THE TRANSLATOR AS WRITER

Despite the growing global interest in translation today, literary criticism still

distinguishes pejoratively between writing and translating. Translation is often seen as

inferior to ‘creative’ or ‘original’ writing, with the translator somehow down-graded into

a second-class citizen with a lesser talent. Often, in reviews, the name of the translator is

never mentioned and critics write on blithely as though they had actually read the work in

its original form without having had to resort to the aid of a translation. This second-class

status is enshrined in the economics of book production also, where writers are often paid

far more than translators. Yet without translators countless literary works would be

inaccessible to generations of readers around the world; we may claim to have read great

works from Ancient Greece, Renaissance Europe, nineteenth century Russia or twentieth

century Latin America, but we have all had to resort at some point to translations. The

millions of non-English-speaking readers who bought the seventh Harry Potter book in

July 2007 had no qualms about purchasing the book in translation, and indeed its global

success is due in great measure to the skill of its translators. When the Turkish writer

Orham Pamuk was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2006, his international

success was due in no small measure to the skill of his many translators

There is therefore a curiously schizophrenic position between the desire to read works

translated from languages that we cannot access and the down-grading of translation into

a second-class literary activity. Furthermore, what adds to the incongruity of this position

is the fact that so many great writers have also produced translations, though it is

significant that often their translations have received less attention than their other

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writings. There seems to have been an almost wilful disregard for the importance of

translation from the eighteenth century onwards, despite the argument put forward by

Jorge Luis Borges in his essay, ‘ The Homeric Versions ’, that there can be no problem

‘as consubstantial to literature and its modest mystery as the one posed by

translation.’(Borges 2002:15)

In 2006 Peter Bush and I edited a collection of essays that sought to explore the vexed

relationship between writing and translating. The book was entitled The Translator as

Writer and in compiling it, we asked a number of eminent translators to reflect on their

own work, to consider their own literary practice and, in so doing, to explore whether or

not there might be any substantial difference between the act of writing and the act of

translating. Our starting point was the firm belief that translation is always a creative act

and essentially an act of rewriting. The task of the translator is to bring the work of

another writer, living or dead, to a new reading public and to try and ensure that the

pleasure of reading is reproduced effectively. The translator first reads the source text,

then settles down to decode it, taking into account all its complexities, including implicit

sign systems, allusions and cross-referencing within a given literary system, then

endeavours to recreate that text in an entirely different language, for a different set of

readers and in a literary system that has completely different sets of allusive patterns and

references. It is a Herculean task and not to be attempted by the faint-hearted, yet

generations of translators have tackled some of the most complex works ever written,

including Shakespeare’s plays, ancient Greek epic poetry, the great nineteenth century

European writers, and countless others.

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One of the translator/writers who contributed to the book had boldly tackled Cervantes’

Don Quixote. John Rutherford’s translation for Penguin Classics came out in 2003 and

was awarded the Valle-Inclan Literary Translation Prize. Rutherford entitles his essay

‘Translating Fun’, to highlight the importance he gave to translating Cervantes’ humour,

inspired by his own daughter’s remark that the novel was ‘boring’. Tackling a major

European classic that had been translated many times before, he stresses the importance

of playfulness:

One of the rules I made for myself was that every joke in Cervantes’ text must be a joke

in mine, not, as in most post-Romantic Quixote translations, a pale shadow in the form of

a meaningless non-joke, literally translated by someone in awe of every word Cervantes

wrote, plus an apologetic footnote about the untranslatability of jokes (another of my

rules was that there would be no explanatory endnotes of any kind, that my Quixote must

make sense of itself (Rutherford, 2006: 77)

