Le mot juste en anglais

Professor Nicholas de Lange – linguist of the month of July 2017

Yanky Fachler kindly acceded to our request and  travelled to Cambridge to interview Professor Nicholas de Lange, the English translator of over a dozen books by Israeli author, Amos Oz, including Judas, which was short-listed for the 2017 Man Booker International Prize. An ordained Reform rabbi, Professor de Lange is Emeritus Fellow and Professor of Hebrew and Jewish Studies at Cambridge University's Faculty of Divinity and Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies. He has held visiting positions at the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies, the Jewish Theological Seminary of Hungary in Budapest, the École Pratique des Hautes Etudes in Paris, the Freie Universität Berlin, the University of Toronto and Princeton University. He is a prolific translator of contemporary Hebrew fiction, and has served as Chairman of the Translators Association. In the following extracts, Professor de Lange shares some insights on the art of literary translation.

Yanky Fachler is a translator, broadcaster and writer of  several books in the field of Jewish history. He was born in the United Kingdom, spent almost thirty years in Israel and currently lives in Ireland, where he is founder and chairman of the Jewish Historical Society of Ireland.

 

 

 Y.F. :  How would you define a translator?

A translator is a reader who is also a writer. I read the text, and then I write it. My aim is to write a book that is word for word like the original – without being a word for word translation. Since I also write many books of my own, I see no difference between a translator and an author. As an author, you convert material from your mind on to the page. As a translator, you convert someone else’s work to the page. I am uncomfortable being asked which specific words of phrases in Hebrew I find difficult to translate. I don’t like being asked whether I find Hebrew a difficult language to translate. The actual words are almost irrelevant. I translate paragraphs.

 Y.F. :  Do you read a book before you start to translate it?

I don’t like to read the book in advance. Partly because translation is so badly paid that it takes up too much time; and partly because I like to discover the book as I go along. This approach, though, can lead you astray. In Oz’s My Michael, there is a couple living in Jerusalem who drink endless cups of tea. One day, the man is ill and he asks his wife to bring him tea with milk. With my British background, I found this strange. How had he consumed all the previous cups of tea? Then I learned that in Israel, tea with milk is only given to sick people. I had to go back and rewrite all the tea scenes, replacing cups of tea with glasses of tea. Going back to the question of reading a book before translating it, some of the other translators at the Man Booker event agreed with my habit of not reading the book first. But one translator was adamant: “I must read the book first, because I might not accept it.” The only time I have turned down a translation job is when I was too busy.

 

Y.F. : The actor Lawrence Olivier claimed that actors must learn to love the unsavoury characters they portray on stage. Does something similar happen with translators? Do you have to love some of the unsavoury characters you translate?

N.d.L. :  Translation isn't impartial. Like Olivier rightly says, you must be on the side of the character. You must love the characters you translate. Many of the characters that populate Amos Oz's books are unpleasant, but I don't let my dislike of them stop me from portraying them as they should be portrayed. Anyway, unsavoury characters make interesting characters. You need enormous sympathy for the characters you are translating. For example, some of the books I translate have no narrator – they are entirely epistolary. Everything is in direct speech. Just as a theatre audience needs to know the distinct voice of each actor on stage, so the translator must make the reader aware of which character is speaking at any particular time in an epistolary piece. While on the subject of dialogue on stage and dialogue in translation, I once translated a piece for BBC Radio 3 that was only intended to be read aloud, not to appear on the printed page. The actress called me and said she had a problem with a couple of phrases. "Could you please go back and check the Hebrew to see whether that is what the author really meant?" My heart sank. This was going to be a disaster. Yet when I went back to the original, she was absolutely correct. Without knowing any Hebrew, the actress had stumbled upon a couple of places where my translation did not do justice to the original.

Y.F. : You are quoted as saying that a faithful literary translation demands transcending the words to convey the whole cultural context. Could you elaborate?

N.d.L. :  As a translator, you have to translate the context of the book you are translating. You are asking people to read about a culture they don't and can't know. You have to make the context clear in a subtle way. For example, when there is a reference to Chaim Nachman Bialik, Israel's national poet, you don'; have the luxury of using footnotes. You need to find a more subtle way of letting the reader know who Bialik is. It's the same with biblical and Talmudical references. I don't feel the need to explain what the Bible is or what the Talmud is. I leave it to my readers to pick up allusions and to look stuff up for themselves.

Y.F. : What is your latest Hebrew literature translation project?

N.d.L. :  I don't go out of my way to look for Hebrew books to translate, but I am currently engaged in translating perhaps the most challenging Hebrew novel, Days of Ziklag by S Yizhar. This hugely influential modernist work was first published in 1958, and is one of the two most difficult Hebrew books to translate. The other is Yakov Shabtai's Zikhron Devarim (Past Continuous). I was drawn to the Days of Ziklag project because it is the ultimate challenge for a translator – a bit like translating James Joyce. Although Yizhar was writing before the emergence of Holocaust literature as a genre, his War of Independence themes resonated with Holocaust themes such as ethnic cleansing.

