Oh my god, Iâm about to go on a ramble, Iâm sorry, I canât help it, the inner translation nerd is coming out. Iâm so sorry. The thing isâthere is actually no such thing as an accurate translation.
 Itâs literally an impossible endeavor. Word for word doesnât cut it. Sense for sense doesnât cut it, because then youâre potentially missing cool stuff like context and nuance and rhyme and humor. Even localization doesnât really cut it, because that means youâre prioritizing the audience over the author, and youâre missing out on the original context, and the possibility of bringing something new and exciting to your host language. Foreignization, which aims to replicate the rhythms of the original language, or to use terminology that will be unfamiliar to the target cultureâ(for example: the first few American-published Harry Potter books domesticated the English, and traded âtrousersâ for âpantsâ, and âMomâ for âMumâ. Later on they stopped, and let the American children view such foreignizing words as âsnogâ and âporridge.â)âalso doesnât cut it, because you risk alienating the target readers, or obscuring meaning.Â
Another cool example is Dante, and the words written above the gates of hell: Abandon hope, all ye who enter here.Â
In the original Italian, thatâs Lasciate ogne speranza, voi ch'intrate. Speranza, like most nouns in latinate languages, has a gender: la. Hope, in Italian, is gendered female. Abandon hope, who is female. Abandon hope, who is a woman. When the original Dante enters hell, searching for Beatrice, he is doomed, subtly, from the start. Thatâs beautiful, subtle, the kind of delicate poetic move literature nerds gorge themselves on, and you canât keep it in English. Literally, how do you preserve it? We donât have a gendered hope. It doesnât work, canât work. So how do you compensate? Can you sneak in a reference to Beatrice in a different line? Or do you chalk her up as a loss and move onto the next problem?
Youâre always going to miss somethingâthe cool part is that, knowing youâre going to fail, you get to decide how to fail. Ortega y Gasset called this The Misery and Splendor of Translation. Basically, translation is impossibleâso why not make it a beautiful failure?Â
My point is that literary translation is creative writing, full of as many creative decisions as any original poem or short story. It has more limitations, rules, and structures to consider, for sureâbut sometimes the best artistic decision is going to be the one that breaks the rules.Â
My favorite breakdown of this is Le Ton Beau De Marot, a beautiful brick of a translatorâs joke, in which the author tries over and over again to create a âperfectâ translation of âA une Damoyselle Maladeâ, an itsy bitsy poem Clement Marot dashed off to his patronâs daughter, who was sick, in 1537.Â
This is the poem:Â
Ma mignonne,
Je vous donne
Le bon jour;
Le séjour
Câest prison.
Guérison
Recouvrez,
Puis ouvrez
Votre porte
Et quâon sorte
Vitement,
Car Clément
Le vous mande.
Va, friande
De ta bouche,
Qui se couche
En danger
Pour manger
Confitures;
Si tu dures
Trop malade,
Couleur fade
Tu prendras,
Et perdras
Lâembonpoint.
Dieu te doint
Santé bonne,
Ma mignonne.
Seems simple enough, right? But itâs got a huge host of challenges: the rhyme, the tone, the archaic language (if youâre translating something old, do you want it to sound old in the target language, too? or are you translating not just across language, but across time?)Â
Le Ton Beau De Marot is a monster of a book that compiles all of Hofstaderâs âfailedâ translations of Ma Mignonne, as well as the âfailedâ translations of his friends, and his students, and hundreds of strangers who were given the translation challenge (which you can play here, should you like!)Â
The end result is a hilarious archive of Sweet Damosels, Malingering Ladies, Chickadees, Fairest Friends, and Cutie Pies. Itâs the clearest, funniest, best example of what I think is true of all literary translations: that theyâre a thing you make up, not a thing you discover. There is no magic bridge between languages, or magic window, or magic vessel to pour the poem from one language to anotherâtranslation is always subjective, itâs always individual, itâs always inaccurate, itâs always a failure.Â
Itâs always, in other words, art.Â
Which, as a translator, I find incredibly reassuring! Youâre definitely, one hundred percent absolutely, gonna fuck up. Which means you canât fuck up. You can take risks! You can experiment! You can do cool stuff like bilingual translations, or footnote translations! You write your own code of honor, your own rules that your translations will hold inviolable, and fuck it if that code doesnât match everyone elseâs*. The translations they hold inviolable are also flawed, are failures at the core, from the King James Bible right on down to No Fear Shakespeare. So have fun! Itâs all in your hands, miseries and splendors both.Â
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