Translation and Etymology.

From Elaine Blair’s NYRB review of Essays Two: On Proust, Translation, Foreign Languages, and the City of Arles, by Lydia Davis:

For Davis the translator, pleasure is closely tied to difficulty. “See if, for oiseuse, you can find a word in English beginning with o and ending in the z sound that means the same thing and, if possible, has the same derivation”—this is the kind of challenge she sets for herself. “Handily, for this last problem, there was the perfect solution, otiose,” which means, “like the French, ‘at leisure’ or ‘idle.’”

[…]

Her goal of staying as close as possible to the vocabulary of the original novels leads her far down the path of etymology, both in English and in French. (Pleasure #10: “You become more and more knowledgeable about your own language and its resources as you work.”) Translating into a language that offers so many synonyms, Davis tries to find one that either shares its etymology with the French original or derives from a similar context. She might translate a word not into its exact contemporary equivalent but into its etymological ancestor: “Alors, ‘then,’ comes from the Latin illa hora, ‘at that hour.’” Knowing this, Davis might in some cases use “at that hour” instead of “then.”

I’m sorry, but that’s just crazypants. Sure, if you find a good equivalent that happens to be etymologically related, it’s pleasing (if your mind is that way inclined), but it’s also purely decorative — it has nothing to do with the actual business of translation. To use “at that hour” instead of “then” because of etymology is malfeasance, in my opinion, and I will regard Davis’s translations with increased suspicion in future. (For another view of her essays, see this post from last year, and for a different complaint about her methods, see this one from 2018.)

Comments

  1. It’s also inconsistent to speak of oiseuse as beginning with o (spelling, not sound) and ending with the z sound (sound, not writing). Otiose is, unless it is thought to be too obscure, a reasonable translation of oiseuse, but that isn’t why. (And it doesn’t end with a z sound anyway, at least not in my pronunciation on the rare occasions when I pronounce it.)

  2. So this etymologically obsessed translator would render En un lugar de la Mancha de cuyo nombre […] as

    In a location of La Mancha whose name […].

    Because “ Lugar- Esta palabra en su etimología procede del castellano antiguo «logar» y con ella del latín «locālis» que quiere decir local.”

    No thanks.

  3. David Eddyshaw says

    I think a better translation would actually result from the deiiberate avoidance of etymologically related words (as with Eddyshaw’s Rule: “No Latin word ever means the same as any English word transparently derived from it.”)

    But either policy shows a misunderstanding of what translation actually is which is so radical that it prompts one to suggest a career change.

    (On reflection, I suppose there might be something to be said for this in translating poetry, or at least the sort of poetry where the original is going strongly for phonaesthetic special effects. But even then, slavish copying of the original sound effects seems unlikely to lead to a happy outcome.)

  4. David L. Gold says

    if the author did not choose alors with the meaning of its Latin etymon in mind, the translator should not translate it with its Latin etymon in mind either.

    If alors in the French original does not evoke its Latin etymon in the mind of readers of French, the translator is under no obligation to evoke that etymon either

    Regarding “Pleasure #10: You become more and more knowledgeable about your own language and its resources as you work,” her method indeed teaches her something but her readers gain nothing.

  5. Well put.

  6. I have tried to spend my life remaining rationally ignorant of French, and the internet is now not helping me very confidently with either how to render “crazypants” into French or in determining what French word or phrase might be well-Englished as “crazypants.”

  7. Timbré, cinglé, démentiel, dérangé, dingue, fêlé, foldingue, frapadingue, maboul, sinoque, toqué, tordu, zinzin…

  8. Or, if you go the etymological route, pantalons écrasés.

  9. Translating back into English, I get shatterpants, which has an unfortunate connotation.

  10. Google Translate suggested “foupants,” but further googling suggested that that was perhaps rare-to-non-existent as an actual French lexeme. Also “pantalons fous” which is perhaps an overliteral calque that would not signify anything relevant to an actual Francophone.

  11. Eddyshaw’s Rule: “No Latin word ever means the same as any English word transparently derived from it.”

    Eddyshaw rules !

    You have, unfortunately, stopped short of enunciating a universal regularity familiar to all who frequent this blog as familiars of Hat. No word borrowed or derived from another language ever means to the lender what it means to the borrower. At any rate not after 100 years or so.

    To avoid grief, never a borrower or lender be ! For loan oft loses both itself and friend, and borrowing dulls the edge of husbandry. This above all: stick to thy last, and it must follow, as the night the day, thou canst not cobble any man’s meaning.

  12. David Eddyshaw says

    You have, unfortunately, stopped short of enunciating a universal regularity

    I know my place.

