Edith Grossman

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Transcript

Ramona Koval: Edith Grossman joins us now from her home in New York. Welcome to The Book Show Edith.

Edith Grossman: Thanks so much for having me.

Ramona Koval: Edith, you say you believe that serious professional translators often in private think of themselves as writers, and you say is this sheer presumption, a heady kind of immodesty on your part. And I was struck by this phrase, 'often in private', there seemed to be a kind of almost shame in stating that.

Edith Grossman: I'm not quite sure if 'shame' is the word, perhaps a specific desire to avoid confrontation with critics.

Ramona Koval: Tell me more about that.

Edith Grossman: Well, clearly translators are writers because we write the book. Any translated book that you read has been written by a translator, which is the thing that reviewers so often forget. I wouldn't go so far as to call oneself a co-author with Cervantes of Don Quixote as you did, I'm bright red, blushing because of what you said. But certainly the English version has come out of our knowledge of English and of the original language that we translate from.

Ramona Koval: Because you say that really the original writer and the translator are speaking together, not in union but together all the same.

Edith Grossman: I think I used that image to talk about my feeling when I feel that the translation is successful and that I have captured the intention and the tone and the artfulness of the original writer in my English version. And then it's as if we were speaking together, and I think I said not in unison but in harmony.

Ramona Koval: You talk about the need to develop a keen sense of style in both languages. How do you do that? Are you immersing yourself in speakers of the second language, of writers of the second language? And of course you'd have to do the same with your first language too.

Edith Grossman: One of the things I do is read a great deal of fiction in English. I read American authors, I read British authors and authors from other parts of the English-speaking world. And one of the reasons for doing that, aside from my addiction to fiction, is that that gives me a sense of what's possible in English, and the places where it is especially flexible or not flexible. In a sense it matters more how sensitive I am to English than to the original language, to the first language, because English is the language I'm writing. There's that wonderful anecdote of Gregory Rabassa when he was translating One Hundred Years of Solitude and a rather dim interviewer asked him if he knew enough Spanish to do the translation, and his answer was, 'The real question is do I know enough English.'

Ramona Koval: You mentioned the flexibility and the non-flexibility in certain parts of the language. Can you talk a little bit more about that? What do you mean?

Edith Grossman: Some things that we might not think are possible if we paid attention only to our sixth grade English teacher are in fact possible in contemporary fiction and in contemporary prose. In other words, good authors make contributions to the flexibility and the expansiveness of the language, and that is what I'm looking for. In other words...I'm trying to think of an example...

Ramona Koval: I just thought of something...we were told you can't have a sentence without a verb, that's what we were brought up on, and if you read a lot of authors sometimes you have sentences without verbs.

Edith Grossman: Right, they may not be grammatically complete sentences but every reader understands them.

Ramona Koval: So you talk about the deep reading you do of the text that you're translating. Tell me about this reading deeply. Does it mean that you have to read it many, many times? Does it mean that you read it for different things each time?

Edith Grossman: What I mean by 'deep reading'...and it comes after a couple or three readings...what I mean is capturing the subtleties of what the original author is doing. Because artful language has both the stated and the unstated in it, and the stated is fairly obvious, the unstated is really what differentiates one writer's style from another. And those unstated, unspoken elements are what I try to bring over in analogous fashion into English. That kind of reading, analysing the way parts of the sentence relate to one another and how the sentences in a paragraph relate to one another and so forth, how the paragraphs connect within the chapter, this is more intensive than an ordinary reading of a book. But to my mind it's what I have to do in order to create something in English that feels to the English-speaking reader the way the original feels, in my case, to the Spanish speaker.

Ramona Koval: You quote Borges who told his translator to write what he meant to say.

Edith Grossman: I know, it's a lovely phrase, isn't it. Of course it's a little tricky because of the way Spanish works because the phrase 'querer decir' which would be more or less 'to want to say' also translates as 'signify'. So he was making a lovely pun with his translator.

Ramona Koval: You describe it as the translator is listening to the first text and speaking the second text, and I thought that was interesting because you're using the language of the ear here rather than just the eye.

