Translators give new life to foreign literature
Few novels in recent years have intrigued Americans so thoroughly as Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose. Yet readers of this mock medieval mystery tend to forget that the words are not the author's own; they are the creation of that most invisible, yet most indispensable, figure in world literature: the translator. The man who ingeniously rendered The Name of the Rose into English from the Italian is William Weaver, one of a number of outstanding translators currently enlarging the literary horizons of the English-speaking world.
Some translations are works of literature in themselves. A case in point: Greg ory Rabassa's luminous English render ing of One Hundred Years of Solitude by Nobel Laureate Gabriel Garcia Márquez. Following the translation's 1970 publication and its climb to the bestseller lists, Garcia Márquez announced that he preferred Rabassa's English version to the Spanish original. "That is probably less of a compliment to my translation than it is to the English language," says Rabassa with the self-effacement that has been the translator's destiny.
Indeed, until the 1950s translators' names were usually omitted from title pages. Even today they are rarely men tioned by reviewers, except for purposes of disparagement—unless the translation is by a celebrity, like Poet Robert Fitzgerald's version of the Iliad. Critics are fond of quoting Robert Frost's barb, "Poetry is what disappears in translation," or Vladimir Nabokov's disdainful verse, "What is translation? On a platter/ A poet's pale and glaring head,/ A parrot's screech, a monkey's chatter,/ And profanation of the dead."
Literary translators must also endure something worse than carping: low pay. Most earn a flat fee of about $50 per thousand words, and no bonus, if the work sells well. During the past decade a few highly skilled special ists have negotiated a share of the royalties, ranging from 1% to 3%. But as New Direc tions Editor in Chief Peter Glassgold points out, advances on royalties for most translated books remain in the $1,000-to-$5,000 range. "That's not much to divvy up among the author, the original foreign pub lisher and the translator."
In some cases, of course, even those scraps may be overpayment. Among the translators of the 1 ,000 or so foreign liter ary works published in the U.S. each year, there exists a sizable number of tin-eared amateurs. "Ninety percent of all translation is inadequate," Critic George Steiner complains in his famous study of the subject, After Babel. Many practitioners know too little of foreign idioms and subtleties. Others write awkward English. A plague be upon them; they are the descendants of the people of Babel, condemned for their arrogance to a confusion of tongues.
Still, in every era a handful of great translators have persisted and prevailed. They have taken their vocation literally (in Latin translatus, a carrying across), transporting books over the abyss of different languages, cultures and epochs. Russia's greatest poet, Alexander Pushkin, put it best: They are the "couriers of the human spirit."