In the gangster drama The Outfit (2022), the sublime Mark Rylance plays Leonard Burling, an English cutter (not tailor, please, “Anyone with a needle and thread and fifteen minutes can be a tailor”) who practices his craft in Chicago in the 1950s. To the local Irish mobsters, who use his shop as a stash house for the illegal returns on their “investments,” the unshakably polite craftsman and tradesman Burling is known as English, a nickname that is belittling or gruffly affectionate depending on the crook addressing him. Throughout the picture, we hear Burling, who trained on the Row, explain his craft in voice-over, from start to what he calls finishings. This narration, by the way, like Fred MacMurray’s Walter Neff and his confession in Double Indemnity, is diegetically worked into the storyline, but on several levels by comparison with Neff’s straightforward telling of his femme-fatalled crime. For Burling’s voice-over, like the jacket we see him working on over the course of the film, is both an account of how a bespoke suit gets made and commentary on and explanation of the events we see playing out on screen.
At one critical point we hear English tell an amusing story about his past: “Some years ago a customer comes into my shop, with a suit, not mine. The customer says, ‘The jacket, it’s too big…’ ‘The problem,’ I say, ‘is the shoulders.’ But the customer says, no, he likes the shoulders. The problem is the sleeves. We go back and forth. Finally, the customer says, ‘It’s my money, and I’m telling you, cut the sleeves.’ So what do I do? I say, ‘Yes, sir,’ and then I cut the shoulders. The customer, he comes back, tries on the suit. ‘It’s perfect,’ he says. ‘That’s exactly what I asked for.’”
Translation is an art, a craft, and in many cases a business as well. In that business, the translator does indeed have to cut the shoulders at times and let the customer conclude that the sleeves have been rightly shortened. Things are certainly complicated – and tact is required – when translator and customer share the same tongue. Thus, a French-speaking friend and colleague has to deal with French-speaking clients who are convinced that they, too, handle written French with as much, if not more, mastery as my friend, who has been working in the language for years. Once, he told me, he had a client suggest all sorts of changes. He was flabbergasted, floored, and not a little blue at all the red. He got over the blue part and, as he explained to me with a wink in an email, commiserated with the client, i.e., so many good suggestions but the deadline, alas, that pitiless taskmaster, did not leave him the time to incorporate the many fine emendations.
For the English-language translator, things are decidedly worse. Because English is the de facto lingua franca (gotta love that, Italian to explain the hegemony – Greek! – of English today), and given our human gift of deluding ourselves as to the true level of our abilities, English translators have to face many a mediocrity who knows better while knowing a lot less of the target language than they do. This is especially prevalent in the field in which I have done the bulk of my business, in art history and art criticism, particularly contemporary art criticism. Long ago, when I was new to New York City and the fax and the phone were the only game in town – the ease of internet communications and research was still a few years in the future – I translated an essay of around ten pages and found myself going over my English version on the phone with the French-speaking author, our conversation conducted in French. I remember having used in the text, and mentioned in our conversation, that go-to verb in art history, “boast,” as in “the museum boasts three Picassos and a half-dozen first-rate paintings by Cézanne.” What is that, that “boast” (qu’est-ce que c’est ça ?), my client asked with the tone of doubt and annoyance tinged with disgust used after your dress shoe has hit something squishy and malodorous on the sidewalk. I patiently explained the verb’s use and how it is a synonym for “have” or “possess,” a standard way of avoiding repetition. “No, I don’t want that” (non, je ne veux pas ça) came his informed judgment.