Rutherford celebrates the creativity of translation, proclaiming that ‘the literary translator

must be a creative writer’ (ibid: 77)This is a view that recurs through all the essays, albeit

in different ways. Anthea Bell, notable translator of French and German fiction and the

woman responsible for bringing Asterix the Gaul to English-language readers declares

that translators are indeed writers, but with a difference. A writer starts with a blank piece

of paper or screen and as the writing evolves, so the blankness is gradually filled,

whereas for the translator there is a always a pre-existing text that first has to be read and

decoded. She depicts translation as an act of tightrope walking, with the translator

striving to keep a balance between the exigencies of the target language readers and the

constraints posed by the original text. There is, she believes a duty on the part of the

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translator ‘to preserve the illusion that what was thought and written in one language can

be read and understood, in its essentials, in another.’ (Bell, 2006:66)

Anthea Bell’s perception of the translator as being both a creative writer and different

from the writer who produced the original is an echo of the view expressed in his famous

essay ‘Traduccion: literatura y literalidad’ by Octavio Paz back in 1971. Paz also makes a

distinction between the two kinds of writing, not to privilege one over the other but rather

to explain how different kinds of creative processes come into play when one is writing

and when one is translating. He is at pains to point out that translation and creation are

twin processes, and cites the example of Baudelaire and Pound where it is impossible to

distinguish between the two. His summary of the two different yet parallel processes is

worth quoting in full:

The poet, immersed in the movement of language, in constant verbal preoccupation,

chooses a few words- or is chosen by them. As he combines them, he constructs his

poem: a verbal object made of irreplaceable and immovable characters. The translator’s

starting point is not the language in movement that provides the poet’s raw material but

the fixed language of the poem. A language congealed yet living. His process is the

inverse of the poet’s: he is not constructing an unalterable text from mobile characters;

instead, he is dismantling the elements of the text, freeing the signs into circulation, then

returning them to language.(Paz, 1992:159

Paz’ distinction is very important: he acknowledges that both translating and writing are

creative processes, but sees the one as involving an inward movement, during which the

writer fixes words into a shape that will be definitive, while the other involves an outward

movement, during which the translator dismantles the original text and liberates the

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words, before embarking on a second stage, that of reformulating the text in a second

language.

A fundamental question for generations of translators and translation theorists has

centred around the idea of liberation. How much freedom may a translator be permitted

has been endlessly debated, with a cline of positions proclaimed, from one extreme that

suggests that the translator has no freedom whatsoever and is necessarily the slave of the

original, to the other extreme whereby the original text is merely the starting point for the

creation of a completely new work that is only tentatively connected to the source.

These two positions can be traced as far back as the ancient world, when St Jerome,

following on from Cicero, distinguished between two types of translation, the ‘word for

word’ and ‘sense for sense’ variants. Word for word originally referred to the kind of

glossing of ancient manuscripts that ultimately led on to the beginnings of vernacular

European literatures, whereas the notion of sense for sense acknowledged that there are

fundamental differences between languages that have to be negotiated. What, after all, is

a translator to do when a word simply does not exist in another language, neither as

signifiant nor as signifie? And even if linguistic equivalents can be found, since language

changes over time and literary genres come and go, how might a translator cater for the

totally different expectations of a target readership in contrast to those of the source

readership? This kind of negotiation is anything but slavish and requires sensitivity and

intelligence. Indeed, the more we look at how writers and translators work, the less valid

making distinctions between their two activities becomes. The boundary, if there can

even be said to be a boundary, is very fuzzy, and both activities require a high degree of

creative skill. What differs though, is the way in which translators and writers approach

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their task at the outset. Anthea Bell points out that whatever theories a writer or translator

may hold, there is little – if any- discernible difference between the end product of either,

while Josephine Balmer, translator of Ancient Greek and Latin poetry and another

contributor to the book, goes further and declares that ‘the one leads into the other and in

their continued practice, the two become indivisible.’(Balmer, 2006:194)

