Page:Performing Without a Stage - The Art of Literary Translation - by Robert Wechsler.pdf/83

 he’s only translating. But at least the reader would be giving Bly his informed consent.

Where does this leave faithful but mediocre translations, such as Peters’ Rilke? Well, no publisher is going to label anything as mediocre. In fact, few publishers are even going to recognize mediocrity or incompetence. Mediocre books come out by the bushels, and many of them sell lots of copies. That’s what review publications are for. But I won’t get into them until the last chapter of this book.

Let me tell a little story to illustrate the concept of free versions and fidelity, this time in terms of prose. A few years ago, my house published Peter Kussi’s translation of a 1929 novel by the Czech writer Karel Polacek, entitled What Ownership’s All About. Polacek’s novels had never been translated into English, despite the fact that he was a very popular and well-regarded novelist and story writer, nearly as popular as his contemporary Karel Capek, nearly all of whose works were translated into English. Many Czechs insisted Polacek was impossible to translate into English, because his language was too difficult and its effects could not be captured in English. Peter Kussi and I agreed that it would be better to capture as much as possible rather than to let Polacek remain unavailable to English-speakers. The result was a work I felt was excellent, but which received lukewarm reviews.

Besides the fact that no one can capture the love another country has for one of its writers, the biggest problem with bringing Polacek over into English is that what was then radical and experimental for Czech, in terms of language, is old hat in English and had largely been accomplished in English even before Polacek’s time. What Polacek did was to bring colloquial Czech into literary Czech, with a vengeance. In Czech, colloquial and literary are in many ways different languages, or dialects at least. One was not supposed to use colloquial language on paper. In English, colloquial and literary aren’t really all that different.

Polacek also had a very individual way of writing, of presenting dialogue especially, which is hard to capture because it is so deeply rooted in the spoken Czech of his time and his characters’ place geographically and classwise. Any dialect is impossible to 83