1 THe MANY FACES oF TREASON rushwer tye COMMONPLACES MAY COME AND Go, but one that has held forth over the years to the dismay and discouragement of = 5 translators is the Ttlian punning canard sadutore, tadtore (ccanlator, traitor, leading one to believe that the, translator, ‘worse chan an unfortunate bungle, isa eacherous ave. Be~ fore copping a plea and offering 4 nolo contender, let me see ‘wherein this treason lies and against whom.’Then we transla- tors can withdraw once more into that kimbo of silent scrvi- tors, for, as Prince Segismundo says atthe end of Calderén’s [Lf Is # Dream when he awards his liberator the tower where hie had been imprisoned, "The treason done, the taitor i no longer needed.” ‘Let us submit éhe practice of tansation to a judicial en- quiry ino its various ways and means and in this display seck fut ehe many varieties of betayal which might be inherent to its ar say are and not craft because you can teach a erat but 2" you cannot teach an are}You can teach Picasto how to mix his pints but you cannot teach him how to paint his demoisle. ‘There are many spots where translation can be accused of tweason, all inevitably interconnected in such diverse ways that an overll view is needed to reveal the many faces of the tea- son the Halians purport to see,‘The most elemental ofthese will be betrayal of the word, for the word is the very essence of language, the metaphor for all the things we see, feel, and imagine. Out of this we also have a betrayal of language, in both directions (I try t0 avoid the jargon of “target language”; I am an old infantryman, and, ‘we doglaces were taught to shoot at a target and, ideally, kill, i). Languages ate the products of a culture, or pethaps the reverse as some bold anthropologist might have it Treason against a culture will therefore be automatic as we betray its ‘words and speech as well as assorted other litte items along the way, ‘Then we come to personal betrayal those against the peo- ple involved in the act of translation, The first victim is, ‘of course,the author we are translating, Can we ever make dif- ferent-colored clone of what he (read he/she, as in a U.N. document) has done? Can we ever feel. what the author felt as hhe wrote the words we are transforming? As we betray the author we are automatically betraying our variegated reader~ ship and at che same «ime we are pasing on whatever bit of betrayal the author himself may have foisted on them in the original (unless we have left i out on some Frosty morning, along with the poetry), Lastly and most subtly we betray our- selves.[We will sacrifice our best hunches in fivor of some pedestrian norm in fear of betraying the task we were set to do.) ‘The facelessness imposed on the translator, so often thought of van ideal, can only mean incarceration in Segismundo’s tower in the end, This lst betrayal must stand before all the treason hhere delineated asthe most foul Words are treacherous things, much moreso than any translator could ever be.As is obvious, words are mere meta~ pphorts for things. This is shown by the biting episode in Part 11 ‘of Gulliver’ Tiaels where the traveler teaches the city of La- ‘Swit Gulbse\s Teavels The Many Races of Teston ado and visits the Grand Academy. Here Dean Swift has the Projectors explain a plan to sive our lungs by doing avay with ‘wont in oral communication, “since wordsare only names for things, it would be convenient for all men to eatry about them such things as were necessary to expres the particular business they ae to discourse on.” This solution, along with prolonging for lives, would aso eliminate the need forall dhe many lan= {guages that ae spoken in the world. We could even get about rebuilding Babel, More than likely Swift was also hinting at ‘lass distinctions here, as a wealthy man with a retinue of ser= ‘ants carrying his“‘things” would be much more eloquent and texpresive than a poor man who would have co do with one simple rucksack. In the real world the rich man with his col- Tege education can express himself so much better and more clearly than the poor illiterate. “There is more to it than thie,f'a word is metaphor for a 4, thing, why does a single thing fave so many metaphors i conbit about it2Here we have che dire consequences of Babel If Mama Lucy had speech, her Usprace must have spread out and scattered into more variants chan the bindsongs ofa single Species This has left us with a welter of wore to designate one simple thing. Sone can never sound Tike piene, 0 are the two ‘wonks interchangeable simply because they represent the same object? Since Faubert would either say or think pie when hae picked one up does stone cover his thought when we trans lace him? We can only say that here trasation has betrayed a complete and clear sense of the stone’ thingness for the au thor, with no attempe in this lithic example eo bring in the at= tendant nuances of Peter and the Papacy. That Lagadian dis- ceusion would best be left 10 the likes of Bouvard and Pécuche, along with the analysis of why a diamond isa stone to the jeweler bura rock to the jewel thet.Neely th oso tre ee a she wor ius ao been.As it mos ahead (pegs a nguoge wil a word dwn eth all mane otra tes along the wey, Bsrng i off on a eifeent angen fom wor in another wnt meant wo describe the Same hing Among languages there re ever wo many terms se to denote the sme object and by the very varie they beget ny os stiliyofaceraining ce une realty of ail eect The now rant cul of etermincy mi be Mapp th his bu eo sips obo a his ame mes and which wh ahr wht we ated an wht esl be oro if we ewe ge that maybe tat thee Sm thing lke Heenbergh pine of tncerainy stk lesioogy so that every tine eel one a plo We hae somchow made semthing dient om si o Sin. ‘This eves ws with che question of whether 2 Hoe can eet bea ple ora pion a toe and whether