Practical Translation: Proust

A LitHub Radio Podcast I'm Lurdy Davis, I'm getting into character. I am Scott Von Kreuz. Not really. Okay. I don't know how Mr. Grieve sounded, unfortunately. Yeah, I know his question. In 1999, 12 distinguished writers gathered at Casa Echo, a villa on Lake Como, to discuss the art of translation. They talked about what makes one translation better or worse than another, translation is a practice of interpretation, and translation as a powerful political act. 25 years later, their ideas are still apt and influential. But in the decade since the world of translation has evolved, both as an art form and as an arm of the global publishing industry. The market has increased in both its reach and its prestige, new publishing houses have entered the scene, and so of new translators, from distinct backgrounds, with broader ideas of translation activism. So last October, I convened a group of translators and publishers to return to those issues, and to examine a field at an inflection point. Now, we're going to share those conversations with you. In this series, you'll hear from the translators Maureen Freely, Daisy Rockwell, Virginia Jewish, Jeremy Tiang, and Tiffany Tsau. Maureen translates from Turkish, Ginny from Italian, Daisy from Hindi and Urdu, Jeremy from Chinese, and Tiffany from Indonesian. You'll also hear from Adam Levy and Jacques Tastard, the publishers of transit books and of Fitzgerald Oeditions, two of the most prominent independent houses today. We met at the site of the original colloquium Casa Echo, which offered a scenic backdrop for our many challenging conversations. Every day for the next week, we're going to release a new episode, and we hope this cadence will capture the heeded intensity that we felt in our week of marathon sessions. You'll hear us discuss the many difficulties of producing literature and translation, the deep pleasures of attending to syntax and style, the scars that colonial histories leave on language, and the nitty gritty of agents, royalties, and money. Today, we'll start the series with an exercise in practical translation, a discussion of seven different English interpretations of one highly complex sentence from volume one of Marcel Proust's in Search of Lost Time. Maureen Freely will speak first, followed by Daisy Rockwell, Virginia Jewish, Jeremy Tiang, and finally Tiffany Tsau. It sounds like a lot to keep track of, but in the course of these conversations, I promise you will get to know all of their voices very well. I'm Marva Emre, welcome to Hawthorne and Scomo Conversazione on Translation. So, is it my turn to be Scott Mumprieve? No sooner had the warm liquid and the crumbs with it touched my palate, then a shudder ran through my whole body, and I stopped intent upon the extraordinary changes that were taking place, and exquisite pleasure had invaded my senses, but individual detached with no suggestion of its origin. I will read James Greve, this is from 1982, but at the very moment when the sip of tea and cake crumbs touched my palate, a thrill ran through me, and I immediately focused my attention on something strange happening inside me, I had been suddenly singled out and filled with a sweet feeling of joy, although I had no inkling of where it had come from. And I'll be reading the Scott Mumprieve revised by Kilmar and Enright in 1992. No sooner had the warm liquid mixed with the crumbs touched my palate, then a shiver ran through me, and I stopped intent upon the extraordinary thing that was happening to me, an exquisite pleasure had invaded my senses, something isolated, detached with no suggestion of its origin. This is Lydia Davis from 2002, but at the very instant when the mouthful of tea mixed with cake crumbs touched my palate, I quivered, attentive to the extraordinary thing that was happening in me, a delicious pleasure had invaded me, isolated me, without my having any notion as to its cause. I'm reading from the Carter version from 2013. No sooner had the warm liquid mixed with the crumbs touched my palate, then a shutter ran through my whole body, and I stopped intent on the extraordinary changes that were taking place in me, an exquisite pleasure had invaded my senses, but individual, detached with no suggestion of its origin. The sounds like the most airy, dite, phone, sex, hotline I've ever listened to. And I will read from the Brian Nelson, but at the very moment when the mouthful of tea and cake crumbs touched my palate, a thrill ran through me, and I immediately focused my attention on the extraordinary thing that was happening inside me. A delicious feeling of pleasure had invaded me, isolating me, without my having any inkling as to its cause. So these are six different translations that are not completely different from one another, but do have important differences. I'm curious how this strikes the five of you as translators who are not translating out of French, but out of very different languages. I'm struck with how similar they are, and it might be because of the language pairing from French to English that there's a lot of cognates and so on, but I also suspect that Scott Montcreefe has just such a towering figure in this translation so that even the people vehemently disagree with the way he did it can't really get away from what he did to the French. I feel like many of his phrasing are taken all the way down the line, even by Lydia Davis, who I think was probably trying the hardest not to be Scott Montcreefe. Well, and it seems that all of these, one of them is obviously a deliberate choice to preserve and yet revise the Scott Montcreefe, the one that I read the Kilmarin and Enright from '92. But it seems that they toggle between deciding