Shadow Puppets

The assignment was to write a narrative essay that somehow related to one's own experiences with reading and writing. It's hard to pick just one or two things I liked about this class – I feel like almost every part was great! I really enjoyed the longer assignments that we got to spend more time working on. I also loved the detailed, clear instructions on how to write exam-style essays: that definitely made writing less stressful.

. . . . .

Translation.

I knew it meant changing languages, but for years I never had to think about the concept. Eventually the term came up in math class: defined as shifting a curve a fixed number of units in some direction. I spent hours in front of graph paper, translating up, down, left, right; creating new equations and recovering old ones. I drew the same curves over and over until I was bored to death. Translation never changed the shape: it could only move things around.

A few months later, I learned another definition of translation: interpreting mRNA to make proteins. Though the mechanics of protein synthesis were more complicated than the geometric transformations in math class, the rules governing the result were just as straightforward. Every codon represented exactly one action. If you knew the sequence fed into the ribosome, you could predict exactly what would come out.

If you asked seventh-grade me to define translation, I think my answer would have run along the lines of “converting information into a different encoding.” Not always simple, but the difficulty lay chiefly in the tedium. If you had the patience, anything could be translated. You just had to open the rule book, locate the applicable changes, and, after running through the algorithms, display the result.

. . . . .

If translations were tedium, books were the diametrical opposite. In elementary school, I read indiscriminately anything on the bookshelf. (Fortunately, my mother’s discretion in stocking the shelves preserved me from disaster.) The moment I finished my chores I’d grab a book, rush to my room, lie down on my stomach, and turn the pages at constant speed until acted upon by an external force. Crime and Punishment, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, The Three Body Problem, Beowulf, Inferno: the characters danced about in my head like puppets, clinging there more tenaciously than formulas or equations ever did.

One of my favorites was Les Misérables. True, the sentences seemed sometimes a little stilted, a touch disconnected. Nevertheless, the book – filled with crime, adventure, and unexpected grace – drew me into its story until even my mother’s insistent voice, telling me to sit at a table, could hardly break my focus.

. . . . .

Books are words, and words are language, so perhaps it’s no surprise that in seventh grade I decided languages were fun. Despite knowing only English and a questionable amount of Mandarin Chinese, I registered for a linguistics competition. I knew about case, tense, and mood. How bad could it be?

The first page of problems deflated my pride. Languages were so much more than case, tense, and mood. I learned that some languages could use the same verb for “frozen,” “lost,” “settled,” and “torn.” I learned that instead of just “this,” “that,” “these,” and “those,” some languages had special demonstratives for objects at a medium distance, objects lower in elevation than the speaker, or objects not visible to the speaker.

Once the initial frustration faded, I started wondering. How could English capture the meaning of a verb so versatile it appeared to have four completely separate definitions? How would you translate “that house, except ‘that’ means the far away one I can’t see, not the other one that’s also far away but still visible” without producing a masterpiece in the art of clunky sentences?

I didn’t know.

. . . . .

I heard of the book Anna Karenina and decided to read it. “Can you buy Anna Karenina?” I asked my mother, who, though she might deny other petitions, seldom rejected a request for a book.

“The one by Tolstoy?” she asked.

“Yes.”

A few weeks later, a brick-shaped bundle showed up on the dining room table.

“This translation is supposed to be the clearest,” my mom said as I unwrapped the package, “but some people criticize it for being too literal.”

Too literal? How could a translation be too literal? Weren’t translations supposed to say what the words literally meant or else risk becoming paraphrase? Wasn’t the point of translation to be a clear window, obscuring as little as possible the author’s intentions?

. . . . .

I read Anna Karenina quickly, as usual. I found the same stilted sound I had first noticed in Hugo’s books, but now it raised a new, particularly nagging doubt. What if the translation was too literal? What if the words had lost their connotations? The original contained both Russian and French, but the translators turned it all into English. How could I understand the nuances of the different languages used by the Russian nobility if those distinctions disappeared in my version?

When I finally turned the last page, I felt annoyingly unsatisfied. It wasn’t just the infidelity and aimlessness of the main characters that bothered me. I felt I had never really read the book. I had read a translation, yes, but now I was sure that a translation could never be the real thing. Translation wasn’t just shifting the same curve to a different place – the curve would inevitably lose its sharpest corners, its highest pinnacles, its steepest plunges. Translation wasn’t just plugging letters into an algorithm – the machine might spit out words, but it left meaning behind. I could never be sure that a translation avoided flattening four verbs into one or mangling demonstratives that don’t exist in English. Far from being a clear window, translation was an opaque screen standing in front of true meaning. Looking at Chinese translations was worst,

since I could to some degree understand the original. Translation would never capture the tight, parallel rhythms of The Art of War: every extraneous word cut out, its groups of three and four characters mirroring and complementing each other in succinct eloquence. What Sun Tzu wrote in forty-odd characters took twice that many words to express in English, not to mention that it lost its almost poetic cadence and turned into dry, meterless prose.

Translations would never be equivalent, or even close, to originals. I slammed books shut in frustration – I knew just enough to glimpse what I was missing and not enough to reach it. Shortly after finishing Anna Karenina, I sorted through my stack of library books and returned every volume not authored in English. I resolved to no longer waste my time on flavorless paraphrases. I would read only English books.

. . . . .

A few months after my English-only pledge, I walked to the library to meet a classmate who never showed up. Browsing the shelves to fill time, I came upon a title I’d heard of: The Red and the Black. It was translated from French, which meant it was a waste of time. Fortunately, my goal at that moment was to waste several hours. I found an unoccupied corner and opened the Book.

It was, at first, as dull as I’d expected. But strangely enough, I found myself warming to the characters and their comical exploits until, by the fiftieth page, I was actually laughing – forgetting even the expectation of quiet in a library, turning more than one head to see where I sat curled between a bookshelf and a railing. Irony, at least, could shine through translation. Perhaps even a story first written in French could be worthwhile. After all, my memory had not discriminated between translations and English works – I still remembered most of the books I’d read over the years on the floor of my room. By the time I finished The Red and the Black, I was fully convinced. My interest in linguistics had been right to give me a new appreciation of the flowing style of original language. But it ought not to have created a distaste for all translations.

I know now what translations miss, and I will study languages until someday I can read the great authors as they were meant to be read. But I also know what translations retain: stories so real that even imperfect words cannot cloud their clarity. Sometimes I think of the characters as shadow puppets. The shadow theater seems at first an opaque wall. But when the play begins, the silhouettes appear sharp and clear through the screen. Even a shadow play, devoid of color and depth, can draw an audience. Even a translation can call up sympathy.

. . . . .

I used to think little of translations, little thinking they were all around me. Now I know that neglect was unjustified. I know the translation of words is both far more complicated and more fascinating than the predictability of numbers and nucleotides. But my second neglect – perhaps I should say avoidance – was equally wrong. Shoving those translations down the library return chute was shoving away stories, people, cities, ideas. True, these stories were rendered in imperfect language. Yet my old eagerness to read, if nothing else, had proven them beautiful.

The sequel to The Three Musketeers waits on the shelf. I am firmly determined to waste my afternoon on it.