The translating sin
The violence, risks, uncertainty, backstabbing, and joy of a very human activity
Paper, my children, was once a scarce commodity…
Palimpsests were manuscripts written on reused material, where traces of erased texts could be identified underneath others. This recycling exploded in the Middle Ages when obtaining Egyptian papyrus got increasingly difficult. So people re-used it, complicating the idea of "original" — a concept that was only developed from the 14th century onwards.
The word palimpsest comes from the Greek for "scraped or scraped again," which is also a nice illustration of the translation craft. Each bit of a language, be it words or numbers, carries with it the weight of its culture: the contexts for its emergence, the reasons for one meaning to be adopted instead of another by a considerable number of people, its relationship with other words in phrasing, what was before and what ceased to be afterward. When someone translates a text into another language, they need to make room for another world with its contexts, cultural differences, etc.
One letter stands between the Arabic words حب (hob) and حرب (harb). It carries a multitude of meanings lost in their translation to "love" and "war." The acronym of the Palestinian organization Hamas coincides with حماس, "enthusiasm" or "zeal" in Arabic, which is how they would like to be seen. But Israeli Jews pronounce their name as חָמָֽס (khamas), "violence" in Hebrew. The Spanish word jamás (never) has nothing to do with either of them.
Every translation error could lead to a battle in a minefield, especially in the Middle East. After an explosion at a hospital in Gaza in October 2023, the international press reported 500 casualties, citing the Hamas Ministry of Health as their source. Soon, an avalanche of articles condemned journalists for reproducing these numbers so quickly. Critics overlooked the fact that the UN, the US State Department, and Israeli intelligence themselves also use data from the Palestinian agency, as well as from any other territory involved in a conflict. In the end, the Ministry of Health had nothing to do with the debacle. The numbers came from a poor English translation of a video posted by Al-Jazeera on XTwitter. The ministry spokesman had mentioned ضحية (victims), which means all those who suffered the consequences of the attack, both dead and wounded. No one had bothered to attempt their own translation from the primary source.
False cognates never started a war, but they have provided the missing spark for those searching for an excuse.
In the second half of the 19th century, the territorial expansion of the Prussian Empire was a major concern for the French. They had already managed to get Prince Leopold, from the family of King William I of Prussia, not to step onto the throne in Spain, but they were not satisfied. On July 13, 1870, the French ambassador cornered the king during his royal stroll, asking for guarantees that no one from the Prussian dynasty would ever claim the Spanish throne again. The king said he couldn't accept those terms and asked Chancellor Bismarck to inform the public about the event. Bismarck provided an abridged version of the incident with some surgical flourishings, giving the impression that the king had "refused to receive the ambassador”. Furthermore, William, still according to Bismarck, "let him know through an adjutant that His Majesty had nothing further to communicate to the ambassador." The wording was deliberate: an adjutant is a high-ranking officer in German but a mere orderly in French. Hungry for a pretext and drunk with jingoism, France declared mobilization the next day, July 14, the anniversary of the Fall of the Bastille. As for Bismarck, he got exactly what he wanted: a war in a word.
New buildings
Ferdinand de Saussure split the linguistic sign, the element at the base of language, into two: words or signifiers and the images they evoke or signifieds. It is a two-story building; one level lodges form and the other one is for content. Now, try building a replica at another place with its own rules, terrain constraints, and bureaucratic restrictions.
Poets and lyricists work hard in this complex branch of engineering –– and their translators work harder. Chico Buarque played with the Portuguese homonyms Cálice (chalice) and cale-se (shut up!) in his song to fool censors from the military regime in the 1970s. How do you sing this in Mandarin in Hong Kong? Paula Fernandes gave up on any meaning when turning Lady Gaga's "We're far from the shallow now" into "Juntos e shallow now" (Together and shallow now). In Jabberwocky, Lewis Carroll made sense of non-existent words by placing them into logically structured verses. A translator of such texts needs to pay attention both to the original meaning and the sound of the words to find a similar flavor in their language. Is it pleasant? Is it uncomfortable? Is it alliteration? Is it difficult to pronounce when you read it?
(You can read translations of Jabberwocky in several languages here, including Brazilian Portuguese by poet Augusto de Campos.)
"Tone is fundamental," explains Regina Przybycien, translator of Polish Nobel Laureate Wisława Szymborska's poetry into Portuguese. "Every translation is an attempt to recreate the meaning of the original in another language, with other sounds and poetic resources."
Every translation is an attempt.
"Keeping the references of the original culture and using explanatory notes seems like a very unpoetic option," Przybycien continues. "On the other hand, using references from one's own culture, which the reader can identify, displaces the meaning and inevitably creates other connotations."