  13. Some counterexamples: atrocity/as, avarice/tia, debilitate/us, futile/is (fig. in Latin), insipid/us, modicum, moribund/us, perpetuate/us, pusillanimous/sis, sacrosanct/us (ext. sense in Latin). That’s 11 of a total of 53 derivatives I checked, so about 20%.

  14. démentalons

  15. David Eddyshaw says

    Some counterexamples

    Ah, but the case there is as with Pierre Ménard’s Quixote.
    The Rule is exceptionless.

  16. PlasticPaddy says

    @rozele
    foudessous

  17. Ah, but the case there is as with Pierre Ménard’s Quixote.
    The Rule is exceptionless.

    Ah, both prescriptivism and the No True Scotsman fallacy. I admire, but I do not imitate.

  18. David Marjanović says

    *lightbulb moment*

    I knew about crazed in the “crisscrossed with fractures” sense, but it didn’t occur to me it could be from écrasé, which it rather obviously is in hindsight.

  19. No it isn’t, or at least most modern dictionaries don’t think so; current English dictionaries all say craze is from Scandinavian, with Wiktionary giving cognates in Danish krase and Swedish and Norwegian krasa (though I’m having trouble finding those in dictionaries. Are they obsolete?). TLFI even says the borrowing was the other way, French écraser from Middle English crasen!

    On the other hand, the Middle English Dictionary says Middle English crasen is from “OF crasir; ult. Gmc.” I wonder which of these sources is most recently revised.

    The OED’s etymology for craze, v. is from 1893 and is undecided:

    A fuller form acrase , acraze v., is known in 16th cent.; if this existed earlier, the probability would be that crase was aphetic for acrase, and this < Old French acraser, variant of écraser. The latter is supposed to be of Norse origin: compare Swedish krasa to crackle, slå i kras to dash in pieces. If not aphetic for acrase, the English crase may be immediately from the Scandinavian word.

    However, the 2011 revision of †acraze, v. cuts off the French option: “Probably < a- prefix1 + craze v., after acrazed adj.” That must be because the forms with a- have not been found before the 1500s, while the shorter craze and crazed go back a century or two earlier; Chaucer mentions glass windows with “nat an hole ycrased”.

    I can’t find anything resembling acraser or crasir in the Anglo-Norman Dictionary, which may also weigh against a French origin.

  20. ktschwartz: Danish krase and Swedish and Norwegian krasa (though I’m having trouble finding those in dictionaries. Are they obsolete?)

    Not in Norwegian. Perhaps not very common anymore, but still alive, e.g. in masonry terminology as krase ut, utkrasing “removing mortar from existing masonry”.

  21. PlasticPaddy says

    @trond
    This krase would rather seem to be cognate with English scratch, German kratzen and Dutch krassen (maybe even a borrowing from Dutch/Low German?). Are you sure this is same word as krasa?

  22. Lars Mathiesen says

    @ktschwartz: The one Trond talks about is another word which Danish spells kradse; Swedes mostly say kratta (which also exists as Da kratte) — I never heard krassa much less krasa there in this sense. All from G kratzen. (PP sniped me).

    On the other hand, current Swedish does have krasa sönder and gå i kras ~ ‘collapse (noisily)’. But the etymology is just “onomatopoietic” (ljudhärmande) and with no Nordic cognates and attestations only starting in 1651 (about the sound of snail shells being crushed underfoot which would still be a valid usage) I don’t think it can be the origin of craze.

    Also now I looked at Trond’s link and it’s about a similar sound word to the one in Swedish, not the kratzen loan. (Danish has knase with almost the same meanings, also a sound word, with similar occurring in No and Sw dialects it says).

  23. PlasticPaddy says

    @lars
    Sorry, i was reacting more to Trond’s mortar examples, which looked like Ger. auskratzen (mortar is already écrasé)😊

  24. Lars Mathiesen says

    Hmm, maybe I was too quick. The ODS does mention a Da krase corresponding to the (Old) Swedish and Norwegian ones, but older, and claims it’s the origin of Fr écraser (however they would know). Last attested in 19th century dictionaries and I never heard it myself. Still a sound word with no antecedent in ON.

    (It was hidden under the noun krase variant of krås = ‘craw’, which Danish got from Dutch. That’s the crush root).

  25. Lars Mathiesen says

    @PP, that’s the part you sniped me on, we are in total agreement. (Though I don’t see that sense under écraser in the TLFI. It also says “borrowed from Middle English, probably of Scandinavian origin,” so which way was it? It passes the buck to the ODEE (to crasen), but I’m too deep in this rabbit hole already and not looking it up there).

  26. @ktschwarz: What’s going on with that form “ycrased” in Chaucer? I assume, from what you say, that it’s not evidence of aphesis, but then it must have a prefix y– attached. What did that mean in Middle English?

