on translation, bilingualism, culture, and... well, everything
Arts & Letters Daily was this glorious beacon of Culture when I was in high school, alongside NPR and the New Yorker, and then the New York Times and the New York Review of Books. (Goodness! I seem to have migrated east in the meanwhile, with a lot more Chicago going on, but the list still stands. Oh, and I went to NYC for the first time ever this weekend, by the way - and while I bear it no ill will, I think I will remain more in love with its output than itself. More on this later -anyhow.) But I've rediscovered A&L, like running into an old friend on the street, and while I'm working my way through these fifty suddenly opened tabs, here's the first beautiful shining essay I've read in its entirety. It is "McCulture," by Aviya Kushner:
"It’s not that Americans aren’t interested in the world at all. It’s just that we seem to want someone else to do the heavy lifting required to make a cultural connection. . . . We don’t have much time, so we want a taste, some fast food to go. And so we read ethnic literature the way we down an ethnic meal. We can get a burrito almost anywhere, but it’s often mildly spiced, adjusted just for us, and wrapped for those in a rush. So we’re eating a translated burrito, and we’re reading a world prepared especially for us. But we don’t believe anything is missing. After all, we eat 'ethnic' food, and often."
And:
For the past six years I have been intensively reading the King James Bible, to learn what the Bible in English looks and sounds like. I have been surprised and moved by the translation, sometimes baffled and sometimes angered. Adam, for example, the first man of all, comes from the word adama-earth-in Hebrew. In English, Adam’s name is suddenly earth-less and, therefore, meaningless. Throughout the Bible, what is obvious in Hebrew, like man’s roots in earth, is often not so in English translation, and vice versa. Something that English makes obvious-for example, “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth,” followed by a period-is far more ambiguous in Hebrew, and therefore a matter of debate among the rabbis.
I often think about the men who perhaps struggled over what to name Adam in English. The lives and deaths of Biblical translators were awful; William Tyndale, the first to use Hebrew and Greek versions as he translated, and whose work eventually made its way into the 1611 King James, was tried for heresy, strangled, and burned at the stake in 1536. Previously there was John Wycliffe, who directed the translation of the Latin Vulgate-a fifth-century translation from the Hebrew by Jerome-into the English vernacular in the latter 1300s. Though he managed to die naturally, of a stroke, in 1384, his remains were exhumed in 1428, burned to ashes, and thrown into the River Swift. Sometimes, reading peacefully in America, I think of how much translators suffered so English readers could hold this text in their hands.
For centuries, translating a text signified that it was essential, worthy of preservation and dissemination. The first translation of the Bible, the Septuagint, was commissioned for the Greek-speaking Jewish community of Alexandria, Egypt, who feared that Jews could no longer read Hebrew. To keep the Torah alive, they translated it. It was not an easy decision. The Talmud, in fact, recounts that the day the Torah was translated into Greek, “a darkness descended over the world.” Translation, then, has long been frowned upon, especially if it involves moving from a holy tongue.
But also:
International fiction doesn’t always follow the traditional American and British structure of beginning, struggle, climax, and ending, which also governs the average U.S. television sitcom and the standard Shakespearean play. Latin American magical realism, for example, usually works differently. Borges would probably sneer at the idea of plot as a triangle, with action rising and then descending. Too simple, too angular, too Anglo, he might laugh. How we tell our stories matters almost as much as our stories themselves. Story structure affects how we see history, and, of course, ourselves.
[you might as well give in and read the full piece here]
"It’s not that Americans aren’t interested in the world at all. It’s just that we seem to want someone else to do the heavy lifting required to make a cultural connection. . . . We don’t have much time, so we want a taste, some fast food to go. And so we read ethnic literature the way we down an ethnic meal. We can get a burrito almost anywhere, but it’s often mildly spiced, adjusted just for us, and wrapped for those in a rush. So we’re eating a translated burrito, and we’re reading a world prepared especially for us. But we don’t believe anything is missing. After all, we eat 'ethnic' food, and often."
And:
For the past six years I have been intensively reading the King James Bible, to learn what the Bible in English looks and sounds like. I have been surprised and moved by the translation, sometimes baffled and sometimes angered. Adam, for example, the first man of all, comes from the word adama-earth-in Hebrew. In English, Adam’s name is suddenly earth-less and, therefore, meaningless. Throughout the Bible, what is obvious in Hebrew, like man’s roots in earth, is often not so in English translation, and vice versa. Something that English makes obvious-for example, “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth,” followed by a period-is far more ambiguous in Hebrew, and therefore a matter of debate among the rabbis.
I often think about the men who perhaps struggled over what to name Adam in English. The lives and deaths of Biblical translators were awful; William Tyndale, the first to use Hebrew and Greek versions as he translated, and whose work eventually made its way into the 1611 King James, was tried for heresy, strangled, and burned at the stake in 1536. Previously there was John Wycliffe, who directed the translation of the Latin Vulgate-a fifth-century translation from the Hebrew by Jerome-into the English vernacular in the latter 1300s. Though he managed to die naturally, of a stroke, in 1384, his remains were exhumed in 1428, burned to ashes, and thrown into the River Swift. Sometimes, reading peacefully in America, I think of how much translators suffered so English readers could hold this text in their hands.
For centuries, translating a text signified that it was essential, worthy of preservation and dissemination. The first translation of the Bible, the Septuagint, was commissioned for the Greek-speaking Jewish community of Alexandria, Egypt, who feared that Jews could no longer read Hebrew. To keep the Torah alive, they translated it. It was not an easy decision. The Talmud, in fact, recounts that the day the Torah was translated into Greek, “a darkness descended over the world.” Translation, then, has long been frowned upon, especially if it involves moving from a holy tongue.
But also:
International fiction doesn’t always follow the traditional American and British structure of beginning, struggle, climax, and ending, which also governs the average U.S. television sitcom and the standard Shakespearean play. Latin American magical realism, for example, usually works differently. Borges would probably sneer at the idea of plot as a triangle, with action rising and then descending. Too simple, too angular, too Anglo, he might laugh. How we tell our stories matters almost as much as our stories themselves. Story structure affects how we see history, and, of course, ourselves.
[you might as well give in and read the full piece here]