Limits and Aspirations in Translation

    The more I read Lesser's "The Mysteries of Translation," the more intimidated I felt by translation. She describes an almost magical persuasiveness in Birnbaum's translations of Murakami that she finds missing in later translators' work, and reading that, I found myself thinking about how nice it would be to bring the essence from an author you find compelling into a new language. Not that I'm presuming to know what Birnbaum's thoughts were as he worked, but this is just the shape that the ideal translation is starting to take in my mind. At the same time, this ideal forces me to confront the difficulty of translating a work at that level, and it starts to feel like nothing I might produce will achieve the effect I'm looking for.

    Still, I'm going into this having concluded that translations are, inherently, modifications of an original work, and I'm still a student, so maybe it's better to do the best I can and not let perfectionism bog me down too much. And of course, a modification implies that a translation can never perfectly capture the original intent. Rubin seems to agree to some extent, saying that "people shouldn't read translated literature, [sic] they should learn the language themselves." I'm unsure whether that comes from a similar lack of confidence in his own work to convey enough of the original text's meaning, or whether the best way to consume foreign literature is really just to learn the language. Regardless, it's obviously impossible to simply pick up a language whenever you come across literature you would like to read, which brings me back to the idea that, as a translator, my job is to work within my limits to convey the meaning I see.

winter