So Much Depends

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: 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 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.

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Mind the Sense, Mine the Sounds

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 . 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.

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The Unlovely Gaze Where Every Eye Doth Dwell

What then is difficult, even impossible, to translate into English? Sometimes it is indeed a single word, though often not the “hard” or “rare” (read technical) lexemes that the imagination might immediately conjure up; sometimes it is how the word or phrase functions brilliantly with its peers, which involves something of le mot juste that Flaubert so esteemed (easily enough translated as “the right word,” by the way); and sometimes it is how one language allows words to do their work together, what people commonly think of when they think of the word grammar, and what is more properly called syntax (from the Greek suntaxis, suntassein, to arrange together). First, the single word.

The term regard in French is a good example. In English the term can be translated as gaze, look or glance, and the French word is of course the origin of the English “regard,” which made its first appearance in the language far back in 1380, according to the second edition of the OED. On the face of it, regard is indeed quite easy to translate into English. In art criticism, art history and cultural criticism in general, fields where I often find myself working, regard has proven especially popular. I haven’t got access to the necessary resources to do proper linguistic research but I wouldn’t be at all surprised to learn that the use of the word in French began to shoot up in the late 1960s or 1970s, at least in academic publications, art criticism and so on (by way of a benchmark, Foucault’s Discipline and Punish was originally published in 1975 in French; the first American edition dates from 1977). The same would hold for “gaze,” the usual translation for regard in this sense. It would be far easier, moreover, to follow gaze’s soaring fortunes since the word was probably less commonly employed in English in comparison to regard and its frequency in French. It is to this particular use, or overuse, that we owe the existence of such terms as the male gaze, the spectator’s gaze, the extra-diegetic gaze (the knowing wink at the audience), even—inevitably, come to think of it—“gaze in the military,” the title of both a 30 January 2007 news item in the New York Post and a few postings that are still floating around the English blogosphere.

The difficulty with translating regard springs from the term’s relative commonness in French. The regard du spectateur, for example, comes readily off the pen; indeed, a French critic who has no patience for the arch arcana of a Lacan or a Derrida could still write the expression without blushing or feeling like a hypocrite. Not so with “the spectator’s gaze.” That is one common rendering of the French locution and it still stands out a bit in English. Place it in a translated text and you tip off some, risk turning off others. Its presence would probably signal, or further confirm, that the piece in question is in a certain vein of criticism (the very heavy going kind) and not to everyone’s taste. As a translator, I naturally owe allegiance to the original, but I do have leeway. For a treatise that offers readers few treats (sometimes I find myself pleading to a heartless unyielding computer screen for even half-baked ones), I might indeed use “the spectator’s gaze”; the author, I would sigh, has made his or her choice. For a piece of criticism that is looking to reach readers, or at least hasn’t forgotten them altogether, I would probably use “the viewer’s gaze” instead, the term being much less remarkable—it wouldn’t really call attention to itself the way “the spectator’s gaze” does.

But things grow complicated for the English translator when a writer uses regard as a stand-alone concept, analyzing, for example, le regard and its function in a work of art or literature. Strict conformity to linguistic logic would impose “the gaze” (regard du spectator = the spectator’s/viewer’s gaze; le regard = the gaze), and certainly in a piece of criticism done in the not-to-be-trifled-with vein, the reader would encounter “the gaze” quite a lot, not always a pleasant prospect. In this case the English translator can prepare the terrain by using, for example, “the viewer’s eye” when the first regard occurs and thereafter shifting between “the eye,” “the viewer’s eye,” and “the eye of the viewer.” Eye is far commoner in English than gaze (the latter noun has just under one column devoted to it in the OED, the former a little over ten; and for its use with other terms—eye-bedewing, eye-beguiling, eyeliner, eye-wages, eye-waiter—there are another six columns of citations); it is that familiarity that renders the form here a little more palatable, a little lighter on the tongue.

By way of a parting tidbit, when doing just cursory research on “the gaze” and the pun “gaze in the military” popped into my head, I was one hundred percent certain of finding earlier uses on the web, and indeed Google immediately obliged with the references mentioned above. The internet and search engines are a humbling experience for anyone thinking about cracking wise with language and wordplay. Think you’ve come up with an original pun? Plug it into a search engine and prepare to see the high opinion you have of your wit cave ignominiously. When Rupert Murdoch was being grilled by the British parliamentary committee and you thought, ah yes, how appropriate, good old merde in the dock? Already done, back in 2007, though the “dock” in that instance had a different sense.

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