I was with a few non-French-speaking friends recently when the following tagline (apparently signature in French, a nice repurposing of the term) for a French specialty cheese drew our attention: Invitation à un voyage sensoriel.

First came an explanation of the allusion hovering behind the phrase, a reference to the French poet Charles Baudelaire’s rightly famous poem “Invitation au voyage,” the title usually being translated as… “Invitation to the Voyage” (I have my doubts about that rendering and return to it below). “Invitation au voyage,” the title at any rate, is immediately recognized by most French-speakers and hence is not unheard-of in advertising copy. Hunting around for English equivalents, I can think of Keats’ “On Chapman’s Homer” (true title: “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer”), or Frost’s “Stopping by Woods” (again the complete title is “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening”), which are generally familiar to people in the United States, although I suspect that English-language advertisers haven’t been falling over themselves in their rush to capitalize on poem titles.

The more enlightening discussion, however, had to do with sensoriel, which you could English as “sensory.” To take an example close to our cheese noodling here, the concept of sensory marketing is called le marketing sensoriel in French; it could well be that the French marketing or advertising team had that very usage in mind, consciously or unconsciously, when someone came up with the tagline. In any case, a rough mental first-draft translation might be “Invitation to a sensory voyage.” Why not “sensuous voyage” or “sensual voyage,” my non-Francophone friends wanted to know. Ah, there’s the rub. Sensuous or sensual voyage in French would be voyage sensuel, and that, good members of the reading public, is not what the author or authors wrote. Translator’s gotta translate what’s on the computer screen. That suggestion, however, leads to two observations.

First a bad translator, someone with only a cursory grasp, if that, of the out-of language, might well leap to the conclusion that sensoriel is surely the Frenchman’s way of saying “sensuous” or “sensual”—why the French are always slipping the pleasures of the flesh into most absurd of places, the thinking goes. Not so here, or at least not in the way a bad translator might understand it.

Secondly, and more importantly, an experienced translator normally cannot get away with a turn of phrase like “sensory voyage,” even though it would in fact be an accurate translation. The general reader, encountering something like “Invitation to a Sensory Voyage” on the wrapping of a specialty French cheese, would conclude that the phrase was a bad translation, an utterance that no native speaker or writer would ever make under normal speech conditions.

In the end I would settle for “invitation to a voyage of the senses,” which is strictly in French, invitation à un voyage des sens, but never mind, there is no end to compromise in the translation dodge. Translators are constantly weighing just how far they can go in their target language, looking for what they can reasonably get away with.

One final word about that usual English translation of the title of Baudelaire’s well-loved poem. The great American poet and translator Richard Wilbur, for instance, prudently avoids the problem altogether by leaving the French title at the top of his English translation. The difficulty lies in the use of the definite article. Le voyage could be, for example, “the voyage/journey/trip (that I took over the summer—that is, with any dependent clause that justifies the definite article here). But one could also conceivably render le voyage as “travel,” the general concept of moving over a significant distance for business or pleasure, which we express with the articleless noun (what specialists call anarthrous nouns or substantives). This presents a poser.

The content of Baudelaire’s poem doesn’t in fact describe a particular voyage, journey or trip, or the act of traveling, all of which could justify the use of the definite article: Invitation to the journey (we shall make together to this or that place…) “Invitation au voyage” describes an exquisite, ideal place (Amsterdam was the inspiration here) that the poet would like to reach and inhabit with his beloved. Perhaps a more accurate rendering would be “Invitation to Travel” (and notice how we have dropped the articleless noun for a verb, with the preposition “to” of “invitation” and the “to” of the to-infinitive neatly fusing into one word). Whereas “Invitation to a Journey” doubtless sounds better, and “Invitation Far Away” or “Invitation to a Distant Shore” are immediately—and all too slickly—perceived as “poetic” (a temptation the translator must constantly resist), the most accurate translation in the circumstances, the one that most closely approaches the original sense of the French, would probably be “Invitation to Travel.” After you, Monsieur Baudelaire.

The single word, then words together and how they sound, and now, finally, how words are allowed to go together to make a coherent utterance, that is, something that a native speaker and reader of a given language would hear or read and accept as coming from a fellow practitioner of the language, regardless of the content. This final category in what can prove impossible to translate, in what we lose when we say something is lost in translation, involves the bugbear grammar.

