Up until last week, I thought that faithfulness may be closer to preserving the author's intended experiences. But what if the intended experience itself is ambiguity, awkwardness, or even imperfection?
I used to think of ambiguity as a problem that a translator had to manage or solve. But Seidensticker’s translation of The Izu Dancer gave me a different answer. When he added an agent, the dancer’s brother, to the scene where a white object is being waved, simply to make the English more natural and grammatically clear, he destroyed the openness of the original. More importantly, he eliminated the possibility that the dancer herself might be the one waving. His attempt to clarify the sentence actually took away something that Kawabata had left for the reader to imagine.
Looking back at my own translations, I realize that I have always been concerned with how to recreate the “same” experience for the target reader, which, in my mind, often meant “helping them understand”. For example, when translating Croquettes, I was afraid that English readers would not catch the sexual implications or the deadpan humor, so I kept struggling with whether I should domesticate or clarify certain parts. In a way, I was constantly acting as a commentator of the text rather than simply a translator.
But Seidensticker’s treatment of the “girl/woman” passage in Snow Country made me reconsider this instinct. Instead of explaining the ambiguity for his readers, he simply followed the original and allowed the uncertainty to remain. If the characters/authors themselves are in confusion, perhaps readers should sometimes be allowed to remain puzzled as well.
Then, faithfulness does not mean giving target readers the clearest possible version of the original. Sometimes it means preserving the same space for uncertainty, hesitation, and interpretation, leaving room for readers to arrive at meaning on their own.
Mingzi
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