The greatest difference between performing a translation and performing a piece of music is that while music is written to be performed on instruments, literature is not written to be performed in other languages. No writer thinks, How wonderful this will sound in Swahili! Or, Will this come across in Slovak? And the poets of earlier centuries and cultures hardly thought, If I don’t rhyme, how much easier it’ll be for a twentieth-century American poet to translate me!
It’s true that pieces of music are often transcribed for instruments they were never intended for, but these are not performances necessary to give life to the work; they are unnecessary, incidental changes. If they don’t work, if they don’t capture the spirit of the original, so what. It doesn’t make the performances impossible, simply unsuccessful in the particular instance by the particular soloist or group. The original is not destroyed; it isn’t even damaged.
Translation is both more and less wrenching than such adaptations. It takes a work of art whose medium is a particular language, and places it in a medium that is at once exactly the same and very different. When someone makes a film based on a novel, the novel has to be wrenched completely out of its medium. When someone writes a poem inspired by a painting, the painting is wrenched into another sphere entirely — there are no more brushstrokes, no perspective, no frame, except metaphorically — and everyone knows it and expects nothing but an interesting interpretation. The translator wrenches a poem into English, but is still stuck with language as his medium. There are words and words, sounds and sounds, expressions and expressions, lines and lines, rhythms and rhythms, images and images, wordplay and wordplay. It is conceivable that every effect in the original can be reproduced in the translation. Every single one. Perfectly. There is no Platonic ideal of an adaptation; there is a Platonic ideal of a translation. And wherever there are ideals, there is the impossibility of attaining them. The perfect anything is impossible.
Impossibility is not only something that critics talk about and writers use to justify their anger at or disappointment with what translation does to their works. It is also something that bothers translators themselves. Translation is what Jonathan Galassi, an
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