Bugbear, of course, because for most, grammar is the language stuff, the rules, that we were supposed to pick up at school and either did, and now often make sure others know that fact (you know who you are and frankly you are not helping matters… plus you are often mistaken); or didn’t and now either are playing catch up, by trying to relearn the rules as adults, or don’t care but know, too, that the rules are out there, somewhere, waiting to pounce.

That is not what I mean, however difficult, even impossible, one may deem grammar by the way. I mean something that is permissible in one language and is put to use by writers in that language, but which cannot be done in the target language. A very simple example by way of illustration. In French, as in many languages, all nouns have a gender (“table” is feminine, la table, whereas a pot is masculine, le pot, to take two examples where the words are nearly identical in spelling and sense in the two languages). The third person singular and plural pronouns in French will reflect the gender of the noun they refer to, so la table can simply be referred to as elle while le pot would be il, if you wish to speak of them elsewhere without actually repeating the words in question (Le pot ? Il est sur la table. La table ?! Mon dieu, elle est dans l’autre pièce… “The pot? It’s on the table. The table?! Jeeze, it’s in the other room…”). In English, as any English-speaker knows, for “table” or “pot” all we have is “it,” and indeed the neutral pronoun seems to apply to much that is in our world, or which we might want to talk about. Now if in French there is, say, a complicated sentence with a number of things mentioned but only one of them is masculine while the rest are feminine, or vice versa, and in the following sentence the writer only wants to focus on that one outstanding thing, the new sentence can limit itself to the appropriate pronoun, whether il or elle. The reader will almost instantly know the referent. In English, the translator cannot count on using “it” alone; the term might refer to several things in the earlier sentence. Thus, because of how the languages work, the English translator probably has to repeat the term in question, or find a synonym, to avoid ambiguity.

Along the same lines, a possessive pronoun (my, your, his, her, its, and so on) in French agrees with the gender of what it goes with, sa table but son pot; not so in English, of course. For the third person singular, for instance, we want to know the sex of the person referred to, whether it is his or her table. In a number of instances in the field where I often work, art history and criticism, I have faced the problem of not knowing from the artist’s name whether I need to write, say, “his vigorous, expressive brushstrokes” or “her vigorous, expressive brushstrokes,” since the original French here would offer me no clue. Usually, if there are at least a few sentences about the artist, somewhere there is an indication, a personal pronoun or a past participle that has to agree with the person: Né à Tokyo, il travaille… or née à Paris, elle travaille… (we have borrowed the latter née into English of course, written née or nee, as a way, now a bit posh I suppose, of indicating a woman’s maiden name). Quite recently in a French text, I had to deal with an artist whose given name is Gedi. My apologies if the limits of my general knowledge are showing. Since the piece involved short notices on about two dozen artists in all, there were exactly four sentences devoted to this artist and the work being shown, with nary a né or née to help. Worse, while the second sentence of the notice did indeed use the masculine pronoun il (ah, I’m saved!), a careful reading revealed that it could arguably refer to two things in the preceding sentence, the artist or son travail (his/her “work” or “work of art”—masculine in French). In the pre-internet era, I would have been in a fix.

As it turns out, Gedi is a male name. Yet I was still in a fix, strictly speaking. Was the author referring to the artist or son travail, “his work,” when, in the second sentence, we read, “…il empêche l’accès à l’élément visuel…” (he/it thwarts [our/the viewer’s] access to the visual element)? Interpretation was called for, and in all likelihood, it was indeed the artist who was the subject of the clause. This kind of difficulty—not impossibility—is rare but perhaps not as rare today as one imagines. By way of an experiment, I found on line a gallery that shows Gedi as well as a good number of other contemporary artists, and along with the Rachels and the Richards, I find a Bjarne (I’ll guess male before looking it up) and a Haegue (lovely name, but no clue). And to return to the supposedly familiar arres, Ryan, come to think of it, used to be almost exclusively a male name, but not so since the 1970s.

