Can a good translator be a bad writer?

A few days ago, I asked a private Facebook literary translation group whether it is possible to be a good translator and a poor writer. How do translations fail (other than misunderstanding the original language)?

My post provoked a couple dozen comments, many of which agreed with Daleth who said, "No. A translator IS a writer. A translator who is a bad writer is also, by definition, a bad translator. Just because you can accurately convey the meaning of a text, that doesn't mean you're a good translator." Rachel said, "If I say (as I do) that a good translator has to be a good writer, I mean that they have to be good at putting words together in their own language."

Kevan expanded on that: "A bad writer cannot be a good translator. They may be able to fully understand the source text and produce a faithful translation, but will that final product be good writing unto itself? No. There are numerous, sometimes countless, ways to render a thought into a language, and the talent and skill of the translator in writing his/her mother tongue will guide those choices. A talented translator will give us natural, elegant prose worthy of being called literature. A poor writer who translates will give us clunky, inelegant, tone-deaf prose, that while grammatical and conveying the meaning of the source text, will be unpleasant to read."

Silvia wrote: "You have to be a good writer, otherwise it is a literal translation that fails to capture cultural elements and metaphorical meanings."

My own suspicion is that the ability to translate is one skill and the ability to write clear, fluent English is another. Some of those who commented define "good translator" as someone who writes clear (appropriate? accurate) English. But I think that begs the question. Certainly the opposite is true: Someone can be a fine writer in English and be a terrible translator.

What is going on in "The Factory"?

The factory in Hiroko Oyamada's novel The Factory is immense. It has apartment complexes and housing that looks “like a real suburban development full of tidy two-story homes,” supermarkets, a bowling alley, karaoke, a fishing center, hotel, “more restaurants than you can count” not including employee cafeterias, a post office, bank, travel agency, a couple of book stores, an optometrist, a barber, an electronics store, a gas station, a museum (with works by factory artists and employees, but still worth a look), its own bus and taxi companies. 

The factory is much bigger than the average town. It has its own mountains, forests, and river. It has its own Shinto shrine and priest. “All we’re missing now,” says the employee who is acting as a guide for a new employee, “is a graveyard. I guess we don’t have a temple, either.”

For all this we never learn what the factory manufactures, what it produces.

The book follows three employees. Yoshiko Ushiyama, after going through five jobs in four years, is hired by the factory and feels fortunate to be taken on as a part-timer. In college, she focused on the Japanese language and how people communicate, particularly the use of language in print media. She’s hired by the Print Services department as part of the Staff Support team. Her job is to shred documents. That’s it. Shred bins full of documents three or four days a week

Yoshio Furufue, a graduate research assistant in bryology, the study of mosses and liverworts, is hired to determine how to grow moss on the factory’s roofs. “We have a few different organizations taking care of our trees, flowers, roads, and streetlights,” says the PR guy explaining the job. “Green-roofing has been a real blind spot, thought, and that’s why HQ finally decided to step in and deal with it on their own.”

The third employee, a former systems engineer for a small company, is hired as a proof reader. Packets arrived daily and “our job was to take whatever we found in the packet—documents of various types and formats—and proof them. In some files, there were additional materials, like manuscripts or newspaper articles. If that was the case, we were supposed to check the document against them for accuracy.”

Aside from evoking the mind-numbing routine of these jobs—although Furufue lives in factory housing, studies the local mosses, and determines they will not grow on the factory’s roofs—Oyamada captures the office bureaucracy, the plant tour, the after-hours drinking, a hunt for the Forest Pantser—a middle-aged man “who ran around the forest trying to pull the pants of men and women of all ages.”

And the story begins to slide from the realistic—or recognizable, if exaggerated—world into something stranger. Grayback Coypu, a rodent, “similar to the spiny rat”; Washer Lizards, “the order of scaly reptiles”; and Factory Slags, “a member of the order Pelecaniformes, related to the cormorant” begin to appear. Mutations provoked by the factory? And what does the factory do to the humans who work within it?

Hiroko Oyamada, who was born in Hiroshima in 1983, based the novel on her experiences working as a temp for an automaker’s subsidiary. The Factory won the Shincho Prize for New Writers, and The Hole, her next novel, won the Akutagawa Prize. 

David Boyd’s translation from the original Japanese is clear and fluent. The publisher or book designer did the book no favors by limiting the number of paragraphs. Because Amazon Japan does not have a “Look Inside the Book” feature, I cannot tell if this is how the original appears. In the New Directions edition, paragraphs go on for pages, one quote following another like a line of ants. It saves space, and it may have been an art director’s idea to have the reader drag herself through the story the way the characters have to drag themselves through their days at work, but it make hard reading.

Nevertheless, for anyone interested in contemporary Japanese literature, it’s worth the effort.

There's more disfunction than love on South Green Road

Janice Spector’s debut novel, 2207 South Green Road, is an account of the lives of an extended Jewish family in a suburb of Cleveland, Ohio. It’s set in the early 1960s; a time marker is two characters going to a first-run showing of “El Cid” with Charlton Heston, which was released in 1961.

