AN INTERVIEW WITH HELEN LANE

BY CLIFFORD LANDERS

Clifford Landers:You have translated Nobel Prize laureates, among them Octavio Paz.Which of the Spanish-language writers was the most satisfying to translate?

Helen Lane:Easy.When I go to heaven, in the old-fashioned metaphor, I may take under my left arm as my masterwork Augusto Roa Basto's Yo el Supremo, because I think it is already a masterpiece of the 20th century and is certain to be read in the 21st.I try to choose books now at the end of my life that are going to go on.

CL:We are aware that translation is an ephemeral activity, and that 200 years from now, maybe 50 years, the English language will have changed sufficiently so that a new translation will be necessary.How do you feel about that?

HL:This doesn't bother me at all.Take the example of Cervantes and the Quixote.The first contemporary translation of the Quixote, by someone who lived the same years as Cervantes, is still very valuable to scholars.I don't think it matters whether you do the first, the eighth, or the tenth translation; it's going to be useful to someone as a contemporary document, showing how the target language was used at that time.

CL:Is there a need for the classics to be retranslated every generation?Do we need our own Quixote, our own Homer?

HL:I'm a great admirer of Samuel Putnam's translation of the Quixote, but when you read the preface, you realize that he is taking straight an author who I think has been very ironic up to that point.Just for that reason, someone needs to do a more modern translation of the Quixote, more conscious, perhaps, of Cervantes's complex narrative relations to the story he is recounting.

CL:Putnam was the first to translate Jorge Amado in this country.In the 45-plus years since The Violent Land appeared, the English language has changed noticeably.For example, today no one would say "Negro."This is not the translator's fault, merely a case of the language evolving.

HL:Yes.I have no statistics to back me up, but probably English is the language changing fastest, at least lexically.I'm not sure about syntax.I think all languages are extremely conservative about syntactical change.

CL:To what literary sources do we as translators owe the most?

HL:My education is entirely European.The great quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns was all about Homer, and it was really an argument about translation.Someone should write about it and the contemporary argument about multiculturalism.The bone of contention was how Latin a translation of Homer should be.And the Bible, of course, has been the center of translation interest from the beginning, I think.

CL:Is there any writer whom you would like to translate that you have not yet had the opportunity to translate?

HL:I had one.I called my publisher and said that I will go very happily out of this life, but I do wish I had translated Onetti.He said, "That's funny, I have a book of Onetti's and I can't find a translator."That's what my next project will be.It's a short novel called Dejemos hablar al viento.The publisher suggested the title Let's Talk to the Wind!I don't think that will do.[Laughter]Seriously, it has an epigraph by Pound that says "Let the wind speak," so there's nothing to do except reproduce it as the title.

CL:That's a case where the title is in effect prepackaged, but how do you feel about changing titles, syntactically or otherwise?

HL:I'm usually very upset when publishers change titles to vulgar titles to sell.The preeminent example of that is a tragic book by Elena Poniatowska whose subject was the killing of unarmed demonstrators, largely students and onlookers who were nearby residents, in Tlaltelolco Plaza in 1968 by police and soldiers.It had the wonderfully resonant title of La noche de Tlaltelolco, referring of course to Cortés and the Noche Triste.It was changed to Massacre in Mexico!I can give a lot of examples like that.A much more subtle one is a book that I finished not long ago, which was called in Spanish El pez en el agua, Mario Vargas Llosa's story of his participation in the Peruvian election campaign.I entitled it A Fish in Water, without the article, and it was changed to A Fish in the Water, thereby losing the parallelism with the English idiom "a fish out of water."

CL:Do you care to talk on record about the problems you've been having with this publisher?

HL:Absolutely.Since I'm going to court about it and have already hired an attorney, there's no use to be silent.I have always been one of the main translators of Mario Vargas Llosa, and when his memoirs came out I received a letter asking whether I would like to translate them.Of course I said yes immediately.I did the book, had the usual standard contract for translation, was paid the advance--not as much as I usually specify, which is half.It was far less than that.That struck me as not quite right, but I didn't say anything.I finished the very long book and when I received the remainder of the honorarium due me, almost $2000 was gone from it.I discovered it was for copy editing.That is not part of the translator's business.I've never heard of such a thing.They said they had not felt that my translation was "suitable."That rather surprised me, because Mario had never expressed the slightest dissatisfaction with the translation, and I think the author is perhaps a little better judge than the publisher.The latter explained that he had sent it to an outside editor who had made many changes in the text and just incidentally had done some copy editing.I asked to see the "corrected" proofs, and I would say that 95 percent of the $2000 was for just straight copy editing.And the additions were all made to the text I was given, and I don't add to a text without permission of the author.I wouldn't dream of adding whole paragraphs to a text, like the [added] explanatory paragraphs about Peruvian politics.As for my translation being "unsuitable," the very same letter from the publisher offered me the translation of Mario's newest novel!