Other difficulties arise between French and English, for example, because of such a simple thing as word order (I may be stretching the “grammar” category here). For nouns with modifying adjectives in English, the usual word order has the adjective coming before the noun, the yellow rose; in French the usual order is the opposite, la rose jaune. This may seem like a minor point, but in French it often allows the writer to continue to work from the adjective without interrupting the flow of the sentence. In a recent translation I encountered this turn of phrase, “…il extrait des objets emblématiques d’une certaine esthétique de la pacotille…” (…he selects objects that are emblematic of a certain cheap, bogus aesthetic…). The emblématiques following the noun it modifies allows the writer to specify what the objects are emblematic of without the addition of a dependent clause; in English I had to do just that, add a dependent clause (“…that are emblematic of…”). This may not seem like much, but the addition of two words, in cases where brevity is critical, can pose a problem. It can also prove quite a headache to recreate stylistically when working from what we might call classic French art-history prose. The sentences tend to be long and the writers very fond of what linguists call recursion, the capacity of language to add infinitely to an utterance in a nesting Matryoshka doll effect. It puts me in mind of a truly professional gentleman burglar before an especially tall chest of drawers: he neatly pulls out the lowest drawer, deftly goes over the contents, leaves it open and passes on to the drawer above that, and so on, to the very top. The sentences run to Faulknerian or Proustian lengths, often by using the short cut of building from an adjective or past participle which we have just seen above.

In the complete clause I quoted, for example, there are in fact two such constructions, “…il extrait des objets emblématiques d’une certaine esthétique de la pacotille (guirlandes lumineuses, fausses fleurs) assez typique des banlieues pavillonnaires,” which in English yields, “…he selects objects that are emblematic of a certain cheap, bogus aesthetic (strings of lights, fake flowers), one that is fairly typical of residential suburbs with their rows of individual houses.” (The astute bilingual reader had already noticed that extrait, from the verb extraire, lexically “to extract, to pull out of, to quarry,” even “to excerpt,” ought to be “…[from this] he draws objects…,” but an English verb closer to the original doesn’t really fit here.) Emblématiques de is followed closely by assez typique (fairly/rather typical of), modifying une certaine esthétique de la pacotille. In English this ought to involve two that or which clauses following closely on one another, but that would make for an intolerable echo of the breathless drone generated by the well-informed museum docent on a tear. I introduce a break in the sentence (“one that is fairly typical…”) to avoid just that. In a sentence with six, seven, or more such clauses, many more in a wonderfully meandering, beautifully wrought sentence by Proust (often a chest of drawers that soars right through the ceiling into the floor above—and beyond, making it as far as the attic three or floor flights up), it becomes impossible at times to mirror the contours—and the length—of the sentence in the original.

From the single word that stands as a stickler for the translator, we come to a broader category, how words that work brilliantly together can be especially troublesome when you are trying to recreate them in another tongue. This category of difficulty includes word play (a pun could hinge on a single word but of course it is how that word sounds like another or others that counts), the particularly well turned phrase in which the sound plays as important a role as the idea expressed, and generally top-flight poetry—especially poetry. As a translator, you try your best but you know your enterprise is doomed to some degree of failure; in such cases we can speak of something that is indeed impossible to translate, even if some part of the original does carry over into the target language.

The great Lewis Carroll has the Duchess in Alice in Wonderland offer this “moral,” a word she is very fond of, “Take care of the sense, and the sounds will take care of themselves.” Sound advice indeed. It is precisely what a translator cannot do, for the sounds almost never do take care of themselves. First, a word of explanation in case we overlook how clever Carroll is being here. The author of the Alice books is playing on an English saying, “Take care of the pence and the pounds will take care of themselves,” a bit of folk wisdom that is probably unknown to most Americans. It is of course dollars and cents, not pounds and pence, in the United States, Canada and Australia, to mention several other major countries where English, if not the pound, has currency. The joke might fly right by us.

The original English adage—this is true of so many proverbs—has phonetic qualities that make it quite distinctive in its own right. There is the clear alliteration of pence and pounds, and both words receive a strong stress in the phrase. Moreover, a kind of one-two-three waltz occurs if we listen carefully; aside from the first two syllables, the stress falls on every third one thereafter (anapests, in terms of metrical units). Finally, I’ve mentioned front and back vowels in an earlier posting, and these two nouns offer a play of front and back vowels between them. I am probably not alone in hearing a kind of resolution, as the term is understood in music, when reading pounds just after pence. From pence and pounds to sense and sounds, the same analysis applies to Carroll’s witty variation on the adage. Which makes it hard, though not yet impossible for a translator.