We meet the family patriarch Morris Katofsky; his hypochondriac wife Becky; his daughter Esther; Esther’s pharmacist husband Harold; Esther and Howard’s overweight and lonely ten-year-old daughter Edna; Morris’s brother Abe (who has a gambling addiction); Morris’s two goyim employees in his floor-scraping business Willie and George (while the family is barely religious, many have strong feelings about non-Jews; a point the author underlines); Becky’s younger sisters Ceal and Libby; Ceal’s husband Al; Libby’s husband Joe; Becky’s successfully brothers Arthur and Izzie; Arthur’s wife Millie; Izzie’s wife Ethel; Lurlene, Morris and Becky’s black cleaning lady(?), housekeeper(?); and Ida.

Ida is interesting. Ceal and Al have a brain-damaged child Rosalie. When Ceal realized she needed help to care for Rosalie, she decided she needed a full-time resident aide. The agency sent “a slight, bespectacled Negro girl, holding all her belongings in a large brown paper bag.” The agency says Ida is 18; Ceal thinks she is no more than13, but welcomes her anyway. Indeed, Ceal and Al unofficially adopt her as a member of the family.

According to the author’s website, Spector “received her first awards for story and playwriting in the sixth grade in University Heights, Ohio. She attended college in Brooklyn, New York, and began her career at The New York Times, where she worked on the foreign and metro news desks. After relocating to Northern Virginia, she focused on political and media consulting. Her last employment was as a speech writer for a U.S. Congressional Committee. Most recently, she was a member of the National Finance Committee for Biden for President.”

While the novel is filled with incident—and stuffed with characters—there is not a lot of drama. The family celebrates Morris’s 63^rd birthday. Abe, who owns a candy store, has to borrow $1,000. Becky, with the connivance of a malleable Dr. Gold, becomes addicted to pain killers. Edna is put in the hospital to have her tonsils and adenoids taken out. Becky disappears for a while, frightening the family. Abe disappears, sending Morris to Florida to retrieve him. Becky begins to haunt Emergency Rooms in regional hospitals in her search for drugs. Harold, Esther, and Edna go on a vacation trip to Washington, D.C.

Howard is not a very sympathetic character. When Edna accidentally puts her hand through the storm door glass badly slashing her wrist and arm, Harold “refused to come even when they hollered that Edna was hurt. After all, he reasoned, it’s not like there isn’t anyone to take her to the hospital. He was entitled to his relaxation and it was Saturday night. Bonanza was on TV—he wasn’t going to miss that.” 

Although 2207 South Green Road is subtitled “a novel of love and dysfunction,” the incidents of disfunction tend to swamp the examples of love. For example, when the family would go to White Castle, Joe ordered a cheeseburger with grilled onions, ketchup bread-and-butter pickles, French fries, and birch beer. “After all the orders had been placed, Joe’s wife Libby would inform the server, ‘We need to make a change. My husband will have a plain hamburger. Nothing on it. No fries. No birch beer. He can have water.’” Perhaps it was her way of showing love.

In any case, 2207 South Green Road is an interesting evocation of one family’s life.

Interestingly, 2207 South Green Road is an actual address in the Cleveland suburb. You can look it up on Google Maps, which I did, and here it is. 

Intriguing meditations on translation, writing, and literature

The little art Kate Briggs writes about is translation. She attributes the description to Helen Lowe-Porter, the first translator of Hermann Mann’s Buddenbrooks and The Magic Mountain. Briggs’s book is an extraordinarily rich series of meditations—I hesitate to call them essays, some are no more than a sentence—on writing, literature, translation.

Briggs herself is a translator and, based on the evidence within This Little Art, was simultaneously translating Ronald Barthes’s The Preparation of the Novel as she wrote the book. Because I’ve never read Barthes, Briggs’s writing about him and her engagement with his lecture notes has piqued my interest; I now have two books of his waiting on my to-read shelf.

Until I began doing it I never gave translation much thought. With my interest in things Japanese, I was aware I could not have read Kawabata, Mishima, or Tanizaki without their translators. I heard the rumor that Kawabata would not have won the Nobel Prize in 1968 (the first Japanese to do so) had the judges not been able to read his works in translation. But what is there to say about it this little art? One so little that publishers occasionally leave the translator’s name off a book’s cover.

As it turns out there’s lots to say. And Briggs says a lot to say and says it well: “When I teach translation (I am a translator and a writer and a tutor), I am often surprised by how often students are surprised to discover that translating involves writing, that its most vital prerequisite is an interest in writing, for the reason that written translations have to be written.”

That made me wonder whether it is possible be a good translator and a poor writer? How do translations fail (other than misunderstanding the original)? My questions provoked a lively discussion among a private translators group on Facebook (and I will post about it). But what does a translator do these days in contrast, apparently, to the time when the goal was replace every word in the original language (then usually Greek or Latin) with an equivalent English word. 

(Do that and you get something like: “The friends him they abandon, the father not approve the his decision, only the mother him is close” from “Gli amici lo abbandonano, il padre non approva la sua decisione, solo la madre gli è vicina.”)

