In this podcast episode, Dr. David Bellos, a professor at Princeton University, discusses his journey into translation and his book on translation ‘ Is that a Fish in your ear’ . Dr. Bellos began translating in the 1980s and emphasises that translation has always been a balance between self-expression and scholarship. He also touches on the challenges of humor in translation and the complexity of dealing with a third language (L3) in texts. Dr. Bellos also discusses his course, ‘Great Books from Little Languages,’ where students read recent works translated from less dominant languages. The episode,also covers the issue of copyright in modern culture, which he teaches about at Princeton.
(00:12) Introduction and Background of Dr. David Bellos
(01:06) Journey into Translation
(02:29) Advantages of Being an Academician
(03:31) Writing Biographies
(06:02)The Art of Translation: Challenges and Insights
(21:53) The Role of Copyright in Modern Culture
(23:27) Broadening the Canon: Exploring Lesser Known Languages
(26:11) Reflections on a Lifetime of Translation
(27:32) Conclusion and Final Thoughts
H: Welcome to our podcast, David.
David Bellos: Glad to be here.
H: So please tell us about your journey into translation.
David Bellos: I’ve been a teacher of foreign languages, notably French, since longer than I can remember. And obviously in the teaching of languages, I’ve always used translation and helped students to learn. What you might call pedagogical translation as a support to language learning.
But in about 1981, I read a book in French that bowled me over Perec’s Life of Users manual. And even before I’d finished reading it it occurred to me that it was a book that would be wonderful in English too, and that. To share it with my friends and family, I’d need to translate it. So, that’s where my journey into translation as a professional activity began.
And I was really very fortunate to be able to find a publisher who agreed finally to bring it out. And so my first translation, is the most important was Perek’s Life He Uses manual, which is a masterwork. It’s a work of genius and it got then and has continued to have a wide readership in English.
And one thing leads to another. And so I went on to translate more Perec and then people asked me to translate other things and so on and so forth. So that’s how that began.
H: Do you find any advantage of being an academician?
David Bellos: Oh, immensely. The first thing is that being a university teacher pays my rent, pays my salary, because there is absolutely no way I could live fully from the work I do as a translator.
But there’s a secondary or supporting advantage, which means that. Even when I’m not translating, I’m engaged with the business of books and literature and understanding texts. And I have come to see, I came quickly to see that actually translating and writing, criticism and interpretation are all part of the same enterprise.
H: Do you discuss your work of translations with your students?
David Bellos: Sometimes yes. I don’t like to use myself as a piece of evidence too often. It makes one feel slightly posthumous but yes. Sometimes I do engage with students over issues that arise in books that I’ve translated myself.
H: You wrote biographies of Jacques Tati and Georges Perec. Please tell us about those biographies.
David Bellos: Obviously the Perec biography arose from the translation because once Perek started to be read in the English speaking world people started to ask who is this man?
And of course at that time there were no real answers. They weren’t any books about him. Parag, especially not in English. And so a very brave publisher said look Bellos He said, why don’t you write a biography? And I said, what me? And he said I’ll pay you lots of money. And so that, that was a really interesting and for me, life changing enterprise because Parag died relatively young.
And so most of the people who had known him – Wives and cousins and. Colleagues and friends and published. They were still alive and not exactly old either. So that I had this unique opportunity to talk to actually more than 100, probably about 150 different people to collect. Lots and lots of information and indeed documents that were believed lost or not known about.
So that, that’s the first biography and it grew directly out of my work in translation. The Tettey biography is quite different and that’s got nothing to do with translation. I’ve always liked the movies of Jacques Tati. And then I saw his masterwork, Playtime, in a remastered copy again in the 1990s, and I thought, this is extraordinary, and somebody had to write it.
So I read all the books that were about Jack Tati, and I thought I can do better than that. None of them were the book I wanted to read. So I wrote the book I wanted to read about Jack Tati and again, I was very fortunate in being able to do but the puzzle with, for me, with Jack Tati and it’s.
The complete opposite from Perec is that Tati was not an educated man. He was not a very clever man. He couldn’t do sums and he was barely literate and yet in the medium of movies he was able to be Incredibly subtle, intelligent, graceful, elegant. And so for me, the Tati biography is a quite different kind of enterprise.
It’s a kind of questioning of how could a man like that achieve work like that? The kind of, dissonance between what you can learn about the man and what you can learn from the movies.
H: in fact, what drawn me to Dr. David Bellos is that we have been doing a series of interviews with translators from across the world. Recently, we interviewed Tess Lewis, a famous Swiss German translator. She recommended a series of books for budding translators to read. One of the first books that featured is That a Fish in Your Ear?
David Bellos: That’s very sweet of her. I’m very pleased.