It is a tightrope act, whether in poetry or prose. Some translators have the help of the authors themselves, which does not eliminate the risk of controversy. Deborah Smith was criticized for adding words to the sparse Korean writing of Han Kang in books such as The Vegetarian. However, the two of them worked on the process together and continue to do so in a relationship that brings the co-authorship of a translator to an unusual spotlight. Others have had a more peaceful marriage. Lia Wyler kept in touch with J.K. Rowling to reinvent the persnickety-slippery neologisms, wordplays, and spell phrases from the Harry Potter universe in Brazilian Portuguese. French translator Alice Raillard became such a long-time friend of Brazilian author Jorge Amado that they co-authored a book: Conversations avec Alice Raillard, in which he’s credited as the author even though she interviewed him.
All these people succeeded in making choices as they negotiated with their fellow authors: you give me an image, and I’ll pick the most telling piece of it on my side of the divide. All the rest must remain latent in the shadows. Others might have to do without the author’s input, but in any case, something in the original’s gotta give.
An attempt
It’s a lot of metaphors. Here. Let’s try a hands-on practice with a single sentence:
Deu-lhe Quincas uma cabeçada, a inana começou.
Deceptively simple but aren’t they all? It’s a quote from The Double Death of Quincas Water-Bray, a 1959 novella by Amado and one of the finest picaresque works you’ll read. Some context is necessary before we sink our teeth into the sentence. We already have a clever title here. Its first English-language translator, Barbara Shelby, opted for The Two Deaths of Quincas Wateryell, which has a nice ring to it. In his 2012 translation, Gregory Rabassa chose to emphasize the main character’s stubbornness — he was served water by accident and he had vowed to forsake non-alcoholic beverages for the remnant of his life — with the image of a protesting donkey hence Water-Bray.
The novella tells the story of a man who might have died or just played a prank on friends and family. His lowlife friends decide to sneak him out of his wake for a night out in the rough, decayed city center of Salvador, the capital of Bahia. If this sounds like Weekend at Bernie’s meets Cannery Row, the writing on the pages screams otherwise. First, there is the unreliable narrator from the harbor area who claims he is just stating the facts. As he spins his yarn, he begs the reader to reach their own conclusion. Then there is the enigma of the main character, a retired civil servant who decides to leave his middle-class family seemingly out of the blue to live as a prankster hobo at the city center. Finally, Amado alternates active and passive voice and employs indirect speech to keep Quincas’s fate ambiguous.
And we’re back to the quote above. Quincas and his friends have just arrived at a seedy bar on their way to the seafront. A group of drunken sailors is looking for trouble. One of them trips over Quincas’s stretched leg and threatens him. Per the sentence, Quincas replies with a head-butt and the show starts — that’s the gist of it but the sentence doesn’t stand in a vacuum. It poses three immediate challenges to its translator: (a) oral language, which inevitably comes with local flavor and its own musical flow; (b) the lack of connectors (when, after…) enhances the sense of movement — the whole scene, which is to say the entire paragraph, is very kinetic; and (c) there’s the word inana, which means ‘trouble, disorder, chaos’ and evokes the nasal comicality of ‘banana’ in Portuguese as well. It’s a lot to unpack from seven words. Then there is the imagined reader, who hails from different backgrounds and comes with their own expectations, all identified, sorted, and catalogued by the publisher and the editor in a neat market package — a process that writer Percival Everett and filmmaker Cord Jefferson mocked in literature (Erasure) and film (American Fiction).
When he translated Amado’s novel for the Penguin Classics series, Rabassa, who died in 2016, was hardly a dilettante. He’d been the first receiver of the National Book Award for Translated Literature (for Julio Cortázar’s Hopscotch) and he had works by Clarice Lispector, Osman Lins, García Márquez, Machado de Assis, Eça de Queirós, and Amado himself under his belt. So he offered this English version of our quote:
Quincas bumped him with his head, and the fun began.
‘Bump’ is an interesting choice. It suggests both a deliberate strike and an accidental hit, the kind of ambiguity that is absent in the very intentional original sentence. It also slights the unreliable narrator in the language level: this is too wordy for someone who’s telling a tale (tall or not, it’s up to you) in the middle of a bustling city street. A well-behaved ‘and’ connects the first and the second clauses, which softens the rough edges of the more explosive Brazilian Portuguese version. ‘And the fun began’ is certainly not ‘all hell broke loose’. Through Rabassa’s words, the English-version reader sees a different kind of action. It’s Nick Carraway describing Tom Buchanan’s shenanigans.
Betrayals
“Translator, traitor,” the saying goes (much smoother as the original Traduttore, traditore), and it's not news. In 1539, Niccolò Franco wrote: "My dear traitors, if you don't know how to do anything other than betray a book, go shit in the dark!" He ended up dead not for inaccurate translations but for defaming a pope.
On the other hand, Antoine Galland betrayed and lived to tell the tales of The Thousand and One Nights. When he introduced the set of traditional Arabic narratives to the Western world in the 17th century, he added stories, omitted poems and obscenities, cut passages considered long, and so on; in short, he pulled a makeover of his host's home without consent. C.K. Scott Moncrieff did no differently with Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time.
Cathay (1915), Ezra Pound's collection of poems from classical Chinese tradition, was based on notes by sinologist Ernest Fenollosa since Pound didn't understand an atom of the originals. You can't get much more palimpsest than this.