It should be fairly clear then that we translators, when we are doing our job properly, are taking care of the sense, primarily, but also the sounds, which come in at a very close second. In some instances, however, the challenge is too great, the variables legion, and we have to settle for sense alone. The pun, the extremely smart turn of phrase, the beautifully wrought verse is truly impossible to translate. If I turn back into English word for word a translation of Carroll’s punning observation found in one anonymous on-line French version, it would read, “Take care of the sense, and the words will take care of themselves.” The French completely jettisons the alliteration as well as any allusion to a comparable French adage (occupez-vous du sens, et les mots s’occuperont d’eux-mêmes). On the other hand, Henri Bué, in his Aventures d’Alice au pays des merveilles, brought out just four years after the original 1865 publication of the first Alice, opts to play off an extremely well known French proverb that is loosely related to the English one (and introduces two types of animal into his rewritten form of the proverb, a happy addition to a story ostensibly for children). The bit of folk wisdom is un tiens vaut mieux que deux tu l’auras (the English equivalent is “A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush,” although literally the phrase would come out as “A ‘take’ / ‘hold’ is worth two ‘you will have’s”). The translator cleverly reworks it into un chien vaut mieux que deux gros rats (or literally, “One dog is worth two fat rats”). In this case, the sounds achieve some of the same effects and internal coherence of the original, even if we have moved away from the original’s sense. Finally, in his Alice nel Paese delle meraviglie (1913), the Italian translator Silvio Spaventa Filippi, for example, while sticking close to the sense of the original, comes up with a fine series of alliterations at least: Guardate al senso; le sillabe si guarderanno da sè. Here it is “sense” and “syllables” that approximate Carroll’s sense-sounds link.

One widespread example of a phrase that truly defies translation in most cases is the terse mercantile poetry advertisers sometimes achieve in their slogans. Advertising slogans are all around us of course, and have been for many generations. In this instance, it is the very best that are full of passionate intensity. And a studied interconnectedness between sound and meaning that makes for a simple, yet diamantine utterance, memorable in the best sense of the term.

In French there is the famous slogan Dubo, Dubon, Dubonnet, which goes back to the 1930s. It is true that the play on the name of this French apéritif was greatly helped by the visual genius of Cassandre (Adolphe Mouron), who designed the advertising poster. On the other hand, by way of purely verbal proof of the slogan’s staying power, I began studying French at the age of twenty and the slogan seems to have always been part of my acquired French culture. Indeed, since the poster, or rather images (the affect was achieved through a succession of three images) first appeared, the phrase has become part of every French speaker’s common heritage. (By comparison, in the English-speaking world, at least in the United States, the “I want you for the U.S. Army,” dating from 1917, is memorable mostly for the image accompanying it; apart from the striking echo of “you” in “U.S.” and the subtle suggestion of a collective “us”—from I to you to us/U.S.—there is nothing much to recommend the locution aurally.) The French slogan simple repeats twice the first two syllables of the product name (it comes from the family name of the original maker of this fortified wine), but there is both a play on words and a sense of progression, from the open vowel in Dubo to the nasalized vowel in Dubon to a kind of resolution in the three syllables of the complete name, now with an additional vowel that is pronounced higher up in the throat. The play on words is hard to convey. “Dubo” sounds exactly like du beau while “dubon” is both the speech sound and written form (missing one space) of du bon; the former would mean, very awkwardly, (some) beauty, and the latter, (some) good. In other words, “something beautiful, something good, Dubonnet.” As if these suggested qualities were not enough, the last three letters of the name spell out an adjective in French that means clear, sharply defined, distinct, clean (net, pronounced like our English net). The original ad underscores this term by the way, because all the letters of the name are outlined and are gradually colored in to form the appropriate words from one image to the next (Dubo/Dubon/Dubonnet), as the derby-sporting man pictured there drinks up naturally! The second, central image clearly balances “Dubon,” which is darkly colored, against a clear “net.” A mere seven syllables then, but ones that make excellent use of some of the language’s sound and semantic possibilities. Simple and yet simply impossible to translate.