Tales Wagging Translators

Bruce Krajewski reviews Damion Searls’s “The Philosophy of Translation.”

By Bruce KrajewskiNovember 24, 2024

• Philosophy & Religion

• Literary Criticism

AN ADVERTISEMENT FOR a property reads: “Cozy fixer-upper needing some TLC with a view of the bay.” Translation: A money pit that will require funds far beyond the asking price to make it habitable, and that bay view from one window in an uninsulated attic can be had only by sprouting a giraffe’s neck.

Damion Searls, award-winning literary translator from German, Dutch, French, and Norwegian, would likely suffer my advertisement example gladly, even though his book focuses on literary samplings. If you want the learned docent’s tour through the Contemporary House of Translation, you cannot go wrong with someone as experienced and talented as Searls. In addition, he’s modest: “Most of what I say, probably all of what I say, has been said before by other people.”

As you would expect from a generous guide, Searls shares his learning. He informs readers that Sigmund Freud’s English translators have overcomplicated nouns, wanting them to be more medical. “Parapraxes”—“forgetting names,” experiencing “slips of the tongue”—might as well be “screw-ups.” According to Searls, Freud comes across in the original German as far less scientific and clinical.

On the tour, Searls doesn’t shy away from expressing his viewpoints: “The annoying claim that translation is impossible actually rests on the obvious fact that translation is possible and happens all the time.” My hope is that Searls would concur that the property example with which we began would count as one of those all-the-time happenings.

It’s less clear what he would do with Nimrod’s line in Dante’s Inferno: “Raphèl mai amècche zabì almi.” That line, as Jordan Kirk has it, has defied interpreters’ efforts to identify it as an instance of Arabic or Hebrew, Basque or Greek. It is composed of no particular language. Sometimes efforts at translation hit the brick wall built from supplies for the unfinished Tower of Babel. Other times, challenges to translation’s possibilities come from writers who build in “untranslatable” words and phrases, like Armand Schwerner in The Tablets (1968–91).

My admiration for Searls’s accomplishments does not preclude occasional disagreements. His claim that “children need to sound like children, no matter how precocious” causes me to plead for exceptions—say, for the voice of the title character of television’s Young Sheldon (2017–14), which has been dubbed and thus translated into German.

At other times, I wish that I had read this book before submitting some of my own translations. I would have followed Searls’s advice: “[T]he temptation among academic philosophy translators is to be extraliteral about the nouns, especially in crucial moments of the German, precisely where the English most needs verbal energy.”

In evaluating translations, Searls urges us to exercise our ears:

The acoustics of the text is so much of what matters in a translation and so little of what people usually talk about: translations are always reviewed and praised or criticized in terms of their accuracy, or perhaps faithfulness, when the sound of the thing is what makes or breaks it.

As an experiment in acoustics, it would have been edifying to learn what Searls makes of the simultaneous translations that go on at the United Nations during speeches before the General Assembly, or at the European Parliament. In the context of the verbal gymnastics required for simultaneous translation, it’s difficult to sanction fully Searls’s claim that “translation is a kind of writing linked to a kind of reading.” To be fair to Searls, his concern is with written literary and philosophical translation.

It’s the rare person who is able to witness the kind of translation that goes on at the United Nations. When many people think of translation, they think of books. With perennially popular works or literary texts that make their way into the canon (not canon as a set of official texts but as works that have “becom[e] binding on a group of people”), translators find themselves re-sounding, retranslating (Searls prefers “realigning”), such as Emily Wilson’s realignments of Homer, or The Bible in Cockney (2001)—“God then planted a nice little garden in Eden, in the East, and it was ’ere that ’e put the geezer he’d made out of dirt.”

We are fortunate to live in times awash with translations and “realignments.” ’Twasn’t always so. Searls turns to Denis Feeney to make the case:

[T]here is no evidence that any performances of originally Athenian tragedy or comedy occurred in the western Mediterranean “in any dialect other than Attic.” The Latin project of systematically translating literary texts is not a natural or inevitable thing to happen, and analogies for it in the ancient world turn out to be hard to find.