whether the emphasis should be on the butt of the French that begins and placing the emphasis on the time, but at the very moment, but at the very instant, but at the very moment, or reducing the impact of that with the English no-suit. So as to get to the phrase about the warm liquid and the cake mix, so it's a sort of shift as to whether time is more important or the substance that is being swallowed is more important. I'm interested in how agency seems to shift in different translations, so there's the grieve where, you know, I immediately focused my attention on something and I feel like that makes the narrator more active in this. But then there's also the translations that seem to emphasize a passivity of being invaded, being overwhelmed by this very sexual experience of the tea invading his body with the cake cross. The thing I noticed most of all when I look at these is that some of the translations personalize. So isolated me, isolating me. It's putting me at the center agency. It's a polite way of putting it. I take it more with me, maybe, rather than an interest in the sensations as themselves. Well, there's an emphasis certainly in the Davis invaded me, isolated me. And even though we can see that grammatically, that's what's happening in the French. The French allows you to drop that pronoun so you don't have to repeat the me, me, in the French. And so it's a choice, I think that Davis is making here to bring more emphasis onto the sort of petrarch in me here. I'm also struck in the French how the word "izolais" is isolated or bracketed by comments. And so even though again we can analyze grammatically that it follows the own plasier phrase, it really sits in an isolated way that it doesn't, I think, in many of the other versions. And you're suggesting that that's mostly because of what English makes us do. Well, I think that English normally makes us do that, but I think that translation can also push the boundaries of what English can be. And hence the decision, I think, in 1922 and the Scotland Creek to leave that word detached, and he's working with a different grammatical structure here. But I think that we can find ways to drop some of the repetition of the subject that English requires in theory in a way that a romance language does. I always go back to Michael Henryheim, his suggestion or directive or just encouragement that we do follow the rules of English grammar, then we challenge them. We show ourselves that we can do things that we can do. that we thought we weren't able to do. - I mean, I try to bend the rules of English grammar as a side by mono personal mission to bring back the commas flies for a start. (laughing) And with regard to the different translations, I have to say that I'm most interested in what they're doing in context. So in a way I find it hard to judge them as individual sentences without knowing what comes before and after. It feels like I can pick out certain linguistic differences 'cause obviously they are different. But at the same time, I know that these choices have been made with a bigger picture in mind and that's the thing I can't see from just these excerpts. - What's the shutter in the original French or the quiver or the thrill? - Yes, I eat. - I say. Does that have ambiguity in the original? - I think so. Some people are saying real and shipper. - Yeah, that's what I was interested in. - Quiver, yeah. - Yeah, they're changing that word a lot. - But in the French, it's certainly I trembled, right? As opposed to this happened to me. So there's a shifting here, as we've mentioned about the agency, but yes, you can certainly feel already that leaning towards a certain erotic or a trembling pleasure. I think there's a lot of English words that could stand there, but each one has their own nuance. - I just am curious to hear you all comment on two things. One precisely what you mentioned, Tiffany, which is claiming pleasure or the sensation of pleasure as a verb, I trembled, I quivered, versus isolating the sensation as a noun, a thrill, a shutter. That is an interesting difference, and it doesn't seem to have entirely to do with agency. It seems to do with how much you want to externalize. Pleasure. The other related thing that strikes me is the way that the idea of isolation sometimes attaches to the individual, to the subject. It's isolating me, and sometimes it attaches to the pleasure. And exquisite pleasure had invaded my senses, but individual detached with no suggestion of its origin. So I'm curious to hear you all talk about how grammar here, whether you choose to translate something in a verb form, or whether you choose to make it a noun, is actually mapping onto different ideas about where we locate pleasure, and where the effect of sensation comes from, whether it comes from the thing itself, whether it's detached from the individual, or it's wholly localized in the individual, because that seems so important to Proust's whole idea about what art is and what it can do to us, or what memory is and where it lives. - Well, I'm just, again, looking at the French here, it's striking to me that we have first a sort of I quivered, I became aware, a woken alert to this extraordinary thing happening in me, and then this pleasure that is invading me. So we start with the I, and then we have the invasion, or the awareness in fact that this has come into me from this imbibing experience. - One of the big critiques of Scott Montcrophes that he put into many words like people said, he overdid it, and so you can see that he was overdoing it in this, but I like the way he overdid it, and I think there's kind of a protocol on your translating more closely related languages where you're supposed to try to