The second example: In 1913, Ezra Pound, inspired by his discovery of Chinese poetry, writes the manifesto "A Few Don'ts by an Imagiste." Published in Poetry magazine that year, it is enthusiastically read by a young Chinese poet named Hu Shih, who is studying in Chicago. Hu returns to China and, in 1917, publishes his own, quite similar, manifesto, "Tentative Proposals for the Improvement of Literature," which becomes known as the "Eight Don'ts," and sets off a literary revolution, the May Fourth Movement of 1919. The story is more complicated, but it may be summarized as this: Hu Shih found in American poetry what Ezra Pound thought he had found in the Chinese. Like the protagonist of a Sufi parable, the poet went to the other side of the world to discover what was at home. Perhaps it is a parable for all translation.
The necessity of translation is evident; so why is it a problem– or, as they now say, problematic? Milan Kundera famously considered the poor translations of himself as– and only a man would write this– a form of rape, and he characterized the bad translations of Kafka as betrayals in a book called Testaments Betrayed. All discussions of translation, like 19 th century potboilers, are obsessed with questions of fidelity and betrayal. But in the case of a writer like Kundera, who came of age in a society dominated by the secret police, "betrayal" carries an especially heavy weight. We know what a translation is supposedly a betrayal of, but is it unfair to ask to whom the text is being betrayed?
And one can never mention the word "translation" without some wit bringing up– as though for the first time– that tedious Italian pun traduttore traditore. Luckily, the Italian-American philosopher Arthur Danto has recently and I hope definitively laid it forever to rest:
Perhaps the Italian sentence betrays something in the cultural unconscious of Italy, which resonates through the political and ecclesiastical life of that country, where betrayal, like a shadow, is the obverse side of trust. It is an Unconscious into which the lessons of Machiavelli are deeply etched. Nobody for whom English is a first language would be tempted to equate translation and treason.
The characterizations of translation as betrayal or treason is based on the impossibility of exact equivalence, which is seen as a failing. It's true: a slice of German pumpernickel is not a Chinese steam bun which is not a French baguette which is not Wonder Bread. But consider a hypothetical line of German poetry– one I hope will never be written, but probably has been: "Her body (or his body) was like a fresh loaf of pumpernickel." Pumpernickel in the poem is pumpernickel, but it is also more than pumpernickel: it is the image of warmth, nourishment, homeyness. When the cultures are close, it is possible to translate more exactly: say, the German word pumpernickel into the American word pumpernickel – which, despite appearances, are not the same: each carries its own world of referents. But to translate the line into, say, Chinese, how much would really be lost if it were a steam bun? (I leave aside sound for the moment.) "His body (her body) was like a fresh steam bun" also has its charm– especially if you like your lover doughy.
It's true that no translation is identical to the original. But no reading of a poem is identical to any other, even when read by the same person. The first encounter with our poetic pumpernickel might be delightful; at a second reading, even five minutes later, it could easily seem ridiculous. Or imagine a 14-year-old German boy reading the line in the springtime of young Alpine love; then at 50, while serving as the chargé d'affaires in the German consulate in Kuala Lumpur, far from the bakeries of his youth; then at 80, in a retirement village in the Black Forest, in the nostalgia for dirndelled maidens. Every reading of every poem is a translation into one's own experience and knowledge– whether it is a confirmation, a contradiction, or an expansion. The poem does not exist without this act of translation. The poem must move from reader to reader, reading to reading, in perpetual transformation. The poem dies when it has no place to go.
Translation, above all, means change. In Elizabethan England, one of its meanings was "death": to be translated from this world to the next. In the Middle Ages translatio meant the theft or removal of holy relics from one monastery or church to another. In the year 1087, for example, St. Nicolas appeared in visions to the monks at Myra, near Antioch, where his remains were kept, and told them he wished to be translated. When merchants arrived from the Italian city of Bari and broke open the tomb to steal the remains, Myra and its surroundings were filled with a wonderful fragrance, a sign of the saint's pleasure. In contrast, when the archdeacon of the Bishop of Turin tried to steal the finger of John the Baptist from the obscure church of Maurienne, the finger struck him dead. (Unlike dead authors, dead saints could maintain control over their translations.) Translation is movement, the twin of metaphor, which means "to move from one place to another." Metaphor makes the familiar strange; translation makes the strange familiar. Translation is change. Even the most concrete and limited form of translation– currency exchange– is in a state of hourly flux.
The only recorded example of translation as replication, not as change, was, not surprisingly, a miracle: Around 250 B.C., 72 translators were summoned to Alexandria to prepare, in 72 days, 72 versions of the Hebrew Bible in Greek. Each one was guided by the Original of all Original Authors and wrote identical translations. 72 translators producing 72 identical texts is an author's– or a book reviewer's– dream and a translator's nightmare.
A work of art is a singularity that remains itself while being subjected to restless change– from translation to translation, from reader to reader. To proclaim the intrinsic worthlessness of translations is to mistake that singularity with its unendingly varying manifestations. A translation is a translation and not a work of art– unless, over the centuries, it takes on its own singularity and becomes a work of art. A work of art is its own subject; the subject of a translation is the original work of art. There is a cliché in the U.S. that the purpose of a poetry translation is to create an excellent new poem in English. This is empirically false: nearly all the great translations in English would be ludicrous as poems written in English, even poems written in the voice of a persona . I have always maintained– and for some reason this is considered controversial– that the purpose of a poetry translation into English is to create an excellent translation in English. That is, a text that will be read and judged like a poem, but not as a poem.
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