H: I picked the book on Kindle, Amazon Kindle and started reading it.
The most beautiful sentence I read in the whole book is that, which encapsulate whatever your research that has gone into the entire work of translation is. This is the last sentence of the book and you said translation is another name for human condition.
David Bellos: Yeah, but I mean it arrives as the conclusion of a, an argument that translation is paradoxical because in order to translate you need to believe like fundamentally that everything is comprehensible.
And that we are all the same because the same things can be said in different languages. But you also have to believe that everybody is different because you are moving from one language to another. And that there is something fundamentally different about the book in this language and that language.
So in that, it just struck me that’s actually the way we relate to other people. To actually have a social life, you have to believe that other people are just like you are. Otherwise, you wouldn’t have anything to say to them, and you have to believe, and you do believe, that everybody’s different.
Otherwise, there wouldn’t be any point in saying anything to them. So that, it’s this how shall I put it, constitutional contradiction that is I say the human condition, it’s what life is like. That’s the way things are, that things are both the same and different. At the same time, and always.
H: Now, this book, it got translated into other languages too, a lot of other languages. If I write more than 8 languages, it has been translated into. Was there any interaction with the translators? How did you feel about the process as a translator?
David Bellos: A lot of interaction with the first translation into French that I was fortunate to have a translator of genius a man of immense culture and learning and great good humor.
And since I, I know French quite well, we worked rather together on that and there are adaptations and corrections and transformations. To make it work in French as well as it works in English. And I must say, I think that the second French edition is probably actually closest of all the versions to what I actually want [00:09:00] to say.
With the Russian translator, I had a different kind of relationship. I never met her. But she, turns out to be quite a significant mathematician who also translates with a very precise and persnickety mind. And she queried many of the things I said and tried to rewrite it to be a little bit more exact, which was fine.
And I appreciated that I do read Russian, but not very well. So I trusted her on what made. Sense in Russian. And the third translation where I had interaction of some extent was with the Chinese translator in the People’s Republic where one of the chapters had to be completely rewritten for because.
Part of it was unacceptable for political reasons in China and there it was all rather awkward but I think we arrived at a very satisfactory solution for that chapter in the end. The other [00:10:00] translations yes, for the Spanish edition, there’s a whole extra section about Bible translation in Spanish, which has a different history from Bible translation in English and that’s been added.
But I I’ve had not much interaction with the German translator or the others that have followed since then in I’ve met the Japanese translator, but we didn’t interact very much. So there you are. That’s the story. But the key thing was the very happy collaboration and cooperation with the French translator.
H: Now you have identified not only the various issues in translation challenges and all, but also you have given a lot of statistics about for example, dominance of certain languages. And you said obviously English is one of them, French and German being the others.
Can you talk about the that particular chapter a bit?
David Bellos: Yes, that is something that concerns me very much. The numbers they’re never really right in the sense that there are all sorts of ways of. establishing figures about the circulation of books internationally. But really the results whichever way you count things and whichever sources you use are very clear that the languages of translation in the world.
Today are exactly what they were 500 years ago. And the book world is unbelievably conservative and traditional. Printing was invented in Mainz in 1458 and Mainz is a few miles from Frankfurt and Frankfurt is still the place where translation contracts are drawn up. And the Frankfurt book fair is where it’s all.
French and German have been central languages for the circulation of books ever since the demise of [00:12:00] Latin, and they remain there. And since the early 20th century, English has gone on a rampage at occupying an ever larger space in the circulation of books. So to the extent that what I suggest in, is that a fish in your ear?
And what I actually do believe is that translating into English is actually a different enterprise from translating into any other language because it’s the key to translation into all other languages. Not the universal key, but the dominant key, incredibly dominant key and at the same time, it’s a very narrow gate because very few books proportion of very few books published in the Anglosphere are translations.
So it’s simultaneously hugely important and extremely rare. On a global scale, whereas the other way around translation from English is [00:13:00] happening all the time, everywhere, all around the world. So structurally, it seems to me that different operations and the, when we argue about how you should translate, et cetera, you do have to think what is the risk, the different responsibilities of the translators into English and out of English.
H: Challenges in translation being humor. Humor in translations. And you mentioned the metalinguistic function of the language, with some lovely examples in the book. I really liked that section.
David Bellos: My main point is that most kinds of humor don’t pose any special Situational humor, irony satire there are all sorts of kinds of humor that pass across language barriers with no more difficulty than anything else.
And so it’s important not to focus too much on this issue. But people do, [00:14:00] because it’s a, certain kinds of jokes, namely puns, word plays, things that revolve around features of the source language itself, obviously don’t have any direct translation, because you’re talking about a different language when you do it.