CL:Since then, hasn't there been an even more egregious effort on the part of the same publisher?

HL:Yes.The second one was even more disturbing, as a precedent for other translators.I had been doing for Farrar, Straus & Giroux, just to see what it was like, translations of books for young readers by Juan María Merino, from Madrid.He had been very pleased with the first two parts of the trilogy; this was the third book, which I submitted a year ago in late September.I have correspondence, which I conserved, so I know they were planning to publish the book.Suddenly, about three weeks ago, I got a letter:"We find that your book is unsuitable for publication," apparently written by a young and naive editor.Her next sentence was, "And besides, the last two books by this author haven't sold very well."[Laughter]I've hired an attorney who's a specialist in copyright, and this is where I would like help from anyone who either knows the law or has had a similar experience and knows exactly what is meant in a contract by an "acceptable" manuscript and whether this must be spelled out in the contract.I feel that it should not take a year for them to notify me that it's not acceptable.I have that in several English contracts; they usually have two months, I think, to warn me if it's unacceptable or needs correction.Incidentally, my surmise that the sudden "unsuitability" of my manuscripts had more to do with the near-bankruptcy of Farrar, Straus & Giroux than with the quality of the translations submitted has been corroborated by the recent regrettable sale of this fine old house to a German publisher.This, of course, will in no way deter my claim for proper reimbursement of my work.

CL:Turning to a more positive aspect of our profession, what advice would you give those who want to begin doing literary translation?

HL:The question means that you too have probably taught translation.It's the first question I'm always asked.My reply these days is that I'm convinced the future of publication lies with small presses.I advise them to publish, even it not for money, with small magazines, or if they can arrange it, with small presses.And, if they already have made some reputation, to approach university presses.I don't think there's very much future with large houses.Also, I don't think it's any use to teach classes in translation with the idea that you are forming professional translators; this would never be my approach in setting up a workshop.

CL:Would you agree, then, that literary translators are born, not made?

HL:[Pause]I think I have to agree.My own translation practice has proved that there is something inexplicable about how you come across the right translation.

CL:Translators have been called "secondary" creators.Would you argue with that definition?

HL:Someday I would like to get together a roomful of translators who are quite familiar with the history of translation and discuss this subject of why we are second-class citizens in the republic of letters.I myself don't know why.I definitely am of the opinion that translations are re-creations, in much the same way that the interpretation of a piece of music by a performing artist or artists is a re-creation.After all, an English text of a work does not exist until the translator creates it, just as a piano interpretation by Horowitz does not exist until he executes it.One of the most pleasant things I ever received in my life was a dedicated copy from Roa Bastos of my translation of his Yo el Supremo, which read, "Thank you so much.You are my first reader in English."I think that expresses exactly what a translator is.I felt that whatever I was doing, at least with Roa Bastos, was the right thing.Octavio Paz once suggested to me that a more modern word for us in our profession would be "transducers," that is to say, "transmitters of energy from one form to another."

CL:A translator must extract the maximum meaning from a text, because every word must be understood.To translate we must first understand.

HL:In my own experience one of the chief teaching tools was the explication de texte.There you learn to look at every single small detail, down to the proportion of consonants and vowels in a poem, for example.That's traditional in France, and it was a wonderful opportunity for learning how really to know a text and know how a text works.It's like taking a watch apart, really.Those were the days of New Criticism, where you just let meanings bat back and forth in the text without ever considering what was outside the text.At least in advanced explication de texte you were to place it first within the author's oeuvre, then within a larger framework of either genre or historic period.

CL:How do you feel about the theory that the author is only one of many who interprets his or her work and that another's interpretation may be equally valid or even more valid?

HL:I'm sure that's true.Let's go back a minute to the Quixote.There are a number of fine translations, both in French and in English, none of them absolutely contemporary.I read these constantly and find that each time something that I haven't thought of when I have reread the Quixote comes up, and I'm sure that happens with any rich, good original.

CL:To what extent is the translator entitled to place his or her own interpretation on certain passages or phrases that are ambiguous in the original?

HL:I'm going to answer what's called in French "Norman style."I'll answer your question by asking you one:How can you help but do this?

