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The Swedish
John Cowper Powys Society
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Newsletter no. 11 – The agonies of translation by Sven Erik Täckmark In the literary journal Metamorfos
(no 3 1989) edited by the legendary Halvdan Renling, Sven Erik Täckmark wrote a brief reflection upon
the art of translation, which we reprint here, partly as a reminder of the ongoing work with The Autobiography. THE AGONIES OF TRANSLATION Only
at a few occasions have I translated poetry. I have, however, translated
around 30 books from English, German, and Danish (some of them in cooperation
with good friends), both non-fiction and fiction. It is some-times claimed
that the most important thing for a translator is to master his own language.
This is a doubtful truth indeed! In
fact you have to be very familiar with the language you are translating from.
And yet: so often a translator falls short in his work with the rhythms of
the foreign language, its changing personal tone and idiom. The English
language e. g. with its wealth of words, its countless idiomatic expressions,
proverbs, puns, slang and vulgarisms, and its for us strange names for objects and phenomena.
And how often – too often – it happens that the dictionaries – even the best
ones – leave us in the lurch! And how
often it happens that the translator faces problems of one kind or another.
It can be questions concerning national and local historical, political,
literary allusions, folklore, myths, legends. And
unfortunately you sometimes have to deal with words and expression that
simply cannot be translated. One of the most difficult, yes, sometimes even untranslatable, books I have dealt with, is the Autobiography
(1934) by English-Welsh novelist and philosopher John Cowper Powys. Now and
then I felt utter powerlessness before its endless rows of classical,
philosophical, historical and poetical allusions, not the least the ones connected
to events and characters in the works by among others Homer, Dante,
Shakespeare, Milton, Rabelais, Charles Dickens, Walter Scott, Henry James, Dostoievsky, Thomas Hardy. When
I in 1975 translated Powys’s great breakthrough novel Wolf Solent from 1929 with
all its philosophical and psychological plunges I was forced to go into the
worlds of Plato, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche and Hegel – among others. Oh, how I
pestered my English friends with questions concerning everything when I
worked with these two books. My old
English teacher, Charleston, at Stockholm University College, once wrote in
the mar-gins to one of my translation exercises: ”Stay as close to the origin
as possible, but also keep away from it far enough.” That is a paradox, but
no serious translator can escape it. One thing is especially important,
really important, I would claim; no one can complete a translation if he does
not feel himself congenial with the artist behind the work. It is true that
you have to give the book a decent Swedish linguistic vestiture,
but at the end of the day it is the voice of the writer that must be heard
and felt, his style, his atmosphere, his originality must be reproduced as
true as possible in the mirroring that a translation always is, no matter how
exceptionally good it can seem to be. |
This page
updated 4 April 2012.