The ethics of the anti-smooth translation - to do right abroad, this translation practice must do wrong at home

The multiple translations of Andrey Platonov’s The Foundation Pit and Nabarun Bhattacharya’s Hārabārta fall along a continuum of the domesticated and foreignized translation.  What makes both of these cases so interesting is that the same translator has created translations at different points on the continuum, which cannot be too common.

Joe at roughghosts, who pointed me to the Bhattacharya novel, notes that the practice or something like it in fact is common in translation from Afrikaans.  Here we see Leon de Kock, the translator of Marlene van Niekerk’s Triomf (1994), describe what happened to them:

We’d been counting on a South African publisher only, so we were making a mixed language polyglot translation, and suddenly Marlene’s agent in London came up with a contract with Little, Brown, a major trans-national publisher. She phoned me up and said, “We have a big problem here. We can’t go on with this mixed, bastardized publication. We have to render it in straight English.”

The translator actually moved in with the author.  Together they squashed the “Afrikaans-isms” and “South African-isms.”  The result was two translations, one for the South African market and one for everyone else.  De Kock thinks that maybe today this would not be so necessary.  “[P]eople have begun to realize that it’s OK that not everything be in proper English anymore.”

He might be right.  The newer versions of The Foundation Pit and Hārabārta suggest he is.  Even with a more domesticated Harbart from New Directions and a wilder Herbert from Seagull, both are more linguistically out-there than previous translations.

I thought I would remind myself about what I meant by “domesticated” and “foreignized,” so I took a look at Lawrence Venuti’s The Translator’s Invisibility: A History of Translation (2nd ed., 2008).  I was surprised to see that the distinction was so old, going back at least to Friedrich Schleiermacher:

In an 1813 lecture on the different “methods” of translation, Schleiermacher argued that “there are only two.  Either the translator leaves the author in peace as much as possible and moves the reader towards him; or he leaves the reader in peace, as much as possible, and moves the author towards him” (Lefevere 1977:74)*.  (p. 15 of Venuti)

The translator chooses, Venuti paraphrases, between domestication, “an ethnocentric reduction of the foreign text to receiving cultural values, bringing the author back home,” and foreignizing, “register[ing] the linguistic and cultural differences of the foreign text, sending the reader abroad” (p. 15).

Schleiermacher and Venuti make an ethical case for the foreignized translation.  You should want more messiness and obscure references and endnotes explaining it all.  The last thing you should praise is the “smoothness” of the translation.  “Fluency” is the word Venuti finds in professional review.  We have been lectured that we should say something about the translation, so professionals say it is “fluent” and amateurs say it is “smooth.”  The hell with that, argues Venuti: “to do right abroad, this translation practice must do wrong at home, deviating enough from native norms to stage an alien reading experience” (16)

I don’t know.  On the one hand, yeah!  That’s what I like.  That’s what Joe argues for: “If you read literature from foreign cultures, don’t you want your equilibrium challenged a little along the way?”  But he is not quite willing to make an ethical argument, and – this is the other hand –  I am not either.  It is more an argument about taste.  It is too much like telling people what to read.  If you want smooth, read smooth; there is plenty of that.   But it is great to see translators and publishers who recognize that there is also an audience for foreignness.

* André Lefevere’s Translating Literature: The German Tradition from Luther to Rosenweig (1977) is Venuti’s source for the quotation.

Nabarun Bhattacharya’s Harbart - Bengali innovation becomes a translation theory case study

A review-like bit first.  The book at hand is Nabarun Bhattacharya’s short, crazy 1994 (or 1993?) Bengali novel Hārabārta in the New Directions edition, translated by Sunandini Banerjee.  Harbart is what they’re titling it.  Harbart is the hero.  He kills himself five pages into the time-scrambled first chapter.  The rest of the book is more conventionally structured: childhood, adolescence, a surprising career as a “Conversations with the Dead” mystic.  Suicide, eventually.  There are real ghosts, although his medium business is a con; there’s a blue fairy, like in Pinocchio; there are some other unusual things.

Harbart has some resemblance in tone and attitude to the novelinos of César Aira which I enjoy so much, so the book is a good fit at New Directions.  Aira would love the ending.

Bhattacharya’s conceptual purpose has nothing in common with Aira’s.  Bhattacharya was political, a left radical.  He was blowing up Bengali literature.  I get the idea that one of his innovations, one reason Hārabārta became a cult novel, is that it is full of swears.  “He introduced the street’s everyday crudity and idiom” – full of swears, I think that means.  That 2013 Shamik Bag article goes through the politics in much more detail than the novel itself.

The exciting thing in the novel is the language.  The Banerjee translation is the third English version – confusingly, also the fourth, but let’s save that idea.  I know nothing of the first version, but looked at the second (2011), by Arunava Sinha, on Indian Amazon.  Here he is, on the first page:

The mad old woman in rags was sitting there, her legs, splayed, splashing water.  Dogs with rotted flea-ridden skins were trembling in their sleep at the sound of screeching owls.  (Sinha)

Vivid, yes?  And here is Sunandini Banerjee, the new version:

A mumble-mad woman sitting there in rags, legs wide open, splashing the water.  Every now and then an owl letting out a screech and the skin-rotten dogs whimpering in their dreams. (Banerjee, 3)

The first page of the Banerjee also has “frothy-foaming light-dust,” “piss-cross games,” and “a Star-TV-signal-sucking satellite dish,” more compound neologisms.  The inventive compound words are a feature of the entire novel, a central device.  Great fun.  The novel is also full of languages – Hindi and English especially – which are translated or absorbed in the older translation but highlighted in Banerjee’s, the Hindi annotated and the English italicized.  This a noisy novel.

Looking back to that 2013 article, Sinha says that he “wants to retranslate Herbert (Sinha translated it as Harbart) in more creative ways.”  Banerjee has done it.

Harbart is now an outstanding case study in the domesticated (Sinha) versus foreignized (Banerjee) translation.  Better than I have suggested, even, because next week in England and elsewhere, yet another translation of Hārabārta will be published – also by Sunandini Banerjee!  Two translations appearing at roughly the same time by the same translator.  This cannot be common.  As Joe at roughghosts describes the books, the non-American version is even more foreignized, with more compound words and with Bengali in the translated text.  No reviewer of the American translation besides Joe has any idea that there are two versions.  I hope, once the texts are all available, that someone – ideally someone with Bengali – will knock the translations together and see what happens.

So interesting.  I want to pursue this idea tomorrow.