TRANSLATION CRITICISM

By Rainer Schulte

The awkwardness and helplessness widespread among critics faced with the task of having to review a literary work in translation are reflected in the limited vocabulary consistently repeated to characterize published translations. Reviewers of translations are frequently reluctant to comment on the nature of a translation. At times, they don't even realize that they are reviewing a translation and they treat the translated work as if it had originally been written in English.

The expressions used to characterize translations are predictable: "beautifully translated," "a fine job," "this apparently ungraceful translation," "The translation holds up well," "sensitive and truly faithful in spirit," "the language in this disciplined translation is deliberately flat, unheroic, oddly nervous," "The translation, though able, is not brilliant," or "the translation is adequate, but somewhat wooden and pedestrian; it also seems insensitive to certain of the cultural references."

It is obviously easy to criticize the total inadequacy of these comments, but perhaps it is time to reflect on the responsibilities of a critic who engages in reviewing translations. What is the function of translation criticism and who should be doing it? The critic of works in translation should be familiar with the source language, the cultural and aesthetic context of the original work, and the differences of linguistic perceptions that exist between the source language and English.

Very few critics are translators themselves, and therefore, they are not tuned in to the specific ways of thinking, the rigorous research, and the re-creative activities undertaken by the translator to produce a successful translation. Naturally, it is difficult to say what a successful translation might be. There are no ultimate criteria for a successful translation, but there are criteria that can be determined to establish whether a translation did justice to the original source-language text.

Ideally speaking, critics should place foreign authors within the context of their entire oeuvre, their language, and their culture.Translators provide the reading public with a finished work, a final draft that does not convey any sense of the decision-making process and of the frustrations involved in the preparation of the final draft. The translated word looks awfully calm on the printed page. It does not speak of all the research and thought processes that were necessary to make the translation possible. While translators deliver the final product of their translation activities to us the readers, a product that seems to be immutable in its finality, translation critics should reopen the dialogue between the translated text and the original work. They profile the incompatible elements that become apparent in the act of cultural transferals. They recognize the foreign in the original texts and evaluate how successfully the foreign has been recreated in English. They draw boundary lines around cultural and historical phenomena that don't find exact reproductions in the receptor language. And finally, they open our eyes to the refined perspectives that cultures have developed throughout the ages and make us appreciate the foreignness in the source-language text.

Naturally, the best-qualified person to undertake and implement this kind of criticism would be the translator himself or herself. But it is unrealistic to think that translators will take the time to pursue translation criticism on a continuous basis. In the realm of literary criticism we know that some of the most insightful pieces on writers have been written by other writers. One might remember Henry James' essay on Hawthorne, which still today carries the excitement of one writer thinking himself into the creative process of another. The translator as reviewer would be equipped to engage in a similar intense reconstruction of a given translation.
Translators spend most of their time on the actual translation of texts, which strenuously restricts the time that might be dedicated to the critical dimensions of assessing and evaluating an already existing translation. Here begins the relatively new journey of the translation critic, whose activities could easily bring about new scholarly vistas in the context of literary and cultural studies. The ideal critic of translation would be able to assess the linguistic, literary, and aesthetic dimensions of the source language, would be familiar with the foreign language and the particular ways of seeing and hearing in the linguistic structure of that language in order to detect the differences of perception that exist between two languages. Only then can we expect a realistic discussion of how successfully or unsuccessfully the nuances of the source-language text have been recreated in the new language. Thus, the reviewer of translations would establish a valuable dialogue between the original work and the translation.

If the critic of translations is thoroughly familiar with the source-language and the literary and cultural landscape of the writer's country, then such a well-oriented bi-cultural critic could become a major force in channeling and directing the cross-cultural exchange of literary works. Because of the critic's extensive knowledge of both the original language and the receptor language, he can play a major role in selecting those works that deserve to be translated from a foreign language into English. For a book to travel successfully from one language into another, the aesthetic and cultural ambiance of the new language must be taken into consideration. Often, a work that is well received by readers in the country of origin fails to attract the attention and the appreciation of the people in the new language. This could be said particularly for works that are deeply rooted in the history and social habits of the source-language, and therefore display specific linguistic, cultural and historical idiosyncrasies that cannot find an echo in the new environment of the receptor language. To facilitate the cross-cultural flow of literary works we need are people who can stand in both cultures at the same time, people who see the cultural differences, and have a sense of the refined vibrations feeding two cultures so that one can enrich the other through the process of translation. Naturally, not every literary work can be translated and obviously some should not be translated, but the mechanism of choosing which works should be translated can be revitalized and placed into a meaningful context through the bi-cultural expertise of a critic.

In the regular sense of the word, critics are supposed to provide the reader with entrances into works. In the context of translation, critics could open entrances not only into the new work, but also into the complex texture of another culture. Indeed a noble and worthwhile enterprise. In the discussion of translated works, critics can also provide another function: they can take the reader from the translatable to the untranslatable in each work, thereby focusing on those moments in a literary text that do not find an immediate equivalence in another language and culture. In pointing to these differences, both critic and reader will comprehend the ways of seeing that are predominant in the respective cultures. What attracts us to literary and artistic works is their ability to take us into different ways of seeing and perceiving. Critics can help us in finding entrance to these different perspectives of ordering the world and make us feel comfortable in that new environment since they have prepared us for these ways of interpreting the world.

Rooted in their bi-cultural orientation, critics will be able to detect the sameness in the differences of two cultural perspectives and can use that recognition as the starting point in their presentation of translated works to the reader. Theirs would be a continuous process of refinement, in the sense that they would take readers deeper and deeper into the subtle ways of cultural and aesthetic thinking prevalent in different cultures, which would ultimately facilitate the enjoyment of translated works.

Seen in this light, critics of translation have to fulfill a formidable task, yet a very important and useful one. They draw the readers toward the foreign in another culture, make them feel comfortable with the unusual and strange in that culture, and heighten the enjoyment of living through the rich texture of emotional and aesthetic experiences reflected in the structures of a foreign language.