very normal for a translator to feel that 80% of a work can be brought over, but sometimes it’s as low as 50%. “If it’s one hundred percent,” Donald Frame has written, “or even close to that, it may not be challenging or at all interesting.”* Eighty-percent might seem low, but then how many novels ever exceed 80% of what they could possibly be?
Despite his beliefs, Shelley did translate poetry, and even Mann, after stating his belief in the destructiveness of translation, acknowledged its necessity: “Yet who would wish to discourage the peoples of the world from translating, merely because it is fundamentally impossible? . . . I do not know a word of Russian, and the German translations in which as a young man I read the great Russian writers of the nineteenth century were very feeble. Nevertheless, I consider this reading among my greatest cultural experiences.”*
Here Mann touched on the essence of why translation, no matter how impossible, is done: it is necessary. How else would he have read Dostoevsky and Tolstoy? How differently Mann would have written with no knowledge of the Russians!
But translation is not only necessary to make great writers greater. It is necessary to remove a terrible curse. The place to turn for the question of translation’s necessity is the biblical tale of the Tower of Babel. Let me start by giving the King James Version version, from Genesis 11:
And the whole earth was of one language and of one speech. And it came to pass, as they [Noah’s family, after the flood] journeyed from the east, that they found a plain in the land of Shinar; and they dwelt there. And they said one to another, Go to, let us make brick, and burn them throughly. And they had brick for stone, and slime had they for morter. And they said, Go to, let us build us a city and a tower, whose top may reach unto heaven; and let us make us a name, lest we be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth. And the Lord came down to see the city and the tower, which the children of men builded. And the Lord said, Behold, the people is one, and they have all one language; and this they begin to do: and now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do. Go to, let us go down, and
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