[Note: The following is an excerpt from a paper that my spouse Katja L. presented to the Contemporary Club, her Cincinnati women’s writing group, on April 9, 2018.]
Dear George,
The art of translation has been of longstanding interest to me. Primarily because I was surrounded by relatives and friends who chattered away in languages that I couldn’t understand. English was the lingua franca of our home but my earliest memories of non-English are of my father and mother speaking in Yiddish. My father loved to recite long passages from King Lear and the Merchant of Venice in Yiddish, whereas my mother belted out musical numbers on our well-tuned upright piano in that hysterically funny sounding language which she spoke effortlessly with her father. My weekends were spent with my grandparents in Germantown, Philadelphia, and they spoke Yiddish in between the hours when we all listened to the Metropolitan Opera on the radio in Italian, German, French, and occasionally Russian. My grandparents would translate the operas into Yiddish (for me), and I would try to make sense of it all by nodding my head and translating a word or two into some shred of understanding.
My grandparents kept an orthodox household which meant we sat in the dark all day Saturday, waiting for our beloved opera to begin and then, for four hours, we sat in silence (except during the Opera Quiz). After the opera, we all went on our Saturday walk, both adults discussing in Yiddish and English the pros and cons of the afternoon opera. If Richard Tucker had sung that afternoon, their lives were made complete. “A cantor and an opera singer!” What could be better! I was five years old at the time this routine began, and to my young ears Yiddish mimicked gibberish — a crazy mixture of sounds that sounded like perpetual jokes. It was the lilt, the tone, the gestures which accompanied it, and the fact that I was unable to read it or understand it which frustrated me.
Moving on to other languages, I remember the relief I felt when I learned to read Hebrew and received a reward (a Bible) for translating the chapter about the Jewess Rebecca in Ivanhoe from Hebrew into English. Of course, the fact that the original was in English helped enormously although there were no Cliff Notes at the time.
In high school I was introduced to Montaigne and Rabelais, and that was when I began to learn the importance of translation. Years were spent learning to understand the vocabulary, word-play, and acrobatic sentence structure of Rabelais, the serious, clarity, and irony of Montaigne. Translation became terribly important to me during my many years of graduate study in French for it introduced me to a different culture, religion, history, ideology, philosophy, and above all meaning.
Graduate study led me to a variety of jobs as a translator. One was with the the Ford Motor Company where I managed to turn a manual into English that had originally been written in Japanese and previously translated into French. This task required numerous trips to the Ford plant in Batavia where I met with the engineers and learned the functions of various auto parts. I then spent hours searching through engineering dictionaries trying to decipher French and English engineering vocabulary.
While working for Laura Strumminger, French historian and Head of the Department of Women’s Studies at UC, I had the opportunity to translate articles and books from the French into English.
When Kings Island was being built, the need for a French-English translator for signage throughout the park was needed, and guess who ended up translating the golf course and miniature golf course signs!
The utilitarian aspects of translation are certainly important. Once in France I had a job as both interpreter and translator for the Bic ballpoint pen company. They were in negotiations with the Texas instrument company called Casio.
It was during this period that I was introduced to some of the conundrums of translation and interpretation.
• Does one interpret word for word?
• Does one interpret bad or ugly remarks or does one smooth things over?
• How does one choose the words one uses?
In November, 2017, I came across a fascinating article in the New York Times Review and Magazine section regarding translation. It referred to a wonderful new translation of Homer’s Odyssey by Professor Emily Wilson of Yale University. Dr. Wilson is the first woman to translate the Odyssey into English. As I read the article and then the book, I wondered if the translator’s gender had an effect on the translation. So many other things have an effect on a translation (scholarship, cultural background, history, linguistic evolution, choice of words) that it seems reasonable to think that gender is an additional factor.
Modern literary scholarship can actually be redefined by the translator’s word choices. The whole question of “what is the story you are trying to tell depends on the word choices that you choose. For example, the Greek word “polytropos” appears in the first line of the Odyssey as a description of Odysseus. A literal translation of “poly” is “many”, and “tropos” means “to turn”. Thus, polytropos literally means “many turns”. However, the translator must choose a word in English that describes Odysseus. Sixty different translations have been made of this word, including: crafty; full of resources; of many a turn; many sided man; deep; sagacious; adventurous; shifty; ingenious; various minded; of many of twists and turns; cunning.
Emily Wilson chose the word “complicated” in order to answer the question, “What sort of man is Odysseus?”….
Love,
Katja
So much enjoyed this! If you have read either A Man Called Ove or Britt Marie Was Here, I think the translation from the Swedish is phenomenal.
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