äquivalenz” (“the criterion of equivalence”) (263) as a workable if admittedly imprecise measuring standard. The ideal is for “the translation to incorporate on its side of the equation the same degree and kind of literary quality as the original” (261). Aware that he is plying anything but a precision instrument, Federmair adds that this “calculation admittedly remains rooted in instinct and feeling and scarcely permits of being ‘objectified,’” but he finds equivalence, however ascertained, indispensable as the basis of any “ethos for translators,” a principle he accepts “as a matter of course” even when he is not conscious of calling on it. “Anyone who wishes to evaluate a translation as a translation cannot in the long run bypass the criterion of equivalence. How one defines it, however, is a matter one can and should dispute” (263). (Translations from Federmair by VK.) For all its unscientific imprecision, this principle of equivalence can function as a point of departure and return for translators, a gravitational pull center that helps guard against whim or solipsism. It implies, too, and rightly, that anyone looking for something like a rule book or manual is searching in vain, but it proves helpful in mitigating arbitrariness when assessing the quality of a translation.

Federmair is obviously writing here to an audience of translators, taking it for granted that his principle of equivalence is being deployed by someone working from one language to another. But what about readers interested in literature in translation who do not know the language being brought into English? There are many interested readers of Lampedusa and Starnone who do not know Italian, of Grass and Musil who do not know German, of Lorca and Zafón who do not know Spanish, for example, and they are active, alert participants capable of responding to the translation as a work of linguistic art and craft on its own. These are the readers George Saunders addresses in his book A Swim in a Pond in the Rain, about a class he teaches in creative writing on the basis of some six or seven short stories originally written in Russian. “I don’t read or speak Russian, so I can’t vouch for their faithfulness to the originals,” writes Saunders, and he concedes that “we’re losing the music of the Russian and the nuance they [the stories] would have for a Russian reader” (6). Even so, he asks his students to undertake “A Translation Exercise” (403-406) by studying five translations into English of the same sentence by Isaac Babel and having them rank the five versions, even to produce one of their own. He notes that any ranking independently of knowing Russian, is being made “by way of some fundamental aspect of your artistic taste” and that any preference must have “something to do with your innate sense of voice” (404). For the aspiring writer, the sense of voice is “that which you are going to be relying on in every sentence of your career,” and while most readers of this essay are probably not creative writers, they would not be reading it if they were not conscious of and receptive to the nuances of literary structure in a sentence—tempo, balance, stylistic consistency, periodicity, rising and falling accentuation in conjunction with rhetorical and syntactic progression.

Saunders invites and empowers readers, then, who do not command the languages from which the works they are reading have been translated. It seems obvious that a reader who knows Icelandic well can better judge the quality of a novel by Halldór Laxness in English, for example, than one who doesn’t, but the reader without Icelandic is by no means excluded. In the first place, the reader with both languages may have a more limited sense of rhythm and structure in any language, and in the second, it is valid and even essential to judge a translation into English, for instance, as a literary artifact in English, not just a “duplicate” of or “appendix” to a work in Icelandic. With these points in mind, readers of this essay, whether fluent in French or not knowing the language at all, are invited to go back to the examples from the translations of Anthony Hecht above and to judge the two versions of each poem not necessarily so much from the standpoint of equivalence as from that of innate sensibility, of both instinctive and conscious responsiveness to the English rending as a work of art in itself. 

Is not translation, after all, by the very nature of the undertaking, an exercise that includes, that invites inside those who otherwise would remain locked out? It seems only right, then, in keeping with the spirit of translation in the first place, to address not only fellow translators in applying Federmair’s principle, but also to draw the circle wide enough for all interested readers to take part. This essay began with one example, that of Marianne Moore and Jean de La Fontaine, and it will eventually return to that example with a better sense of how to make a judgment. Not quite yet, though; here an eighteenth- or nineteenth-century writer might ask the patient indulgence of the gentle reader while an examination of equivalence helps to an understanding of what works more generally and what doesn’t. Moore was taxed with distorting La Fontaine in both letter and spirit, and it will make for a fairer assessment if we test our criterion to determine success or lack of it in various translations.

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References

Auden, W. H. “Introduction.” IN Stifter, vii-x. Here x.

Bellos, David. Is That a Fish in Your Ear?: Translation and the Meaning of Everything. New York: Faber and Faber, 2011.

Bernofsky, Susan and Jill Levine. “The Tiff: What Makes a Transaltion Truly Bad?” Asymptote, 17 Nov. 2014. https://www.asymptotejournal.com/blog/2014/11/17/the-tiff-what-makes-a-bad-translation/

Brower, Reuben A. On Translation. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1959.

Federmair, Leopold. “Abschweifungen des Übersetzers.” IN Federmair. Formen der Unruhe. Vienna: Klever, 2008. 259-272. 

Fitzgerald, Edward. The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. https://www.gutenberg.org/files/35260/35260-h/35260-h.htm. All five editions are included. (Cited as Fitzgerald/Gutenberg.)

“Ford Really Should Have Let Marianne Moore Name the Edsel.” Dangerous Minds. 2 Dec. 2013. https://dangerousminds.net/comments/ford_really_should_have_let_marianne_moore_name_the_edsel

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Gilroy, Harry. “Marianne Moore, 81 Today, Given Literature Medal.” New York Times, 15 Nov. 1968, 44. https://www.nytimes.com/1968/11/15/archives/marianne-moore-81-today-given-literature-medal.html?ugrp=u&unlocked_article_code=1.eE0.7geB.ZmrQo0hWG3Np&smid=url-share

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Guy-Evans, Olivia. Review of Saul McLeod, Karl Popper: Theory of Falsification. Simply Psychology. 21 Jul. 2023. https://www.simplypsychology.org/karl-popper.html

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La Fontaine, Jean de. The Fables of La Fontaine. Trans. Marianne Moore. New York: Viking, 1954. (Cited as La Fontaine/Moore.)

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Wittman, Emily. “Constance Garnett: A Rehabilitation.” Princeton University, Program in Translation and Intercultural Communication. 16 Nov 2023. https://ptic.princeton.edu/events/2023/constance-garnett-rehabilitation.

Wurmitzer, Michael. “Gorman-Gedicht: Deutsche Übersetzung in höchstem Maß missglückt.” Der Standard, 30 Mar. 2021. https://www.derstandard.at/story/2000125448713/gorman-gedicht-deutsche-uebersetzung-in-hoechstem-mass-missglueckt

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Originally published on Hopscotch Translation
Tuesday, June 25, 2024

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