The indivisibility between writing and translating is apparent once we start to consider

the careers of many great literary figures who are primarily remembered for their novels,

plays or poems but who also translated. Alexander Pope may be seen as a great satirist,

but in his own time he was hailed as one of the leading translators of Homer. In

marginalizing the importance of translation as a shaping force in literary history, critics

have overlooked the significance of the translations made by eminent writers. Who now

remembers that George Eliot was a distinguished German translator, who translated a

number of important philosophical works, including Spinoza’s Ethics ? Indeed, the

nineteenth century fascination with German writing led several prominent figures to

translate important works, including Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Thomas Carlyle and

Matthew Arnold. Sir Walter Scott translated Goethe’s earliest play, Goetz of

Berlichingen with the Iron Hand. Poetry, plays, novels, philosophical and political

treatises all found their way into English, with Thomas Carlyle playing a leading role of

coordination. Yet when we think about the age of Romanticism, we do not immediately

think of the importance of translation, nor do we reflect on how much time and energy

writers were expending on translation.

There are two basic questions that need to be addressed: on the one hand, there is the

question of why so many writers also choose to translate, while on the other hand there is

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the question of why their translations have tended to be overlooked. Both questions are, I

believe , connected. There has been resistance to the idea that translation is a major force

for innovation in literary history, since this does not always fit comfortably with

nationalistic theories of creativity that tend to highlight the importance of ‘native’

products and play down the importance of imported forms and ideas. But writers have

always gone out into the wider world in search of sources of inspiration, and when they

have found works that they admired they have tried out their literary skills by

endeavouring to reproduce those works in another language. D.H. Lawrence, for

example, so admired Giovanni Verga that he translated the great Italian’s novels and

short stories, including Cavalleria rusticana. Lawrence translated Verga almost

obsessively, and undoubtably Verga’s verismo style had an impact on his own writing.

What is less well-known, however, is that D.H. Lawrence also co-translated a work by

Ivan Bunin, the Russian writer. When a writer takes the time to translate something

written by another writer, there is always a good reason for such a decision, whether it is

to experiment with alternative modes of writing or to try and push the boundaries of

one’s own style. Or it may simply be that the text a writer is translating at any particular

time is one that he or she wishes they could have written in the first instance, in other

words, translating that work is a logical next step in one’s writerly development.

Poets from Shelley to Swinburne, from Byron to Rupert Brooke translated from various

languages, ancient and modern. In some cases, the writers had learned these languages at

school, but others acquired languages through travel and, more often through reading

extensively. It was not uncommon for an educated man or woman in the C19th to read

competently in several ancient and modern languages. In some cases, family history

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played a role in language learning, as with the Rossettis. Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s

translations of early Italian poetry are qualitatively far better than his poetic ballads

written in English. His fellow Pre-Raphaelite, William Morris was also a prolific

translator, from Old French, Latin, Greek and Icelandic, to name but four, and his

Icelandic saga translations fed directly into his later prose writing. He discovered the

sagas as a result of travelling in Iceland, and also wrote an account of his journey. The

hugely successful nineteenth century American poet, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow was

an extraordinarily successful translator, and also used his translations as a basis for

imitations such as Tales of a Wayside Inn that appealed to a vast public.

Classical literature has always presented a particular challenge to writers. John Keats’s

ode. ‘On first Looking into Chapman’s Homer’ pays tribute to the first really great

English version of Homer, though by Keats’ time both John Dryden and Alexander Pope

were well-established as pre-eminent translators of classical works from Latin and Greek.

Interestingly, Keats did not have a privileged education and so had no Ancient Greek

himself, hence his respect for translation. In contrast, Matthew Arnold engaged in a bitter

quarrel with Francis Newman about the correct way to translate ancient works for

modern readers, which resulted in his famous essays, On Translating Homer published in

1860 that established a benchmark for the ideal translation. However, though Arnold’s

views on translation may be well-known, what is less well-known is that Elizabeth

Barrett Browning also translated from the Greek, publishing a version of Aeschylus’

Prometheus Bound in 1833. Robert Browning also translated several Greek tragedies, and

a host of writers including Gerald Manley Hopkins, Thomas Hardy, W.B. Yeats and

A.E.Housman translated occasional speeches or fragments.

