"Couriers of the Human Spirit"

By Patricia Blake

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 Marquez. Following the translation's 1970 publication and its climb to the bestseller lists, Garcia Marquez 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."

> Foremost among the couriers from the Spanish and Portuguese is Rabassa, 62, who has spent the past two decades bringing Latin American literature north to the U.S. The authors he has translated constitute a pantheon of Hispanic letters: Garcia Marquez (Colombia), Julio Cortazar (Argentina), Miguel Angel Asturias (Guatemala), Mario Vargas Llosa (Peru), Jose Lezama Lima (Cuba), Luis Rafael Sanchez (Puerto Rico), Vinicius de Moraes (Brazil).

Despite Rabassa's attachment to Latin America, he prefers to live in an English-speaking environment. Born of a Cuban father and an American mother, he has spent most of his life in the North eastern U.S. He did go to Brazil for 18 months on a Fulbright-Hays fellowship in the mid-1960s, but that was long enough.

"You could become so Brazilianized, you couldn't express yourself in English," he decided. Nowadays, Rabassa works on the sun porch or in the kitchen of his Long Island home, producing a first version "as fast as I can type." He then carefully revises his draft, penciling in queries for the author.

Most of his quandaries arise from Latin American writers' love of verbal play. In A Manual for Manuel, Cortazar characterizes different types of secret policemen in a string of richly suggestive alliterative words, hormigon, hormigucho, etc. In English, a literal translation (big ant, big clumsy ant) would have been ungainly. Rabassa's solution: dominant, sycophant, miscreant.

> Weaver, 61, the preeminent interpreter of Italian prose, is a Virginian who lives and works in the Italian hill country between Arezzo and Siena. To prevent his English from becoming too Italianized, he makes yearly trips to New York City, where he consults with his most "nurturing" publisher, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich's Helen Wolff. When Weaver is not translating such writers as Alberto Moravia, Elsa Morante and Italo Calvino, he reads vast quantities of American mysteries, which he reviews for the London Financial Times. "Crime books," he maintains, "are very good at keeping you abreast of what people are saying back home."

Unlike many of his colleagues. Weaver is reluctant to consult with authors about obscurities in their books, or even to show them his work in progress, unless they have perfect command of English. He has good reasons. Five years ago, one author complained that Weaver had used the word cot instead of bed.

"Isn't that short for cottage?" the writer demanded. When Weaver began translating Morante's monumental novel History, she phoned him several times a day to ask how he had rendered certain words.

When Weaver answered, he recalls, "she would say, 'Well, it doesn't mean exactly this, but it means this, plus a little bit of that, and a hint of another thing.' When I realized that History contained 200,000 words, I decided to quit." Before he could inform Morante of his intention, she phoned, saying she had decided she could be of no help and would stop pestering him. Thus are great translations born.

> The doyen of professional translators, Ralph Manheim, 77, has lived in Paris for 34 years, secure in his grip on the English language, working with equal fluency from the French and the German. In the tiny maid's room that serves as his office, near the Luxembourg Gardens, Manheim has produced inventive English versions of some of Europe's most difficult writers, including Louis-Ferdinand Celine and Guenter Grass. Manheim's most recent endeavor: a canny rendering of The Weight of the World, an elliptical memoir by Austrian Playwright Peter Handke.

Manheim's decades of devoted labor -- translating more than 100 books for often minuscule fees -- were recognized last year by the MacArthur Foundation, which rewards "exceptionally talented individuals." It singled him out for the top award: $60,000 a year, tax free, for life. Says Manheim: "My main pride is that I know how to be simple. When inexperi enced people run into an everyday ex pression in a foreign work that seems weird to them, they change it into some thing equally weird. But when you know a language well, you can translate the natural into the natural."

Still, sometimes the natural is not enough. To render the coinages, puns, obscure allusions and technical vocabulary that abound in Grass's novels, Manheim consulted a series of specialists. Dentists were interviewed for Local Anaesthetic, stonecutters for The Tin Drum and conchologists for From the Diary of a Snail. On other esoteric points, Manheim prefers to query Grass by letter, rather than participate in seminars that the author periodically conducts in Frankfurt for his translators.