CL:Do you do poetic translation?

HL:All the time.It's a great satisfaction to me, and I often relax by working on a poem, but I've never had the courage to do it for publication.

CL:Do you agree with the Nabokov approach--that you don't need to understand the source language in order to translate?

HL:Not at all.Of course we have the paradox of Pound, who is one of our great translators, and that was his method so many times.But unfortunately a Pound comes along about every thousand years.

CL:Is there a crisis in literary translation at present connected to the fact that the publishing industry is rapidly becoming the "book business," in which books are treated like a commodity and the bottom line is what corporations care about?

HL:I've been living in Europe for the past 24 years, and I've worked far more for British publishers during that time, but just a look into American bookstores shows that commercial calculations are not the bottom line but the top consideration.

CL:Your advice to beginning translators is very good.I've often phrased it slightly differently.I tell them:Start small.

HL:Exactly.You must warn enthusiastic beginners about the question of rights because they think they can just jump in and translate anything, not realizing that there's a whole jungle of rights and permissions that every translator either has to have his publisher go through or go through himself.Most neophytes don't know that.

CL:You work in both Spanish and Portuguese.You've indicated that perhaps Portuguese is the more challenging of the two.Is this correct?

HL:My specialty is really avant-garde authors who are trying to do something more than superficial to change their language.Part of the translators' job should be to change the target language.Everything that is imported from these works from different languages eventually should have some effect on the translator's--and the reader's--own language.I feel that in Portuguese I have done avant-garde authors--Nélida Piñon in particular--and I don't feel I know middle-of-the-road, ordinary Portuguese as thoroughly as I know French and Spanish and can't judge how far they're departing from the mainstream.I don't feel that I can evaluate this as well in Portuguese as I do in languages that I have spoken for years.

CL:If one had to choose between having total mastery of the target language or of the source language, which would be more important for the literary translator?

HL:The target language.Absolutely.

CL:Is it possible to be faithful to both the original language author and to your target language reader?

HL:There I think it's easier to answer, because the reader in general doesn't know the source language, and if you are not really a stylist in your own language, he's going to blame the infelicities of the translation on the author, and that's why I answered that a thorough mastery of the target language is so important.There are lots of caveats there.

CL:Does the variety of spoken Spanish present special difficulties for the translator?

HL:Oh yes.I've done maybe six countries and each is almost a language and not a dialect.In the case of Peru, Quechua has had a large impact on the language.It's interesting, because Paraguay is really much more bilingual than Peru.When a word or song in Roa Bastos is in Guarani, you know immediately from the context, but I don't find the underlying Spanish at all different from that of Argentina, which has its own peculiarities.Mexico for me has fewer because I've lived there for 20 years and they don't seem odd to me.

CL:How do you handle dialect?

HL:I don't agree to do a book anymore unless the author is someone I know, and I never agree to do a book unless they're willing--and I know they hate to do it, and I don't blame them at all--to go back to a work that for them is finished.They're generous enough to answer translators' questions, especially those involving local or dialect terms that present problems for me, but I don't do a book anymore unless I have a pre-established agreement with the author.For years I did French, which is my first [foreign] language, and I had corresponded with one particularly difficult author to whom I sent a list of 30 queries.The only answer I got was, "You do not seem to have understood my book."I thought that was clear from the fact that I was sending him the questions.But I have never had a Spanish-language author refuse to answer queries.And in Brazil, Nélida Piñon answered one thousand questions for Republic of Dreams, and to the thousandth question she was there, she was interested.

CL:So you don't translate deceased authors.

HL:Up until now, I have never tried to arrange to do such a translation, but recently I was offered a wonderful chance to participate in the Lampadia Foundation's series of 19th-century classics which deal in some way with Latin American nation-foundation.I have already asked for Fray Servando Teresa de Mier's Relación de su vida to be reserved for me, and I am greatly looking forward to solving all sorts of new problems involved in working with a non-contemporary text.

CL:One of the things that we as literary translators deal with is culture.How well can one translate from a culture with which he or she is not familiar?

HL:There is so much facile talk about translators being bridges between cultures.That's the typical metaphor.I'm not sure that's possible except by translating well the author you're working on.You're not trying to import a whole culture, just that author and his lenses for seeing his culture.You cannot take the metaphor too literally.Bridges are structures that should go two ways.In most translations we are being too imperialistic; we are imposing the English on other countries.When the Bible was brought to Mexico, the missionaries found that the Indians did not have any idea of what wheat bread was, or why it had significance as a sacrificial symbol, and therefore they had to do a great deal of impromptu explaining of the Bible text in terms of tortilla-Hosts.Today's translation of the Bible into little-known languages is done, I understand, with much more thoughtfulness concerning such cross-cultural differences.