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In the twentieth century, writers such as W.H.Auden, Stephen Spender, Louis Macneice,

C.Day Lewis, T.S.Eliot and Aldous Huxley to name but a few all produced translations.

Ezra Pound ‘s astonishing Cantos were forged through his translation activity of many

years, and he is perhaps the most important writer to have raised interest in Chinese and

Japanese literature. Yet the role of translation in the literary development of these and so

many other writers has often been overlooked, perhaps because they themselves did not

lay enough emphasis on the importance of translating.

Today, writers tend to be more overt about the importance of translating in their lives.

Nobel laureates such as Derek Walcott and Seamus Heaney have produced

extraordinarily powerful translations, Heaney’s version of the Anglo-Saxon epic poem,

Beowulf entering the best-selling lists in 1997. Ted Hughes, late Poet Laureate also made

the best-selling list with his translation of sections of Ovid. Metamorphoses, Tales from

Ovid. Hughes was a prolific translator, and the forthcoming study of Hughes’ translation

works by Daniel Weissbort will cause many readers to revise their views on whether

translation is indeed some kind of secondary activity to so-called ‘original’ writing.

A measure of the interface today between writing and translating can be found in the

difficulty of categorising the work of such figures as Tony Harrison, Edwin Morgan,or

Christopher Logue. All are effectively translator-poets, people whose writing draws upon

different sources of inspiration, some of which have already been composed in other

languages by other people.

Over the last thirty years or so, literary criticism has undergone a revolution, as the

concept of canonical literature has been challenged. How do writers become canonised,

who determines and sustains the canon, why are so many writers outside the canon,

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particularly if they happen to be women? Clearly, there are some writers whose work

endures despite changes in taste over centuries, but as we question the formation of

literary canons, so we need to remember the vital role played by translation in the

development of world literatures. Far from being a marginal activity, translation has

played a central role in shaping literature. Choosing to remember only certain works by

eminent writers while overlooking the importance of their translation activity skews the

picture of their achievement and is an historical distortion. If we were to rewrite literary

history from the perspective of the significance of translation in a literary system, rather

than from the standard perspective of national cultural roots, then we would see a very

different picture from the familiar one we have all been taught to accept. My examples

are drawn from English literary history, but we might equally set about listing names of

Catalan, French, Spanish or Portuguese writers who have also translated. The

phenomenon of the writer who translates but whose translations have been marginalized

is not restricted to the English-speaking world.

The innovative potential of translation is one of the reasons why so many writers choose

also to translate. It is important at this juncture to remember that distinguishing between

writing and translating is a modern phenomenon: in the Middle Ages the distinction was

not made, hence the body of scholarship on how writers like Dante, Petrarch or Chaucer

fuse ‘original’ writing with translations without any distinguishable boundaries. By the

nineteenth century the distinction had become enshrined, hence the legacy we have today

that categorises translations as somehow different from the rest of a writers’ output. It is

surely time to move on.

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We are currently witnessing an interesting trend across Europe of writers returning to the

ancient world for inspiration. From Serbia to Sweden, writers have been rereading and

reinterpreting classical texts. The figure of Medea, for example, the archetypal outsider,

the ‘barbaric’ woman who is first loved and then cast aside, which leads to the terrible

revenge she takes upon her faithless husband has been prominent in the work of many

writers since the late 1980s, significantly coinciding with the growth of immigration into

western Europe. This contrasts with the prominence of another classical heroine,

Antigone, symbol of resistance to tyranny who was prominent in the years between the

two world wars when much of Europe faced the rise of totalitarianism. These patterns are

not coincidental, and reflect the need of writers to go back to the work of their literary

predecessors, rereading and, of course, rewriting. The contemporary English poet Tony

Harrison who has translated a great deal of ancient literature, has written about how he

chose to use themes and images from the ancient world to write about his own

contemporaries. In his essay, ‘Facing up to the Muses’, he asks how it was that the