Relative to the situation described by Feeney, the contemporary world is a cornucopia for translators, for the moment. On the technological front, we have Duolingo, DeepL, Google Translate. Most browsers will translate foreign websites into legions of languages. Talented translators enjoy recognition in the Anglophone world: Lydia Davis, Anne Carson, Marian Schwartz, Michael Hofmann, Andrew Hurley, Ann Goldstein—readers will have their own favorites to add to such a list. One can earn an advanced degree in translation at numerous universities across the planet. Translators might avoid contemplating how much they might owe to global capitalism, to the powers driving profit.

How does Searls sum up translation? He writes, “I want to describe translation as something like moving through the world.” This movement is between languages, between cultures, between ways of life, between authors and audiences. Before the reader gets mesmerized by a theme of oscillation, Searls qualifies his meaning: “Translation is not the ferrying of preexisting meaning across a gap but a retroactive creation of meaning […] out of non-sense.” As an activity, translation is generally reactionary. It happens when people recognize that they don’t know what they are seeing, reading, hearing, or experiencing, and they’re not going to let whatever it is that’s strange, unknown, and baffling be. In this context, translation refuses the philosopher’s Stanley Cavell’s claim that “our relationship to the world is not one of knowing.”

What about the philosophy in The Philosophy of Translation? First, shouldn’t it have been A Philosophy of Translation? Rather than attempt an exhaustive review of what philosophers say about translation, Searls sticks to a slender, curated list of philosophers whose views corroborate his experiences with translation. He cites Cavell a few times, along with some philosophers of language like Friedrich Schleiermacher and Alexander von Humboldt, but the spotlight shines on Maurice Merleau-Ponty, mainly Phenomenology of Perception (1945), rooted in his thesis for the 1943–44 school year at the École normale supérieure. Searls emphasizes a key Merleau-Ponty term, “révélateur”: the “developing fluid for photographs.” “Révélateur” conveys Searls’s view that perception is not world-constructing but a slow revealing, the way an exposed print in developing fluid in a darkroom becomes visible. By contrast, in Sense and Non-Sense (1948), Merleau-Ponty writes, in Hubert L. Dreyfus and Patricia Allen Dreyfus’s translation: “[T]he lived perspective, that which we actually perceive, is not a geometric or photographic one.”

Searls insists: “[M]y whole account of phenomenology is meant to argue that the terms ‘subjective’ and ‘objective’ don’t really apply.” Call this Searls’s upscale way of opening a door to relativism. What does apply? Searls says that “it depends.”

Searls’s relativism carries over into his description of translation. Translators’ “decisions are different in every novel or story or poem or instruction manual.” Without weighing in on whether Searls and Merleau-Ponty are on the same page, anyone with training in the history of philosophy and an awareness that for centuries philosophy has pitted itself against rhetoric would have to conclude that Searls’s approach to translation, in general, comes across as deeply rhetorical, one dependent on “who is speaking, who is addressed, where the text is ‘pointing.’” Socrates (as recorded in Phaedrus) famously opposes those who pitch their discourse to please or to persuade an audience without regard for the truth.

Near the book’s conclusion, Searls’s philosophy of translation, steeped in a relativism that doesn’t correspond to, say, the overtly Marxist Merleau-Ponty of Humanism and Terror: An Essay on the Communist Problem (1947), endorses identity politics:

The importance of publishing more translations from the Arab world or Africa or foreign genre fiction—seems to me not especially different from other crucial issues of representation in publishing, such as the importance of having Black or Asian American or Native American or queer or women’s voices in English-language publications, editorial offices, and prize committees.

In other words, Searls’s proposal leaves the economic-corporative structure in place—no doing away with prize committees that promote hierarchies and entitled groups among writers and translators, but rather making sure all the corporate guards and judges who are invested in the publishing system institute rotating identities. To be in opposition to identity politics doesn’t mean one is opposed to the groups such politics aim to support. As one Marxist critic explains, “The abolition of the one-sidedness of identity—as worker, woman, man, or what have you—represents real human emancipation.”

Searls likely knows plenty of translators who cannot make a living by translation alone. Capitalism doesn’t reward that labor, that identity, handsomely. Thus, some translators, by necessity, have other identities attached to themselves—professor, writer, critic. Despite reservations about Searls’s views on identity politics, I applaud his generosity in providing readers with the possibility of a profound understanding of what’s at stake in translation.