No one is more tolerant of a translation, I’ve found, than the poet translated. He is the first to disbelieve in the whole venture, and marvel at the salvage.”*
After not wanting to be bothered, probably the most typical position of an author is that of Umberto Eco, the Italian semiotician and novelist best known for The Name of the Rose. Here is how his American translator, William Weaver, described Eco’s views of translation: “Umberto is not so much interested in getting the translation absolutely correct; he wants the English to work, so often he will say ‘use . . . ’ or ‘put . . . ,’ departing radically from the Italian, but helping me smooth out the English period. A far cry from Milan Kundera’s notion about translations, which he thinks should not necessarily be smooth or ‘read well.’”* Finally, let me share with you a story about a writer’s coming to understand what translation is all about. The writer is Brazilian poet Adélia Prado, and the storyteller is her American translator Ellen Watson: “About a week or ten days into working together, she got out the American Poetry Review supplement that had thirteen poems of hers in it, and she said, ‘Okay, I want you to put all your books away, close your notebook. Okay. I want you to translate back to me what these poems are, from English back to Portuguese.’
“‘What?!’
“‘I don’t want you to look at my originals, that’s the only way I’ll know what you’ve done: if you look at the English and say it to me in Portuguese. . .’
“I’m a little worried, this is the ultimate test. So I did it, and it was really wonderful, because some of the time she’d be grunting and groaning, some of the time she’d be laughing, some of the time she’d go, ‘Oh! That sound, that sound’—because she’d have me read it in English and then say it—‘it’s just not a sound in Portuguese.’ Sometimes she’d say, ‘Why did you do that?! What did you do there?! That’s not what I had!’ And just fretting and rejoicing up all over the ballpark.
“And then at the end, a few days later, I showed her a poem of mine that Ivan Angelo had translated into Portuguese. I said, ‘Well, here; this will give you an idea of the kind of stuff that I write.’ And she read it, and she read it again, and she said, ‘Okay, tell me what your original sense was, literally,’ and I did. She had felt
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