Edith Grossman: Yes, I find it very curious about myself that whenever I talk about translation I do it in vocal and auditory terms. I'm not quite sure why except that when I am checking on a translation, checking to see if the English actually works as English, I say it out loud to myself, and if it doesn't sound right I have to change it because our eyes forgive everything but our ears forgive nothing. Our eyes can skip down a page and say, 'Oh that makes sense, that's fine,' but if we hear it we'll say, 'Oh no, there's something wrong with that.'

Ramona Koval: Yes, that's completely true. And I read an article where it talked about you listening to music and you perhaps wanting to become a blues singer if you hadn't been a translator...

Edith Grossman: Well, you know, my voice is deep enough, I could have done it, maybe.

Ramona Koval: But you've obviously got an ear for music too and music is important to the way you work.

Edith Grossman: It's terribly important to me. I used to be married to a musician and my two sons are musicians, and I'd like to think it's my influence that brought them to that profession.

Ramona Koval: Let's begin really having a look at the big job, the translating of Cervantes. What an extraordinary thing for anybody to do, and can you tell me about how that job was presented to you?

Edith Grossman: I have spoken about this before. I got a phone call from the publisher, Dan Halpern at Ecco Press that's now part of Harper Collins, and I didn't know him at the time, and we chatted for a minute, and then he said, 'Would you be interested in translating Don Quixote?' And I said, 'Dan, are you sure you have the right Grossman because I do contemporary Latin Americans, I don't do Spaniards.' He said, 'No, no, I know all about that, I do have the right Grossman.' And I said, 'I would absolutely adore translating Cervantes.' So we agreed I would do it and the contracts were drawn up, but when I hung up the phone from that conversation I broke out into a sweat and I said, God, what have I done, how can I possibly take on that novel. So it was with great fear and trepidation that I undertook the project. But I did have a wonderful time working on it.

Ramona Koval: You say this is the equivalent of translating Shakespeare, in several ways, partly because what kind of a figure he is in Spanish literature and in fact world literature of course, and also the language and the time in which this book was written.

Edith Grossman: It's interesting that in terms of time, although Cervantes and Shakespeare were contemporaries and they actually died on the same day (that's very interesting), as a matter of fact Spanish has changed much less over the centuries than English has. So that reading Cervantes, even though he wrote this novel in the early 17th century, is much easier for a Spanish speaker than reading Shakespeare is for an English speaker. English has changed drastically in those four centuries.

Ramona Koval: Because English is more open to change?

Edith Grossman: I'm not quite sure how you explain it. I had a friend who used to say it's because English never had a royal academy of the language and there was no authority preventing words from coming into the language, which is an interesting idea, isn't it, that there was no authority stopping the importation of foreign words into English, which is one of the reasons we have an enormous lexicon. Our language is just huge because we welcome words from all over the world.

Ramona Koval: And what was the Spanish attitude?

Edith Grossman: Well, Spain certainly had a royal academy. Whether it was all external, Ramona, or not I can't say, it may be the nature of the language, something that I simply don't understand and can't talk about. I don't want to attribute it all to external or political factors like the existence of a royal academy of the language.

Ramona Koval: But you say even though things are easier to read in the Spanish of the time, you say two things rescued you, one of them was a Spanish-English dictionary from 1623.

Edith Grossman: Yes, that was very helpful. A friend sent a copy of it to me and that was very useful because when I say that this language has not changed as much as English, it doesn't mean that there aren't words that are archaic or difficult to understand. So that dictionary was very useful to me.

Ramona Koval: And the notes?

Edith Grossman: Oh, the notes for the Spanish edition. The Spanish edition that I used, which was the edition done by a scholar named Martin de Riquer, was filled with wonderful notes that explained references and allusions and difficult terminology. One of the ways he explained difficult words was to compare contemporary translations of the word in English, Italian and French, because Don Quixote was translated very quickly after publication, at least the first part, the 1605 part.

Ramona Koval: Lots of things happen with Don Quixote very quickly, you call it the most careless master work ever written. It's a big, baggy book, isn't it, all kinds of stuff happens and characters and little vignettes of everything.

Edith Grossman: I would never, by the way, use the word 'baggy' to describe it, but I think that part one is saggier and baggier than part two, and it does have lots of inserted stories and vignettes and so forth. It's part of the charm of the book. But that is much diminished in the second novel.