stick pretty hard to the, you know, try to make it the same number of words and the same kind of syntax where as those of us who translate from languages that aren't at all alike, then we are more used to doing whatever we want in order to show what was happening in the sentence. So I feel like he's using more that technique than the other people are so, and he says, "Invaded my senses, but individual detached with no suggestion." He's like really wants to go after that Isole, which is so small and succinct in French, but he wants to show how huge that is. And so he's putting all of these extra words in, and everybody else is trying to pair it back. - Down again, that's what they're critiquing, I think most of them from what he was doing. - So a broad comment here about translation of emotion, which is very difficult from some of our languages, which are more comfortable with emotion, and what I see here is a growing discomfort over the years of translation about emotion and embodied emotion in particular, and Turkish, they're often locating a certain ache over here in the right hand side of the shoulder or whatever in the fourth quadrant of the stomach and so on. (audience laughs) And what I choose to do the honor that is to go back to the 19th century and use the words about emotion that still retains some kind of understanding of the dignity of emotions. Yeah, it's either a squizzid pleasure or delicious pleasure, and it's kind of invading me or it is happening inside me, that is really different from an invasion. The invasion in the beginning with a proust himself and then on grief, they're really enjoying it, but the end is happening, it's hard, but that's sure. There's an ambivalence there. - Yeah, well that's a thing, right? And that's the same with the shutter, right? So there's like a very fine line between fear, maybe horror, but also pleasure and uncertainty, and then also the pleasure of not being in control, just being not overwhelmed with these sensations that are almost isolated from yourself, just happening to you. - In the 2012 Chinese translation by Li Hengji and Xu Dicheng, that last sentence is, And that in my rough translation, a comfortable sensation of pleasure spread through my entire body. I felt as if I was, this is hard to translate, but something about leaving the mortal world, leaving the earth behind, and I didn't know where from. (laughing) - So that's quite a shift there. I would say it does convey the sense, but clearly there's a greater distance between French and Chinese than French and English. So the location is not the census, but the entire body, and instead of individual, detached, all of that, it's more about isolation in the sense of leaving the world behind. - Yeah, there's something over death vibe in that Chinese. - Yes, but I mean, this is the same sort of language that in the Chinese classics, you know, when a mortal visits the immortal plane, that's the sort of vibe. - So this is a divine, a divine, yeah, ethereal. - So I read the Turkish for the music of it, but in the Chinese, Okay, Google translate. (laughing) But as soon as the tea with cake crumbs touched my palate, I was startled and paid attention to the extraordinary thing going on inside me, and isolated, wonderful pleasure, the cause of which I had not the slightest idea surrounded me. Now, the thing that interests me most about the Turkish is it's something that surrounds not me, but my mean is, it's a very, so it's a very, I'm embracing, accepting some kind of pleasure that's coming about, yeah. So it's much more comfortable with pleasure. - Well, we're exchanging other versions. I found this very official blog translation in Indonesian from a blog, named after, I guess, the work, Rosh Hashidu, and she's created this, a whole like entry on why it's called that, and then she translates. From the French it seems, but who knows? So in Indonesian, Yeah, so I guess, you know, roughly, not long after the warm tea mixed with the crumbs, touched the ceiling of my mouth. I shivered and was quiet for a little while. It felt that something extraordinary was happening to me. Extraordinary happiness. pleasure that invaded my senses, something isolated set apart without knowing from where it came. Yeah. I do like "long it, long it" because "ceiling" is the word "long it" just means "sky". "Long it, long it" doubled is "ceiling". But I think there's a niceness to that. And that's just happens to be from the Indonesian. So I think it's very interesting to see-- Nice music. Yeah, it's exactly. Yeah. I didn't read the first sentence earlier, but notably "cake crumbs" was translate as "dien sinsa" and "dien sins" means snack. And I think this might be because a madeline wouldn't be recognized as a "dankout" the word for "cake" because that's like a slice of cake. And this is more like a cookie. And then you'd have to say like "pull-her-ized piece of cake" and it would get really-- I think sometimes been done under pressure to translate food as recipes, you know, a pastry type dish that is fried and has cheese or meat in it. Food I think is so-- I mean so much culture conveyed through food in the important list of certain words. I'm struck-- I have the Natalia Ginsburg translation here. She translates "britually the focaccia." Well, focaccia we tend to think of it as something that is a savory rather than a sweet here. So it's an interesting choice, but I think it gets to Jeremy. What you're saying that cake is not something that we tend-- there are plum cake, but we call that plum cake, actually. So it would step outside of the Italian, but there's a way in which what actually does not translate is the concept of the madeline itself. And yet that is for us in English