  27. David Eddyshaw says

    It’s the Middle English reflex of Old English ge-; like the cognate German ge-, it gets automatically prefixed to past participles unless they have a prefix already:

    Whan Zephirus eek with his sweete breeth
    Inspired hath in every holt and heeth
    The tendre croppes, and the yonge sonne
    Hath in the Ram his half cours yronne,

  28. @David Eddyshaw: Ah, of course! I know far too little about Middle English, so I didn’t recognize that y– as an intermediate step in the erosion of West Germanic ge– to zero in Modern English past participles

  29. @PP, @Lars M.

    I agree (and I should have noticed) that krase ut owes more to krasse “scratch” and Ger. auskratzen than to krase “crush”.

    Krase in the sense “fall into pieces” made a renaissance in 1993 when the Hallingdal dialect song Ei krasafaren steinbu “A shattered stone shed” became a national hit, though I doubt many outside the region knew.

    Conflation is part and parcel of this set. Sw. gå i kras is Norw. gå i knas.

  30. In Swedish, krasa is still used, but it doesn’t mean “crazy”, it refers to the sound of something breaking. Gravel can “krasa” when you walk over it, or the china can “krasa” when it breaks.

  31. Lars Mathiesen says

    @Moa, nobody is claiming that the modern sense of crazy is from Scandinavian, it was an internal development in English. Cf Cracked, a Mad-style humor magazine.

    (The English sense of fine cracks in the glazing of ceramic items is krakeleret in Danish, from French craqueler).

  32. David Eddyshaw says: “But either policy shows a misunderstanding of what translation actually is which is so radical that it prompts one to suggest a career change.”

    What seems missing in this discussion is that people (well, me at least) might be reading Lydia Davis’ translations primarily because they are interested in her writing, rather than for her engagement with the ‘actual business of translation’. Her career is doing quite well and if she’s just following her own aesthetic whims sometimes, that’s fine with me.

  33. I’m sure you’re in good company, but surely you’ll agree it’s not actually sinful to be interested in translation as such.

  34. No, it’s not a sin at all — I probably shouldn’t have just popped up here with my one-off comment, my apologies. I felt echoes of a similar feeling when reading that awful Helen DeWitt thread on MetaFilter back in 2011 and got a bit agitated. I’ve found your blog and MeFi posts wonderfully measured and fascinating over the years!

  35. David Eddyshaw says

    people (well, me at least) might be reading Lydia Davis’ translations primarily because they are interested in her writing, rather than for her engagement with the ‘actual business of translation’

    And good luck to you! Why not?

    There is a fairly grand tradition of writing which is worthwhile in itself, despite that fact that it purports to be a translation, and, considered purely qua translation, is really not very good at all. Much of Ezra Pound springs to mind … (and FitzGerald’s wonderful Omar Khayyam …)

    I think the question of how much you are annoyed by the deficiency of the translation as such probably depends on how interested you actually are in the original; and admittedly, not everybody actually is, when you come down to it.

    It’s a pity if the only accessible translations are of the freeform “inspired by an original idea from …” sort, but I don’t think this is an issue here especially.

  36. I probably shouldn’t have just popped up here with my one-off comment, my apologies.

    Heaven forfend — one-off comments are great! I hope I didn’t come off as putting you down, I just wanted to clarify. I think Lydia Davis is a fine writer (I gave her Collected Stories to my wife for Christmas a few years ago), I just have problems with her ideas about translation. I have to admit I’ve forgotten the Helen DeWitt thread; I’ll have to go refresh my memory (and indignation).

  37. …Good lord, I had no memory of that thread, but when I got to the bottom I discovered it was the final straw that made me quit the site back then. There sure were (and are) a lot of asshats!

  38. January First-of-May says

    There is a fairly grand tradition of writing which is worthwhile in itself, despite that fact that it purports to be a translation

    And then (AFAIK) every so often you get something that’s technically a translation, but it’s so great in its own right that approximately nobody remembers it was supposed to be a translation. Pushkin’s Feast in the Time of Plague (Пир во время чумы) is a great example – it’s technically a translated section of a play by John Wilson but who’d know that if they hadn’t looked it up?

  39. I hope I didn’t come off as putting you down

    No, not at all! Just some nervousness on my end at sticking my head up.

    I was also alarmed at her comment on that previous post of yours that “she doesn’t read the book she’s going to translate, she just starts from page one”. It brought to mind this interview with Joachim Neugroschel: “I never read a book before translating it. No reason to. I do not translate the words literally. Only a bad translator would translate literally. […] You don’t have to have a sense of the author’s work to translate. I read a page and get the style. It is a question of music and rhythm.”

    I find it hard to agree with him, but also like his translations!

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