All The More Reason

‘What is translation?’ asked Vladimir Nabokov: ‘…On a platter/ A poet’s pale and glaring head/A parrot’s screech, a monkey’s chatter/And profanation of the dead.’

Nabokov’s poetic consideration of this question was essentially defensive. His two stanzas of artful self-justification, On Translating Eugene Onekin, were jabs at the jaw of critics who had denounced his idiosyncratic, even ‘profane’, English translation of Pushkin’s verse-novel.

As a Russian author émigré and multi-linguist, Nabokov had both personal and professional reasons for seeking the essence of translation, but anyone who has ever attempted to translate anything will have addressed the problem, as they anxiously paw at a dictionary in search of le mot juste.

As it happens, le mot juste, is a good example of the translator’s folly in action. The most recognisable English rendering of this shop-soiled phrase would be ‘the correct word’, ‘the precise word’, or, if you’re feeling less adventurous, plain-old ‘the right word’. But even though each of these versions gets the message across, they are all monochrome facsimiles of the original French phrase, which expresses a more profound idea. The word juste is, in French, entwined with notions of justice and fairness; by searching for le mot juste, one is therefore endeavouring literally to ‘do justice’ to the language in which one is working.

Occasionally, one comes across a foreign term that appears ‘untranslatable’. By this, one usually means that it is difficult to do justice to it with a single word from one’s native tongue. The translation of the Portuguese word saudade as ‘sorrowful longing’, may not furrow too many brows, but articulately conveying the fact that this expression has a positive connotation takes rather more linguistic élan.

Tim King, Prospect Magazine’s excellent French political analyst, was recently forced to suck a thoughtful tooth as he tried to convey the meaning of Jean-Marie Le Pen’s florid French to the readers of his blog:

”I think a foreigner who wants to adopt French nationality begins to become truly French only when the bones of his parents dissolve into the earth of France,” he told me last week. “It’s at that moment that one begins to belong to the nation charnellement.”(A word for which I can’t find a quick equivalent – carnally doesn’t work, though it can do in other circumstances, viscerally, perhaps, intimately not really). Jean-Marie Le Pen talks in images, which I have to say makes talking to him vivid, alive and sometimes very funny. ‘

To put the exact English translation of charnellement (an adverb linked to the idea of a charnel house- an institution no longer, sorry, a la mode) in the mouth of Le Pen would be to make him sound long-winded and inarticulate, which, for all his vices, would be an unjust representation of his character. Translation, as this example shows, is therefore neither wholly art nor science: it combines factual rigour with an appreciation of a language’s aesthetic.

The translation of poetry poses an even greater challenge because the translator is restricted by form. For Nabokov, the safe transport of his delicate poetic cargo could only be assured by removing it from the distorting constraints of Pushkin’s original meter. Unlike previous translators of the piece, Nabokov privileged exactness at the expense of Eugene Onegin‘s melodic sense. Walter Arndt’s rendering of the following stanza, for example:

Winter…the peasant, feeling festive,
Breaks a fresh fairway with his sleigh,
Snow underfoot, his nag is restive
And, barely trotting, plods his way.

Becomes, in Nabokov’s literal, ‘free’ verse:

Winter! The peasant, rejoicing,
Breaks a new track with his sledge;
His poor horse, sniffing the snow,
Attempting a trot, plods through it.

Arndt gives us a sense of the undulations that a Russian reader would recognise, but he must resort to confection to achieve his effect. Is the reader’s gain greater if he knows that the peasant’s horse ‘restiveness’ is a result of his sniffing of the snow? ‘The drudge or the rhymester’, Nabokov wrote, ‘has substituted easy platitudes for the breathtaking intricacies of the text‘.

In justifying his own work, Nabokov calls on Pushkin for posthumous absolution of his ‘honest roadside prose/All thorn, but cousin to your rose.’ But a thorn by any other name still pricks our feet. The ‘metropolitan critic’ Edmund Wilson, himself a scholar of Pushkin (and until the publication of his critique in the New York Review of Books, a friend of Nabokov) scorned this approach for producing ‘a bald and awkward language which has nothing in common with Pushkin or with the usual writing of Nabokov.’ Neither honesty, then, nor poetic licence, can altogether prevent a linguistic miscarriage of justice. On the journey from one tongue to another, it seems that something is always lost in translation.