Greeks could present on stage the worst things they could imagine, ‘gaze into terror, as

Nietzsche said, and yet not be turned to stone’. (Harrison, )

Harrison, like so many of his contemporaries has seen the twentieth century as an age

when art has been pushed to its limits. The horrors of the Trojan war offer a parallel for

the horrors of contemporary warfare, the suffering of the Trojan woman comparable to

that of the deportees to Nazi slave camps, Soviet gulags and the refugee settlements of

Darfur. The sheer unblinking cruelty represented in Greek drama and poetry finds its

reflection in the post-Auschwitz age, made possible only through translation.

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Let me now, in the final part of this essay, turn to another aspect of the translator as

writer issue, to examine the empathy that can exist between writers and their work that

spans time and distance. I have suggested above that sometimes translating may be the

logical next stage of a writer’s individual development. In the preface to her beautiful

collection of poetry, Chasing Catullus, Poems, Translations and Transgressions Josephine

Balmer starts by posing the basic question:”What is the relationship between translation

and poetry?’ (Balmer,2004:9)She goes on to answer her own question, a question made

all the more significant by the fact that also in 2004 she had published another anthology,

this time entitled Catullus. Poems of Love and Hate. What distinguishes the two

collections is the use she makes of translation, for while the latter is indeed her version of

poems attributed to Catullus, in the former she deliberately sets out to obscure the

boundaries between her own poems and those she has chosen to translate:

The result is this collection, a journey into the border territory between poetry and

translation, offering versions of classical authors interspersed with original poems,

reimagining epic literature, recontextualising classic poems, redrawing the past like the

overwriting of a palimpsest. It inhabits the no-man’s land between copy and original,

familiar and unfamiliar, ancient and modern……(Balmer, ibid:9)

The poems, she claims, cover a range of interpretative positions, from what she calls

straightforward translations to poems inspired by an original, to her category of

‘transgressions’, by which she means poems that ‘shamelessly’ subvert the original

meaning. The trigger for her book, however, was not a desire to experiment with literary

categories per se, but rather an attempt to find a way of writing about a deeply traumatic

painful personal experience, the death of her small niece from cancer. She found a way of

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saying that which she wanted most to say in her own words, but through translation,

through the rendering into her own language of part of a long poem written centuries

before by a long-dead poet who was writing not about anything personal at all, but

retelling the classical myth of the abducted of Proserpina, daughter of the mother

goddess Ceres, whose loss brings darkness and winter into the world.

Balmer’s transgression theory comes close to my own practice in a volume of poems and

translations published in 2002, entitled Exchanging Lives. For several years previously I

had been writing and translating poetry, publishing in small magazines apart from a

collection of Polish women poets, undertaken with a co-translator, Ariadne’s Thread .

Translating poetry was never a substitute for writing my own, but always a means of

exploring themes, ideas and images that I found congenial in some way. The title poem

of my Polish volume, for example, was taken from a powerful poem about the onset of

war and being driven into exile, by Maria Pavlikowska-Jasnorzewska. The theme of exile

and the use of the myth of Ariadne and the Labyrinth held a strong appeal for me and I

had written a series of poems about the Ariadne myth, albeit using the myth very

differently. I also found the self-deprecating ironic humour of the Polish poets,

particularly Ewa Lipska and Wislawa Symborska very close to my own attempts at irony.

In short, there was a relationship between translator and original writers that provided the

impulse for the translations to happen.

There was an even stronger relationship with the Argentinian poet, Alejandra Pizarnik,

whose work is combined with my own in Exchanging Lives. I found her work

fascinating, though her life story could not have been more different from my own, and I

steadily translated dozens of her tiny imagistic poems over several years. During that

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time I became familiar with her writing, obviously, but I also began to notice something

else: I found my own style of writing gradually starting to shift, and whereas I had tended

to write poetry that foregrounded patterns of sound, now I found myself starting to make

shorter, tighter poems that depended upon imagery for their impact rather than

predominantly on sounds and wordplay. I discovered that I had been gradually moving

away from sentences and closer to abstract imagery, which was both liberating and

surprising. Translating had quite simply enabled me to move forward and start to write in

a new way.

