Notes on Translation

I SHALL begin by saying something that seems obvious, but that cannot really be so obvious or it would not be so often ignored and even contradicted. Different kinds of translation are needed for different purposes. If one is translating a legal document all one needs to do is to convey the meaning; but if one is translating literature one has to convey feeling as well as grammatical sense. The author puts his feelings — exasperation, pity, delight — into the original. They are there in his rhythm, his emphasis, his exact choice of words, and if the translator does not feel while he reads, and simply gives a series of rhythmless dictionary meanings, he may think he is being “faithful,” but in fact he is totally misrepresenting the original.

Almost at the end of the Bhagavad Gita there is a passage of great power and beauty in which, instructed by the God, the warrior Arjuna at last overcomes ail his scruples. There is a war on, he is a soldier and must fight even though the enemy are his friends and kinsmen. This is what various standard translations make him say:

1. O Unfallen One! By your favour has my ignorance been destroyed, and I have gained memory (of my duties); I am (now) free from doubt; I shall nowdo (fight) as told by you!

2. Destroyed is my delusion; through Thy grace, O Achutya, knowledge is gained by me. I stand forth free from doubt. I will act according to Thy word.

3. My bewilderment has vanished away; I have gotten remembrance by Thy Grace, O NeverFalling. I stand free from doubt. I will do Thy word.

4. My bewilderment is destroyed; I have gained memory through thy favour, O stable one. I am established; my doubt is gone; I will do thy word.

In addition to being totally without rhythm No. 1 has the disadvantage of a pointless inversion of word order and of quite unnecessary explanations in brackets. If any reader has got as far as this in the poem and yet still needs to be told what it is that Arjuna now remembers and what it is that he proposes to do, he must be so exceptionally inattentive as not to be worth catering for. No. 2 is better; but as the title Achutya will convey nothing to the mind of the reader, it seems better to translate it, as the other three translators have done. And is there any point in trying to preserve, as all the translators do, the Sanskrit idiom “get memory” for “to remember”? In No. 3 the rhythm would be better without the “away” after “vanished,” and “away” adds nothing to the sense. But I think No. 3 (by Professor Barnett) is the best of the four. No. 4 is spoiled by “I am established,” which, though a correct etymological gloss on the original, is not a possible way of saying “I have taken my stand” — that is to say, “I am resolved.”

I suggest something of this kind:

I don’t pretend that this is more than a pale echo of the original; but I think it has a shade more force and rhythm than the four other versions. No doubt all four translators were aware that they were tackling the finest moment of a fine poem, but this feeling does not seem to me to come through in their translations.

There are indeed in anything one translates certain key passages or lines about which one feels from the start that it is going to be of vital importance to get them exactly right. No makeshift or approximation will do. Such a passage comes at the end of the chapter “Ukifune” in The Tale of Genji. Ukifune, unable to decide between her two lovers, has made up her mind to throw herself into the river. Her maid Ukon pesters her with good advice.

Literally translated the passage runs: “Ukon, space-nearly lying, that doing: ‘Thus only when one thinks about things, because the soul of the person who thinks about things goes astray there are indeed likely to be frightening dreams. Having decided one way or the other, oh that you may somehow get on!' So she sighed. [Ukifune] pressing the soft clothes against her face, lay; that indeed.” The dream referred to is evidently (as commentators have recognized) the dream “too terrible to mention” which Ukifune’s mother had had the night before. I translated the passage: “Ukon now came to sit with her for a little. ‘When a person goes on tormenting herself as you are doing, we all know what happens: the soul gets loose from the body and goes wandering about by itself. That’s why your mother has been having these bad dreams. There’s nothing to worry about. Just make up your mind one way or the other, and it will be all right. At least I hope so,’ she said with a sigh.

“Ukifune lay with the soft bed clothes pressed tight against her face.”

