Dear List,
On offer, for Xmas-season shoppings, there's a new
translation of "The Real Life of Sebastian Knight" in Portuguese, as
disgraceful as the former one: "O Original de Laura" & by the same
versionist. There's been a little publicity about it on line*. It's a shame
that those who are going to read Nabokov for the first time in Brazil will
now reach him by such careless, insensitive works, in contrast with the
excellent translations by European-Portuguese artists (Telma Costa, ed.
Teorema, for example). In RLSK we read "My first impression
of him is always a breathless one of suddenly soaring up from the floor,
one half of my toy train still dangling from my hand and the crystal pendants of
the chandelier dangerously near my head." In
Brazilian-Portuguese, breathless is presented as "out of breath" (
"Minha primeira impressão dele é sempre de uma subida súbita e sem
fôlego do chão, metade do trem de brinquedo ainda pendurada de minha mão e
os pingentes do lustre de cristal perigosamente próximos de minha
cabeça.") The fun, for me, derives from the realization that
there are various kinds of breathlessness in English ( a
surprised gasp, to be out of breath, a breathtaking scenery,
etc) and that, in Portuguese, there's not a one-word option for the kind
of "intake of air,"applied by Nabokov in RLSK. Nabokov's style loses
its shimmering varicolors and his music becomes mainly a "massig" or a
"staccato."
There is a very good review of "Why Translation Matters" by Edith
Grossman, in The New York Times (April 11, 2010) with the title "Duet for Two
Pens," by Richard Howard, which I recommend for those who are interested in this
subject. Curiously, the name of Vladimir Nabokov is absent when
translations of the Russians is mentioned by R.Howard.
Excerpts: Does translation matter? Edith Grossman’s new
book argues that it does, right in the title, and she ought to know....one of
the first texts in Yale’s energetic new series, Why X Matters, each volume of
which is to present a “concise argument for the continuing relevance of an
important person or idea.” Certainly when X equals translation, I can imagine no
defender more qualified — or, as it turns out, more querulous — than Grossman,
whose version of “Don Quixote” a few years back caused a sensation in the
shadowy realm of newly translated classics, and whose ulterior dealings with
Hispanic splendors, ancient and modern, have stirred even so mild-mannered an
assessor of cultural accomplishments as Harold Bloom to proclaim her, ominously
enough, the Glenn Gould of translators.
Once she (Grossman) blows the
froth of professional courtesy off her brew, is the drastic inadequacy of the
treatment generally offered to translated literature in this country.
..translators are fated to imbibe is the redeeming awareness that despite all
the insults and impositions translation sustains in our culture, it is crucial
to our sense of ourselves as human. Grossman is at her eloquent
best... when she reveals her joy in her work and her true inspiration:
“Where literature exists, translation exists. Joined at the hip, they are
absolutely inseparable, and, in the long run, what happens to one happens to the
other. Despite all the difficulties the two have faced, sometimes separately,
usually together, they need and nurture each other, and their long-term
relationship, often problematic but always illuminating, will surely continue
for as long as they both shall live.” ...Translation’s fate must be determined
in those ears and minds, not in the offices of various foundations and
publishers; hence her essay...Her clues, seeded throughout this essay, as to how
to go about creating, completing and correcting a translation as an authentic
work in another language (she writhes at the metaphor of “the target language”)
are exactly what a reader, especially a nontranslating reader, requires.
Meanwhile, in spite of the cruel and unusual punishment that translation faces
in the culture at large, Grossman and others like her continue to offer us
enlightenment. Gradually and laboriously, a genuine contemporary achievement in
the teaching and consequent production of translations of classical European
literature, particularly poetry, has flourished, or at least sprouted, in the
last decade. The Greek translations of Guy Davenport and Anne Carson; half a
dozen versions of “The Divine Comedy,” including translations from W. S. Merwin,
Robert Pinsky and Mary Jo Bang; Rika Lesser’s inspired versions of the Swedish
poets Ekelof and Sonnevi; translations of virtually the entire corpus of the
great 19th-century Russians by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, which
smoothly correct the odd imbalance of Constance Garnett’s peculiar effort to
make all Russian authors sound alike; and quite recently the surprising
restoration of Thomas Mann by John Woods (who captures Mann’s endemic humor,
transforming every great tome into an ironic treasury). Against the odds, all
these gifts have come our way in recent years. We have also been vouchsafed an
enormous and quite unsuspected library of Portuguese and Spanish poetry (from
Richard Zenith’s Pessoa to John Felstiner’s Neruda), which returns me to Edith
Grossman’s poetry of the Golden Age; her last chapter is called, without the
shadow of an apology, “Translating Poetry.” Here Grossman triumphs over her
resentments of our culture’s scandalous abuse of translation. Her account of
what she calls “the endless quandary of writing and of writing as a translator”
is passionately explored and patiently explained... translation matters because
it is an expression and an extension of our humanity, the secret metaphor of all
literary communication; and because the creation of any literary translation is
(or at least must be) an original writing, not a pathetic shadow or tracing of
the inaccessible “original” but the creation, indeed, of a second — and as we
have seen, a third and a ninth — but always a new work, in another
language.