N’importe nawak

I just reread Michel de Certeau’s essay “Walking in the City” (“Marches dans la ville”) for my reading group, and I happened to have the original French as well as two different translations at hand, so I decided to compare them. To give you an idea, here are the first couple of sentences of the essay, in French first of all:

Depuis le 110e étage du World Trade Center, voir Manhattan. Sous la brume brassée par les vents, l’île urbaine, mer au milieu de la mer, lève les gratte-ciel de Wall Street, se creuse à Greenwich, dresse de nouveau les crêtes de Midtown, s’apaise à Central Park et moutonne enfin au-delà de Harlem.

Now here is Steven Rendall’s translation (from The Practice of Everyday Life) :

Seeing Manhattan from the 110th floor of the World Trade Center. Beneath the haze stirred up by the winds, the urban island, a sea in the middle of the sea, lifts up the skyscrapers over Wall Street, sinks down at Greenwich, then rises again to the crests of Midtown, quietly passes over Central Park and finally undulates off into the distance beyond Harlem.

And the translation by Richard Miller and Edward Schneider (from The Certeau Reader and the anthology On Signs):

To see Manhattan from the 107th floor of the World Trade Center. Below the wind-stirred haze, the urban island, a sea upon a sea rises on the crested swell of Wall Street, falls into the trough of Greenwich Village, flows into the renewed crests of midtown and the calm of Central Park, before breaking into distant whitecaps up beyond Harlem.

What do you think? Miller and Schneider’s first sentence is, for me, indisputably better, even if the World Trade Center does lose a few stories (the WTC had 110). It preserves the punch of the original and shows that converting the original infinitive to a participle is not only ineffective but unnecessary. The second sentence is harder to call, but I’d give the nod to Rendall, largely because he stays very close to the original. Miller and Schneider, on the other hand, decide to show off their literary prowess. They begin with the “wind-stirred haze,” which sets the tone already, followed by “a sea upon a sea” for the more prosaic “sea in the middle of a sea”; the plain “gratte-ciel de Wall Street”, literally “the skyscrapers of Wall Street,” becomes “the crested swell of Wall Street.” It’s not that all this lyricism is bad in itself; it’s just that it isn’t in the original. (On the other hand, Miller and Schneider do fix a small error in the original: no one calls Greenwich Village “Greenwich,” (possibly because Greenwich, Connecticut is not far away); it’s either Greenwich Village or the Village.) Rendall, for his part, drops the ball with “passes over Central Park”: what could it mean for the island (or the sea that is the island) to pass over the park? Is it passing over itself?

So much for the first couple of sentences. Kind of a draw between the two translations, you might conclude. Unfortunately, Miller and Schneider’s tendency to translate a bit loosely becomes increasingly fatal. As the essay becomes more technical, their translation just gets muddier. Reading it, I thought of the claim made by Alan Sokal and others that postmodern theory is nonsense, with the proof being that nonsense sentences can be inserted into texts without anyone noticing. That is in fact exactly what Miller and Schneider do: their translation simply makes nonsense out of some of Certeau’s sentences (or at the very least utterly mistranslates them). Here is the beginning of the essay’s third paragraph, according to Miller and Schneider:

To be lifted to the summit of the World Trade Center is to be carried away by the city’s hold. One’s body is no longer criss-crossed by the streets that bind and re-bind it following some law of their own; it is not possessed – either as user or used – by the sounds of all its many contrasts or by the frantic New York traffic.

A very trippy second sentence! What could it mean for the body to be “criss-crossed by the streets that bind and re-bind it”? And what is the connection between the first sentence and the second? How does it follow that if you’re “carried away by the city’s hold” your body is no longer criss-crossed? Shouldn’t it be the opposite (you’re carried away, you’re criss-crossed, you’re bound…)? Rather than ponder these mysteries further, let’s consider the French:

Etre élevé au sommet du World Trade Center, c’est être enlevé à l’emprise de la ville. Le corps n’est plus enlacé par les rues qui le tournent et le retournent selon une loi anonyme ; ni possédé, joueur ou joué, par la rumeur de tant de différences et par la nervosité du trafic new-yorkais.

