their - The University of Texas at Dallas

translate the maximum number of pages in a day, and
the quick turnaround demanded by the client.
Not wanting to lay all the blame on the publishers,
nor entirely exonerate the translators, we must
recognize that translation done in a hurry cannot be
good. An original work can sometimes be born in the
white heat of inspiration, poured out in one stream, in
a few weeks or days, and benefit from it; translation,
however, is filigree work, and should not be done in a
rush.
What should particularly be avoided is to do a
translation directly from the text without having read
it before: the translator who thinks that he will save
time doing so is deceiving himself, since the reading
allows him to get a perspective on the difficulties
involved, and to do the necessary research as he sees
fit. Once he has read the original in advance, marked
the difficult vocabulary, understood the allusions, he
will no longer have to interrupt his work and will be
able to carry it out at a uniform tempo, being able to
calculate the time required with reasonable precision.
It is not enough for the translator to attentively
read the text he is to translate. He must verify its
reliability, a task that simply does not occur to the
publisher. I was working for Editora Globo when a
translation of Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, which had
been commissioned for the excellent Biblioteca dos
Séculos, came to my attention. Luckily, I noticed in
time that the translated text was one of the many
adaptations for children and managed to prevent the
translation from being set in type.
Another case, perhaps even worse, might have
happened in the Coleção dos Prêmios Nobel de
Literatura, which dedicates a volume to each prizewinner.
This collection was modeled on a similar
work published in French by a Parisian publisher,
which provided to its Brazilian collaborator the
illustrations that had been commissioned. In the case
of Sienkiewicz, as there was no translator capable of
translating directly from the Polish, the obvious
choice was to have the famous Quo Vadis translated
from the French. And I would have delivered the text
in question to a translator if the slimness of the
volume had not made me suspect that something was
amiss. A comparison with another edition confirmed
that the original had been mutilated almost
unimaginably, with cuts made not only in every
chapter but on each page and every sentence. Seeing
that the complete novel would require two volumes,
when the collection had reserved only one for
Sienkiewicz, I resolved the problem by replacing the
novel with a collection of short stories by the author.
This case leads me to examine two problems in
literary translation: the first, making use of an
intermediary language which the translator does not
know the language in which the original is written,
and the second, adaptation.
Intermediary translation is a necessary evil,
without which masterworks created in languages that
are exotic or spoken by peoples that are small in
numbers could never be disseminated. For a century,
the monumental works of Russian literature were only
able to come to the attention of the West thanks to
translators who were almost exclusively French,
whose translations were then translated into other
languages. The great Hindu epics, the Chinese
classics, the Thousand and One Nights, the Tale of
Genji, Scandinavian literature … all of this was
transmitted in second-hand translations. The
disadvantages of the process are immediately obvious;
and yet these are acceptable if the alternative is a
complete ignorance of such important creations of the
human imagination.
The quality of the indirect translation is logically
dependent on that of the intermediary text. For this
reason, the validity of the latter has to be most
carefully established. However, even an intermediary
text of real value can give rise to awkward or
unreadable retranslations when the translator is not
able to identify and counterbalance distortions
resulting from the intrinsic nature of the intermediary
text.
French, the preferred intermediary for world
literature for centuries, is, paradoxically, a language
that is one of the least appropriate for the task.
Incapable of imitating the turns of phrase in other
languages, without the possibility of constructing new
words, and alien, in general, to neologism, with
limited resources in derivation, it is a filter that is
unable to transmit many characteristics of the original
text. In his preface to his translation of Hamlet, André
Gide complains of the intransigence of this language
of strict grammatical and syntactical demands, clear,
precise, and prosaic, “if not anti-poetic.” 2
I have spoken elsewhere about the problems
produced by translating an Italian text through
French. 3
50