As for Picassos with an ess at the end, I had a French-speaking colleague in Paris, three years before the above, ask me if I wasn’t mistaken writing about several Picassos (in French, plurals of proper names are invariable and do not take the ess that marks the plural normally, so referring to works of art by the maker’s name would be invariable, no ess; le musée possède trois Picasso would be the correct form). She was not the first person, and certainly not the last, to whom I had to reveal patiently a startling truth, that French is one language and English another, indeed a whole nother ballgame. The same woman around this time was also a bit shocked that I would use contractions (“I don’t know,” “I’d have written”) in my translation of an interview with the Nobel Prize-winning writer Claude Simon. It would seem that Nobel-Prize winning authors in conversation never speak like the rest of us. Again, patiently, I assured her that an English-speaking Nobel-Prize winning author would probably say “I don’t know” in an interview, never “I do not know.” Finally, one of my favorite bits of Gallic overreach occurred around this time and when I was working for the same magazine. The French sculptor César (born César Baldaccini) was known for his compressions (compacted metal, often automobiles), expansions (polyurethane foam pieces), and so on, pieces that, to a skeptical eye, seem pretty much facile variations on a fairly straightforward formula. I was informed by César’s studio that his pieces are all unique and hence there cannot be several Césars, as I had mistakenly translated at a number of points in the article-interview. Patiently I protested. Cheerily I explained that English doesn’t work like that; “several César” sounds, to the native ear, like a mistake… No, each piece is unique; “César” cannot take an ess. César could take a fecking hike, as far as the English tongue cared, but I quickly devised a workaround and emended the text. Five pieces or works by César, the uniquest French artist of them all! That was easy. Caesar non supra grammaticos, or Caesar is not above grammarians… That is, even the highest authority, the most powerful individual, has no power over how language works in the end. How I would have liked to have used that at the time, but sleeves had to be shortened, shoulders cut. Now I get to bring it out more than thirty years after the events.
The most egregious example of being out of one’s depth in my experience involved one half of a very wealthy Swiss couple that collected art, especially non-Western works from around the world, pre-Columbian, African, Southeast Asia, Oceania. They were very discerning collectors – but absolutely not gifted linguists. A native speaker of French, Monique Barbier-Mueller decided that she could translate into English a chapter in a book written by her husband, if memory serves. I was called in at the very last minute, when the English version was laid out and about to go to the printer’s, to sauver les meubles (literally “save the furniture”) and salvage the project before it saw print and the disastrous chapter joined Pedro Carolino’s English As She Is Spoke on the humor shelf. I deeply regret not keeping a copy of the priceless thing, before and after my rewrite. And this was before Google translate; Mme Barbier-Mueller had come up with her truly unique idiom entirely on her own, it would appear. The book was on pre-Columbian art and I was genuinely glad to learn, for instance, that lamas (sic) were pack animals as well as a source of meat for the Inca. As Mrs. Lovett might have sung, “If you’ve eighty-sixed priest,/What’s the harm of tossing in lama?/Go on and splurgee, they’re clergy at least.” New Yorkers, by the way, are rightly proud of their deli lama meats. The entire translation was one long howler glittering with an inexhaustible series of particular blunders. As I recall, one statue was described as “blandishing a sceptre,” while elsewhere the “primordial couple arouse from Lake Titicaca.”
Usually, when a client questioned a particular word choice or turn of phrase from the margins of the English version, or, horribile lectu, suggested improvements, unable not to delve into the matter I would return polite, even enthusiastic, and somewhat detailed explanations of my original translation or why the question was interesting or the proposed change unnecessary, awkward, and incorrect often enough. This was poor but ever-hopeful pedagogy (I am doubtful any client ever retained much, if anything, from my attempted instruction) and bad business (marginalia eat away at “margins” in a different shrinking sense). As I neared the age of sixty, I began to have an inkling that casting my bread upon the waters was maybe not a wise commercial strategy, no pain for my pains, no additional bread for my labor.
A ditty, I thought. Head them off at the impasse. Intimate to the French author through English style that only one of us in this temporary relationship really knows l’anglais:
In toil and tomes alone grown rich,
I sort of know what I’m doing,
And up and/or around with which,
I’d prefer you were not screwing.
