Impossible To Translate
In 1915, Franz Kafka published "The Metamorphosis", about a man who turns into something else. The very first sentence of The Metamorphosis is
"Als Gregor Samsa eines Morgens aus unruhigen Träumen erwachte, fand er sich in seinem Bett zu einem ungeheuren Ungeziefer verwandelt."
On the face of it, a fairly simple German sentence. Generations of proud English and German speakers, however, have had trouble with the last bit.
The phrase "ungeheuren Ungeziefer", means "horrible vermin" (according to David Wyllie's translation) or "monstrous vermin" (according to Stanley Corngold's translation), but it's very difficult to translate. "Ungeziefer" definitely means "vermin", but English speakers are far more likely to mentally categorise "vermin" in terms of rats and mice. It makes your brain do a little skip, which is something any writer or translator wants to avoid.
The description of a carapace and many legs and so on makes it clear he is some sort of insect, so "vermin" is no good; it's sending our understanding in the wrong direction. In 2002, Richard Stokes translated it as "monstrous insect", and the most popular translation (by Joachim Neugroschel) is "gigantic insect", but this is technical language, a description of phylum and class and contains nothing of the horror implied in the word "Ungeziefer", so "insect" is no good. Another approach has been to attempt to define exactly what kind of insect. A beetle? A cockroach? Vladimir Nabokov had a mild obsession with nailing down exactly what sort of beetle was intended, which is probably irrelevant to the point of the story, and in any case, no one can agree. As with all of Kafka's writing, it's less about accuracy of detail, and more about pushing a certain urgent, paranoid mood into your mind. The language we choose for our translation must be a translation of mood, not of words.
Wikipedia has the adorable "gigantic insect-like creature", which, although technically very accurate, is so self-consciously avoidant that it's taking us even further away from the text by thrusting an image into our brains and then refusing to define what the image is. Ian Johnson's "monstrous verminous bug" is probably the best translation, as it covers the idea of being too big, of being some sort of pest, and the word "bug" is admirably non-specific while meaning, essentially, "insect". Even this valiant effort, however, doesn't have the flow or snap of "ungeheuren Ungeziefer". This leaves us with Stanley Applebaum's "enormous bug", which sacrifices meaning for flow, but given that the entire King James bible was written under that mandate, maybe that's not such a bad thing.
There is a very interesting sub-field of linguistic anthropology called folk taxonomy, which is specifically the study of how people decide to categorise the meaning of their words (and things). As you might expect, this is often at variance with the real relationship between those words and things. There are many examples of experiments run where subjects from different cultures are shown photos of a dog, and a tiger, and then a cat. They are asked which of the two first photos is "most like" the cat, without expanding on what they mean. The idea is to get the subject to determine what you mean, and decide accordingly. The results can sometimes be surprising. People connect words and meanings in ways that would never occur to you or me, and fail to understand the connections we make. And that's fine.
It's looking more and more like "Ungeziefer" is the translator's nightmare: impossible to translate while maintaining both the mood and the meaning. And that's just the first sentence. Next week on Impossible To Translate, I hope to get into the second sentence.
"Als Gregor Samsa eines Morgens aus unruhigen Träumen erwachte, fand er sich in seinem Bett zu einem ungeheuren Ungeziefer verwandelt."
On the face of it, a fairly simple German sentence. Generations of proud English and German speakers, however, have had trouble with the last bit.
The phrase "ungeheuren Ungeziefer", means "horrible vermin" (according to David Wyllie's translation) or "monstrous vermin" (according to Stanley Corngold's translation), but it's very difficult to translate. "Ungeziefer" definitely means "vermin", but English speakers are far more likely to mentally categorise "vermin" in terms of rats and mice. It makes your brain do a little skip, which is something any writer or translator wants to avoid.
The description of a carapace and many legs and so on makes it clear he is some sort of insect, so "vermin" is no good; it's sending our understanding in the wrong direction. In 2002, Richard Stokes translated it as "monstrous insect", and the most popular translation (by Joachim Neugroschel) is "gigantic insect", but this is technical language, a description of phylum and class and contains nothing of the horror implied in the word "Ungeziefer", so "insect" is no good. Another approach has been to attempt to define exactly what kind of insect. A beetle? A cockroach? Vladimir Nabokov had a mild obsession with nailing down exactly what sort of beetle was intended, which is probably irrelevant to the point of the story, and in any case, no one can agree. As with all of Kafka's writing, it's less about accuracy of detail, and more about pushing a certain urgent, paranoid mood into your mind. The language we choose for our translation must be a translation of mood, not of words.
Wikipedia has the adorable "gigantic insect-like creature", which, although technically very accurate, is so self-consciously avoidant that it's taking us even further away from the text by thrusting an image into our brains and then refusing to define what the image is. Ian Johnson's "monstrous verminous bug" is probably the best translation, as it covers the idea of being too big, of being some sort of pest, and the word "bug" is admirably non-specific while meaning, essentially, "insect". Even this valiant effort, however, doesn't have the flow or snap of "ungeheuren Ungeziefer". This leaves us with Stanley Applebaum's "enormous bug", which sacrifices meaning for flow, but given that the entire King James bible was written under that mandate, maybe that's not such a bad thing.
There is a very interesting sub-field of linguistic anthropology called folk taxonomy, which is specifically the study of how people decide to categorise the meaning of their words (and things). As you might expect, this is often at variance with the real relationship between those words and things. There are many examples of experiments run where subjects from different cultures are shown photos of a dog, and a tiger, and then a cat. They are asked which of the two first photos is "most like" the cat, without expanding on what they mean. The idea is to get the subject to determine what you mean, and decide accordingly. The results can sometimes be surprising. People connect words and meanings in ways that would never occur to you or me, and fail to understand the connections we make. And that's fine.
It's looking more and more like "Ungeziefer" is the translator's nightmare: impossible to translate while maintaining both the mood and the meaning. And that's just the first sentence. Next week on Impossible To Translate, I hope to get into the second sentence.