Ukon, of course, is not a peasant. But she is on an infinitely lower rung of the social scale than Ukifune, and this (though I have not attempted to bring it out even in my literal translation) is expressed in the verb forms that she uses. One must make her talk as a maid might conceivably talk to a mistress, but remember that she is the daughter of Ukifune’s old nurse and is an intimate as well as a servant. Then one must make it clear that she is being aggravating and that it is just this continual flow of well-meant and quite useless advice that is driving Ukifune to desperation. Have I elaborated too much, to the point of spoiling the poignancy of the passage? I don’t think so; looking at it some twenty-five years later I do not want to alter it, and even feel that if Ukon had been speaking English, this is more or less what she would have said.

There is not any other translation of the passage with which I can compare mine. If there were,

I might suddenly feel that I did, after all, make rather a mess of it. In saying this I have in mind a passage in the No play Sotoba Komachi:

That was the way I translated it in 1921, and it is not bad verse. But I must confess that when recently I read Sam Houston Brock’s translation of Sotoba Komachi in Donald Keene’s anthology,

I was rather shaken. His translation of this passage is:

I felt at once that my translation was hopelessly overladen and wordy and that it tried in a quite unwarrantable way to improve upon the original. Not that I am altogether satisfied with Mr. Brock’s. If mine is too poetical, his I think is a shade too prosy, and nothing will convince me that “Of her brow” makes a very good line of verse.

There is a wonderful passage in the Chinese novel Monkey where Tripitaka after his Illumination sees his discarded earthly body drifting downsteam: “Tripitaka stared at it in consternation. Monkey laughed. ‘Don’t be frightened, Master,’ he said, ‘that’s you.’ And Pigsy said, ‘It’s you, it’s you.’ Sandy clapped his hands. ‘It’s you, it’s you,’ he cried. The ferryman too joined in the chorus. ‘There you go,’ he cried. ‘My best congratulations.’ ” In her paraphrase of the book (1930) Helen Hayes says, “A dead body drifted by them, and the Master saw it with fear. But the Monkey, ever before him, said: ‘Master, do not be alarmed. It is none other than your own!’ The Pilot also rejoiced as he turned to say ‘This body was your own ! May you know joy!’ ”

Vital (in the original) is the repetition of the two simple words shih ni, “It’s you,” and if one gets bored with the repetition and represents the words as only having been spoken by two people, it seems to me that one spoils the whole passage. The second thing to note is that when the ferryman says “My best congratulations” (k’o ho) he is using the ordinary everyday formula of congratulation that one would use if one met an official who had had a rise, and that it is with whimsical intention that it is applied to Tripitaka’s advance from ordinary human status to Buddhahood. Helen Hayes’s “May you know joy!” so far from being a banal formula (which is what is required) is something that no one has ever said to anybody.

THIS brings us to the question of voices. When translating prose dialogue one ought to make the characters say things that people talking English could conceivably say. One ought to hear them talking, just as a novelist hears his characters talk. That sounds obvious and undeniable. But it does not seem to be the principle upon which translators, whether from Far Eastern or European languages, generally work.

Take for example Beatrice Lane’s translation of the No play Tsuchigumo. A concubine called Kocho (Butterfly) is made to say “Bearing medicine given by the doctor, I, Kocho, have come. Pray tell him so.” Can you hear anyone saying that? A literal translation would be “Please tell his Honour that Butterfly has come with some medicine for him from the Chief Physician.”

One does not have to be a literary genius in order to avoid translator’s pidgin of the kind I have just quoted. One simply has to develop the habit of hearing voices talk. The reader who cannot consult the original will of course tend to think that “queer” English is the result of a praiseworthy fidelity to the author’s idiom and may have a comforting sense that he is getting right inside the author’s mind. I have even been told that translations which read well cannot possibly give a true idea of the original. But as a matter of fact when, as in the case quoted above, one compares bits of queer translation with the text, one generally finds that the oddity is completely arbitrary and represents no native idiom at all. People, in fact, who write very well when expressing their own ideas tend (unless they have been to some extent schooled in translation) to lose all power of normal expression when faced with a foreign text. I once edited a volume in which a number of archaeologists, all of them excellent writers when expressing their own ideas, undertook to translate articles by German colleagues. The matter of the articles was purely technical and concrete; the translators knew exactly what had to be said. But one and all they were unable to produce anything but the most abject translator’s pidgin. The sight of German sentences put them completely out of their stride.

