Why the traitor can use some sympathy

Faithful readers of this blog may recall posts in which I have talked about the translator's dilemma. Because I have been using translation to improve my knowledge of Japanese, I have occasionally had a problem with a term that is familiar to native speakers but would mystify most Western readers— "natto" for example.

My dictionary defines natto as "fermented soybeans." But to stick closely to the original Japanese and translate that a character was eating fermented soybeans at breakfast does not convey the reality that natto (with a burning hot yellow mustard) is seen by many Japanese as promoting health and regularity. Perhaps an analogy would be say that the character was eating muesli for breakfast. But if readers don't know "muesli"—which in content, texture, and odor is entirely different from natto—I'm not sure you've accomplished much, aside from distorting Japanese breakfast dishes.

For this reason and more I will be attending the Bread Loaf Translator's Conference in Vermont this year. This is "designed to provide training and community to beginning as well as experienced translators in the pursuit of translating literary texts into English—or to those aiming to be more sophisticated readers of literary translation and to incorporate it into the classroom." I will be in a workshop with nine others in which we will be exposed to "some of the recurring questions, problems, and pleasures of the activity of literary translation."

And in preparation for all this, I've just read Sympathy for the Traitor: A Translation Manifesto by Mark Polizzotti, which The MIT Press recently published. Polizzotti is the publisher and editor-in-chief at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and, according to the flap copy, has translated more than fifty books from apparently French and Spanish. 

The translation issue of course goes back to the third century B.C. when seventy (or seventy-two) Hellenistic Jewish scholars translated the bible into Koiné Greek—the Septuagint. Seven hundred years later, Saint Jerome "undertook a new Latin translation based on the Hebrew and Aramaic source texts, bypassing the Greek." St. Augustine of Hippo criticized it because it wasn't based on the orthodox Greek version. And about a thousand years later, Martin Luther translated the New Testament into "a radically simplified, 'sweet and good' German that was intelligible to the common man" which "aroused the ire of the Church fathers."

There are two translation issues with the Bible: What is the source? And: Does the translation convey the sense (meaning, implications, intentions, message) of the original? (Plus, in the 16th Century there was another question: who should be able to read the text at all?) 

Polizotti believes that in general a translation should convey meaning and, to radically simplify his argument, be easy to read. If the translation is a chore to read in English, why read it at all unless you are dragooned into doing so for grade in class? I would like the translations my conversation partner Naoko Miyazaki are doing to be enjoyable for what they evoke of Japanese life and culture and for the English to be unnoticeable.

Because Japanese is so different in grammar and syntax from English, because I believe Japanese in fact has fewer words than English, because Japanese can be so allusive, and because cultural references—like natto—can be mystifying for Western readers, translating is challenging and stimulating. I'm looking forward to my week in Vermont to learn much, much more.