First, note that Miller and Schneider’s mistranslation of the first sentence is 180 degrees wrong: one isn’t “carried away by the city’s hold”; rather one is not carried away; one is (as Rendall translates it), “lifted out of the city’s grasp,” a notion which, not surprisingly, fits much better with the contrast Certeau is making between the view of the city from above and being in the city. As for Certeau’s second sentence, how strangely clear it seems, and how distant from the baroque, sado-masochistic fantasy of Miller and Schneider.

Their main mistake is to take enlacé to be equivalent to the English cognate enlaced (meaning “intertwined,” “interlaced”) which is indeed the most common sense, but not the appropriate one here; this error then leads them to translate tournent and retournent as “bind and rebind.” Another problem is the ambiguity of “its” in the phrase: “it is not possessed … by the sounds of all its many contrasts.” The reader would expect “its” to have the same referent as the “it” that precedes it – namely the referent “one’s body.” But “the sounds of all [one’s body’s] many contrasts” doesn’t make much sense. Certeau’s meaning is clear enough in the French. Rendall’s translation gets it right:

To be lifted to the summit of the World Trade Center is to be lifted out of the city’s grasp. One’s body is no longer clasped by the streets that turn and return it according to an anonymous law; nor is it possessed, whether as player or played, by the rumble of so many differences and by the nervousness of New York traffic.

The veil is lifted from one’s eyes: even a French theorist with a taste for literary language can make sense!

One more example. This one’s from the essay’s first paragraph. Here’s the French:

Ville faite de lieux paroxystiques en reliefs monumentaux. Le spectateur peut y lire un univers qui s’envoie en l’air.

The second sentence is difficult to translate because of s’envoie en l’air, which could be glossed as “to get off ” on either drugs or sex. (The Stephen Frears movie Sammy and Rosie Get Laid is known as Sammy et Rosie s’envoient en l’air in French.) Certeau titles this section of his essay “Voyeurs ou marcheurs,” and voyeur has the same primary sense in French as it does in English: in a playful way, Certeau is comparing the pleasure he gets from the view on top of the World Trade Center to a voyeur’s pleasure in watching a sexual act. So s’envoie en l’air is clearly meant sexually here, and is an important support for Certeau’s analogy. A possible translation might be “The spectator can read there a whole universe getting off.” Would the English-speaking reader get the sexual reference? I’m not sure. In French, it’s set up to some degree by the previous sentence: the lieux paroxystiques can be read to suggest paroxysms of pleasure and reliefs monumentaux can take on phallic connotations. But how to capture that in English? Perhaps: “A city made of places in paroxysm, in monumental reliefs.” In any case, here’s what Miller and Schneider do with the passage:

Paroxystic sites with monumental reliefs. The spectator can even read the fading urban universe.

I suppose they interpret s’envoie en l’air as meaning something like “send itself up in smoke” (hence the “fading” as the smoke dissipates). Who knows. For what it’s worth, Rendall doesn’t quite get it either (though he certainly does better);

A city composed of paroxysmal places in monumental reliefs. The spectator can read in it a universe that is constantly exploding.

***

Anyone who has studied a foreign language has had the experience of reading a text – it could be anything, a newspaper article, a street sign – and struggling to make sense of it. Perhaps Miller and Schneider’s translation represents their own experience of reading Certeau: they assumed that what was obscure for them was inherent to the essay; and they took care to reproduce this same delightful, suggestive, “literary” obscurity in their translation.

While Certeau’s writing is not as strange as Miller and Schneider make it, there’s no denying that it is sometimes difficult and is full of metaphor and allusion that complicate the translator’s task. A style like this – far from uncommon among French theorists! – is clearly more “at risk” for bad translation than a straightforward expository style in which obscurities or illogicalities in the translation would stand out as probable mistranslations (and therefore be corrected) rather than appear as instances of the author’s taste for paradox and abstraction. I wonder how Lacan has fared in translation. Then again, would it even matter? Maybe Sokal had a point.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 5th, 2007 at 5:18 pm and is filed under Literature, Translation. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.