Death of a translator (in memory of William Weaver, 1923-2013)

Many of you have probably heard of Italo Calvino–writer extraordinaire, fabulist, and author of several influential works, most notably, Invisible Cities and If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler.* If you know Calvino, you also know he was an Italian writer, which means if you’re reading this text, you’ve probably only read Calvino in translation.

My dear friend Robin was the first to encourage me to read Calvino’s work, but she stressed that I should be careful of whose translation I read. She gave me her recommendation: William Weaver.

I’d been curious about translation in the past. I’d wondered, when reading a translated text, whether I loved the original author’s work or whether I loved the translator’s. In reading William Weaver’s translations of Calvino, I learned that I loved both.

Weaver and Calvino had an auspicious start to their writer/translator relationship, which began shortly after Calvino had fired a different translator for taking liberties with his work. As a result, Weaver went out of his way to make sure Calvino felt included in the translation process, which often led to consideration of the original text as well as the translation:

With Calvino every word had to be weighed. I would hesitate for whole minutes over the simplest word—bello (beautiful) or cattivo (bad). Every word had to be tried out. When I was translating Invisible Cities, my weekend guests in the country always were made to listen to a city or two read aloud.

Writers do not necessarily cherish their translators, and I occasionally had the feeling that Calvino would have preferred to translate his books himself. In later years he liked to see the galleys of the translation; he would make changes—in his English. The changes were not necessarily corrections of the translation; more often they were revisions, alterations of his own text. Calvino’s English was more theoretical than idiomatic. He also had a way of falling in love with foreign words. With the Mr. Palomar translation he developed a crush on the word feedback. He kept inserting it in the text and I kept tactfully removing it. I couldn’t make it clear to him that, like charisma and input and bottom line, feedback, however beautiful it may sound to the Italian ear, was not appropriate in an English-language literary work.

Falling in love with foreign words (with any words) is a writer’s occupational hazard. However, I envision translators holding their words to a higher standard than love. They may love words, but loving them is, of course, not enough. Love is imprecise. Love is, often, not synonymous with respect.

Translating, like editing, is often considered an invisible art, but I’d argue that it’s more visible when more than one translator is at work.** Lydia Davis wrote an insightful response to a negative review she’d read of her translation of Proust’s Swann’s Way—in the review, Davis was accused of paring down Proust’s language in an attempt to make her translation a more signature version. (NB: Hers was the first translation since the original translation, which had scholars diving to parse the differences.) An excerpt from her rebuttal:

It is not difficult for an experienced writer to compose a cadenced sentence. But my aim was, precisely, to follow the lead of Proust’s own text as closely as possible, unadorned by my own interpretation, uninflected by my own writing style, not simplified, but not complicated, not obscured, but not “updated.” And because of the beauty of Proust’s prose, the work was an endless pleasure; what a privilege to spend one’s day deciding to toss out the nice enough “catastrophic deluges,” for instance, in favor of the more peculiar, but closer, “diluvian catastrophes.”

I’ve never attempted to translate another writer’s work (and, though I am in awe of the art of translation, I likely never will), but I imagine that shedding your own aesthetic style is like teaching yourself to walk, long after you’ve already learned. While this new method may be more ornamental or more circuitous than your usual gait, it will get you to your destination faster and more efficiently (and, likely, through the appropriate entrance) than you would had you followed your usual protocol.

That said, I also imagine translation must be like learning how to not talk—how to measure, how to refurbish your words for someone else’s voice. My most recent book features a woman whose speech production is greatly reduced after she becomes paralyzed, a topic I chose to write about for many reasons (physical paralysis as paralleled with emotional paralysis), but mainly because I found the idea terrifying. I find the idea of translation far less scary, but still an undertaking that requires a great amount of patience and will to be successful.

William Weaver was immensely successful. When I read his translations, I find I want to live in them. I want to fashion a house for myself with his thoughtful, deliberate words because I know they’ll hold.

 

 

* – If you haven’t heard of Calvino, I’d start with Invisible Cities, then go to Mr. Palomar, then hit his collection of essays, Six Memos for the New Millennium. Before you delve further, check the translator just so you can be aware of the nuance occurring.

** – To see what I mean, look at Calvino’s Complete Cosmicomics, which was translated by Martin McLaughlin, Tim Parks, and William Weaver. If you’re not yet ready for Calvino, there are other teams of translators. Etgar Keret’s work is regularly translated by Miriam Schlesinger and Sondra Silverston. Borges’s Ficciones was edited by a crew referred to (in every edition I’ve ever encountered) only as “Emece Editores.”