Why Publish a Bad Translation?

Because it's better than having no translation at all

News and Sundry

• James Marriott
  has a sobering essay about the precipitous decline in reading. His conclusion is that we are living in a “post-literate” society. While I have a few quibbling objections, specifically about Marriott’s use of scholarship on pre-literate societies, I do agree with him on the broad outline. Reading is in free fall, and this has knock-on effects on political organization and creativity. I don’t think the damage is irreversible—the banning of phones in schools, for instance, can yield positive results almost instantaneously—but it is good to get the measure of the problem.

• Reading and writing are unpopular because reading and writing are difficult, and yet without them a high level of competence in anything is impossible, so argues

  David Bessis
  in this newsletter post about the mathematician Alexander Grothendieck. Bessis takes Grothendieck at his word, arguing that his agonized, exhaustive writing methods were key to his astonishing abilities. It might also be worth noting that in OECD countries PISA scores in mathematics are declining alongside those in reading, though not as precipitously.

• The first complete Chinese translation of James Joyce’s monumental final novel, Finnegans Wake, has been published by Shanghai People’s Publishing House. Congrong Dai, a professor of Comparative Literature at Fudan University, accomplished the task after 18 years of effort, one year longer than it took for Joyce to write the book. Besides a paywalled article in The Irish Independent, there hasn’t been much discussion in English of this achievement, a stark contrast with attention the project garnered a decade ago, when the first volume of the novel became a surprise hit in China. Perhaps the decline in literacy helps explain the discrepancy.

Why Publish a Bad Translation?

Last week, I received an email from a reader, who, having read my last newsletter about typesetting haiku, declared that “my translations” were hard to read because they were “too wordy”. At first I was just plain baffled. I thought I had made it clear that Shadowings was published in the early 20th century, in 1900 to be exact. If I had actually translated the haiku, the lack of quality would have been minor news compared to my extreme longevity. As it happens, the book was written by Lafcadio Hearn, who lived from 1850 to 1904.

When asked about this extreme case of mistaken authorship, the reader answered that he had been misled by the phrase “when I set my own version of the text”. I admit this might have been somewhat confusing. To clarify matters, I amended the phrase to read “when I set my own layout of the text,” which, while somewhat redundant, is less ambiguous. As I’ll show shortly, Hearn was far from the only person who deserves credit for these translations—but I don’t. I’m just the typesetter on this one.

Are the translations too wordy? In some cases, I agree—hence my dig at the “logorrheic” conventions of poetry in Hearn’s time. This was a bit unfair, and, to be honest, I expected more criticism for that editorial comment than for anything else in the newsletter. Fault-finding can never be a solo pursuit. Anyway, I do get hung up occasionally, for instance on this haiku:

Waré to waga
Kara ya tomurō—
Sémi no koë.
—Yayū.

Methinks that sémi [cicada] sits and sings by his former body,—
Chanting the funeral service over his own dead self.

I don’t read Japanese well enough to compare Yokoi Yayū’s original with Hearn’s version, but I have translated enough books myself, both prose and poetry from the German, to trust my initial impressions. As I’ve written about before, readers of translated literature are often too deferential to assumed expertise and too hesitant in forming their own opinions; I’d be a hypocrite if I held back my opinion because I wasn’t a Japanologist. So in that spirit, I’ll offer a brief, somewhat amatuer commentary on Hearn’s translation, or rather, on his version of the poem.

The negative impression stems almost entirely from the first word: methinks. Yayū wrote in the 18th century, during the Tokugawa Shogunate. Despite Japan’s isolation from the rest of the world, it was a period of high modernity compared to the Anglo-Saxon era, from which we get methinks (mē þynceþ). Even if there were a neat semantic equivalence between the Japanese and English words, I would still hesitate to give the literal translation. The word has too many associations with the fanciful European medievalism of Walter Scott or Charles Maturin. It rips you from the Japanese context, if only briefly.

Though Hearn was thoroughly adopted into Japanese culture, even starting a family and taking on the Japanese name of Koizumi Yakumo (小泉 八雲), he still possessed many of the limitations of his 19th-century orientalist peers, especially in language competency. Hearn had limited facility with Japanese, spoken and written, and did not master the kanji system of Chinese characters. Despite the scholarly persona he embodied in his writings, Hearn could not directly read Japanese literature, but rather relied on intermediaries to interpret the texts for him.

So then why publish Hearn’s translations, or rather interpretations, if they’re so outdated? Well, the question can be answered with another question: where else am I going to find a collection of Japanese poems about cicadas in English? So far as I know, there haven’t been any others. Even if we broaden our search to include Japanese literature about insects more generally, what we get is more…Lafcadio Hearn. Eleven out of the twelve books he wrote in Japan feature bugs of one kind or another. The subject captivated him, to such an extent that Hearn is still regarded in Japan as an authority, though much of that reputation can be ascribed to Japanese translations of his work, which began to appear in his lifetime. Still, you would think that a culture as fascinated with insects as Japan would produce a native expert on Hearn’s level, but he remains irreplaceable. For that, we can excuse the occasional anachronism or infelicity.

This is perhaps what Jorge Luis Borges meant when he said: “I have read many works only in translation, sometimes in very bad translations, and I don’t think it matters very much. What matters is the encounter with the book.” This was not tossed off aside, not some one-time provocation, but a principle he espoused throughout his long career. This is not to damn Hearn or any other past translators with faint praise, but rather to make two important points: (1.) that literature is resilient across languages (2.) that the worth of a given writer inheres in their contributions as a whole, rather than in isolated words, lines, or phrases. To pretend otherwise is quibbling. The bias, as I’ve written before, should be for the work to exist. One is better than none.

The grave of Koizumi Yakumo (Lafcadio Hearn) as it appeared sometime before 1921, from Masanobu Ōtani’s translation of Insect Literature