Y.F. : Do you ever collaborate with other translators?

N.d.L. :  Right now, I am collaborating on S Yizhar's Days of Ziklag with a former student of mine, Yaacob Dweck. But what with me living in England, and Yaacob living in the USA, we have calculated that it will take us many years to complete the project [1] . I am not unaware of some of the perils of working with a collaborator. The translator Ros Schwartz once told me of her experience in co-translating a book with another translator. She soon discovered that they each had their own style, and this made it very difficult to find a consistent voice. Even little things like the propensity of one translator to use "start" where the other translator used "begin" caused difficulties. As a rule, I often feel uncomfortable reading other translators. If a book is translated from a language I don't know, I find myself asking what the original was like. I suppose I only enjoy translations that are extraordinarily well done.

 

Y.F. : In Judas, Shmuel gives Yardena a gift for her secular birthday and another for her Hebrew birthday. Having two birthdays is like having two identities. As a translator, does English represent your secular identity, and Hebrew your sacred identity?

N.d.L. :  That is a very subtle question. Yes, English is my secular identity. I certainly regard Hebrew as a sacred tongue, and I prefer to use it only for sacred purposes. I have translated more medieval Hebrew poetry into English than modern Hebrew literature. I don't speak modern Hebrew. I can't read a Hebrew newspaper. [2]  I can listen to the news, but I get lost when they talk about politics. I am unfamiliar with many modern colloquialisms. I do not even regard myself as an expert in Hebrew literature. At the get-together of the Man Booker Prize short-listed authors and their translators, the authors were asked to read from their work in the original language. Amos Oz wasn't there, and they asked me to read. I refused, because my spoken modern Hebrew is not good enough.

 

Y.F. : Jews have traditionally been multi-lingual. They spoke the language of the host country, they prayed in Hebrew, and conversed in Yiddish, Ladino, Aramaic or Arabic. Does the Jewish cultural DNA give Jews an edge when it comes to translating?

N.d.L. :  It is true that through the ages, Jews used their linguistic versatility to become great translators. But the golden age was during the medieval period. In the world of modern literature, Jews no longer have an edge. Most of today's best translators are not Jewish. A lot of translations of modern Hebrew literature used to be clumsy, with translators often not even translating into their mother tongue. But things are much better nowadays, because the authors themselves have learned to be more choosey about who will translate them.

  

Y.F. : You seem to be drawn to works associated with Israel's War of Independence. Do you think that the war could have been avoided?

N.d.L. :  The main theme of Judas is the conflict between David Ben-Gurion, Israel's first prime minister – a true-life character, and the fictional character of Shaltiel Abravanel. Ben Gurion believed that the Arabs would never accept a Jewish state in Palestine, so the only alternative was to fight them. Abravanel insisted that war was avoidable, and for his views he was expelled from the ruling elite. He did not think that Israel should be a Jewish state, rather a country in which all could live in equality as brothers. Whatever my views on Abravanel's views may be, I do not let this influence my translation.

 

Y.F. : In Israel today, some people brand Oz a traitor for his controversial political views. How have his views impinged on your long-term collaborator as Oz's translator?

N.d.L. :  I don't have any opinion about Amos Oz's political views. I am a translator, and I'm really not involved or interested in Israeli politics. I am an academic. It is not my job to pass judgement on the opinions expressed in the book. It is not my job to impose myself on the text. It's not my job to get involved in the politics. It is my job to translate what's put in front of me.

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1. The interviewer explained to us that de Lange apparently believed that despite modern technology, such as Skype, he and his assistant would have needed to sit together to pore over many fine points in order to perfect the translation.

 

2. We asked the interviewer how it was possible that Professor de Lange could not read a Hebrew newspaper and yet had translated all the books of Amos Oz, which are written so beautifully and at such a high register. Mr. Faschler explained that Professor de Lange was a specialist in medieval Hebrew and has translated much medieval Jewish poetry and liturgy. However, he had first met Amos Oz at Cambridge when they were both young, and apparently through that friendship he had developed an impressive command of modern Hebrew, despite his claim that he could not read a newspaper.

Nicole Nolette - linguist of the month of June 2017

  The interviewee: Nicole Nolette joined the University of Waterloo in Ontario, Canada, as Assistant Professor of French Studies in July 2017.  She is the recipient of the Ann-Saddlemyer prize, awarded by the Canadian Association for Theatre Research, and also the winner of the award for best work in theater research for the period 2014-2016, presented by the Quebec Society of Theatre Studies, for her book Jouer la traduction. Théâtre et hétérolinguisme au Canada francophone (2015). She has published numerous articles in the fields of translation, theater and French-Canadian literature. From 2014 to 2016, she was Social Science Research Council postdoctoral research associate of the Cultural Agents Initiative at Harvard University.