what we remember most. And Ginsburg in fact talks in an interview about how she had tried to italianize the madeline to make it into an Italian word and how that's reworked in various additions and revisions. So let me just read the Italian sentence. But in the moment it's the same thing that the source of my story is that I'm going to say that I'm going to say that I'm going to I realize that the Italian of course is, it can be and is so much closer to the French, but two things that I really wanna point out that take us back to the various Englishes is this or the delicious pleasure. And perhaps more in this is what you were getting at, the way in which some translators choose, in a moment about tasting and tasting that is a pleasure that provokes a memory, the move away from that deliciousness to make it exquisite, a word that works in so many ways, but that drops the very central notion of eating and the deliciousness of this. The other thing I think is wonderful about what Ginsburg is doing here is this so a sip mixed with crumbs. The sentence that we're analyzing in the French does not use the word "T". It's this mixture of liquid or warm liquid malle and with these crumbs or crumbles of gâteau. And the French holds that all together rather than the broken up, had the warm liquid comma and the crumbs with it. And so I think that unity of a warm liquid and the crumbs in it that are all being swallowed has something to do with this blurring of the distinction of the inside and the outside that commas can disrupt and perhaps even repeating the "T" as an important piece of information, but less important because we already know that the "T" is there. So I like Ginsburg's solution to just use this word, a sip mixed with crumbs that gives us already this idea of a quantity almost of how little is needed in this Madeline episode to spark this emotion. - Conjunctions can disrupt it too, which is what strikes me about the Turkish, that there's a way to use the endings so that the whole mixture is in two words, right? And the relationship between the "T" and the crumbs, the one being inside of the other, is conveyed by the ending of the second word, but there's no conjunction necessary. - And the only conjunction in the French is the first word, which is interesting. - And this sentence taken in isolation, all this warm liquid, it could be any warm liquid. (laughing) - Yeah, well that's a thing. Actually, now looking again at this unofficial Indonesian version, I feel like it's a bit sanitized. They've translated the pleasure part as Gmuraan, which is basically, actually it's not pleasure, it's more like happiness or joy. And I feel like that's just much more, you know, I felt happy as opposed to I was having a, you know, sexual experience with the warm liquid and the crumbs. - To go back to food for a moment in Turkish, they just say, "Madeline spelled the Turkish way." Yeah? And if you go online, you'll find that every discussion of that passage has a picture of a Madeline. (laughing) - So in the Chinese, Madeline is Madeline. And if you Google that, it brings up a page of people named Madeline, or places named Madeline. And all you have to go on earlier is the earlier, just a previous description of it being short and plump, but this translation goes with a short plump snack. So in fact, no one in terms to contextualize it, it's just a thing that's no added context. You just have to accept that he is using this thing. - It's not even sweet or something. - No. - I have another question for everybody, which is if we look at these different translations and just look at the way they flow, and we talked about that a little bit, do they all flow really sensuously? - Well, I am always a big fan of the word inkling, which I notice is in the grieve in the Nelson. That was very satisfying to me. - Yeah, I actually wanted to talk about that final phrase, which varies with no suggestion of its origin without my having any inkling as to its cause. - It seems like the way you translate that is going to depend upon whether you're prioritizing the sense or the sensual as being isolated or whether you prioritize the individual as being isolated. And then there is a difference both rhythmically, sonically between inkling and suggestion. So I'm curious to hear, you all talk about how decisions made earlier have to carry through the rest of the sentence in order for the idea to be coherent by the end. - I like Davis's notion. I feel like it flows better. Inkling, I like as a word individually, but it's very, what is it? Inkling, it's very just sharp by itself. - Well, she's following her rule of cognates. - Yeah, there. I feel suggestion is so long. - I don't think a single one of them does not end with origin or cause or inkling, whereas in the, I'm sure, some of the other translations we've been looking at certainly in Turkish, what we have first is because of the way that Turkish can construct things. It has sort of double-jointed grammatical possibilities. So you have the clause about what I had no idea where it came from, but you don't even have to say it, yeah? And so it lands on the amazing feeling. - Yeah. - Or the wondrous, I think, would be a better translation for. But so it's that emphasis, and I think often, it can be what different languages make possible. If you have a language that is comfortable with the past of voice, you can actually almost be the observer of an exquisite pleasure that is surrounding you. Not invading, that is just-- - I noticed that inkling and notion, both of them, you're forced to bring in his agency. Like, I didn't have an inkling. I had no notion or my, you know, my, without my having any inkling. But with suggestion, he's sticking, he's