Book reviews -- The Art of Translating Prose by Burton Raffel

Comparative Literature, Winter 1995 by Rendall, Steven

THE ART OF TRANSLATING PROSE. By Burton Raffel. University Park, Pa.: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1994. xi, 169p.

Translators often complain that theories of translation, especially linguistically-oriented theories, seem almost wholly irrelevant to the actual practice of translation. Whatever the merits of this complaint, it seems clear that much remains to be done in the broad field that extends between abstract theoretical models and metaphysical reflections on translation, on the one hand, and translatorial rules of thumb and how-to manuals on the other.

Burton Raffel is one of the few currently tilling this field. He combines a linguistic approach to translation studies with a distinguished record of translating literature: Beowulf, works by Chretien de Troyes, Rabelais, Cervantes, and Balzac, and other major texts. He has, moreover, a discriminating ear for English prose style, and a fine sensitivity to literary effects that is not always found among professional students of linguistics. Finally, he has a broad, indeed apparently encyclopedic, acquaintance with world literature.

In this lively and engaging book--conceived as a complement to The Art of Translating Poetry (1988)--Raffel begins from the hypothesis that in the case of prose, the degree to which a translator "tracks" the syntax of the original text is a reliable indicator of the general quality of his translation. He then proceeds to test this hypothesis by analyzing extant translations of passages selected from St. Augustine's Confessions, Beowulf, and works by Boccacio, Heine, Balzac, Flaubert, Zola, Maupassant, Galdos, Proust, and a modern Indonesian novelist. In the second part of the book, he pursues the same line of argument by examining translations of two major authors he has himself translated, Rabelais and Cervantes.

Raffel's analyses are crisply conducted, beginning with concrete, determinable syntactical features such as sentence and phrase length and punctuation, and moving on to related features (mood, voice, tense, etc.). Once he has assessed the degree of correspondence between translation and original in this regard, Raffel considers lexical and other issues; in most cases, he finds that the initial evaluation based on syntactical tracking is confirmed when other features of the translation are examined.

Raffel accordingly concludes that his hypothesis is generally valid, though he acknowledges that accuracy in tracking the syntax of the original is not in itself a sufficient criterion for evaluating the success of a translation. He argues persuasively that an author's prose style is inseparable from his syntax, and that when a translation fails to offer some sense of the syntactical structure and rhythm of a text, it travesties the author. This may seem an obvious point hardly requiring a book-length demonstration, but it will seem so only to those who have not carefully examined translations currently in wide use. As Raffel decisively shows, many, perhaps even most, of these translations are seriously defective in both syntactical and lexical rendering of the original texts they purport to represent.

Exhibit number one in Raffel's case against neglecting syntax in translating prose is constituted by the widely-used translations published by Penguin Books. He argues that these translations systematically flatten out, domesticate, and even bowdlerize the texts they claim to convey into English. His wrath is less that of a pendant than that of a connoisseur outraged at the misrepresentation of texts he clearly loves, particularly since this misrepresentation deprives the text of its pungency and force: he repeatedly characterizes such translations as lame, limp, bland, flat, levelling. Although Raffel's prosecution is relentless (suggesting that had he followed his first calling--the law--he would have made a fearsome district attorney), when one has examined the evidence he adduces, it is difficult to conclude that his criticism is excessive.

It may, however, be somewhat outdated. Although Raffel assures us that he is not flogging a dead horse (p. 126), since E.V. Rieu's and J.M. Cohen's Penguin translations are still widely used throughout the English-speaking world, he does not mention more recent volumes in the Penguin series that seem to me to mark a departure from the earlier policy. I am thinking of Robert Fagles's Sophocles and Homer, Barbara Reynolds's Orlando furioso, Paul Chilton's Heptameron, and other translations that have appeared in Penguin editions over the last decade. In the preface to his new Penguin translation of Madame Bovary, which appeared after Raffel's book was in press, Geoffrey Wall emphasizes the importance of preserving so far as possible Flaubert's peculiar syntax and punctuation; on checking his versions of the passages discussed by Raffel, I found that Wall avoids many of the flaws found in the older Penguin translation. This could be seen, of course, as evidence that Raffel's criticism of the latter was justified.