Lost in translation

Hey, kids–

Hope everybody’s having a groovy Friday. I’m currently reading a Swedish writer’s mystery. The author is a bestseller in Sweden, and I find that I rather like crime fiction that originates in Norway, Sweden, and Iceland. For those who have read Stieg Larsson, you’ve got a taste there of the different mood and cultural mores of crime fiction from that part of the world.

The translator who handled Larsson’s work, I thought, did a reasonable job, though some of the terms and phrases probably lost their impact when going from Swedish to English. Which is why I wish I could read Swedish (and Norwegian and Icelandic), because linguistic nuances from the original language just don’t carry into English (or vice versa).

Language, after all, is a vehicle of culture. Through language, you have a window into the inner workings of different regions of the world where that language is spoken. When I was teaching anthropology, the segment my students and I did on language often ended up garnering the most interest, especially when we discussed cultures that are disappearing because native speakers of the language are dying and younger generations haven’t learned it.

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What the heck is Andi trying to say? Click on…

David Treuer, who is Ojibwe, notes his sense of losing something more than just language in a 2008 piece he wrote for the LA Times. Then, he noted that only 3 Native American languages will survive into the middle of this century. He says:

If my language does die — not now, not tomorrow, but, unless something changes, in the near future — many understandings, not to mention the words that contain them, will die as well. If my language dies, our word for “bear,” makwa, will disappear, and with it the understanding that makwa is derived from the word for box, makak (because black bears box themselves up, sleeping, for the winter).

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And yet, I think, more will be lost than simply a bouquet of discrete understandings — about bears or namesakes. If the language dies, we will lose something personal, a degree of understanding that resides, for most fluent speakers, on some unconscious level. We will lose our sense of ourselves and our culture. There are many aspects of culture that are extralingual — that is, they exist outside or in spite of language: kinship, legal systems, governance, history, personal identity. But there is very little that is “extralingual” about story, about language itself. I think what I am trying to say is that we will lose beauty — the beauty of the particular, the beauty of the past and the intricacies of a language tailored for our space in the world.

That’s why language is important. It conveys culture. Through the ways people express themselves linguistically, you can get a sense of how they have organized themselves in their part of the world, and how the environment in which they live influences who they are and how they think of themselves. And that’s why a translation can be so important. A good translation will capture the essence of the original language and evoke certain imagery. It won’t completely bridge the cultures, but it’ll give you a really good taste of it.

Which is why though I enjoy reading literature and fiction in translation, I wish that I could read the original languages, as well. My point (and generally, I try to have one) is that I’m currently reading this bestselling Swedish author in translation. And it’s driving me absolutely crazy because the translator in this instance has created an awkward narrative that has ended up creating a not-so-great work in English.

And that makes me wonder about the whole art of literature in translation. If you find someone who is a writer to do the translation, perhaps you then have to worry that the translator will inject his or her own writing style into the piece, and it’ll become something that the original author didn’t intend. Or, and perhaps worse, you end up not injecting any style and the prose becomes awkward and almost amateurish. The book I’m currently reading is riddled with telling and not showing, characters that come across as cartoonish, horribly passive writing, and dialogue filled with explanation points. Imagine if everyone in books that you read spoke with explanation points:

“Hey, Bob! Good to see you!”
“And you, Jim! How are those kids of your? Heard Liesl got accepted to college. That’s just great! You must be very proud!”
“I sure am! She’s a great kid!”

That’s sort of what’s happening in this book I’m trying to read. It’s clunking along, and currently reads like a second draft, when some things have been cleaned up but others haven’t. The translator simply did not capture this author’s style, has not created a sense of mood, and has not captured how something should read if it were written by a native Swedish speaker.

I also recently finished a book that takes place in Iceland, with supposedly Icelandic characters. The writer is British, who spent years in Iceland. So he wrote it in English, but all his dialogue is British, with British slang and expressions. It was kind of jarring, thus, to be reading about these Icelandic characters who were throwing British slang about in their dialogue with each other. I got no real sense of Icelandic culture, because all the characters spoke like British transplants to the area. Kind of weird.

Translators, thus, have to be able to capture not just the essence of another language, but the essence of the other language’s writer, without injecting too much of his or her own style into the piece. A translator has to create a well-written book in the secondary language, and somehow bring the original language’s nuances and the individual author’s quirks into that translation. That’s a tough job, but as I try to slog through this Swedish mystery in translation, a necessary one. Translation is an art, and the more books I read in translation, the more I appreciate that.

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Happy reading and happy writing, whatever language it it.