The Sun Never Sets on the English Language

Translations and the Book Trade

A recent article from the New York Times revealed that many young Europeans are choosing to read American and English books in the original language. Why? The article offers this reason:

Booksellers in the Netherlands said that many young people prefer to buy books in English with their original covers, even if Dutch is their first language, because those are the books they see and want to post about on BookTok. In some bookstores in Amsterdam, young adult sections carry mostly English-language books, with only a handful of Dutch options.

The tone of the article seems mostly negative, but I don’t see why. If these teens can read in another language, then good for them – though the probability of an American or English (or Australian) teen learning, say, Dutch to read a popular author from the Netherlands is almost zero. Regular readers of Cosy Moments will know my view: anyone serious about the humanities must learn languages.

Yet, the article does highlight a serious problem with the popularity of English-language books abroad:

Publishers… as well as agents in the United States and Britain, worry this could undercut the market for translated books, which will mean less money for authors and fewer opportunities for them to publish abroad.

Native English speakers are blessed with a rich literary tradition, but this can sometimes produce an indifference or even hostility to other languages. Philip Larkin expressed this quite firmly in an interview published in the Paris Review:

Interviewer: In one early interview you stated that you were not interested in any period but the present, or in any poetry but that written in English. Did you mean that quite literally? Has your view changed?

Larkin: It has not. I don’t see how one can ever know a foreign language well enough to make reading poems in it worthwhile. Foreigners’ ideas of good English poems are dreadfully crude: Byron and Poe and so on. The Russians liking Burns. But deep down I think foreign languages irrelevant… A writer can have only one language, if language is going to mean anything to him.

This is somewhat misleading: Larkin did know a decent amount of French, and his provincial genius might make you think that learning languages is a waste of time. Literary history is full of major figures who were inspired, motivated, and enthralled by foreign literature. For many people, their introduction to other cultures is through translations.

(photo source)

And that’s why we should be worried about a smaller market for translated books. Translators are like garbagemen: both are indispensable to society but are only noticed when they do a bad job. The ideal translator must be self-effacing and capture the original so well that the reader forgets they’re reading a translation. The ideal translator must be invisible.

Few translators reach this ideal, though not for lack of talent. One difference between translators and garbagemen is that garbagemen get paid a lot more. Even the most gifted professional translator must choose between producing imperfect work or dying of cold.

I can draw on a bit of personal experience here. Although I’ve never translated professionally, I have published the occasional translation. A good translator doesn’t just know languages, but the cultures and histories associated with them. I teach Latin and Ancient Greek, and am occasionally in the embarrassing position of sitting before passages I understand perfectly without having a faint idea of how to put them into English. In these instances, translation is a kind of labour, but I did it because I loved the work I was translating. Those translators who must produce a certain number of lines or pages a day don’t have the luxury of perfection, and understandably resort to feeble compromises. I pity anyone who has to translate work they don’t love — I would rather drink battery acid.

It goes without saying that translators should understand the language of the original, but they must be masters of the target language. There are considerably good and influential translations by people who barely knew the original language; their distinguishing skill is stylistic flair. Alexander Pope’s translations of Homer earned him a considerable fortune and reputation even though he barely knew any Greek. (Christopher Logue was one of Homer’s most vivid modern translators and was equally ignorant of Homer’s language.) Lin Shu (1852 – 1924) introduced a lot of Western literature to China and was praised for his excellent literary style. He translated nearly 200 European novels without knowing a word of a foreign language. (His friend related the plots which he transcribed into classical Chinese.) If the translator is a good writer, linguistic inaccuracies won’t mar the work, but no amount of philological expertise can help someone with a tin ear and wooden tongue.

The New York Times article seems to be rebuking the wrong people. When the internet is making it easier to be fluent in English, why should anyone read translations instead of the original? If translators are poorly paid, and authors don’t earn much money from export copies, who’s to blame? The readers who buy the books they love, or the publishers who stingily compensate the people doing the work?