Book Review: The Philosophy of Translation

What if translation is as simple as seeing what someone had to say, and telling it to someone else?

The Philosophy of Translation, a sort of autobiography of translation from Damion Searls, the renowned translator of the recent Nobel Laureate Jon Fosse, falls in two parts. Part one provides “a history of ideas of translation and most of the philosophical argument.” In particular, Searls writes about Maurice Merleau-Ponty and the concept of illusion. In philosophy things can get muddled–is a chair really a chair, and is a building really a building, and how so–but Merleau-Ponty, says Searls, “says that the illusion relies on the usual case.” In so many words, a building is a building (i.e., not a facade) and if you want to see more then go inside, says Searls, that is, “when we walk down a street, we don’t see the fronts of buildings, we see buildings [...] and if we want to see more of it we walk through the door.” What does this have to do with translation? In Searls' words, "we can make this same move with translation: The annoying claim that translation is impossible actually rests on the obvious fact that translation is possible and happens all the time." What if translation is as simple as seeing what someone had to say (seeing the building) and telling it to someone else (who might want to walk through the door)?

The second half of the first part tackles concepts in the history of the philosophy of translation and their examples, especially the concepts of “source language,” (the original language any given work was written in) and “target language,” (the language any given work is translated into); along with the related concerns of “domesticating” (assimilating so-called “foreign works” into a usually dominant culture or context, making them seem less “foreign,”) and the inverse, “foreignizing” (making works seem more “foreign” or exotic). Searls believes that translations exist within a structure of dominance, but also that this binary of “assimilation” or “foreignizing” is too simplified. Searls uses the Septuagint–an extremely famous translation, the earliest extant Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible from the original Biblical Hebrew–to undermine the binary. The text “was [translated] by Greek-speaking Jews in Alexandria [...]. They were pushing their own texts into Greek, you might say, not pulling or bringing something into Greek from elsewhere”. Searls offers a more contemporary example to undermine the opposition between “source” and “target language”. Searls cites the presence of English translations of Spanish in English dominant yet multilingual contexts, with the observation that “an English translation of, say, a Cuban novel is likely to be read by lots of people who also know Spanish, who are maybe from Cuba, or are the children of Cuban immigrants...”, etc. Things are not monolingual, things are multilingual.

To me, part two reads almost like a style guide of the English language, even akin to E.B. White’s Elements of Style. In Searls’ words, the second half “contain[s] most of the concrete translation examples.” This is my favorite part of the book, and here are some examples from it:

There are no rules, only decisions.

Searls offers this principle as he enters into a discussion of Brage/Bragi the dog, “one of the great dog characters in literature,” and “one of the best translation decisions I made in those books [Septology].”

In Norwegian, the dog’s name is Brage (pronounced BROG-eh), and that is how I kept it through all my draft translations of the first book until at some point it clicked in my mind that English speakers would likely hear this in their heads as rhyming with “rage” and “page.” [...] I asked Fosse if the name meant anything special to him and he reminded me that Brage is the Norse god of poetry—I hadn’t recognized it because the name I had always seen in books of Norse myths was “Bragi,” the Old Norse and Icelandic spelling.

And so in Searls’ English, the dog is named Bragi for pragmatic reasons. Bragi, the theonym, Bragi, the skaldic god of poetry in Norse Mythology, Bragi, Asle and Asle’s dog. It should be obvious, and so it is. “Plus, it sounds cute, and even, I later realized, subliminally rhymes with “doggie””, writes Searls.

In describing the titling process for Fosse’s latest novella, Kvitleik, or A Shining, Searls writes:

Fosse’s latest novella, about an everyman figure wandering in a forest, getting lost, and encountering presences who appear as shining auras of pure white, is called Kvitleik, which means “whiteness”: kvit = white; -leik is the ending that turns an adjective into a noun.

However, calling an English-language book Whiteness in the 2020s would suggest a whole universe of concerns around racial privilege. [...] The publishers and I went with A Shining, taking advantage of still other associations not in the Norwegian, but this time suitable (spooky Stephen King and Stanley Kubrick).

Anyone who’s read Septology–in Searls’ English–will straightaway recognise that everything is shining. Emptiness: shining. Heaviness: shining. (“a gentle shining light, like faith. [...] like a promise.”) A Shining Darkness is a painting by the other Asle, a mirror-character of the protagonist Asle of Septology. “A Shining Darkness” becomes an obsession, “yes, a kind of light, a kind of shining darkness, an invisible light [...] speak in silence [...] speak the truth [...].” “[...yes...] the invisible light [...yes...] and without this light [...] then it’s a bad picture...”

This is a translation decision, poetic and political, pertinent at the time of titling–Stephen King, Stanley Kubrick, yes–but A Shining also recalls the snow-filled landscape of Bjørgvin and Dylgja, Asle’s painting in Fosse’s Septology, the shining darkness of death and of the sea in Fosse’s A Summer's Day. In The Philosophy of Translation, Searls quotes Proust, who allegedly responded to doubts concerning his ability to translate Ruskin from English into French–considering his alleged tenuous command of the English language–with the riposte, “I don’t claim to know English; I claim to know Ruskin.” Searls knows Fosse. (And Salten, and Walser, and Hesse, and Bachman, and the list goes on.)

I first encountered Searls via Salten’s Bambi during a four hour layover at the Newark airport, and yes I would recommend this translation of Bambi or any work translated by Searls, but especially Fosse or Walser. It’s obvious to me from Searls’ book on translation that he’s an extaordinary pedagogue, but it does leave you wanting for more of Searls as a writer in his own right. So it’s with great pleasure that I’m looking forward to Searls’ debut novella Analog Days set to release this October.

Damion Searls will be giving a free online lecture about The Philosophy of Translation on Sunday, May 11th at 12:00pm ET as part of The Paideia Institute's new lecture series, Translation from the Classics to the Contemporary. RSVP here.