One cannot help but sympathise with members of the government who have the feeling of being in the wrong place at the wrong time. In 1997, even Tony Blair might have thought it incredible that his party would still be in government ten years hence, at a time when, unluckily enough, the renewal of Britain’s nuclear weapons system needed to be considered.

If the Tony Blair of ten years ago would have found the present scenario improbable, one can only imagine what the Tony Blair of twenty five years ago might have made of the decision that his government would finally arrive at. Might he have condemned the renewal of these ‘nuclear boomerangs’ and furthermore insisted that the government use ‘unilateral steps [to] secure multilateral solutions on the international level.’? He might well have: after all, these are the words of the Labour Party manifesto on which he ran for election in 1983. A member of CND, as he was at the time, would be unlikely to resile from these positions.

Not unreasonably, the weather-beaten Tony Blair of today would point out to his callow counterpart that we now live in very different times. The rhetoric of 1983 no longer arrests us in the way it did when mutually assured destruction was a very real possibility, rather than a horrific curiosity gawped at by students of the Cold War. It is true that in a multi-polar world the potential threats to national security are less predictable. The question one needs to ask though is this: are nuclear weapons the best way – both practically and ethically – of insuring against future risk of attack?

The government cites ‘state-sponsored nuclear terrorism’ as one of the new threats that could materialise within the lifespan of the upgraded Trident missiles. Having the capacity to eradicate a state would, it is argued, deter that state from supplying terrorists with the means to wipe London, New York or Tel Aviv from the map. This, of course, assumes that a return address would be possible to discern with enough certainty to sentence thousands, if not millions, of its addressees to death. Who would we trust enough to make this call? Who would trust their self enough to make it? Who, furthermore, would wish to have such a responsibility at the tip of his finger when the recipients of your payload might be, let us say, the helpless non-citizens of a Shi’ite theocracy which rather presumptuously insists that ‘its’ ummah could, and would readily, ‘absorb’ any such attack? Who could entertain facilitating the ‘martyrdom’ of a people who, until the white light of the blast had blinded them, would be unaware that they had auditioned for such a role?

The other ‘known unknowns’ are rather more familiar, but no more comforting for it. We know that there are states who may directly threaten us in the future. We don’t know exactly who they are at present, although it doesn’t take too much imagination to figure out which countries with either nuclear capabilities or nuclear aspirations our deterrent might seek, one day, to deter. However counter-intuitive it may sound, psychopathic regimes may well be susceptible to the nuances of ‘game theory’; irrational systems do not necessarily act irrationally. For as long as there are countries with nuclear weapons, it is wise to assume that arming ourselves with systems like Trident will reduce any risk of attack from states that value their own survival.

Prudent as it may be for the government to renew Trident on the basis that it is taking out ‘insurance’ against the possibility of unknown future threats, it must not overlook the ultimate goal of total, global disarmament. In the halcyon, ‘bi-polar’ days of the Cold War, when Trident’s missiles were targeted in dreadful symmetry at a known target, the balance of terror was readily apparent and, therefore, containable. This was a house fire that could be kept under control. But its dying embers now threaten to spit themselves into the scrub. If Iran goes nuclear, Saudi Arabia, Egypt and others will surely follow, and we should not be so naïve as to think that we can shield ourselves from the ensuing inferno. Or holocaust.

In 2010, the next round of Nuclear Non-Proliferation talks will take place. Delaying a decision on Trident until then would make little material difference to the effectiveness of the British nuclear deterrent, but it would make a huge difference to the international perception of this country’s good faith. How could any government minister seriously engage in these talks in the knowledge that the cheques for a weapons system that will last until 2050 have already been signed? Established nuclear powers must be willing to take the moral high ground in facing down immoral regimes. When Iran invokes the rhetoric of tu quoque to justify its nuclear ambitions, what will our response be? Until we abandon our policy of defensive genocide, we will continue to fight fire with fire.

Michael P