“THE BELIEVER: That’s interesting – I would have imagined the opposite: that translatability would be the condition of great writing – that what it means to have written something great is that there is something so powerful in it that can communicate even through the scrim of the worst translation.
ADAM THIRLWELL: Maybe novels cope better than poetry with being mutilated and deformed. Their style functions differently. The real problem is how much weight to put on the loss, or on the inevitability of loss. I think there are very many emotional or neurotic aspects to this. It’s often as if some people want to say that if something isn’t a pure substitute for the original, then it’s a failure – whereas surely in fact it’s just a likeness, and it would only be hysterical to attack a likeness for not being a perfect replacement. And one thing that does seem true is that often linguistic turns and tropes that can’t be repeated in a new language turn out not to be so crucial to a story’s stylistic essence: the essence turns out to be much more a cloud and mobile. It’s a vaster thing than maybe we used to think, a novel’s style. That’s one possible conclusion
THE BELIEVER: Thinking about it as “a likeness” is very relaxing. That comparison had never occurred to me. Did you think about it like that always, or are you only thinking about it like that since the project?
ADAM THIRLWELL: In fact, I’m stealing this idea from David Bellos, a Princeton professor and, more importantly, translator of Georges Perec and Ismail Kadare. Around the time I was first putting this project together, the NYT asked me to review his new book on translation: Is That A Fish In Your Ear? and one of his arguments is that we have to stop thinking of translation as substitution. “A translation is more like a portrait in oils.” I remember I loved this analogy so much that I wanted to write an extra digressive paragraph using Picasso – there’s this great thing Picasso once told Brassai which I’ve always loved: ‘I always aim for likeness. A painter has to observe nature, but must never confuse it with painting. It can be translated into painting only with signs.’ And I remember thinking, I want the Picasso of translation! The Bellos analogy is so good because it neatly shows how much more flexibility there could be in the way people think about translations: each one is just looking for equivalent signs, not perfect reproductions.
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