“In Norwegian, there are lots of times in conversations when people stop and look at each other, and ‘det vert stilt’.” For Damion Searls – best known in the English-speaking world for his translations of works by the Norwegian Nobel-Prize winning author Jon Fosse – you could translate the Norwegian phrase by something like “it got quiet” or “they fell silent” or “there was pause”.
These renderings are perfectly accurate in a dictionary sense, but they don’t feel right. A more natural translation in English would use a negative as a subject, verb or object: “No one said anything”, “They didn’t speak a word”, or “They said nothing for a moment”. Searls’s work is an attempt to draw wider conclusions about the nature of the translator’s task from an attentive reflection on his own translations from German, Norwegian, French and Dutch.
The title, The Philosophy of Translation, is unfortunate. Readers expecting a systematic treatment of the philosophical bases underpinning the activity of translation are likely to be disappointed. Searls, who is withering about translation theory – it is “irrelevant at best, importunate at worst” – is more concerned with opportunistically drawing on aspects of philosophical thinking as a way of legitimising his translation practice.
Even when he directly engages with the philosophical tradition, as with the work of Merleau-Ponty, he is vaguely apologetic: “I know ‘phenomenology’ is an awful word. It’s easy to stumble over.” Plain speaking is a welcome virtue, but the line between clarification and condescension is easily crossed. Searls’s book sits more comfortably within a range of titles that over the last decade or more have brought the experiences and reflections of practising literary translators into the public domain.
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Edith Grossman’s Why Translation Matters (2010), Kate Briggs’s This Little Art (2017), Mireille Gansel’s Translation as Transhumance (2017) and Daniel Hahn’s Catching Fire: A Translation Diary (2022) are companionable bedfellows for Searls’s deep commitment to translation as a particular form of writing produced through a meticulously close form of reading.
He is at his best deploying his formidable erudition to illuminate specific linguistic choices he has made over the course of his career. Searls, commenting on the name of the dog, Bragi, in his translation of Fosse’s Septology, notes that, in the original draft of his translations, he had kept the Norwegian spelling, Brage. Unfortunately, as he began to realise, for English-language readers “Brage” would rhyme with “rage”. For the diminutive, relatively inoffensive creature of Fosse’s imagining, “Brage-rhymes-with-rage is not a good dog name”.
In conversation with the author, Searls learns that Fosse had named the dog after the Norse god of poetry, Brage. Searls had not made the connection because the books of Norse myths he had read had used the Old Norse or Icelandic version of the name, Bragi. The new find was all the happier in that it had the good fortune to rhyme (in certain pronunciations) with “doggy”. Although it is generally accepted that names of people or places should be left untranslated (no one would ever write “Frank Mitterrand” unless it was part of a comedy sketch), Searls argues that one should never say never in translation and that it all depends on context, as in the case of Fosse’s dog.
The exceptional clarity of Searls’s prose means that he explains with great deftness some of the recurring problems in translation, such as the turgid nature of sizeable portions of German philosophical translation in English. A German-English dictionary will tell you that something is a noun but will not, as he points out, tell you that nouns work differently in both languages.
German nouns are “vigorous and interesting” because they can be compounded in all kinds of ways and indicate orientation in space, whereas verb use in German prose tends to be somewhat generic. In the case of English, on the other hand, verbs are where the action is. Nouns without the kick-start of adjectives or verbs lie lifeless on the page. The unfortunate result with the more literal translator is that “complicated nouns with bland or impersonal verbs don’t capture in English the precision and intensity of the German”.
Renowned translators can often be a tetchy bunch. St Jerome, the great “father of the Western Church” and translator of the Latin Vulgate, wrote in his Letter to Pammachius that he ardently wished “to strike back at those who insult me, to settle my ire”. Martin Luther, hero of the Reformation and translator of the Bible into German, routinely referred to his critics as donkeys (“I will not allow the papists to judge for their ears continue to be too long and their hee-haws too weak for them to be critical of my translating”).
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Searls is not above the odd swing of the verbal crosier himself. At one point, he excoriates Milan Kundera, the Czech novelist, referring to “Kundera’s stupid claim” about an aspect of German language usage; and he baldly states when Jane Ellen Harrison, the English classicist, makes an ill-informed claim about an indigenous language word that “Harrison’s linguistics here is nonsense”. Searls’s tonic presence is there on every page of The Philosophy of Translation and readers of his translations can only remain grateful for his unstinting commitment to share with both his authors and his readers what he calls “the fruitful miracle of communication”.
Michael Cronin is Professor of French at Trinity College Dublin