 

The interviewer: Geraldine Brodie is Lecturer in Translation Theory and Theatre Translation, and the Convenor of the MA in Translation Theory and Practice at University College London. She devised and co-convened the Translation in History Lecture Series and the Theatre Translation Forum, and was a co-editor of the online journal New Voices in Translation Studies from 2012 to 2015.

Geraldine's research focuses on theatre translation practices in contemporary London, including the collaborative role of the translator in performance and the intermediality and interlinearity of surtitles.She is a frequent presenter on these topics, in the UK and internationally, and her work has been published in a variety of publications. Geraldine is a member of the Panel of Associates of ARTIS, a new research training initiative in the broad area of translation and interpreting studies.

Geraldine has an MA in Comparative Literature from University College London and read English as an undergraduate at Brasenose College, Oxford where she specialised in Linguistics, Old and Middle English and Old French. She has a Diploma de Español como Lengua Extranjera from the Instituto Cervantes. Geraldine's research interests include the multiple voices of translation; direct, indirect and literal theatre translation; adaptation and version; the intermediality of surtitles; and ethics in translation. She is a Fellow of the Institute of Chartered Accountants in England and Wales and a member of the Chartered Institute of Taxation. Geraldine's first monograph, The Translator on Stage, will be published by Bloomsbury in 2017.

Geraldine was our Linguist of the Month in August 2016.

 
The following interview was conducted in English by Skype between London and Ottawa.

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GB:   Your recent book, Jouer la traduction, discusses translated and bilingual theatre in areas of Canada where French is a minority language. How did you become interested in this topic? What is your personal experience of working in French in Canada?

NN: My interest in bilingual  theater (French-English) and its translation began in 2005 when I was studying with Louise Ladouceur at the francophone Campus Saint-Jean, University of Alberta. At that time I became interested in the bilingual theater of Western Canada because its translation often seemed impossible. I examined whether, rather than considering this theater as untranslatable), one could see it as a game. I then wanted to see if this game of translation might also take place elsewhere, in other postcolonial or diglossic conditions, for example. I chose to study two other case studies similar to that of Western Canada: the province of Ontario, to the west of Quebec, and the region of Acadie, to the east. The city of Montreal and McGill University seemed to be the ideal places from which to observe the evolution and movement of theatrical productions from across Canada. I worked with Catherine Leclerc, a specialist in literary multilingualism and author of Des langues en partage? Cohabitation du français et de l'anglais en littérature contemporaine (2010).

I have also been able to visit the sites of production and translation of bilingual theater over the years. For three years I worked as a postdoctoral fellow in the United States with Doris Sommer at the Cultural Agents Initiative at Harvard University, supported by a grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. And for the past year, I have been teaching in Nova Scotia, on the extreme frontier (and origins) of the territory of Acadie. My studies in translation were conducted in French in English-language universities, and I continue to teach in a similar context.

 

GB: Can you give some examples of how French-language theatre is presented in areas where French is a minority language? What approaches to translation are taken, and what kinds of audiences are catered for?

NN: There is a quite significant difference between theater produced west of Quebec (Ontario, Manitoba, Saskatchewan, Alberta, British Columbia) and that produced in the east (Acadia). In Ontario and Manitoba, for example, francophones make up about 4% of the population; in Alberta and Saskatchewan, the figure is more like 2%. In Acadian New Brunswick, on the other hand, French is the main language of 30% of the population. This difference in the demographics of minority groups also appears in the practices of production and translation of bilingual theater.

In Acadia, the francophone population, even though bilingual to a large extent, creates very little bilingual theater. However, a wide variety of French dialects inspires artistic production. Some of these local varieties of French (including Chiac, spoken in Moncton) also include borrowings and code-switching. This is the case, for example, in the futurist production Empreintes [Traces], presented by the Moncton-Sable Collective after a text by Paul Bossé, which includes an actor playing a Chiac-speaking cyber sapiens who has some fun with the translations she interprets for the audience.

In Ontario and especially in Western Canada, theatre practitioners are more likely to opt for bilingual theater. In Western Canada there is often a preoccupation with identity or community, whereas in Ontario there is a tendency towards the artistic, and sometimes post-dramatic, exploration of bilingualism on stage. I’m thinking, for example, of the production Le Rêve totalitaire de dieu l'amibe by Louis Patrick Leroux, in which the character of the Commentator makes ironic judgments in English on the dramatic action that takes place in French. In another production, L'Homme invisible/The Invisible Man, two actors share the action: one narrates, the other translates; the direction of translation is then reversed so that there is no longer any identifiable language of departure or arrival.

