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Book Review: The Philosophy of Translation

Yale University Press

I tend not to review books in translation, but I did make an exception some years ago for a vigorous new English edition of Tolstoi’s War and Peace since it was touted as “more faithful” to the original. It read well, but what do I know! Now, thanks to Damion Searls’ new book, The Philosophy of Translation, at least I pretty much know why I’ve kept away and what I should look for when I take up a novel in a language other than English, especially one that has garnered prestigious prizes or caused a worldwide stir. Searls, a superb scholar who hails from NYC public schools, specializes in translating prose and poetry from German, Norwegian, French, and Dutch, as well as being interested in Asian, African, and Native American languages and dialects.

The book might overwhelm were it not for Searls’ style – a colloquial, conversational manner that uses active voice, analogies, wit, and humor. He acknowledges his own shortcomings at times and has no hesitation in writing to authors for advice. He particularly dislikes the word “faithful” used by translators who think they’ve nailed it. No one nails it, he argues: times move with political, cultural, and therefore semantic change, reading standards shift.

The Philosophy of Translation is heady reading, but in introductory remarks, Searls notes that he’s structured the book in two parts: philosophical theories and comparative examples of word choice, phrasing, sound, force, word order, and movement. He invites readers to jump to these practical sections first if they want. Translation, he says, is reading a text – understanding an author, his times, his milieu, not copying word for word. Tone is significant. If an author say is being sarcastic in German, having a character say “good morning” though it’s really afternoon, go for that phrasing that admits the sarcasm, the original author’s intention.

When Searls takes on the central question of how much a translation should convey a sense of the foreign language or whether it should be “domesticated” in the translation, he does so with reason, seeing both sides, though he, himself, leans a bit to foreignness. In fact, he points out, English-speaking readers are bilingual because our own vocabulary has both Latinate and Anglo-Saxon roots.

Though Searls explores the relationships between “source texts” and their “target audience,” he bridles at such terms and feels they lead to the fallacy that somewhere there is one “faithful” rendition. There are no right or wrong translations, he says, but there are those that are better or worse than others. He shows why and even admits that some translations make him “angry” –those that distort a forceful original style with “miserable, impenetrable prose” – as has been the case with Freud over the years by translators trying to make him sound scientific, or the critic Walter Benjamin, whose elegance and energy have been flattened into wordiness and academic jargon. The many examples here are telling. Searls wonders if such translators just didn’t care, an indictment he extends, not just to them but, to their editors, publishers, and reviewers.

A good translation, he asserts, is “faithful to the author’s way of seeing the world not to literal verbal accuracy.” It expresses the “bond between language and community, and so the use of language is always a social and political act.” Searls is speaking to us, American readers, at a time our nation is changing demographically and linguistically. His book may be challenging, but it is timely and important.

Joan Baum is a recovering academic from the City University of New York, who spent 25 years teaching literature and writing. She covers all areas of cultural history but particularly enjoys books at the nexus of the humanities and the sciences.