Plain Talk

By Mursi Saad El-Din

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I remember a PEN International Forum on Translation held in Rome in November 1961. The forum was co-chaired by the famous Italian writer Alberto Moravia and by Douglas Young, the poet and then president of the Scottish Centre of PEN.

Discussions in the forum centred on two issues, the material and the cultural. Quite a number of speakers, mostly professional translators, took the floor. While I can no longer remember who said what, I still have a recollection of the main issues raised.

First it became clear that all translation presupposes a choice, since it is impossible to translate any major literature in its entirety into other languages. This choice is determined by the taste of the publisher (who is concerned with his would be readers), often also by social or political prejudices and, above all, by financial considerations.

It was made clear that while there was an established movement to translate from world languages -- English and French, for example, into less known languages -- the opposite is rare. This is motivated by the desire in some smaller countries for knowledge of other literatures, countries where, in the words of J.G. Weightman, "a number of prominent intellectuals are prepared to spend time translating major foreign works." In such countries, he continues, translation is, as it were, "a national import" and the translator himself "may enjoy considerable prestige."

This is certainly the case in Egypt where translators are mostly university professors or, in some cases, the writers themselves. Going through the names of Egyptian translators, one cannot fail to recognise their status in the intellectual world. Some of them were responsible for making foreign works part of the English literature curriculum. Translated Russian classics, for example, have long since been part of the university curriculum in English literature departments. When I was a student in the English Section of the Fouad 1st University (now Cairo University) Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard was part of the drama course, which was still the case when I later returned to teach in my alma mater.

But to go back to the Rome PEN International Forum on Translation, a point repeatedly discussed was the quality of translations. Many errors in published translations were cited. But, as some of the conferees pointed out, once the rights of a particular contemporary work have been sold, it cannot be re-translated, however bad the existing translation may be.

Translation, according to the Rome forum report, "is a perpetual attempt to square the circle." Each word or phrase in a given language has its physical form and its peculiar connotations and these, the report goes on to say, "can never be reduplicated with complete accuracy in any other language." Among the examples given is the colour white which is a sign of innocence and virginity in Western countries and a symbol of mourning in some parts of the East. So the most ordinary and apparently interchangeable terms have separate identities.

There is also the problem of dialogue in plays. The report gives the example of translating from Cockney into other languages, but I suppose the same can be applied to the translation of an Upper Egyptian or Alexandrian dialect into English or French.

But publishing translated works is also a business venture, an aspect which brings its own set of problems discussed in the report. These include questions of copyrights, payment to the author, rates of payment to the translator and the question whether the translator's name should be on the cover. The report then calls upon UNESCO to bring out representative classics from lesser-known languages.

The report's sobering conclusion is that "translation is a long, slow process of compromise, like ceaselessly reflecting objects in a distorting mirror with the hope, each time, that the reflection will be accurate, though one knows that this is impossible."