editor of translations at Farrar, Straus & Giroux and a translator of Italian poetry, has called “a hopeless enterprise.” Harry Zohn, a veteran translator from the German, told me, “Even if it were possible to make a living as a translator, I couldn’t because of all the defeats you constantly undergo. Only the translator knows how far short his or her efforts fall from the ideal. It’s a compromise very often; it’s the art of the best possible failure. And to have that as a full-time thing. . . In teaching, you sometimes see results; you sometimes get accolades. As a translator you tend to take it on the chin. It’s a no-win situation, and it’s very disappointing.”
Richard Wilbur has referred to his translation of Baudelaire’s poem “L’Invitation au voyage” as “a less ludicrous failure than the attempts of others.”* And Richard Sieburth told me, in reference to his current work on Mallarmé, “you’re setting yourself up for the fall . . . It’s constantly courting failure, a flirtation with a built-in failure. That’s my task: to learn how to fail.” It is statements like these that led George Steiner to write, “From the perception of unending inadequacy stems a particular sadness. It haunts the history and theory of translation.”*
If I went on like this, the breast-beating would sound increasingly hollow. But as it happens, impossibility is not only an occasion for sadness, it is also one of the translator’s greatest incentives. Sieburth says that he is attracted to impossible projects. Willis Barnstone has written, “What seems impossible to translate is truly worth doing. A neutral passage may be easily translated, but the result may also be neutral. But to the translator-poet the untranslatable poem yields the best poem. One tests oneself according to the resistance encountered, and so the untranslatable incites one, forces one, into freedom and invention. If the poem is to be rendered the imagination must soar.”*
It’s exciting to read Willard Trask’s words, “I’d love to translate Madame Bovary. It’s the greatest novel ever written, and probably the most impossible prose to translate. I’d love to have a try at it.”* Or Octavio Paz: “Poetry is ‘impossible’ to translate because you have to reproduce the materiality of the signs, its physical properties. Here is where translation as an art begins.”*
Many translators look at literary works in terms of the percentage of its attributes they feel can be brought into English. It’s
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