In books and magazines, newspapers and pamphlets, hundreds of thousands of words have been written on what makes a good translation. (APR has, of course, played a role in the continual discourse; the ending essay to the November/December 2020 issue, as of this writing the latest, is entitled “The Archi-texture of the City as a Network of Translation.”) So many things to consider for the translator: voice, music, style, form, verve, flexibility, literalism, contextual priming, transformation and on and on. In “Some Notes on Translation and on Madame Bovary” Lydia Davis writes that while in the midst of translating Madame Bovary she thought there were “fourteen previous translations of Madame Bovary. Then I discovered more and thought there were eighteen. Then another was published a few months before I finished mine. Now I’ve heard that yet another will be coming out soon, so there will be at least twenty, maybe more that I don’t know about.” As Davis relates, each of those translators had different goals and intentions, with the actual words in Flaubert’s novel being the mere scaffolding for each translator to work upon and within. Some aimed to reach the work’s conclusion as efficiently as possible—they worked fast and true—whereas others tarried and lingered, focused on seeing the variegated views, hearing sounds and sniffing scents unattainable at ground level.
Like most things, translation revolves around control. As a co-creator of the text, there’s how much the translator has versus how much they want to—or need to—have. Creative control, sure, but it often goes deeper than that: the way one translates often becomes definitive statement to those unfamiliar with the author’s native tongue. And for great, potentially life-changing works, this responsibility is no small thing. In a recent article wherein a dozen of Polish Nobel Laureate Olga Tokarczuk’s translators were interviewed about their work, the question was broached. Tokarczuk’s Serbian translator