Briggs quotes Douglas Robinson: “Translators are never, and should never be forced to be (or to think of themselves as), neutral, impersonal transferring devices. Translators’ personal experiences—emotions, motivations, attitudes, associations—are not only allowable in the formation of a working [translation], they are indispensable.”

She says that the translator knows that the work “she is translating is not hers: she knows that it didn’t originate with her; it not something that she has already written or said.” Indeed, she may believe she’s not capable of writing something like the original, “and perhaps this is part of its appeal.”

Barthes cites Julio Cortázar, who translated Defoe into Spanish, as writing, “I would advise a young writer who is having difficulty writing—if it’s friendly to offer advice—that he should stop writing for himself for a while and do translation; that he should translate good literature and one day he will discover that he is writing with an ease he didn’t have before.”

This Little Art is not light reading (or not for me). It raises all kinds of interesting questions. What do you do if you are translating from the German (or whatever) and a character speaks briefly in French (or whatever)? Leave the French and trust your English-speaking readers will get the gist? Translate it into English and tag it “she said in French”? 

(To indicate characters were speaking Japanese in one of my novels, I italicized that dialogue rather than tag it. I’m not sure that works either.)

What do you do if you’re translating Barthes (or whoever) into English and he himself translates into French Japanese haiku that have already been translated into English—and he does not cite a source? Briggs managed to identify the source and then struggled to identify the poems Barthes translated. She then apparently went back to the English. Forget the original Japanese.

But while This Little Art may not be light reading, it is certainly worth reading if you have any interest in translation, writing, or literature. Indeed it’s worth reading more than once.  And although it does not have an index or a bibliography, it does have extensive notes with enough citations to keep a diligent student occupied for a good long while.

Go for the great virtues, not the little ones

One of my social media acquaintances noted recently that he was rereading Natalia Ginzburg's slim essay collection The Little Virtues. He reads it once a year, and has done so for twenty years. Wow. I almost never reread something. With an endorsement like that, I thought I ought to look into it.

I've known the Italian author "Natalia Ginzburg" for years, but The Little Virtues is her first work I've read. Her work explored family relationships, politics during and after the Fascist years and World War II, and philosophy. She wrote novels, short stories and essays, for which she received the Strega Prize and Bagutta Prize. An activist, for a time in the 1930s she belonged to the Italian Communist Party. In 1983 she was elected to Parliament from Rome as an Independent. Born in Palermo, Sicily in 1916, Ginzburg spent most of her youth in Turin with her family, as her father in 1919 took a position with the University of Turin. Her father, Giuseppe Levi, a renowned Italian histologist, was born into a Jewish Italian family, and her mother, Lidia Tanzi, was Catholic. Her parents were secular and raised Natalia, her sister Paola (who would marry Adriano Olivetti) and her three brothers as atheists. Their home was a center of cultural life, as her parents invited intellectuals, activists and industrialists. At age 17 in 1933, Ginzburg published her first story, "I bambini," in the magazine Solaria.

In 1938, she married Leone Ginzburg, and they had three children together, Carlo, Andrea, and Alessandra. Their son Carlo Ginzburg became a historian. Although Natalia Ginzburg was able to live relatively free of harassment during World War II, her husband Leone was sent into internal exile because of his anti-Fascist activities, assigned from 1941–1943 to a village in Abruzzo. She and their children lived most of the time with him. Opponents of the Fascist regime, she and her husband secretly went to Rome and edited an anti-Fascist newspaper, until Leone Ginzburg was arrested. He died in 1944 after suffering severe torture, including crucifixion, in jail. In 1950, Ginzburg married again, to Gabriele Baldini, a scholar of English literature. They lived in Rome. He died in 1969; she died in 1991. (Thank you, Wikipedia.)

The Little Virtues was published in 1985 and the eleven essays, fluently translated by Dick Davis, were published in newspapers and magazines between 1944 and 1962. They range from a memoir of the time in Abruzzo to comparing and contrasting herself with her husband ("He always feels hot. I always feel cold . . . He speaks several languages well. I do not speak any well . . . ") to a critique of England and English life ("English shop assistants are the stupidest shop assistants in the world . . . The restaurants are either too crowded or too empty. And they are either stiff and priggish or squalid . . . ") She wrote that last in 1960; England's restaurants have changed.

What makes The Little Virtues worth reading once a year are Ginzburg's essays on her vocation, on human relationships, and on the little virtues. Her vocation, of course, is to write. "When I sit down to write I feel extraordinarily at ease, and I move in an element which, it seems to me,  I know extraordinarily well; I use tools that are familiar to me and they fit snugly in my hands." That, it seems to me, is a good way to tell if what you do is your vocation (I call it my calling) or just a job. It works whether you are a carpenter, plumber, welder, baker, programmer, or poet.

And while it is tempting to quote much more, I will quote only the first paragraph of her title essay:

"As far as the education of children is concerned I think they should be taught not the little virtues but the great ones. Not thrift but generosity and an indifference to money; not caution but courage and a contempt for danger; not shrewdness but frankness and a love of truth; not tact but love for one's neighbor and self-denial; not a desire for success but a desire to be and to know."

I wish I'd read this when my children were young.