So that, that little class of those kinds of jokes and that type of humor requires the translator either to drop it, which often happens to compensate for it by putting in another joke somewhere else where it works. Or to be very creative and to reinvent the joke in the target language, making all sorts of semantic alterations for that to be possible.
These are long established devices. But nonetheless, it’s generally thought by publishers, critics, and other people who ought to know better that funny books aren’t very translatable. As a result, the canon of translated literature in English and from other [00:15:00] languages is remarkably deficient in humor and fun.
And that’s a great. And I’d like people to spend more time looking for funny books in foreign languages and finding ways of bringing those into English so that we don’t get the impression in English that the rest of the world is a pretty sad place where people don’t make jokes. Yeah. I don’t think that applies the other way around.
I think. English language humorists are translated and translated widely into many languages.
H: Now the other one you mentioned about is the awkward issue of L3.
David Bellos: . Because I think in the 21st century, there are so many books of value that are not simply in L1, that are in L1 but engage with a language that is other.
And that language that is other may be the language into which it’s being translated and maybe not. And for me the it’s the skeleton in the cupboard or the elephant in the room because most studies Of translation, whether you start with Cicero or with Lawrence Venuti they don’t talk about it at all.
They think translation is just a matter of transfer from L1 to L2. And it almost never is actually, when you look at it, there are not that many books that don’t have some tokens. An L three of a third language in them, and sometimes quite substantial. And sometimes the en engagement of L one and L three is part of the thematic subject of the book.
And thinking about L three is really very puzzling. And in a way it pulls the rug from underneath almost every theory of translation that exists that are, it’s a a really interesting mental. tangle, what is the status of that L3? And how do you or what are the means of [00:17:00] reproducing it in L2?
I do not think there is a general theory or a general approach. Again, like so many things in translation and the arts at the Generally it is each solution is unique, has to be tailored to that book and to the target language. The French, for example do something very special.
I don’t think you tell me where this happens in India, but I don’t think it does happen anywhere else. When you are translating into French from, let’s say, German or Russian. Or indeed Hindi and in the novel, somebody changes planes in Paris or meets a Frenchman in a cafe and says bonjour in the original text, which you well might then in the French translation, it’ll have a little footnote saying en français dans le texte.
This is French in the original, like waving a little tricolor flag saying, Hey, they speak French too. And that is a cultural thing. It’s a it’s a, an ideological thing. It’s a nostalgic thing as well, where the French like to be reminded that. Mere foreigners do also speak French. L three solutions, especially when L three is L two.
Yeah. Have different solutions, different conventions, different practices in, depending on the direction of translation, the relative. prestige of the languages involved there, etc. So there’s a whole field there that I wish more students would write PhD theses on because it enriches and complicates almost anything you can say about translation.
H: The reason I caught on to that point, that particular chapter is that it happens Many times in Indian translations, when they’re getting it translated from some, let us say some South Indian language, my own mother tongue, Telugu into English, let’s say. And there may be Hindi words in the original other than Telugu and Tamil words.
David Bellos: Your choices are. Many, but none are quite satisfactory because the value of a Hindi word in English isn’t the same as its value or associations in Telugu. You can say what it means and forget which L it’s from, or you can leave it in the original. And just leave people, et cetera, you have various different solutions and in the end the translator has to decide what sort of an object you want to create in the target language.
No I’m sure it arises, I can only really talk about English and French because of the language I know, but I’m aware that the problem I’m quite convinced the problem arises generally in all translation and But lots of us have been tearing our hair out over it for generations without ever saying so.
H: Now one question I asked many translators, even people who have been on, judges on many panels like you, how do you evaluate a translation? Is there a method?
David Bellos: With difficulty. Yes, I have been on panels and I have done it, but To be honest, I actually hate it. When the translation is from a language that I know and where I could do, how should I say, a scholarly evaluation of it.
To really do that for a whole book. It takes a long time. It’s not enough just to glance through and say, Oh, this isn’t a very nice sentence. Or I don’t think that’s right. You actually got to get to an awful lot of work and you might as well translate the book again yourself. When one is looking at books translated from languages that you do not know.
That obviously happens on, on, on translation prize panels. It’s very hard to unscramble whether what you’re evaluating is the book or the translation. The two are in such time, obviously, they’re well welded together in the text you have. Sometimes you can tell straight away that it’s a brilliant book and a brilliant translation.
It doesn’t matter whether it’s right or wrong. It’s just brilliant. Most often though You can’t easily unscramble what is the translator’s gift and skill and what is the writer’s gift and skill. We must try and we must be as clear headed about it as we can. It’s important that good translations get recognized and get promoted.
But the the task of the judge, of the evaluator is not an easy one and always leaves you a little bit uneasy.
H: That’s an honest answer actually. Now, we will move on to the other part that is history of copyright.
