Nossack has said, “My identification with this particular book was so complete, that I imagined myself the only person capable of translating it properly.”* Or the translator can identify so closely with the author that he sees himself as being that author, as writing the same book in English. The Earl of Roscommon once wrote a few lines of verse expressing this feeling:*
United by this Sympathetick Bond,
You grow Familiar, Intimate, and Fond;
Your thoughts, your Words, your Stiles, your Souls agree,
No longer his Interpreter, but He.
This sort of identification, which one can easily imagine in a musician or actor, can also be found among mere translators.
Beyond identification and hospitality is the more unequal relationship of devotion. Translating an author you are devoted to and have always loved as a reader, whose works you’ve studied and taught and read again and again, can be both a great joy and a great trial. Breon Mitchell, a professor at Indiana University, has recently completed a new translation of Franz Kafka’s The Trial. Kafka has been a long-time passion of Mitchell’s, and of all Kafka’s work he is most passionate about The Trial. “I had the problem,” he said in a talk at the 1994 American Literary Translators Association (ALTA) conference, “of my own reverence for the author. It is not the best thing in the world to translate somebody that you revere so highly. If you feel they’re up there somewhere and you’re this Kafkaesque, unworthy person, it does not make it easy for you to translate. In a way, it’s much easier for you to translate somebody when you can say, Eh, it’s a good novel, but I can probably turn out an English version that’ll be fairly good, too.”
A step beyond devotion is that sort of reverence that takes the words of an author as unchangeable, akin to the words of God. In fact, Fred Jordan, the editor who commissioned Mitchell’s translation of The Trial, felt this way about Kafka and asked Mitchell to produce a word-for-word translation. This takes us into the issue of fidelity, the subject of a later chapter, but it is worth knowing that devotion can turn into a sort of reverence that hurts the great master by imposing on his work limitations the author
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