I HAVE used the expression “schooled in translation” because I believe that even if it is a question of translating literature (and not merely technical information) there is a lot that could be learned. It is not, after all, as though a translator has to be or even had better be a creative genius. His role is rather like that of the executant in music, as contrasted with the composer. He must start with a certain degree of sensibility to words and rhythm. But I am sure that this sensibility could be enormously stimulated and increased, just as musical sensibility obviously can be.

A French scholar (whom I greatly admire) wrote recently with regard to translators: “Qu’ils s’effacent derrière les textes et ceux-ci, s’ils ont été vraiment compris, parleront d’eux-mêmes.” Except in the rather rare case of plain concrete statements such as “The cat chases the mouse” there are seldom sentences that have exact wordfor-word equivalents in another language. It becomes a question of choosing between various approximations. One can’t, for example, say in English “Let them efface themselves behind the texts.” One has to say something like “They should efface themselves, leaving it to the texts to speak,” and so on. I have always found that it was I, not the texts, that had to do the talking. Hundreds of times I have sat for hours in front of texts the meaning of which I understood perfectly, and yet been unable to see how they ought to be put into English in such a way as to reembody not merely a series of correct dictionary meanings, but also the emphasis, the tone, the eloquence of the original.

“Toute recherche esthétique,” the French scholar continues, “va contre la bonne foi du traducteur.” I would rather say that the true work of the translator begins with “recherche esthétique.” What comes before that — knowledge of the foreign language — is of course essential as a foundation, but it is a matter of linguistics and has nothing to do with the art that I am discussing. There do of course exist texts in which only logical meaning, and not feeling, is expressed. But particularly in the Far East they are exceedingly rare. The appeal, even in philosophical texts, has always been to emotion rather than to logic.

When I had been translating Chinese poetry for about six years, guided metrically by instinct alone, I discovered that I had been unconsciously obeying a certain rule. This was: to have one stress to each Chinese syllable. The stressed syllables could come side by side, as in

On the hígh hílls nó créature stírs

I have stíll to trável in my sólitáry bóat.

This gave something which Gerard Manley Hopkins (whom I had not then read) called, I think, “sprung rhythm.” I did not use rhyme because I found that to do so carries one too far away from the original. But exactly what sounds one uses at the end of a line is as important if one is not rhyming as it is if one is using rhyme, and a proper rhythmical relation between the lines is as important in free verse as it is in standard, traditional meters. It is true, however, that the tangles into which rhymers get themselves are sometimes almost incredible. A translator who shall be nameless has the two lines:

Believe it or not, all that the original says is

At the same time, though he has made such a mess here, I don’t question that the translator was right in using rhyme, because all his experience and practice had been in writing rhymed poetry. The translator must use the tools that he knows best how to handle. And this reflection reminds me at once of what Lin Shu, the great early nineteenth-century translator of European fiction into Chinese, said when he was asked why he translated Dickens into ancient Chinese instead of into modern colloquial. His reply was: “Because ancient Chinese is what I am good at.”

There are indeed so many lessons about translation to be learned from the story of this extraordinary man that I want to devote quite a bit of space to him. Let me introduce him to you by quoting from the preface to his translation of The Old Curiosity Shop:

“I once went into retreat, shutting myself up in one room for weeks on end. All day the people of the house passed to and fro outside, and although I could not see them I was soon able to distinguish their footsteps and know infallibly who was passing my door.

