It's all very odd. Down the centuries, few activities can have contributed more to the spread of civilised ideas than the work of the translator. At seminal moments in the history of knowledge—seventh-century Arabia, medieval and renaissance Europe— its role in the dissemination of learning was paramount. Yet few comparable activities seem to have attracted so much sceptical gloom. One need not be an expert on the early Church to feel sure that when St Jerome first shyly mentioned the idea of translating the Bible to his chums, there was a sagacious wagging of beards and shuffling of sandals in the dust. Slow-footed Latin couldn't possibly accommodate the quicksilver Greek, and as for those Aramaic idioms... doomed to failure, old boy.
The cynics have been at it ever since. "Traduttore, traditore"—the translator is a traitor, Italians merrily quip. "Translations can be either accurate or beautiful", we are warned, "but never both". Such witticisms have acquired gravitas from speculative psychology. It is now all a matter of sublimated plagiarism, the expression of an impulse rooted in infantile compulsions—the urge to imitate, the pleasures of lying, and simple greed. Where translation into English is concerned, this greed takes the form of latter-day imperialism, the dominant world language appropriating the wealth of smaller nations the way its statesmen once carved up Africa. Why else should it aspire to read as if originally written in English? Consider the case of Joseph Brodsky.
When Brodsky first arrived in the USA he was widely fêted and all the best poets rushed to translate his work. The result was impressive. It was all very flattering, and he was rather pleased. But later he understood what they had actually done. They had simply annexed his material for their own purposes, bending his subjects to the service of their own, rather different, vision. He felt used, betrayed: indeed, "colonised". The inference drawn was that the only sort of literary translation deserving respect would therefore be "rough". Like modern brutalist architecture, it should lay bare the working structure, plumbing and all, and make no pretensions to artistry, or even readability, in its own right. With luck, it might be so unreadable as to deter the reader completely: in which case he would immediately rush off to learn the original language in order to discover what he had missed. That was the theory.
We must not make light of the difficulties. The whole subject is a minefield. Booby traps lie in the most elementary words. "Land", "sea", "apple" or "grape" may look innocent, but for different cultures they carry very different charges—a nightmare when translating titles. What about objects that exist in one tradition but have no equivalent in another? Komatál, kámea? Does one assist with an explanatory circumlocution, or leave the mystery and power of the original to speak for itself? And as for those proverbs and idiomatic phrases! Between Hungarian and English they do sometimes coincide, or seem near enough to be recognisable; but here lies another ambush, especially for non-native translators, apt to seize triumphantly on some striking English idiom that seems to meet the situation perfectly—but doesn't quite. A series of these little slips can reduce the text to farce, and its author to the level of a clown. Add to this the current mania for updating "old-style" colloquialisms with some smart contemporary buzzword, and you destroy the quality of temporal and cultural distance that is so important. There are now publishers who issue "readability" directives to their editors, and install programmes designed to root out such self-evident defects as unusual syntax, repetitions of words and potential obscenities. I once had an editor who attempted to remove all adverbs from the text (not, apparently, in the "house style"). Naturally, she had no idea what was in the Hungarian.

[...]

Len Rix
was born in Zimbabwe, and studied languages before reading English at Cambridge, where he now lives. His translation of The Queen's Necklace will appear later this year, to join his other versions of work by Antal Szerb: Oliver VII (2008), The Pendragon Legend (2006) and Journey by Moonlight (2001, all for Pushkin Press), and A Martian's Guide to Budapest (The Hungarian Quarterly, No. 180). In 2006 he was shortlisted for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize and awarded the Oxford–Weidenfeld Translation Prize for his translation of The Door by Magda Szabó.