either of them canbe that hard object we ate looking ton the ground shin ws tt en if hing a fe cle he or ha ste te an any tego me in ter oe Some conceps sem tobe the excsive propery of one Imei ett heigl ened note When we hve trouble coming up with js the right word in ahh eum to che French anny certain esa qe" IF ve sya certain don mow wha” the ee ragged and ven unmatrl-As we borrow fom another ngage toe ch ou own, more offen than nt tere teason aba nt in the meaning cerainly inthe sound. Although the Trench seund of ing isnot to dificult o ero fly oey in English most people wil piguom tina hyper-Caic lane a Sound wordy of WC ls an his sy iy A t 3 The Meny Feces of Teston betrayal of language is many times the betrayal of words and at the same time i isa reflection of the hurdles present in com- Imunicating between cultures. We tend to acculerate foreign sensitivities, sensibilities, and reflexes into our own milieu with the requisite changes, Ack a New Yorker what Kafla’s Gregor Sansa awoke as and th inevitable answer will bea glant cack~ roach, the inset of record in his city, What Kafka called it was simply an wngehenern Ungesiefr a monstrous vermin. He dhen ‘goes on to describe what is obviously a har-carpaced becte ‘The pull of local reality is too strong for a New Yorker to make a closer concept or translation. This then can be seen asa betrayal bythe imposition of another culture of the author. He is a compendium of all these f guage, culture, and individwal words. These are, i fic, insepa rable, and the author i eheir product, the same as what he will and originality only exist within che ture IF he is to betray i, he betrays it from Js connotes intimate knovedge, while the trans writes, His fie bounds of his Ingor beerys it om without, fom an acquired reflective, not ‘Within bis cultural limits the author, as an itv and, indeed, mast extend himself as far as he can co set hime and his art apart from ehe commonplace, showing all the while whence he comes, doing this through Language most of all With the eranslstor we have quite the opposite situation. He + cannot and must not sec himself apar fi cli out ‘efore itn, To do so would indeed be st marshal his words in such a way that he does not go counter to the author’ intent. Nowhere is translation more dubious al ea asonous. He than here at we try t0 tanslate into our own language and cultare something thac the author is andating into wordssable te Le toyiter ‘within his culture and sill make it our own. Treasonous iti ‘The important thing sto consider whether the teason is high fo low, the sin mortal or ‘nial, There are those who, like Nabokow, view translation as a criminal act that ean only be Judged a to whether iti a felony or just a misdemeanor and. there ate so many critics who do enjoy walking the perp. ‘While allthis is going on, matters of which the translator must be quite aware, there isa danger ofthe tanshtor’ com- sitting the saddest teason of all, betrayal of himself, The transator, we should know, is a writer too.Asa matter of fact, hhe could be called che ideal writer because al he has to do is write; plot, theme, characters, and all che other essentials have already been provided, so he can jst st down and write his ass fff: But he is ako a reader. He has ¢o read the text closely to know what tall about. Here is where he receives less guid= ance or direction from the text. Its a common notion to s3y that if a work has 10,c00 readers it becomes 10,000 different books. The translator is only one of these readers and yet he must read the book in such a way that he will be reading the Spanish into English as he goes along, with the result that his reading is ako writing, His reading, then, becomes the one reading tha i going to spawn 10,000 varieties of the ook in the unlikely case that it wall sel that many copies and will be read by that many people. ‘Our translator must know that diss the best he can do i this place and at thi time and must still recognize that his ‘work is, in a sense, unfinished. Although I have heen sisted ‘with a wandation when [finish it (sa translator ought tobe), years later as I peruse the published text I find myself wishing T could make some changes forthe better. When a translator starts an attempe at reatoning out a solution iti bes ¢ em- late Alexander before Phrygia as he sliced through the Gor- ene yh bateey leit [i me a a ‘The Many Faces of Treason ian knot with his sword in a demonstration of what Ortega y 4 Gaver cle “yl wasn." The tartar mast no bet his 2 Ianches. There will be carping ftom the critics, but he wail be 5. closer to being right that way and, in any cae, he will no have betrayed himself. A carefil confidence in himself is as neces sary fora translator a i is for in an infanery patrol. He must hive a care, however, and remember dhat with the addition ofa slightly aspirated letter auteur becomes ante. point: The er Iacor muse put to good wie that bughear of timid technicians: the value judgment. In translation a in writing, which it sas we have said, the proper wont is better than a less proper but sandard one. Here again the translator must bor tow Alexander’ shore sword, Translation is based on choice onal one at that. Long ago T discovered Finny thing: you ponder a word, any word, long enough it «will hecome something strange and meaningless and usually ludicrous. 1 suppose this is some kind of vebic and a rather pe e, bleeding, ts precious boxlily fluids, ant that could pass for a fve-letter troup ina cryptographic message, When we snap out oft and retrieve the meaning of the word, we have, ina sense, deci- phere iThis is as far as T would go in turning translation en firely over to reason sinceso much of it should be baved on at aqquited the poor word of its very es and leaving a dry alike the one we rely on to drive a car, ‘Onegai vital reason.