If only I could find my first drafts miraculously waiting for me on the computer screen, or on a yellow legal pad in my own scrawl—I’d welcome them in any form. Rough, inchoate, incoherent? Not a problem. I’d happily set about getting them into shape, chiseling, chipping, polishing, like Michelangelo digging his slaves out of the slabs of marble. I long for this miracle because extracting that first draft from the head, or the guts, or wherever it comes from, is as laborious and sweaty as a trip to the quarry to lug a chunk of marble back to the studio.
That’s why I love to do translations. The words are already there; no need to worry about content. I’m not primarily interested in content anyway; it’s always been language and style that keep me enthralled. Making rough words on the page lucid, smooth, shapely. Translation has all the allure of writing, the patient choosing of words and phrases, playing with syntax, testing the sound in the ear, the rhythms of the sentences as they link up in their dance. And it doesn’t require that first and worst part of writing: making it up.
Somewhere in the words, whether in French or Swahili or Indonesian, lie the hidden English shapes and sounds. Those words are already shapely and polished in their own tongues—no rough slab of marble to native readers. But to non-natives they might as well be. The translator discovers (or invents?) their shape in English, deconstructs in order to reconstruct, breaks down in order to return the work to itself in another guise. A makeover of sorts.
Translation has gotten a bad rap over the centuries; so much is lost, its detractors say. The Italians even have a crisp put down, “traduttore=traditore,” which, ironically, can’t be adequately translated. Translator=traitor: the aural pun is lost. True, there are inevitable losses, but even greater gains. In the hands of a skilled translator who’s adept in the nuances of both languages, no treachery is involved. Instead it’s a fantastic gift. Great works are bequeathed to us and become essential parts of our heritage, gifts we come to rely on and that in turn shape our own legacies. Gifts that might have remained incomprehensible are made transparent, gleaming and fresh, in our very own words.
Lynne Sharon Schwartz is the author of twenty-one books, which include fiction, nonfiction, essays, poetry, and translations. Her new novel, Two-Part Inventions, will be published in November by Counterpoint Press. Her first novel, Rough Strife, was nominated for a National Book Award. Her wide-ranging work includes the coming-of-age novel Leaving Brooklyn, nominated for the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction; the poetry collection In Solitary; and the memoir Not Now, Voyager. Schwartz translates from Italian and is on the faculty of the Bennington Writing Seminars. She lives in Manhattan. (Video care of the Center for Translation Studies at Barnard College.)