To be entirely clear (and to use preemptive silverback chest-thumping), I also wrote the following to preface the poemetto:
“Our English translator is a professional with many years of experience behind him. He is quite happy, even eager, to correct a real error when it is pointed out to him. However, if you wish to question his formulations, his turns of phrase; if you want to suggest alternative translations; if you are concerned by a stylistic matter or a choice of words; in short, if any damn thing crosses your mind (almost certainly in French by the way; please be aware of that irony) having to do with his translation and you want to bring it up with him, be advised that he will only consider remarks couched in correct English and formulated in complete sentences. No ‘Stronger word?’ No ‘Correct?’ Niente ‘Why this word?’ Nada ‘In French ceci veut dire…’ He will only entertain (that means ‘consider’ here, by the way – the translator, for one, is certainly not amused) complete sentences in correct English. If you can’t read this paragraph without the help of a bilingual dictionary, you shouldn’t be making comments or suggestions about an English translation. If you can’t be bothered to read until this point, you aren’t a serious writer or scholar and shouldn’t be making comments or suggestions about an English translation. If you think you know English and you only half-understand the above, admit to yourself (it’s not shameful: understanding and writing in any language, especially one you weren’t born into, is hard work!) that you shouldn’t be making comments or suggests. You would only be wasting your time, his time, and any intermediary’s time. All the best!”
I can say that I never heard back from any of the three or four authors I tried my wordploy on, but I doubt it was because any of them was convinced by the text. Indeed, I’m confident nobody bothered to read beyond the first three lines, if that. Maybe the ditty in ital caught their eye and gave them a laugh – provided they had a good enough grasp of English, which in all probability they did not. And twice, I think, I even included a challenge, namely, if the author could point out to me the apocryphal quotation lurking behind the poem, I would be overjoyed and gladly welcome them to our ranks (and take seriously their suggestions). It is of course the remark attributed to Churchill on the supposed rule of not ending a sentence with a preposition (“Nonsense up with which I shall not put.”)
Also around my sixty-year-old milestone, a high point of amusing annoyance was reached by a hapless French artist mining the gender vein. For the translation of a one-page text, I recall, he posed all sorts of questions and pushed lots of stylistic refinements as he saw it. A text one page long. I am proud of having considered every text, no matter the length, to deserve equal professional care but… one page simply summarizing what the artist had done for the show, which was to be expounded on a few weeks later in a proper introduction to the exhibition? I lost my reserve and dipped into my store of saeva indignatio, my savage indignation, when the feckless dauber asked in the marginalia and in French about the difference between “show” and “exhibition,” because “show” is applied to things on television, for example, whereas “exhibition”… I pointed out to him that when you encounter an unfamiliar word or wonder about the precise meaning of a term (perhaps chosen for a very good reason) “you look it the fuck up.” I went on to explain, for the enth time in my career by the way, that the sentence in which “art show” appears contains a number of polysyllabic words; it’s one of the stylistic details a translator must attend to when turning French into English, balancing the weighty Latinate or learned vocabulary a sentence can bear. “Art show” is lighter, as it were, than “art exhibition,” although it is no less serious in its meaning. Works by Old Masters are no less interesting if they are hanging in an art show rather than an art exhibition. By the same token, I thought but did not write, the third rate is not imbued with any of the imagination or interest it lacks merely by being shown in an art exhibition.
The summit of laughable advice on style in a language the advice giver does not possess but confidently knows better than the English translator was achieved for me by the Swiss-German artist Michael Günzburger in a two-page text for his show (or exhibition, I don’t remember which it was in this case) at the Galerie Haas Zürich. Here is a selection of his choicest marginal remarks verbatim; his very first observation concerns the second sentence of the piece (“In Günzburger, the production of form springs from an interest in visualizing the material world through matter itself” – Ms. Laurence Schmidlin wrote it in French, I just translated it; I wouldn’t want to justify it though… I mean, is there any other way for an artist, the producer of form, to visualize the material world than through matter, the stuff of the material world? Alright… Art & Language, yes, but ideas aside, Mr. Kosuth and co.’s output isn’t terribly interesting to look at; it’s a long and tiresome question, settled once and for all repeatedly: the eyes have it):
That sentence does not feel right. [No, that sentence doesn’t think straight; its feel is not its chief problem.]