Others are more diligent, detectives looking for clues. When translating Machado De Assis's The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas into English, Flora Thomson-Deveaux came across the word calabouço. She could have settled for the medieval and generic 'dungeon.' However, she suspected there was more to it. She was right. After some research, she found out that Calabouço (with capital c) was a state-run prison where enslaved Blacks were taken to be punished. Although Machado had written it in lowercase, Thomson-Deveaux settled on "the Dungeon."
And what is an original after all? If we go back further, we realize that the word at the beginning of the process is an imperfect instrument itself. Think of something like malandragem. Depending on each person's experience, background, and moral standards they have developed, it becomes a positive or negative concept: petty crime, idleness and deception, or improvised strategies to fight oppression. Even if someone writes a treatise on the evils of malandragem, the path from their head to the reader's head through the words on blank paper is long enough for the opposite interpretation to seep in. "As I have loved you, so you must love one another," but how many deadly crusades have been fought over these words?
Fabrications
Saint Jerome became the patron saint of translators after taking on the tricky task of translating the Bible into Latin in the fourth century. His approach to tackling the four Gospels, the Old Testament, and some apocryphal texts can be best summed up in his translating principle: Magis sensum e sense quam ex verbum verbum (more sense for sense than word for word).1 He was a remarkably learned man who would confront previous Greek and Latin versions with Hebrew texts to shape his biblical effort, the Vulgata. Caravaggio's Saint Jerome Writing shows the old man in action under the hollow gaze of a skull on his desk, a symbol of his mortality but also the remains of earlier translations.
Eventually, all those layers and layers of translation, interpretation, and adaptation pile up to create senses of their own. As it survived through the ages, the Vulgata is not entirely Jerome’s work. Parts of the New Testament were attributed to some of his contemporaries. Even Caravaggio’s view of Jerome has been disputed. The painting ‘in the style of Caravaggio’ could be the work of a later-age artist, Jusepe de Ribera.
An entire church emerged from a translated verse in the King James Bible. In Mark 16:18, Jesus says that those who spread the gospel "shall take up serpents; and if they drink any deadly thing, it shall not hurt them." In twentieth-century Appalachia, this led to the founding of snake-handling cults such as the Church of God with Signs Following, in which the faithful remove snakes and cobras from their cages and raise them into the air because the Bible told them so. Or maybe not.
In other versions of the text, translators chose to handle the Greek word αρούσίν differently. They followed other passages bearing its root: "kill," "take," "remove," instead of "take up." In addition, verse 18 is apocryphal. The Gospel of Mark ends at chapter 16 verse 8, and everything that comes after it is a supplement to make it fit neatly with the other gospels in the New Testament. One might say that people have died because of a fuzzy translation of a forgery.
Amid all these risks, artificial intelligence comes in as a panacea for translation headaches. Large language models could arrive at more accurate interpretations from training with billions of texts and countless comparisons. Artificial neural network technologies promise to refine contexts. Generative AI would be able to surpass predictive AI in reaching the utopian perfect translation. However, languages are not an exact science, much less with collaborative crowds. An error within a corpus can multiply simply because several people followed the choice of one interpreter, contaminating the AI's database. And these models perform poorly around all that space between the signifier, the signified, and all the context that lies in the middle. Since they cannot extrapolate from uncertainty, they hallucinate strings that amount to no more than fantasies of meaning. People can extrapolate from experience and then some—literary creations are a case in point. There is a reason human translators hallucinate, and from the perspective of a large language model, it is utterly unreasonable.
When we use engines like Linguee and Reverso Context to search for compilations of translations, the results are collections of examples classified as relevant, thanks to a series of rigidly outlined parameters. But the final pick is ours based on subjective parameters that continue to evolve in unpredictable ways, from Finnegans Wake to the next generation’s relationship with words. The amount of nuance involved in a "truth," the connective tissues required to reach it transcend the machine's capacity. A poem, as Roland Barthes wrote, is a vast metaphor. The more original the poetic text, the more it will play with words in a manner that is alien to current machine learning.
"Instead of asking for the truth, [the machine] asks for the opinion of the entire planet, in fact of anyone who has ever written anything online," wrote language scientist Guillaume Deneufbourg in 2021. This observation persists after the arrival of ChatGPT and the most advanced machine learning techniques. Their truth is statistics, not meanings. So we're left once again by ourselves in our attempts at replicating word castles.
The imperfect science is hard but we press ahead. You have probably said or heard someone say that so-and-so words or phrases in one language don't have translations in any other language. This is a half-truth. Digging deep enough, you can say anything in any language, including the infamous saudade. ('Longing' actually works well.) It may take several words instead of one, but it can be done with some ingenuity.
On the other hand, we will continue to be victims of the old curse: one language is a lot, let alone two. 'Sorry' implies a penitent pain absent from the prouder desculpe, 'unguilt me.' There will always be something that eludes us. And that will betray us—or be used to betray us. It is also how the best translators do their job.
Smith and Kang seem to face their collaboration in the same manner.