At once a science and an art, the act of translation is a fiercely humanist endeavour, as Damion Searls explores in The Philosophy of Translation
When each of us looks at a work of art or reads a book, we have the same-but-different experience of it. Swiss psychoanalyst Hermann Rorschach, creator of the infamous eye-of-the-beholder inkblot test, laid out a similar theory in 1921. The experience of reading ‘is miraculously and mysteriously neither objective nor subjective,’ American writer and translator Damion Searls writes in his new book The Philosophy of Translation (Searls previously published a biography of Rorschach in 2017). ‘Neither purely taking something in nor purely revealing or expressing what’s inside oneself. It is a complex interplay of the self and the world, analogous to perception – we see what’s really there in the world, but we see it, and it’s there in our world.’
As a translator, if I read and translate a poem, and ten others translate the same poem, the outcome from each of us will be subtly or radically different. This understanding of translation as a form of interpretation frees it of one of the most persistent (and vague) demands translators face from reviewers, academics and sometimes authors themselves: that it must be ‘faithful’. ‘We never say that reading is unfaithful’, Searls writes, ‘because we realise that a reading is a response, not a copy’.
When someone is reading a work of translated literature, they will often say that they are reading, say, Han Kang, Olga Tokarczuk or Franz Kafka: the original author themselves. There is something illusionary going on whereby the translator (respectively, Deborah Smith, Antonia Lloyd-Jones and Jennifer Croft) is bypassed because some readers find it uncomfortable (or simply uninteresting) that another person read (and wrote) the book prior to their reading of it. The translator will read the book possibly upwards of half a dozen times while crafting in another language the layers of meaning found in every utterance, while simultaneously making sure the new text sings as a standalone work of literature. Each translator will do this work in their own way – to echo Searls, it is both objective and subjective, a science and an art. It might seem shocking or unpalatable to some, but as Searls puts it, ‘a translation is and isn’t the same as the original – it’s the translator’s path through it.’
I didn’t fully understand all this when I decided to become a translator over a decade ago. Inspired by the lecturer who taught a module on translation theory and practice during my postgraduate degree in German Studies, I decided I wanted to become a translator of literature, so I signed up for a one-week intensive course. I brought along my ‘translation’ of a poem by Paul Celan. I say ‘translation’ in diminishing quotes because what I had produced wasn’t a translation at all. I had picked it out of an anthology and, after a cursory read, sat down with an online dictionary and worked my way through the poem, taking the lines at face value and translating them without knowing what it was that connected them or what was behind them. ‘To translate a poem’, I was told by one of the tutors, ‘you need to read it deeply.’ Another told me that ‘translating a story is writing a story’.
Damion Searls relates a similar reckoning in The Philosophy of Translation, a wide-ranging, difficult-to-categorise book that combines essays with first-hand examples from his translations of the work of figures as formally diverse as contemporary Norwegian novelist Jon Fosse (who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2023), philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, and poet Rainer Maria Rilke. We read in the book’s opening pages of his early burgeoning interest in translation, when feedback from family friend Edie (who – surprise! – turns out to be world-renowned Cervantes and García Márquez translator Edith Grossman, author of her own 2010 book Why Translation Matters) helps him realise that he can improve his German all he wants, but it is his skills in reading texts deeply and writing creatively in English that need cultivating if he is to become a translator. Right from this beginning, Searls invites us to think of translating literature as fundamentally an exercise in reading and writing.
In English writer and translator Kate Briggs’s 2017 treatise on literary translation This Little Art, she frames it in the imperative to just ‘do translations!’. Neither Searls nor Briggs is oversimplifying the art of translation; it is this translation of translation which allows readers and future translators to understand that translation starts with reading a story, and then attempting to write it again. The demystification of the art of translation as a mode of empowerment runs through many of the recent wave of writing by literary translators on translation: Mark Polizzotti’s Sympathy For The Traitor (2018); Catching Fire by Daniel Hahn (2022), Translation as Transhumance by Mireille Gansel (2014), translated by Ros Schwartz. In these books translation becomes pleasingly polyvocal rather than monolithic, transformed into something playful and puzzling, and translation as a practice is radically seen as primarily a humanistic endeavour.
In his introduction, Searls offers readers a choose-your-own-adventure pathway through his book, which is divided into two halves, offering them the chance to jump ahead a hundred pages and read it back-to-front. The first half is heavy on the philosophy of translation (hence the title), while the latter is filled with concrete examples from Searls’s work as a translator. I found myself at times perplexed by the space allotted to the potted history of translation and the exploration of phenomenology at the outset (yes, in spite of that title). While ticking off the usual suspects of translation studies like Friedrich Schleiermacher and Lawrence Venuti, and unpicking the etymology of the word translation, I felt like much of this book was at least partly envisaged as a single destination for linguistics and translation students. On his ‘palimpsestic history’ of translation, Searls frustratingly acknowledges the contradictions it raises in our thinking while stopping short of elaborating further, admitting that it ‘doesn’t especially help us resolve them’. I’ve read much of this before, and I simultaneously imagine it being a barrier – or an impulse to skip to the end – for many readers uninitiated in these schools of thought. Reading is subjective like that, as Searls knows only too well.
What I wanted was more Searls, and more of the humour and emotion that sometimes slips into his prose, but mostly remains hidden just underneath the surface. Searls offers up some examples from his own translation work as unpacked conundrums, but I wanted more of these throughout. The proliferation of firsthand writing on literary translation would do well to focus more on these idiosyncrasies and specifics, rather than reiterating what has been said before on the histories and theories of translation in the abstract. By taking this direction, readers and writers may be able to better relate to translators by showing them what we’re actually up to, and how it boils down to that same act of reading and writing. Whenever we read, Searls reflects, whether in our own or a foreign language, we must grow slowly accustomed to the way a writer writes; we have to learn their language and not just their language. For readers to continue to grow their appetite for and understanding of what literary translation really is, reflections on it should, I believe, focus on experience and practice rather than theory, or rather, on the vulnerability and excitement of translation. They should continue to bring into focus the various approaches and attempts upon opening a book; the false starts; pen and paper close at hand; a quickening of a pulse.
Jen Calleja is a writer and literary translator based in Hastings. Her memoir Fair: The Life-Art of Translation is forthcoming from Prototype
