On the Perils of Good Translation (from FB)

Nabokov, one of the greatest facilitators of exchange and communication between English and Russian literatures, despised translation. Translations of all kinds were the regular targets of his barbs in venues like The New Republic--coated with Wildean disregard but boiling with a barely-contained Russian fury--and perhaps his most enduring statement on the impossibility of translation is his incomprehensible, four-volume translation of Onegin: a hyperliteral, dictionaried translexification with reams of notes and treatises meant not so much to translate Onegin as to convey Pushkin's Russia in its entirety as Nabokov understood it, or better yet, to convey the reader to that Russia and to the Petersburg literary culture whence Nabokov sprang.

Agree or disagree, one insight of his that deserves remembering is that the better translation is, in a sense, more injurious than the worse. An awkward, clumsy translation is, like a hastily built coffin, the merest approximation of the corpse of the original. A well-constructed translation, which flows smoothly and borrows richly from the idiomatic landscape of the target language, is a dangerous clone: it moves and breathes like a real live boy, and one is drawn all too easily into a Potemkin world of spinning, gliding marionettes that populate the original culture and language.

This danger is, of course, most acute in the area of artistic literature. A metallurgical manual will always suffer less from translation than Anna Karenina (although its reader might suffer more). Occupying a middle ground somewhere between these is philosophical literature. On the one hand, it is usually less in need of the intensity of feeling and delicate shading that language must provide for artistic literature. On the other hand, if it is truly to be philosophy, it must accomplish an impossible task--it must unmask the world behind language using language itself, stage not a play within a play but a play that slowly, subtly alerts the audience to the fact that they are themselves the performers. And translation here cannot falter, for a missed association or skewered simile are ultimately bearable, but a missed nuance of thought is not. To wit: Karenina will be run over by the train whether it is speeding over the tracks or rumbling along them, while the question of how to render το εν εστιν will determine whether the Parmenides is a profound treatise with a clear set of progressions or a garbled half-joking exercise, as so many of its commentators think it is.

Among philosophical works and their translations, R. Shmuel ibn Tibbon's translation of Maimonides' Guide for the Perplexed is outstanding. While it is not free of the occasional error, it is brilliantly faithful and consistent, and can be relied upon even for hairpin turns and lurking subtleties in Maimonides' thought. It is terribly awkward Hebrew, but here ibn Tibbon is in full agreement with Nabokov--rather than Hebraicize Maimonides' Arabic, he has Arabicized medieval Hebrew. Aside from the numerous neologisms, calques, and direct borrowings, ibn Tibbon frequently preserves, to the chagrin of the starting reader, Arabic locution and syntax. This is done with full awareness--in his introduction to the translation, he explains that he chose a stylistically awkward but philosophically precise approach over a stylistically flowing but philosophically imprecise one for two reasons: 1) his Arabic is not as fully developed, certainly for literary purposes, as his father's (R. Yehudah ibn Tibbon) because the family moved from Spain to Provence, where the younger ibn Tibbon grew up, and 2) far be it from him to assume he understands Maimonides well enough to give a Hebrew "equivalent"!

And as brilliant and thorough as he was, even he, perhaps the greatest philosophical translator in our tradition, couldn't cover every last nuance, because nobody can. These nuances are sometimes secondary, but sometimes shockingly essential. There is absolutely no blame to be laid at the feet of ibn Tibbon, who not only produced a readable and precise translation that has withstood the ages, but did so working under the gun of his Provencal patrons and supporters, who may have loved ibn Tibbon but loved Maimonides even more, and simply could not wait another day for the Arabic work to finally become accessible to them. Here is an example.

In the introduction to the Guide, Maimonides warns the reader not to imagine that the esoteric ideas he is about to expound are fully, consistently grasped by anybody. Rather, they appear in bursts of clarity now and then, and the frequency and intensity of these bursts is responsible for the gradations among philosophers. These moments of clarity are then covered over by המנהגים והטבעים, in ibn Tibbon's translation: literally "the customs and natures". This reads much like Hume's observation that the philosopher comfortably retreats from the frightening abyss of his speculations the moment he goes to the marketplace and engages in his daily affairs. While Maimonides certainly wouldn't contest that point, and this is indeed the import of המנהגים, the customs, there is a different point being made by the second word, which is translated here as הטבעים.

The second point, unfortunately, is lost in translation. The Arabic original reads אלמואד (in Arabic characters المواد), the plural of אלמאדה. The singular and plural are used regularly in philosophical Arabic to mean "substance(s)" or "element(s)", with the plural sometimes having a collective sense, referring to the elemental substances of classical philosophy. Thus, Maimonides means to say that philosophical insight is obscured not only by daily life but by the elements themselves, the fundamental ingredients of the picture of reality presented to every person. Insights of this nature are not gained from delving deeper into that picture itself--those would be the insights of empirical science--but by stepping behind or around it. This is a point he makes more clearly later in the Guide at 3:9, and is essential here.

Why did ibn Tibbon translate the word by the Hebrew טבע? I don't know, and perhaps an expert in Judeo-Arabic translations of the medieval era would. I've consulted Dr. Joel's critical Arabic edition of the Guide and there are no alternative readings noted here. Even stranger is that ibn Tibbon correctly renders the same word as חומר, "material", in the introduction to the Moreh and at 3:9! (Prof. Schwartz' Modern Hebrew translation uses חומרים, "materials", here. While this would be a correct medieval rendering of the word and is what one would've expected from ibn Tibbon, it sounds a little funny in Modern Hebrew, where חומר with no qualifiers simply means "substance" in a very non-philosophical sense.)

In the lexicon of foreign terms that he compiled some years after he wrote his translation (the lexicon was partly meant to clarify terms, partly to attack the "poetic" translation of al-Charizi which came out after ibn Tibbon's), ibn Tibbon notes that the Hebrew טבע is used to cover the numerous connotations of the Arabic טביעה and טבע, both words that are themselves strongly multivalent. He lists four of the senses of טבע that he uses in his translation, but none of them work here.

It is possible that ibn Tibbon simply wanted the second term to resonate with the first. To say "the customs and the elements" or "the customs and material" is quite awkward, indeed, and the juxtaposition really is somewhat jarring in the original. Perhaps ibn Tibbon sought a term that would express the regular, familiar aspect of the elemental world, highlighting that fact that the picture as put together by the elements is pervasive in the same way that daily habit is, and therefore used the word "nature"--which is understood as the sum of latent properties of the elements--in place of the more literal "elements". Or perhaps he had a different version of the Arabic before him.

But part of the difficulty posed by this rendering is anachronistic. That is, the word טבע was such a successful Tibbonide import from Arabic that its post-Tibbon users promptly forgot that it had been borrowed at all, and it took on all of the connotations of "nature" found in everyday language, launching a successful career in Hebrew ethical and scientific literature written by authors who hadn't the slightest acquaintance with Arabic. The plural form, טבעים, appears much less frequently, and the reader of today would find it near impossible to go from טבעים to "elements of nature". Truly a victim of success.

And it is because ibn Tibbon is so good that the reader doesn't think to question his choice here, and Maimonides' important point is lost (though not entirely, as it is made again throughout the work and especially at 3:9, as noted above). One can almost see Nabokov hopping about, screaming the popular Italian saying traduttore, traditore, "translator, traitor" between cackles. But sometimes the act of translation is necessary, and there is no question that the Jewish world benefited far more from ibn Tibbon's choice to translate than it would've had he followed his initial instinct to step away from the work. For those who are engaged in translation, especially for those who succeed, a more prudent warning would be this: traduttore, creatore--"translator, creator"!