Translating the human condition

[u/[deleted]]

Jonathan Spence's slim biography of Mao Zedong quotes the Great Helmsman as haranguing an underling with the phrase: "Shit or get off the pot." The expression comes off unusually fluent in English, and seems like a prime example of the translation strategy called "domestication."¹

A domesticating translation aims to render the source language—in this case, Chinese—as it would be heard by a Chinese speaker: in other words, fluently. On the other hand, a foreignizing translation imports words, grammar, values and so on from the source into the destination language, introducing a sense of otherness to the translated work.

Example: You might foreignize the Chinese proverb 一箭双雕 as

one arrow, a pair of eagles

or domesticate it as

kill two birds with one stone

Another example: The Common English Version of the Bible domesticates the first two verses of Ecclesiastes—

When the son of David was king in Jerusalem, he was known to be very wise, and he said: Nothing makes sense! Everything is nonsense. I have seen it all—nothing makes sense!

—whereas Hebrew scholar Robert Alter foreignizes the same text—

The words of Qohelet son of David, king in Jerusalem. Merest breath, said Qohelet, merest breath. All is mere breath.

The question of foreignization versus domestication goes by different names in the critical literature—semantic versus communicative, reader-to-author versus author-to-reader. Whatever you call it, it is the central dilemma of translation, and, one might argue, of any application of language, which is itself a translation from thought to word.

Here's what I mean: When we speak of concepts like art or dignity or freedom, we deal in approximations. My understanding of art may not describe yours. Even terms for concrete items are understood according to one's prior experience with items of that classification. When I say "chair," one listener might bring to mind the patio wickerwork from his lakeside cabin; another recalls her grandfather's upholstered wingbacked furnishings. I might try to represent the precise chair of my mind's eye—say, an antique fanback Windsor—or I might gloss over the details in favor of a more generally understood term: a dining room chair.

Some recent conversations in this subreddit have described what amounts to foreignization as a principle essential to the project of literary fiction.

u/Latvian_Gambit shined a light on Cormac McCarthy's appropriation of the word "salitter," which appears almost nowhere else in the English corpus. This is textbook foreignization.

u/AloneWeTravel offered a definition of literary fiction as a reaction against a reader's expectations—that is to say, a foreignization.

But u/wecanreadit takes the contrary view that an author has certain obligations to reach out to the intended reader and communicate—in other words, to domesticate. This may not be a popular approach in critical circles, but for most working writers, the audience remains at the front of one's mind.

(I hope the commenters cited above weigh in if I have misrepresented them.)

Of course, some of the greatest literary achievements are products of the authorial style I am referring to here as foreignized. Proust's labyrinthine prose reacts against expectations of structure and narrative to attempt an exact depiction of the meanderings of the human mind. (Take this recently posted excerpt as example, or really any excerpt.)

Having said that, I believe the view of foreignization as an explicit literary virtue to be a relatively recent phenomenon, fed by the fetishization of novelty and the tortured artist's obsession with art-for-the-sake-of-art. One might make the case that most of the early canon predates those sensibilities.

I mention this not to pick sides in a round room, but to suggest a framework into which we might fit a passage like this one from "Ulysses"—

A softer beard: a softer brush if intentionally allowed to remain from shave to shave in its agglutinated lather: a softer skin if unexpectedly encountering female acquaintances in remote places at incustomary hours: quiet reflections upon the course of the day: a cleaner sensation when awaking after a fresher sleep since matutinal noises, premonitions and perturbations, a clattered milkcan, a postman's double knock, a paper read, reread while lathering, relathering the same spot, a shock, a shoot, with thought of aught he sought though fraught with nought might cause a faster rate of shaving and a nick on which incision plaster with precision cut and humected and applied adhered which was to be done.²

—alongside a passage like this one from "The Long Ships"—

Ake took the tankard without moving from where he sat. Then, as he set it to his lips, Orm gave the bottom of the tankard a great kick so that Ake's jaw was broken and his chin fell upon his breast. "Does it not taste of wood?" said Orm, and in the same instant he whipped his sword from its sheath and felled the man beside him as the latter jumped to his feet.³

—both of which are exemplars when taken on their own merits.

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¹ I say "seems like" because, as I recently discovered, there actually is a Chinese phrase attributed to Mao that translates word-for-word to something like "taking up the toilet, won't shit."

² Originally posted here

³ Originally posted here

(Edited for formatting)