David Bellos: I got interested in it a few years ago and together with a an intellectual property lawyer, we.
decided that we would try and educate students about the role that copyright plays in modern culture. Because it, the idea of the ownership of immaterial goods like poems and plays and so forth is actually quite recent in historical terms. It only arose in the 18th century and it has something to do with the shape of literary history in the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries.
So our original project was to try and write a cultural history, or a history of copyright and culture, copyright’s involvement in culture. And we did that, and the course went very well, and we taught it a second time. And I started to learn more, and to get more involved and learn very much from my co author Alexander Montague and do lots of reading, but [00:23:00] then my co author who was at that time in New York decided to give up on the United States and to move to London.
And he has moved to, is now based in London and so we couldn’t teach the course together again. So there was nothing left but to write the book.
H: So David, I have exhausted all my questions that I wanted to ask you. Is there anything that you would like to communicate to our listeners?
David Bellos: Yes, I’d like to let your listeners know that in connection with several of the things we’ve been talking about already this morning I teach a course at Princeton called Great Books from Little Languages, where I have students read nine relatively recent works translated from languages that I call little because they are not often translated into English.
And because they’re from those kinds of languages, they don’t appear on any syllabus in most universities around, certainly around the English speaking world. It’s been a wonderful course. I have lots of students. They love reading. Novels from Indonesia and Korea and Angola and Finland and Sweden.
And my absolute top favorite and the one the students also love very much is from Canada from Bangalore Gacha by Vivek Shanbhag. It’s a little treasure. Which I would never have discovered and my students would never have discovered unless I decided to do something that is really unconventional in an American university, which is to teach stuff that I cannot read in the original.
So I’m very keen on more people doing that kind of thing and exploring and broadening the canon to include works when one can get hold of them written in languages that have no long tradition. Gatcha Gotcha is only the 11th book ever translated from Canada into English. Only [00:25:00] 11! It’s extraordinary.
And Bahasa Indonesia also is unbelievably excluded when you think of, the size of the country and the amount of literary production there. Maybe 20 books have been ever translated from Indonesia into English. I would first of all, love to have suggestions for more books, little languages in the Indian subcontinent.
And secondly, to encourage. Listeners not to be sniffy about translations, not to say, Oh I prefer the original. If you prefer the original, you really are limiting yourself to a tiny section of all the wonderful things that have been created and are being created around the world.
H: Lovely.
We definitely, because even on our podcast, we spoke to more than six, seven Indian translators into English from Indian languages. Some of them are really lovely books, which I don’t think Anglophone world has got the sight of. We have spoken to translators from Tamil. Kannada, Gujarati, Malayalam, whatever I could recommend, I loved, I’ll just send it across to you.
And the final question is I think you’ve had a association with translations, I think, I believe for the last five decades or so, if I’m correct. So what does this journey of translation mean to you personally, David?
David Bellos: Personally I find translation a wonderful halfway house between self expression and scholarship.
Or between creative, creativity and scholarship and that, so that, that’s why it is, it’s always a pleasure to me to translate, even when it’s very hard. But I think what I have learned from it is that no book is easy to translate, even if it’s an easy book. And no book is that hard to translate, even if it’s a very hard.
And that the, even in the silliest or most trivial kind of text, any sentence always raises at some level, all the fundamental intellectual philosophical issues. The translation raises so that if all you can get to translate and be paid for texts of no great standing, don’t worry, you’re doing the same job as the guy who is doing yet another translation of Proust.
H: Thank you, David. Thank you very much. This has been such a fascinating conversation. Probably one of the best that we had on the topic of translation.
David Bellos: Thank you. Thank you very much for this opportunity to speak to an Indian audience.
David Bellos won the first Man Booker International Prize in 2005 for his translation of works by Albanian author Ismail Kadare.
He was educated at Oxford and teaches French and Comparative Literature at Princeton, where he also directs the Program in Translation and Intercultural Communication. He has written biographies of Georges Perec and Jacques Tati that have been translated into many languages and an introduction to translation studies, Is That A Fish in Your Ear? He has translated numerous authors from French (Perec, Vargas, Kadare, Simenon, Antelme, Fournel) and offers a new understanding of the extraordinary life and work of Romain Gary in Romain Gary A Tall Story. His latest book is a study of Victor Hugo’s masterpiece, Les Misérables.
His latest Publication is about the History of Copyright.
Use the following link to buy the book – “Is that a fish in your ear’
Photo Credits:
https://complit.princeton.edu/people/david-bellos
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***Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed by Interviewees in interviews conducted by Harshaneeyam Podcast are those of the Interviewees and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of Harshaneeyam Podcast. Any content provided by Interviewees is of their opinion and is not intended to malign any religion, ethnic group, club, organization, company, individual, or anyone or anything.
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