“I have a number of friends who from time to time bring me Western books. I cannot read any Western language, but these friends translate them aloud to me and I have come to be able to distinguish between the different styles of writing as surely as I recognized the footsteps of the people in my house.”

LIN SHU (1852-1924) was already famous as a writer of essays and criticism in a terse, clear, and vigorous style of literary Chinese when, more or less accidentally, his career as a translator began. In 1893 a young friend called Wang Tzu-jen, who had just returned from studying in France, brought him a copy of Dumas’s novel La Dame aux Camélias and translated it to him viva voce, in ordinary Chinese colloquial. Lin Shu began turning this translation into literary Chinese. It was rather an odd thing to do because, although short stories were sometimes written in literary Chinese, no Chinese novel had ever been in anything but colloquial. The translation was published, and was an immense success.

During the next twenty-five years he published about 160 translations. Wang Tzu-jen, to whom he was deeply devoted, was never again available as a collaborator, and seems to have died rather young. But two of Wang’s nephews knew French and collaborated in various works. One of them, twenty years later, helped Lin Shu to translate Bernardin de Saint-Pierre’s Paul et Virginie. During the twenty-five years or so when he was translating he used at least sixteen different collaborators. Most of them were gifted and highly educated young men who had been sent abroad to study practical subjects, such as naval engineering. They soon became engrossed in their careers, diplomatic or governmental, and it was natural that they were not available as collaborators in translation for very long.

There were, of course, great disadvantages in Lin Shu’s method of work. Knowing no foreign language he was, as he more or less confesses in his analogy about footsteps, rather in the position of a blind man at a picture gallery, whose friends are able to tell him everything about the pictures except what they actually look like. Naturally the method led to numerous small mistakes, and he continually received lists of errata from readers all over China. What made him so remarkable as a translator was the immense force and vivacity of his style and the intensity with which he felt the stories that were communicated to him. “People in a book,” he writes in the preface to Charlotte Yonge’s The Eagle and the Dove, “at once become ray nearest and dearest relations. When they are in difficulties I fall into despair; when they are successful, I am triumphant. I am no longer a human being, but a puppet whom the author dangles on his strings.”

He worked with immense rapidity. In 1907 alone he published translations of Scott’s The Talisman and The Betrothed, Dickens’ The Old Curiosity Shop and Nicholas Nickleby, Washington Irving’s Sketch Book, Arthur Morrison’s The Hole in the Wall, and a number of stories by Conan Doyle and other popular writers.

It is perhaps by his translation of Dickens that he is best known. He translated all the principal Dickens novels, and I have compared a number of passages with the original. To put Dickens into classical Chinese would on the face of it seem to be a grotesque undertaking. But the results are not at all grotesque. Dickens, inevitably, becomes a rather different and to my mind a better writer. All the overelaboration, the overstatement and uncurbed garrulity disappear. The humor is there, but is transmuted by a precise, economical style; every point that Dickens spoils by uncontrolled exuberance, Lin Shu makes quietly and efficiently.

You may question at this point whether it is right to call him a translator at all. But at any rate in the case of the Dickens novels it would be misleading, I think, to use such terms as “paraphrase” or “adaptation.” In any case he was the transmitter, on the grandest possible scale, of European fiction to China, and through him Chinese fiction (which had been tied down to ancient storyteller’s conventions that no longer fitted what the contemporary novelist wanted to say) was revitalized when it was at its last gasp.

I HAVE spoken of the lessons that can be drawn from Lin Shu’s achievement. First, then, what matters most is that the translator, whether working at first or at second hand, should be someone who delights in handling words. As another example of what a difference this makes I would cite the Four Cautionary Tales by Harold Acton and Lee Yi-hsieh, who worked together in much the same way as Lin Shu worked with his collaborators.

