In a powerful op-ed written for The New York Times back in late 2010, bestselling novelist Michael Cunningham writes, ‘I’ve come to understand that all literature is a product of translation’. He explains, and I quote the article at length:
I’ve learned, from working with translators over the years, that the original novel is, in a way, a translation itself. It is not, of course, translated into another language but it is a translation from the images in the author’s mind to that which he is able to put down on paper.
Here’s a secret. Many novelists, if they are pressed and if they are being honest, will admit that the finished book is a rather rough translation of the book they’d intended to write. It’s one of the heartbreaks of writing fiction. You have, for months or years, been walking around with the idea of a novel in your mind, and in your mind it’s transcendent, it’s brilliantly comic and howlingly tragic, it contains everything you know, and everything you can imagine, about human life on the planet earth. It is vast and mysterious and awe-inspiring. It is a cathedral made of fire.
But even if the book in question turns out fairly well, it’s never the book that you’d hoped to write. It’s smaller than the book you’d hoped to write. It is an object, a collection of sentences, and it does not remotely resemble a cathedral made of fire.
It feels, in short, like a rather inept translation of a mythical great work.
The translator, then, is simply moving the book another step along the translation continuum. The translator is translating a translation.
Cunningham is more perceptive than perhaps he admits to himself; he has learned to live without perfection. Translation isn’t perfect because no form of human communication–from speech to smoke signals–is perfect. As long as we cannot read each others’ minds, some amount of misunderstanding will always be inevitable. And so, seeking to transcend that unbridgeable gap between ‘you’ and ‘me’, ‘writer’ and ‘reader’, we promise ‘faithful’ translations of literary works.