allowing pleasure to remain in charge of the whole sentence. That, what first got me on grief, he's, so there's nothing about me, right? An exquisite pleasure had evaded my senses, but then he's lost control, but individual detached with no suggestion of its origin, so it's not about him anymore. - Where the Chinese has an advantage, I think, is it's easier to construct a clause without a subject. So that final trip to Chuturhain is, but don't know from what cause. - And don't know is not necessarily personal. - Yeah, yeah. - But to go back to the one grief, again, the solution is often creating a trance with the language. So you're following the-- the lexical meaning, but you're going into the trans, that it's describing. And I think the end of that sentence is designed in that way for me. Yeah. I think it's an interesting question as to how we create transes in different languages. And what I'm struck with here and looking, again, at the French is that smoothness, that uninterruption of the first part of this phrase, and then the very deliberate isolation at the end. So grammar, punctuation, syntax, but also questions of alliteration, accidents, that these sort of flows of the words. And I would be curious to hear how everyone works with that or pays attention to that. I feel like I'm always that the translating is like a kaleidoscope that you choose certain things to prioritize, and you recognize perhaps the work of the syntax and so try to honor that, but that might drop mean that you're dropping out certain alliterations or certain specific meanings. We're to link this back to a conversation, Daisy, and I were having before we started speaking. We were talking about how easy it can be when you have cognates. But what's interesting to me listening to this conversation is how actually the languages that the four of you are working in allow for something of Proust's idea of passivity and the erasure of the subject in the throes of pleasure to be grammatically conveyed in a way that English doesn't, or that the English translators haven't all figured out a good solution to. And if it were translated into Hindi, it would have the same latitude that was shown in Chinese and Turkish and probably Indonesian where you don't have to have lots of human agency in every sentence. So the impersonal would be very easily expressed. So in the Turkish, there is that sequence, that great flow. And then there's the word "suitanush" which is in place of what everybody else in English is translating as isolated, or, and of course in the French as well. But in Turkish, it is abstracted, which I think is a really, really interesting choice. Because, again, isolated feels like there's a thing that's out there by itself where it's abstracted. It's suggesting that it's becoming one with the air, or just it will longer has solid reality. I often have the opposite problem when I'm translating, which is that the ambiguity that Chinese allows for has to become concreteness when made into English. Yes, same. Right, you have to choose a subject. You have to specify if it's singular or plural. The demands are these strong subjects. Yeah. What I think of, as I'm on the owner of when the little Anglo-Saxon might, who did what when where? And that is not something that you have to-- that's not information that you have to provide in Turkish ever, past of voice being so important in an imperial court, where if you actually say who did what, you might get your head cough, right? So-- and it's also really beautiful in Turkish. It's just a little syllable that gets added to the middle of a verb. So you can say what was done forever and ever without ever saying who did it. Yeah. Indonesian is very similar, like much more preferring, I think, of the passive. It's more-- the word is halos, refined polite gentle, those kinds of things. And in fact, for passive, there's even almost like two forms. You can say D, something, a D and a verb, that means like someone did it. And then you're kind of more curious about, oh, who did it? And then Thur, as a prefix, indicates it was done kind of-- it's passive too, but it's like-- There's no-- By what? Yeah. It's not important. It just is like that. So isolated would be-- that's what they used for isolated, Thur, Isolair, as opposed to D Isolair, which would be like, used isolated by someone. Yeah, I think Hindi is the same. And when I used to teach the language, I would try to explain it by saying that in Hindi, you wouldn't say, I spilled the milk. You would say the milk spilled. Yeah. And if you said I spilled the milk, it would be like this kind of dramatic mission of guilt. Yeah. It was I who spilled the milk. You know, otherwise you just-- it fell over. It's obvious what happened. We don't have to go into it. Oh, that's a bit like-- it reminds you of that essay by Orwell, where he talks about what is it reported? And he talks about like, oh, if a village was raised to the ground and reported, he talks about the use of passive to kind of lied over-- someone is perpetuating bad things. That was-- Yeah. That was the-- In English, it's my main place. It's in the news. Mistakes were made. Yeah. Yeah. We've been listening to Hawthorndin's Komokon Vesatzione from the critic and her publics. I'm Marva Emre, and I'd like to thank the staff at the Hawthorndin Foundation, which is one of the largest funders of the literary arts in the US and UK. Thank you also to the Shapiro Center and the president's office at Wesleyan University, the New York Review of Books, and LitHub. Thank you to our producers Mia Foster and Zachary Fine, to our wonderful editor, Michelle Moses, and to Danny Lensioni for her score. us tomorrow for a conversation on first sentences.