Whether the translator’s style is contemporary or archaic does not matter. Some writers have been brought up on the Bible and handle a Biblical style with vigor and ease. I would cite as an instance Gordon Luce’s The Glass Palace Chronicle of the Kings of Burma. There is all the difference in the world between the deliberate, consistent archaism of this translation and the pointless occasional Biblicisms (such as “these twain” for “these two”) of unskillful translators.

The second point concerns the selection of books to translate. About 1910 the novelist and translator Tseng P’u called on Lin Shu at Peking and explained to him that all he was doing was to add to the already vast number of T’ang stories a whole series of new T’ang stories that differed from their predecessors only in the fact that their material was taken from foreign sources. Such a procedure, said Tseng P’u, could have no influence on the future course of Chinese literature. He advised him, among other things, to draw up a list of masterpieces, arranged according to period, country, and literary school, and then work through it in an orderly and systematic way. Lin Shu explained that as he knew no foreign language he was not in a position to draw up such a list, and that he saw no alternative to his present method. The books that his friends brought him were all well-known works, and there would be no point in translating them in a prearranged order.

If Tseng P’u had known anything about Lin Shu’s temperament (and it does not appear that he had ever met him before) he would have known how inconceivable it was that Lin should ever work to schedule. Moreover, though Lin Shu translated chiefly because he like translating and did not, so far as I know, ever aim consciously at “influencing the future course of Chinese literature,” the effect of his prodigious lifework was in fact to revolutionize Chinese fiction.

As to the desirability of programs and schedules, the question is one which has again come conspicuously to the fore. As part of a new preoccupation with cultural propaganda, various government-sponsored organizations are busy drawing up lists of works that ought to be translated. Young men with linguistic knowledge but often without any literary gifts are roped in to translate, without any particular enthusiasm, works whose only claim to attention is that they have got into an officially compiled list of “masterpieces.” I have a feeling that this system is not going to work very well. What matters is that a translator should have been excited by the work he translates, should be haunted day and night by the feeling that he must put it into his own language, and should be in a state of restlessness and fret till he has done so. “Masterpieces” were not always masterpieces and may at any minute cease to be so. Many of them owe their place on the list to all sorts of extrinsic and relatively ephemeral causes. Even so comparatively short a time ago as my own childhood a poem the title of which I pronounced “Cassaby Anchor” was a “masterpiece,” and I had to learn it by heart. Perhaps one day it will come into its own again; but meanwhile let the translator read widely and choose the things that excite him and that he itches to put into English. If they are not scheduled as “masterpieces” today, very likely they will be tomorrow.

THE Japanese pin their faith to translation by committee. Twenty people (with one exception all Japanese) seem to have taken part in the translation of the Manyoshu (the earliest Japanese anthology) published in 1940. The results were excellent, but this was due, I am sure, to the fact that the one Westerner concerned was Ralph Hodgson, and it seems clear that he was, in the final stage of the work, given a free hand. The next number in the series was Japanese Noh Drama (1954). Here eighteen people seem to have been involved; but it is clear that no Western poet took the bit between his teeth as I believe Ralph Hodgson to have done in the previous case. The result was that the lyric parts of the plays are simply prose, arbitrarily printed as though it were verse, as in the lines

The Japanese committee finds it “regretable” that Japanese literature has hitherto been chiefly translated by foreigners. I believe, on the contrary, that it is almost always better for the translator to be writing in his own language. It is in the highest degree improbable that a writer will command all the resources of a foreign language even as regards vocabulary, and when it comes to rhythm he is almost certain to be completely floored.

These scattered notes on translation deal principally with the Far East, because that is where my own experience lies. But almost all that I have said would apply equally to translation from European languages. I am afraid I may be felt to have taken rather an Only Tailor in the Street line. I have found fault with a good many other people’s translations and in some cases have implied that I preferred my own. But I think it is natural that anyone should prefer his own translations. After all, he has made them to the measure of his own tastes and sensibilities, and it is as natural that he should prefer them to other people’s as it is that he should prefer to walk in his own shoes.