Language barriers

Although I read rather a lot I rarely read much that is translated: most of my reading is books written by English speaking authors. The point of translation is to remove a barrier, to allow the speaker of one language to access the literature of another. Certainly without translators I would never have enjoyed the fun, literary mysterys of Artuo Perez-Reverte.

On the other hand, translation can be a barrier, as some of the clunkier attempts of online services for automatically translating websites so neatly demonstrate, or those marvellous handbooks that some with electrical gadgets and are apparently translated into English from Serbian via Chinese by Greek and Dutch working in lose collaboration.

A translator has to strike a balance between being true to the original and producing something that is readable in the new language. Sometimes they take it beyond readable and produce something that reads well in the new language, but perhaps loses some of the subtleties of the original, incorporates its own meanings that weren't really in the original, or overlays the voice of the translator over that of the author. Especially where poetry is concerned such a translator can almost create a new poem that stands alongside the original but is a new and beautiful thing in itself, recreating the spirit rather than the letter of the original.

I once picked up someone else's copy of Love in the Time of Cholera. I was so struck by the beauty of the language that I rushed to get a copy of my own. Alas, I had not stopped to note the name of the translator, and the version I had lacked the poeticism of that borrowed copy, so I didn't enjoy it at all. A new translator can produce a different book, otherwise why ask people to translate Proust when Scott Moncrieff has already done the job? And why does my modern edition of Heidi leave me longing for the Charles Tritten edition I had as a child? (OK, I admit I miss the pictures.)

Music can be translated, too. Of course there is a matter of interpretation by different players, but in a way that's more akin to different people reading a book. The real translation comes when a tune intended for one instrument is played on another. I'm partly thinking about that because I'm listening to Springwell (again!). I listen because I love the tunes - many are pipe tunes, yet there isn't a single note played by pipes on the CD. The tunes are played mainly on stringed instruments and cleverly incorporate notes played as pipe grace notes: I can hear the birls and strikes, reproduced on the mandolin. They are clever imitations of the pipe sound, but they are also good sounds in themselves on the mandolin.

I am still working on the Braes of Castle Grant. As I think I've mentioned before I've heard this on Eclection. It's a pipe tune played on a fiddle. I don't think that Mr McVarish makes an attempt to play in the style of pipes: he translates the pipe tune into a fiddle tune. And very lovely it is to. But now I come along, not having ever knowingly heard the tune played on pipes, so I am trying to play on pipes something that I know as a fiddle tune. Certainly the notes are there for me to play, they are all in my range, I can see where gracing might sit nicely, but in my head all the time I have a lilting, smooth sound as the fiddle slides and glides from note to note. Pipes do not glide; they stomp, they step, they march, they trip; they move move between notes in a manner that is pipish.

I'm therefore translating a pipe tune that has been translated into a fiddle tune back into a pipe tune. Maybe like exchanging currency enough times at enough borders the commission and exchange rates will leave me with nothing of value. I may make a hideous mess of it, or perhaps I will create something new and beautiful, which is neither the original nor Gabe's translation, but something new.