Ramona Koval: But why is it the most careless master work ever written?

Edith Grossman: Well, for example, Sancho's wife has four different names, and clearly Cervantes forgot what he had named the woman, and so she's referred to by four different names. He talks at one point about Sancho's donkey being stolen but he never mentions that it was stolen. In other words, he leaves that entire incident out and picks up at the point where Sancho is missing his donkey. And other things like that. Today, if you had a good copy editor, the copy editor would pick up these mistakes and get in touch with the author and say you have to fix this. But of course there were no copy editors in the 17th century.

Ramona Koval: And you say he was harried and financially hard-pressed.

Edith Grossman: Oh yes, he was in debtors prison several times. One time he was arrested for accounts that weren't quite straightforward. One of the ways he tried to earn a living, because he could never earn a living as a writer, was to be a tax collector for the Invincible Armada, and apparently his accounts were too bollixed up even for the Spanish government. So he was imprisoned for that.

Ramona Koval: So he had to get this book out, presumably.

Edith Grossman: Well, he had to get the book out...his great love was the theatre but he couldn't compete against Lope de Vega, so he was a very frustrated playwright. He had written shorter fiction and he wasn't making any money and he was in desperate need of money, and this book became his baby, in a way, the thing that would save him. And it was very popular, it was instantaneously popular, but the printer took all the money, so Cervantes still didn't make any money at all from this wonderful novel.

Ramona Koval: You talk about the importance of being able to translate the opening phrase, the importance for you to feel that you can actually do the rest as well.

Edith Grossman: Yes, well, that was a little bit of magical thinking I think. Somewhere I say that probably the best known sentence in all of Spanish...

Ramona Koval: What is it?

Edith Grossman: In Spanish?

Ramona Koval: Yes.

Edith Grossman: 'En un lugar de la Mancha, de cuyo nombre no quiero acordarme...' and then it goes on, I can't remember the rest of it, but that opening is in everyone's mind just as 'To be or not to be, that is the question' is in everyone's mind who speaks English.

Ramona Koval: And how did you translate it?

Edith Grossman: I finally translated it, 'Somewhere in la Mancha, in a place whose name I do not care to remember...'.

Ramona Koval: And what were the decisions that you had to make about that phrase?

Edith Grossman: Let's see...the overarching decision that goes beyond this phrase was whether I was going to make an effort to write quaint 17th century sounding English. And I decided I absolutely was not going to do that, that when Cervantes was writing he wasn't writing quaint Spanish, he was writing very cutting-edge, very innovative Spanish, and I felt the English had to match that. But then for that particular phrase the word 'lugar', for example, can have two different meanings in Spanish, one is 'a village' and the other is 'place', as in site. That's one of the reasons why I finessed it...I mean, I hope I finessed it with the phrasing 'Somewhere in la Mancha in a place whose name I do not care to remember.'

Ramona Koval: Because if you don't want to remember something, presumably you don't want to remember it was a village.

Edith Grossman: Right or give any other clue as to what it was. The other thing was to try to pick up some of the rhythm and some of the sound in English if I could, which is why I used 'care to' with that hard 'k' sound at the beginning to match up with the hard 'k' sound in 'no quiera acordarme' in the Spanish.

Ramona Koval: Now, that's an extraordinary decision that a reader in English wouldn't even know about.

Edith Grossman: I know but I knew about it. And also I went through all the possibilities; 'I do not wish to remember', 'I can no longer remember', 'I do not want to remember'. And I liked the insouciance of 'I do not care to remember', it felt offhand enough to work in that sentence.

Ramona Koval: And insouciance because..?

Edith Grossman: It means it's not that I can't remember but I do not wish to, for you, at this moment remember the place where Don Quixote was born and where he lived. I'm not sure if I can explain it.

Ramona Koval: It's great. But if we multiply this decision about the first phrase, it's a very long book, isn't it. I mean, imagine how many decisions you had to make like that.

Edith Grossman: Yes, but that's what translators do, and that's part of the reason that I get such a kick out of it because in a way it's like doing an endless crossword puzzle, it's just mind games that intrigue me.

Ramona Koval: But who says what the right answer is though? It's not like a crossword puzzle either because, as you say, it's a series of creative decisions and imaginative acts of criticism.

