'Multiples: 12 Stories in 18 Languages by 61 Authors' edited by Adam Thirwell

I sometimes play a game I call Doublebabelfish, in which I take a piece of text and pass it through an automated translation site on the internet into whatever language I choose and then use the same site to translate it back into English, perhaps via another language or two first. I then compare the resulting text to the original and speculate whether the differences arise from the conceptual topography of the intervening language(s), from something about the interface between the languages (their refractory indices, if you like), or (more likely) from the quirks and limitations of the translator. Adam Thirwell was curious about the persistence or otherwise of style in translated literature and devised a similar (but much better) experiment: he took twelve little-known texts and submitted them to strings of writers who often were translating for the first time and whose knowledge of the language they were translating from ranged from excellent to fair. Each translation was then passed to the next translator, who had access only to that version of the text, and so on, like a game of Chinese Whispers, passing frequently enough through English to allow a monolinguist to keep abreast of the permutations. The results are fascinating. Given that each text is reconceived according to the translator’s quirks and limitations (and according to each language’s quirks and limitations), how transparent is it possible for a translation to be? What variants are inherent in the text and what come from without? What negative or positive value do we put on innovation, or on error (and is there always a difference)? And what about the durability of authorial style? The more you read of this experiment the more fascinating it becomes. I found it particularly interesting how an error made early in the string affected more and more of the surrounding text as subsequent translators strove to accommodate it in their understanding of the story. Participants include J.M. Coetzee, Lydia Davis, Jeffrey Eugenides, Com Toibin, Zadie Smith, John Banville, David Mitchell, Dave Eggers, A.S. Byatt, Aleksander Hemon, Etgar Keret, Tash Aw, Sheila Heti and Laszlo Krasznahorkai.

(October 2013)