Ersan Üldes – Professional Behavior

Saturday, January 22, 2011 — Damian Kelleher

Ersan Üldes – Professional Behavior

”Being a translator is nothing like being an ordinary reader, it's the most intimate means of entering into the author's inner world.”

The uncomfortable truth about translating literature is that, unless you can read the original language and compare, you are never quite sure what's missing from a translation. The early translations of Thomas Mann's novels by H. T. Lowe-Porter, though usually quite proficient, failed to properly convey Mann's use of dialect in Buddenbrooks. Constance Garnett is noted for her heroic efforts in rapidly translating many of the great nineteenth-century Russian writers, but her prose tends to flatten the authors to the point where Dostoevsky's characters speak with much the same mannerisms as Tolstoy's. Though small, these errors and omissions cause the English-speaking reader to misread an author, their understanding becomes a shadow of what it could be if they had read the original. Communication is already at a cross-purpose by virtue of it involving more than zero people (for as soon as there are any at all engaged, the ability for true understanding is lost).

And then there are the translators who simply change works completely, butchering the text by removing whole chapters, characters, scenes, language, sex. We perhaps naively assume this sort of business is in the past, but every few years it is discovered that a now-prominent foreign author was heavily tampered with in the early stages of their English-language careers in order to assist in the marketing of their text to American readers. The narrator of Ersan Üldes' Professional Behavior is Turkish, not American, and he is not at present a translator (he was removed from the profession); in his earlier years, however, he translated works of literature into Turkish, at first as faithfully as he could manage, and then, observing both his inadequacies as a translator (how can someone who is not a genius faithfully represent a writer who is?), and, when the commissions were stale and selected for money not quality, the general weaknesses of the texts he was required to translate, he decided to enhance, correct, polish, prune and generally make “better” the writings of others.

...for example, I once kept a character alive until the very end of a novel, writing all his parts myself, since the “real” author had killed him off shortly after creating him, probably thinking he wouldn't contribute much to the plot. And, look, all our “readers” really liked him, and a renowned critic even wrote (in a very respected newspaper, with a very high circulation) that my creation “mirrored” both Proust's multidemnsional characters and Beckett's strange and miserable parodies.

Once the narrator discovers he is successful in hoodwinking both the critical and casual reading public (his friend asks if anyone checks his translation from German, and the response is: “Of course...An editor who doesn't speak a word of German.”), he begins to take as many liberties as he feels he is capable of achieving, not as a writer, but as a translator. For, if he has added characters, shifted scenes, deleted scenes, added scenes, then, surely – he is as much a writer as the writer themselves. And what praise is due surely falls on him, as well?

The narrator becomes undone by Judith Wohmann's The Number Pi: A Romance, which thwarts his attempts at alteration. The narrator becomes furious at this, for his arrogance and success has culminated in the expectation that the translation of a text is not an homage but a battle, and one he fights to win. Wohmann foils his tricks, he becomes discovered for the fraud he is, and the story ends.

To step back from the plot – the nuts and bolts – of Üldes' story, it's worth examining the problems raised with translation and, to a lesser extent, communication in general. Üldes makes a strong statement for the argument that a work can never truly be translated, and though his story is clearly an extreme example, it is nonetheless true that a translator brings as much of themselves to a text as the author themselves.

Take the following first and second sentence from Proust's Du côté de chez Swann.

In the original French: Longtemps, je me suis couché de bonne heure. Parfois, à peine ma bougie éteinte, mes yeux se fermaient si vite que je n'avais pas le temps de me dire: «Je m'endors.»

C. K. Scott Moncrieff's translation: For a long time I used to go to bed early. Sometimes, when I had put out my candle, my eyes would close so quickly that I had not even time to say "I'm going to sleep."

Lydia Davis' translation (ed. Christopher Prendergast): For a long time, I went to bed early. Sometimes, my candle scarcely out, my eyes would close so quickly that I did not have time to say to myself: “I'm falling asleep.”

And finally, Google's translation (a machine translation): Long, I went to bed early. Sometimes, just my candle, my eyes would close so quickly that I had no time to say: "I fall asleep."

Both English translators would be more than capable of justifying their decisions, but both are quite different. To my reading, Davis' choice of “my candle scarcely out” is more subtle than Moncrieff's “when I had put out my candle”, for Davis' translation places the narrator in time – scarcely – whereas Moncrieff places the narrator in physical space – when I had. For a novel concerning time and its individually minute but cumulative effect on a person's life, the use of time as a placing device for the narrator in the second sentence assists in enforcing one of the primary themes of the greater text.

Obviously, Google's machine-translated text is close to worthless, and can safely be discarded – though it, too, shows how a “different” translator might present the text (through transliteration, which can be useful if there is nothing else at hand).

Ersan Üldes knows this – it is no accident he mentions Proust – and the story, while being genuinely entertaining thanks to the curmudgeonly, arrogant tone of the narrator, provides a strong metaphor for the problems of translation as it stands. It's a problem that can't ever be properly solved, and this struggle is noted in particular by any number of interviews with translators. They will, invariably, mention the difficulty in rescuing the original author's “voice” from within the muck and murk of a wholly different language; they will, invariably, admit defeat, and hope that they have made a close approximation.

For some, this is possible. The aforementioned Dostoevsky is a writer of such madness and intensity that even Garnett's translations manage to capture the theological and moral depths of his works, but what of Raymond Queaneau's Zazie dans le métro, which deliberately distorts and mutilates the French language to great literary effect, or our own James Joyce, whose Finnegans Wage attempts to recreate the dreambabble of sleep? Works such as these cannot be translated in their entirety of expression in a way vastly dissimilar to less experimental texts, which puts forth the secondary question: Is it better to have something than nothing? Professional Behavior, for all its negativity, exults in an emphatic yes, and it's clear Üldes himself feels fondly towards the craft and its practitioners.

Professional Behavior is a good, strong story. It raises questions instead of answering them, and the problems put forth are much more important than the plot. It's a vehicle for Üldes to consider the difficulty of translation, and in that it very much succeeds.

Professional Behavior by Ersan Üldes is a short story from the Dalkey Archive Press' anthology, Best European Fiction 2011

Author	Ersan Üldes
Title	Professional Behavior
Translators	Idil Aydogan and Amy Marie Spangler
Nationality	Turkish
Publisher	Dalkey Archive Press

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