Page:Performing Without a Stage - The Art of Literary Translation - by Robert Wechsler.pdf/84

 capture in this sense — evoking a particular place, time, and station — if for no other reason than the foreign reader cannot possibly know anything about the place, time, or particular class characteristics. This further limits how much of Polacek’s special genius can be brought into English. Apparently, what could be brought over, although a great deal, was not enough.

One problem here was that both the translator and I assumed that the best thing was to be faithful to the author’s work by trying to bring as much of it into English as possible. However, it might have been more faithful to the work to have totally reformulated the book, to have created a work in English that told the same stories and presented the same sorts of characters, but in such a way that the effect on English would be as radical as the original’s effect on Czech. This could not, of course, be done in terms of colloquial vs. literary language, at least without doing it in a far more radical way. The goal would be to find a style consistent with the content and as individual as Polacek’s, but which was not an attempt to be the same, to be sentence by sentence or expression by expression faithful. This would be extremely difficult, and it would also be risky both in creative terms and in terms of the reaction of reviewers, especially anyone familiar with Polacek’s work. Very few lovers of Polacek could bear to see such a version done under his name, even if it were clearly called a “version” or the like.

What I’m getting at here is that faithfulness, especially with works difficult to bring into English, can often best be fulfilled by the translator’s freedom to depart from the original. However, few people would consider the result of such freedom faithful, even the same people who love freewheeling versions of Shakespeare or think nothing of dropping meter and rhyme.

One example of a creatively faithful translator is Suzanne Jill Levine, who translated the works of three subversive South American fiction writers with the freedom they expressly gave her so that her translation would be equally subversive in and to English. For her, translation is “a continuation of the creative process” as well as “a critical act which cannot and does not replace but rather complements the original, illuminating its strategies.”* As unfaithful as she was to the words of the originals, she felt great affinity with the authors and was exceptionally faithful to them. 84