In accordance with these multilingual practices, it is also in the west that such theaters explore a variety of different translation strategies. Surtitling, for example, was used initially by the Théâtre Français in Toronto around 2005 and has rapidly been taken up by many of the minority theatrical institutions in Ontario and the west. In contrast, there is no surtitling policy in Acadie; when touring in the west, however, Acadian theater productions are sometimes surtitled.

I am interested in these regional differences with regard to bilingualism and translation, but I am also investigating how theatrical productions circulate and are legitimized in major theater centers in Canada: in French in Montreal, and in English in Toronto. Since theatregoers in these cities do not necessarily share the bilingualism of the minority communities who create the theatrical forms we are discussing, performances are developed to address new audiences. Thus, a particular bilingual production can become more or less bilingual for spectators who may not be able to fully comprehend it in French or English.

These two stages - the initial bilingual composition and its subsequent translations - are what I call “playful translation”. In the book, I discuss certain paradoxes in the reception of bilingual or surtitled theater productions in Toronto and Montreal. On the one hand, in Toronto, English surtitles not only succeed in attracting audiences with English as their first language, but also francophone audiences unused to hearing French regularly spoken in their minority context. On the other hand, francophone audiences in Montreal are themselves often bilingual, and are less resistant than might be expected to the presence of English on stage.

 

GB:   Your book investigates the concept of “playful translation”. Can you explain how this functions in relation to French-language theatre in Canada? Can this concept be applied to other forms of translated theatre?

NN: I consider “playful translation” at two levels: the playful inscription of bilingualism in a theater production, and its reinscription in subsequent translations of the same production for other audiences. In both cases, playful translation may take the form of performed translators, redistributed replicas or surtitles above the stage. The concept of “play” seems particularly potent: it is employed in language (“play on words”, for example) and in theater (where to act is also “to play”). Considering French-Canadian theater from the perspective of play is also quite innovative; it is customary to regret the ongoing assimilation that is manifested by the bilingualism of minority groups. It seems to me that the concept of “play” equally permits the development of opportunities with regard to translation. Creating a space (in the sense of the space necessary for movement) for "play" in the activity of translation is to follow in the line of word play and the play of multilingualism. It puts a stop to the consideration of such practices as fundamentally untranslatable.

I also consider that the concept of playful translation could be applied to other theatrical forms by minority groups on the boundaries of different languages. The work of Tace Hedrick on bilingual poetry (Spanish-English) in North America and its translation, for example, reminds me that there are international connections that can be traced through playful translation. There could also be other multilingual contexts where it would be interesting to test this concept, such as Hong Kong or Yakutsk.

 

GB:   I noticed that your book discusses translation theory from both English-language and French-language sources. How would you envisage a translation of your own book into English?

NN: In writing this book, I aimed to cross linguistic and cultural boundaries of translation theory, minority literature and production. The concept of play, for example, allows me to draw on Johan Huizinga and Roger Caillois, but also on French theory as it is reworked by American cultural studies. I wanted to dip into an interdisciplinary and intercultural repertoire to discuss productions dealing with translation and still in the process of translation. Discussing such productions was perhaps easier in French: the book caters for an audience that already has some awareness of French-Canadian theater. The translation of this book into English would require a fuller presentation of the context generating the issues of French-Canadian theater in order to inform a new audience.

 

GB:         Where will your research take you next?

Since the publication of this book, I have been pursuing several avenues of research. One of them is the contribution of technology, which is ubiquitous in multilingual theater productions and their translations. The character of the cyber sapiens interpreter in Empreintes [Traces] shows that the Chiac dialect and Babelfish style translation can go hand in hand. The use of surtitles is another example of the contribution of technology to the translation of multilingualism. I would like to expand these connections, perhaps by researching perceptions of stage technologies. I am also aiming to advance the theory of multilingual theater; beyond the drama of assimilation, beyond the concept of playful translation - itself carrying some sense of denunciation, I consider that new forms of bilingual theater are making further efforts to target intercultural encounter. To this extent, bilingual theatre presents the hope of potential encounters. In Canada, my concept of “play” relates primarily to French-Canadian theater practitioners, with “hope” attributed to English-Canadian practitioners. A more comprehensive review would consider these two possible forms of bilingual theater in Canada. We have yet to theorize the potential of these moments of meeting - and translation.

[1] Jouer la traduction. Théâtre et hétérolinguisme au Canada francophone
University of Ottawa Press
May 27, 2015

 

[1] Jouer la traduction
Théâtre et hétérolinguisme au Canada francophone
Les Presses de l'Université d'Ottawa
27 mai 2015