translating Dickens: “if you read him, you like him, but if you have to stay too long with one page of Dickens, it is tedious.” And William Weaver told me, “I started translating the book and fell totally out of love with it. Not that I was ever really in love with it, but all of its meretriciousness came through, because in translation you can’t really cheat. With translators, it’s like no man is a hero to his valet.”
In any event, affinity is not always as pure as it seems. Translating a writer you closely identify with is playing with a reflection of yourself, trying yourself on, recreating yourself. Or one could say, as Italian translator Renato Poggioli has, that translators are as narcissistic as poets; instead of contemplating their likenesses in “the spring of nature,” they stare at themselves in “the pool of art.”* French-into-English translator Rosemarie Waldrop took this image a step further by referring to French writer Michel Leiris’s parable of a monk who sees the face of God, and it is his own. The translator, too, has a “sacreligious joy of substituting one’s own face for God’s.”*
Baudelaire, whose translations of Edgar Allan Poe’s stories and a few poems, had a major influence on French literature, wrote, “I have been accused of imitating Edgar Poe! Do you know why I so patiently translated Poe? Because he resembles me. I was astonished and carried away the first time I opened one of his books and saw not only things I’d dreamed of, but sentences I’d thought of, sentences he’d written twenty years earlier.”* But this may have had something to do with the fact that Baudelaire only learned English in order to translate Poe, and therefore could not really understand what he was reading the first time he encountered him. It’s much easier to see yourself in a hazy photo.
Saying that one has a close affinity with the author can also be a way for a translator to hide, even from himself, his desire to make over a work of literature in his own voice, a way not to take responsibility for his views, that is, a way to appear submissive while actually dominating. George Steiner has written, “As with a sea-shell, the translator can listen strenuously but mistake the rumour of his own pulse for the beat of the alien sea.”*
Most translators do seek out writers with similar interests in such things as form, values, philosophy, and politics. And some take
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