In german it says. He started to be interested in interested in eggs, not “found a new passion.” Interested is better. [I was translating from the French original, where “passion” figures in the damn text, “…Michael Günzburger s’est récemment passionné pour l’œuf qui symbolise un potentiel…”]
drawn with Indian Ink
also:
just Ink ? [I had correctly translated into American English, “They depict eggs that are delicately drawn in India ink…” The author, not I, used encre de chine; that’s “India ink” in the US and often “Indian ink” in the UK, as well as “India ink” and “China ink.”]
in german I would add a “-” instead of a comma-.
is that sentence grmmatically correct ? [That sentence was indeed grmmatically correct.]
It was enough to make a cat laugh, as they used to say in Great Britain. By the way, une manche, feminine noun, means “a sleeve” in English, while un manche, masculine noun and homonym, is “a handle,” and curiously enough familiar French for someone who is thick, dumb, a moron. Con comme un manche would be “dumb as shit, dumb as a rock, thick as two short planks.” Spoken off the cuff merely, not off the record.
English the craftsman cutter would have been laughing up his sleeve (and all the way to the shoulder, if not the bank). English knows better, this translator is sure of that.
******
By way of a title for the present I was toying with “Alterations Done on the Premises” and “Seamlessly Taken In” with their classic wordplay on “premises” and “taken in,” but then I came across Seamus Heaney’s “Clearances,” specifically the three introductory tercets to the sonnet cycle he dedicated to his late mother:
In Memoriam M.K.H., 1911-1984
She taught me what her uncle once taught her:
How easily the biggest coal block split
If you got the grain and hammer angled right.
The sound of that relaxed alluring blow,
Its co-opted and obliterated echo,
Taught me to hit, taught me to loosen,
Taught me between the hammer and the block
To face the music. Teach me now to listen,
To strike it rich behind the linear black.
Heaney surely has another meaning in mind, a different wealth altogether, a purely aesthetic pay dirt, in his striking it rich “behind the linear black,” the lines of black print or pixel on the page. Coming after “to face the music,” it is the unavoidable sense. As a rule, when a poet uses the word “music,” especially in an idiom that is the very opposite of the charged poetic line, readers should assume something else, some connotational add-on, is meant. (For me the greatest comic use along these lines is when Nabokov has Charles Kinbote mention the “very loud amusement park right in front of [his] present lodgings,” where he is preparing his “annotated” edition of John Shade’s poem in four cantos, “Pale Fire.” This sets up his exacerbated cry and aside further on in his introduction, just as he explains that the supposedly missing final line of the poem, verse 1000, should be the very first line: “…and damn that music.” Indeed! Kinbote unwittingly, even madly damns the music in the poem, and throws shade at “his poet,” while transforming “Pale Fire” into an amusement park house of mirrors.)
In my experience, only a few translators ever grow rich financially from whatever lode they can work, especially a literary one and above all poetry. Robert Fagles’ English versions of The Iliad and The Odyssey (Viking Press) “have sold an estimated 1.5 million copies combined” (ait A.I.). That’s pretty darn good – the exception that proves the French expression poetry ne nourrit pas son homme, literally doesn’t feed its man, can’t put enough food on the translator’s table.
Writing in the New York Times (“Making Books: Why the Classics Are Retranslated,” NYT, Feb. 01, 2001), Martin Arnold points out some of the winners in the epic-translation dodge, who include Heaney himself and his stunning Modern English translation of Beowulf (“The Irish Nobel laureate’s verse translation…was on the New York Times fiction best-seller list for 10 weeks last year and has sold more than 200,000 copies in hardback. These sales seem truly aberrational. Classics generally sell in the small thousands.”) Arnold also mentions the then recently published translation and scholarly bilingual edition of The Inferno by the American couple Robert and Jean Hollander, the former a renowned Dante scholar who taught at Princeton and the latter a poet and translator. The couple eventually published a three-volume sumptuously annotated bilingual edition of the Commedia. Jean Hollander’s nonrhyming English version is very good.
Literary translation, especially poetry, is indeed for the love of the craft, one’s mother tongue, and the language of the original author. Like its beloved source, such translation makes one per molti anni macro, literally “over the many years lean,” as Dante writes in a well-known verse about his own experience composing the Commedia in exile (Paradiso XXV, 3).