CL:So the culture, you feel, comes along in the train of the words we translate?

HL:I think you have to set aside your projected role of being a bridge between cultures and tell yourself I am translating Jorge Amado into English, and what is going to come through will do so through Jorge's eyes.I find food terms a large problem in translation.Let's say you take the cowardly way out and use the native word.Your reader doesn't know if the dessert thus presented is a marvelous creation or a simple custard in a dish.With stews I often mention one or two ingredients and just leave it at that.I think a tiny interpolation--usually the authors approve it--is the most natural way around it.

CL:How do you feel about translators' footnotes in fiction?

HL:I think you'd have to ask publishers how they feel about it.So much depends on their willingness, or unwillingness, to have footnotes.That's not my decision.I agree that footnotes destroy the mimetic effect in fiction, and I don't think they belong in a novel except under very extraordinary circumstances.In Roa Bastos we did a glossary at the end of the Guarani terms; no one in America really knows Guarani, unlike German or Russian.I was fortunate because Milagros Esquerres had already prepared an annotated edition of Yo el Supremo in French and she collaborated with us.

CL:Have you found the acquisition of specialized vocabulary, such as agrarian terminology, to be a difficulty?

HL:I can speak to that easily because the book I'm currently translating won the Mobil Oil Pegasus Prize for literature.The author is a chemist; it's his first novel.Petch Peden and Gregory Rabassa were two of the members of the jury.A fabulous amount of research was done on the book, because it's set in revolutionary France in the 18th century, which was when alchemy turned into chemistry.Since the author had a vivid interest in chemistry, I found I also would have to have a vivid interest in chemistry!That's one of the great reasons I keep wondering why everyone doesn't want to be a translator.We have a chance to learn so many things that we never would have been interested in otherwise.

CL:I couldn't end the interview without the obligatory question of how you got started as a translator.

HL:Well, I always thought I would be a university professor in Romance languages.I took a degree in Romance languages and linguistics at UCLA.My husband was an automobile designer who went about the whole world organizing the entire automobile industry of a country, which meant that every five months we lived in either another country, another continent, or another hemisphere.And that simply doesn't go with an academic career.Looking around to see what I could do with what I had, I came up with translation and have been perfectly satisfied ever since.

CL:You began translating French.How did you acquire Spanish?

HL:We lived in Mexico, where my husband reorganized the Mexican car industry.At one time and another, we lived very nearly 20 years in Mexico.

CL:Finally, is there anything a neophyte translator should be aware of?Are there any caveats you would add?

HL:Surely not to expect fair monetary rewards.Every translator knows we are vastly underpaid.The chances that translation will be a full-time occupation are very, very small.In some subtle way I want to get it across to students that this is very seldom a full-time profession.I think my own approach is to teach translation as a way to read good literature rather than training for a profession.

CL:Do you have a theory of translation that is reflected in your works, or would you term yourself a pragmatic translator?

HL:In Doug Robinson's book The Translator's Turn, of which I'm a great fan, he says that one of the things that's deadening in translation is the old idea of fidelity, which is understood much too narrowly, either as word-for-word fidelity or even as sense-for-sense or effect-for-effect fidelity.I think I have only one rule, and I will be categorical:I think that I would almost never interfere, in a prose translation, with the basic syntax, what Chomsky would call the deep syntax, of English word order.To me, syntax is the backbone of a language.I think that's my only rule.But I have violated even that one.Four of us--myself, Ronald Christ, Gene Bell-Villada, a professor of Spanish, and Catarina Parra, Nicanor's daughter--are collaborating on translating Lumpérica, a novel by Diamela Eltit, a Chilean writer, who I think is going to be one of the great authors of the 21st century, and the first I know of who is taking Spanish pretty much apart.I think Spanish is much more conservative than English in this respect, and no author that I've read or had contact with has decided, "I'm going to rip Spanish apart and put it together again, as Joyce did in English."Diamela comes closest to this, much with lexicon but more with syntax, interestingly enough.After Joyce and the modernist poets in English, and Diamela in Spanish, nothing has been the same, and it's doubtful whether it ever will be.Something broke open and tremendous new horizons were visible; that probably comes along once in many, many hundreds of years for language.

--Albuquerque, November 5, 1994

Translation Review, Volume 47, 1995.