Are All Translations Failures?

Madeleine Adams

In Tarkovsky’s film “Nostalghia” (1983), the poet Andrei Gorchakov, transplanted to Italy, asks Eugenia, his Italian translator, what she is reading.

She replies: “Arseni Tarkovsky’s poems.”

Andrei: In Russian?

Eugenia: It’s a translation. Quite a good one.

A: Throw it away.

E: Why? The translator’s a very good poet.

A: Poetry is untranslatable, like the whole of art.

When Eugenia suggests that only through reading Tolstoy and Pushkin in translation might a foreigner understand Russia, Andrei retorts that “none of you understand Russia.”

In 1930, a book introducing the concept of B.A.S.I.C. (British American Scientific International and Commercial⏤precious, huh?) English was published. As a result, its pioneers, C. K. Ogden and I. A. Richards, were elevated from their outsider linguist and New Criticism poet statuses into the center of the political and cultural discussion of language and how we use it. 

In 1943, Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill appointed a committee to research B.A.S.I.C Engish: they figured that misunderstandings between Allied and Axis diplomats could spell worldwide destruction, but those problems might be more easily mitigated in an English pared down to 2,000 words. Like Esperanto, another artificial language designed to promote world peace, Ogden and Richards’ B.A.S.I.C. English never really took off. B.A.S.I.C. English peddled sanitized nouns, a currency running on scientific naïveté, and nothing more.

And, surely to Andrei’s dismay, the image of the mystically bearded, fur-hatted, samovar-tending Russian came to symbolize a national character: cultural inflexibility. The Russians cherished it. Russian censors loved “Nostalghia” because they agreed; nobody understood Russia.

All translations are failures. Language’s cultural nuances, phonetic idiosyncrasies, and grammatical shapes (invisible to most of its native speakers, so thoroughly are they steeped in it), are lost in the transfer to another language.

In 2014, I lived for a month and a half in Salango, Ecuador, collecting folktales about the devil for an anthropological ethnography. My task was to capture the South American devil in North American terms. In Ecuador, temptation goes by a different name: el diablo, Lucifer⏤the bearer of light, the bearer of colonial power, the bearer of modern temptation.

In my time there, I learned that ethnography is translation. As a barely intermediate Spanish speaker, I would have agreed at the time with Ogden and Richards: if only I could get the stories in Basic S.P.A.N.I.S.H. (Super Parsed And Neatly Interpreted Symbol Harmony?), and turn them into English! Easy peasy.

One day, I interviewed a barkeep named Andy, a man regarded as a kook by the town for his mystical beliefs and solitary ways. Ostracized, he kept a cabaña by the highway. At plastic tables, a thinly spread clientele played dominos and slugged caña, tooth-dissolving cane liquor that fueled many Salangeñan dramas. There, very slowly and patiently, Andy told me his life’s tragedy.

Andy’s house once stood where his cabaña now was. His son had burned it to the ground when he lit himself on fire.

Andy’s son was about my age when he was separated from his bride-to-be. Though they had begun to share a life together, her mother disliked the match. She sent her daughter away to live in Guayaquíl. For weeks, Andy’s son drank himself into a caña stupor, grief and inebriation rendering him unrecognizable to friends and family. One day, he lay down in his bed, doused himself in gasoline, and lit a match. Andy’s wife left him after that. 

With my clumsy Spanish and measly twenty years of life experience, how could I translate such a loss? Translate it, no less, into the abstract register of ethnography? I listened again and again to the recording of the story, dictionary by my side, repeating Andy’s words, the alienness of their meanings and the humanness of their sentiment converging. 

Many of Andy’s words were not in the dictionary. Some losses are inarticulate in any language.

In “Nostalghia,” Andrei the poet is confused by the word repeated by the Italians conversing in the hot spring where he is bathing: “la fede.” He asks Eugenia, who shakes her head impatiently. After this whole spiel about translation being useless! In Russian, she explains, it’s “vera.” Faith. Perhaps it’s not that nobody understands the Russians; it’s that nobody understands anybody. We operate on pure faith. And is that such a bad thing?

Jhumpa Lahiri, in “In Praise of Echo,” suggests that to translate means to metamorphose, compelled by passionate desire for the original work. As the translator withers away like Echo did in the cave after being ignored by Narcissus⏤poor Echo, condemned by Juno to speak only the words of others⏤she tries to adapt a voice that is not her own to the present feeling. Lahiri contends that translation is “an act of love, of listening and restoring.”

If translation is an act of love, it is an act of unrequited love. Echo’s fascination with Narcissus is one-sided. Like translation, Echo’s words are a solitary attempt to surmount the insurmountable, one human being speaking through only the self-obsessed voice of another. “To translate,” says Lahiri, “is to look into a mirror and see someone other than oneself.” Translation can never depict what ripples under the surface of a work. Linguistic transfer aside, translation penetrates depths that the author himself cannot resist admiring his reflection for long enough to plumb….

Translations are failures. They are acts of faith⏤of loving from afar. They are messy, impassioned graspings at the mystery of artistic creation.

And what is artistic creation about if not failure: the failure of words, the failure to understand?