Edith Grossman: You're absolutely right, by the way, it isn't like a crossword puzzle. But I think there is no 'correct' solution which is why great works are translated so many times. I think Don Quixote has been translated something like 20 times into English, and each translation is different because each translator brings an individual sensibility and a particular literary experience to the job of translating it.

Ramona Koval: You were taking on a big thing, as we said before, because this is a classic of course in Spanish literature, it's a big book, all of these decisions you've had to make, and you say Cervantistas have always loved to disagree and argue. So you're walking into a minefield.

Edith Grossman: I did feel that way. Somewhere I said I had nightmares about them descending on me, accusing me of having betrayed the book. So it was a frightening prospect to bring this book out into the world and I did hold my breath. On the other hand, if feeling good when you've completed a project is a clue as to its being successful, I felt wonderful when I'd finished this translation, I really felt wonderful. I felt as if I had accomplished something huge, and I was very happy about it.

Ramona Koval: And what about when the reviews came out?

Edith Grossman: I was thunderstruck, I was as happy as I could be. Of course every time I read a translation that I've done I find things I would do differently if I were to translate the book today. It wouldn't be the book that I did seven years ago, it would be a different book because I've changed in those years.

Ramona Koval: That must be...I don't know how you'd manage that, you'd look at the book that you'd done and then you think...there's a whole lot of little worms inside it that are sort of calling to you, 'Look at me, change me.'

Edith Grossman: Sometimes actors say that, they say they can't bear to watch themselves on screen because they see everything wrong that they did. And I'm sure that a performing musician hears a recording and can think of 25 different ways the piece would have been more successfully played. So I think any interpretive performer has those doubts about the product.

Ramona Koval: I asked about the reviews, and the reviews were fantastic, but you do talk about people who review translated books and you say most reviewers of translated books are inept. Tell me why they're so inept.

Edith Grossman: I think they're inept...I'm discounting all the wonderful reviews I got for Don Quixote...

Ramona Koval: Of course.

Edith Grossman: Of course. I think they're inept because the majority of them have not thought seriously about what is involved in a translation and haven't thought about the vocabulary they need to talk about the connection between the translation and the original. That's asking a lot of a daily reviewer, I understand that, but all too often sentences for piece are quoted in the review as if they were the original sentences of the first author and not the writing of the translator. Very often nothing is said about the translation. Some publications require the reviewers to indicate that it is a translation, and so they dismiss it with something like; 'ably translated by so-and-so'. And the question I always ask myself is; ably as compared to what?

Ramona Koval: The other word is 'seamlessly' of course.

Edith Grossman: Oh yes, that's another one of my favourite ones.

Ramona Koval: So, 'seamlessly', 'ably'...'ably' sounds like it's a journeyman's job or something like that.

Edith Grossman: Yes. My question is; how do they know it's an able translation? Because you can be certain that 90% of the reviewers at least don't read the original language, so they don't have a clue as to whether the translation is an adequate translation or not.

Ramona Koval: And 'seamlessly', that whole idea that the translator doesn't exist.

Edith Grossman: Well, I guess I'm too aggressive a person to settle for that.

Ramona Koval: So what can they do remedy this, this ineptness? What do you think the reviewers need to do or to say or to know?

Edith Grossman: I think if they think more and more about what is involved in a translation...I'm repeating myself now, Ramona, I'm sorry...but they ought to think very carefully...or perhaps it's the job of the academic critics to come up with a critical vocabulary [unclear]. We don't have one, we really don't have one. [unclear]...

Ramona Koval: I think we're having some trouble with your phone line, Edith unfortunately...I think you're dropping out. Oh dear, I think we're going to have to stop talking unfortunately because you're dropping out and I can't hear your words. But it's a fantastic book, Why Translation Matters, it's published by Yale University Press, the author is Edith Grossman who we've been talking to today. Edith, thank you so much for being on The Book Show today.

Edith Grossman: You're welcome Ramona, it was a pleasure.

Ramona Koval: Thank you so much, and thank you so much for all your fantastic work, we'll read it with new vision and new ears on it.

Edith Grossman: Thank you, thanks very much.

Publications

Title: Why Translation Matters

Author: Edith Grossman

Publisher: Yale University Press