When I came to put the collection together, I tried to find a way of showing that

development. I divided the book into four sections: part one is a translation of a sequence

of Pizarnik’s poems, part two consists of more translations, but this time laid out

alongside some of my own poems in a kind if dialogue. So, for example, Pizarnik’s poem

to her father is set alongside my poem to my father, and the themes of disappointment,

abandonment or retreat into a world of the imagination though different, are co-located.

Part four is perhaps the most contentious, because it engages with the vexatious problem

of untranslatability. One of Pizarnik’s poems is an epitaph that plays on her name. Of

course in terms of lexical items, the poem can be translated, but its poetic quality

disappears once the wordplay is lost. I decided to translate it by writing my own epitaph,

using my own name and playing with the two versions of that name by which I am

known. Here then is Pizarnik’s poem:

Alejandra alejandra

debayo estoy yo

alejandra

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The English translation reads as follows:

Susan susanna

lying below

susanna

There is different wordplay going on in the English poem, but one that takes up the idea

of ambiguity. In calling this a translation, I am engaging in what Balmer has defined as

transgressive behaviour, but arguably does more justice to Pizarnik’s poem than any

literal translation might do. The purpose of poetry, after all, is to be read to be poetry.

In exploring some of the aspects of the relationship between writing and translating, this

essay has argued that crude distinctions between these two creative modes are unhelpful.

Translation has always played a vital role in literary history, even if that role has not been

recognised adequately, for translation ensures the continuity of writing over time, and can

introduce new forms, new ideas, new ways of thinking and writing. Countless great

writers have also translated, often because that is what they would otherwise have written

themselves, had someone else not written it first. We need to look much more seriously at

the role played by translation in the history of literature and investigate more fully the

way in which writers choose to engage with translation in their own literary practice.

Hopefully, in the long term, such research might lead on to a reassessment of the

significance of translation and to an improvement in the status of those under-rated

writers, the literary translators.

References

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Balmer, Josephine, Chasing Catullus Poems, Translations and Transgressions Tarset,

Bloodaxe: 2004

Balmer, Josephine, Catullus. Poems of Love and Hate Tarset, Bloodaxe:2004

Balmer, Josephine, ‘What comes next? Reconstructing the classics’, in Bassnett and Bush

op. cit. 2006 pp.184-195

Bassnett, Susan and Piotr Kuhiwczak, Ariadne’s Thread London, Forrest Books: 1986

Bassnett, Susan and Alejandra Pizarnik, Exchanging Lives. Poems and Translations

Leeds, Peepal Tree:2002

Bassnett, Susan and Peter Bush eds. The Translator as Writer London and New York,

Continuum: 2006

Bell, Anthea, ‘Translation:walking the tightrope of illusion; in Bassnett and Bush op cit.

pp.58-70

Borges, Jorge Luis, ‘The Homeric Versions’ transl. Daniel Balderston and Marcy

E.Schwartz, in Daniel Balderston and Marcy E.Schwartz eds. Voice-Overs. Translation

and Latin American Literature Albany, State University of New York Press: 2002 pp.15-

20

Paz, Octavio, ‘Translation:Literature and Letters, transl. Irene del Corral, in Rainer

Schulte and John Biguenet eds. Theories of Translation. An Anthology of Essays from

Dryden to Derrida Chicago and London, University of Chicago Press, 1992 pp.152-162

Pound, Ezra, Literary essays of Ezra Pound, Edited with an Introduction by T.S. Eliot

London, Faber: 1954

Rutherford, John, ‘Translating fun: Don Quixote in Bassnett and Bush op. cit. pp. 71-83

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Susan Bassnett, University of Warwick

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