Manheim is critical of much contem porary translation. Because he regards Goethe's Faust as untranslatable, he thinks English versions are "a waste of time," though he acknowledges that they "may be of help to students incapable of learning German or unwilling to take the time to do it." He agrees completely with Edmund Wilson's celebrated verdict that Nabokov's translation of Pushkin's Eugene Onegin is unreadable. Lately, Manheim has been outraged by the praise lavished on the new English version of Remembrance of Things Past. Manheim, who has translated Proust's letters, says, "The first translator, C.K. Scott Moncrieff, was a little awkward and a little mistaken, but he did a "marvelous job. Now Terence Kilmartin has altered Moncrieff, and not well." Manheim is most derisive about one Kilmartin method of cor rection: "The way he fixed up a passage was to leave it in French. Problem solved."

In addition to the pro fessional translators like Manheim, writers and po ets in every era have felt a duty to give foreign literature a new life in another tongue. Goethe, who called this work "one of the most important and valuable concerns in the whole of world affairs," found time to translate literature from ten different languages into German. Andre Gide argued that every writer "has an obligation to render at least one foreign work of art into his own language." He chose Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra, then went on to Hamlet. In America most major modern poets have obeyed Gide's injunction. The result is a vigorous body of English verse that encompasses such varied sources as Icelandic epics (W.H. Auden), La Fontaine's fables (Marianne Moore), Brazilian poetry (Elizabeth Bishop), Russian lyrics (Stanley Kunitz) and contemporary Hungarian poetry (William Jay Smith).

Perhaps the most successful translations by a major American poet are Richard Wilbur's renditions of Moliere. The Pulitzer-prizewinning author of seven volumes of poetry has translated The Misan thrope, Tartuffe, School for Wives and The Learned Ladies. His versions have been produced more than 140 times in British, Canadian and U.S. theaters. Wilbur's fluency in replicating 17th century rhymed couplets suggests he was born to the task. In fact, he had only high school French when he landed in southern France in 1944 with the U.S. 36th Division. Most of the soldiers in his unit were country boys from Texas, and Wilbur was enlisted as the company interpreter. Mostly, he recalls, he talked to the French about "what we might want to requisition, like a wheel of cheese."

Later, at Harvard graduate school, French friends introduced Wilbur to a wider menu, including such nonclassical literature as the word games of the modernist writer Raymond Roussel and the visionary prose poems of Villiers de 1'Isle-Adam. Moliere entered Wilbur's life in 1948 when, on a visit to Paris, he saw a production of The Misanthrope. Lately, the voice of the French dramatist has begun to resonate through some of the American poet's own writing in a transcendent collaboration. "The experience of impersonating Moliere has enlarged the voice of my own poems," says Wilbur. "Sometimes I have the illusion that I speak for him."

Other writers have been tempted to speak for Moliere, often with lamentable results. In the 1950s, Poet Morris Bishop translated eight Moliere plays into verse that fell as flat as his unrhymed pentameter. The latest effort is a musical-comedy version of The Miser in jive talk.

Of course, no translator of the classics has a guarantee of exclusivity: in the 20 years since Walter Arndt won the prestigious Bollingen Prize for his masterly version of Pushkin's Eugene Onegin, three publishers have brought out new translations of the same poem. Rabassa, who expects that his version of One Hundred Years of Solitude will ultimately be supplanted, believes the development is inevitable: "If you read Cervantes in Spanish today, he sounds relatively modern, but the translations of Don Quixote made by Cervantes' contemporaries seem terribly archaic." This variety of renditions has some advantages; each new translation influences readers in a fresh way. Rabassa views the process philosophically: "The Greeks have only one Homer. We have many."

The classics are not the only works subject to constant reinterpretation. Some modern books have gone through several translations. Alexander Solzhenitsyn, dissatisfied with some of the first English versions of his works, insisted upon new ones as soon as he emigrated to the U.S. Other demanding authors, who possess a greater command of foreign tongues, have decided that self-translation is best. Nabokov, whose early work was written in Russian, rendered Laughter in the Dark into English. He also turned Lolita, which was written in English, into Russian. Samuel Beckett, an Irishman who writes mostly in French, has translated his plays, Waiting for Godot, Endgame and others, into his native English.

Isaac Bashevis Singer, 80, used to change translators with the seasons, arguing over every article and preposition as his stories went from Yiddish to English. But recently the novelist has professed "great compassion" for the workers he once abused. "Since every language contains its own unique truths," he now believes, "translation is the very spirit of civilization." Then he adds, "In my younger days I used to dream about a harem full of women; lately I'm dreaming of a harem full of translators." --By Patricia Blake