Can we comment on a translation without knowing the original?

1/ Amidst all the shock and horror on twitter over people never having heard of The Odyssey, arose a new quarrel about Emily Wilson’s translation (is it woke? is it badly written? or are detractors simply ignorant?). A few white knights have come to the rescue, saying that those who don’t read ancient Greek don’t get to have an opinion and call it a bad translation. 

Isn’t that just a way to shut down conversation?  

Of course, the opinions of people who can read the original are more valid—they can talk about accuracy and fidelity (or lack of)—but others can still comment on other aspects of the translation: how it reads in the target language, whether it’s good prose/ poetry, if it ends up being translationese, and so on and so forth. After all, do we not make a judgement when we compare passages in order to pick a translation to read? 

Also, we may not be able to criticise Emily Wilson if we only have her and Fagles (who I have heard has a habit of embroidering the text), but why can’t we if we have multiple passages in multiple translations—by Lattimore, by Fitzgerald, by Fagles, by Rouse, by Butler, by her? 

2/ So I’m not going to feel guilty about taking a dislike to, and telling others not to read, Washburn’s translation of The Tale of Genji. I don’t speak Japanese, true, but having compared Waley, Seidensticker, Tyler, and him, I can see what Washburn’s doing and I don’t like it. 

3/ Nor am I going to feel bad about my dislike of Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky. But it’s not an entirely ignorant view—Gary Saul Morson has pointed out what’s wrong with their literalist approach. 

4/ Knowledge is sometimes a hindrance, though. I would never be happy with any translation of Truyện Kiều. Would any Vietnamese? 

5/ I guess Chinese speakers feel the same about translations—especially of Chinese poetry—into Western languages. 

I don’t speak Chinese, but I read Hong lou meng in a Vietnamese translation and occasionally glanced at the English text by David Hawke and could see some of the changes he made—Bảo Ngọc’s (Baoyu) building “Di hồng viện”, “hồng” (“hong”) meaning red, became “Green Delights” because of different connotations of the colours in the two cultures; his nickname “Di hồng công tử” in the poetry club became Green Boy.  

6/ I know a Vietnamese intellectual whose translations I would never criticise to his face. I know what he would say. He would ask about inaccuracies and I would have no responses. He would talk about the two schools of translation (that John Rutherford calls the cavaliers vs the puritans) and I would have no arguments. But no amount of rhetoric will persuade my ears that his translations are well-done, because his sentences in Vietnamese would follow the sentence structure and order of English or Spanish or whatever the source language—it ain’t natural Vietnamese. 

7/ I do think we should not criticise a poet if we cannot read them in the original. My friend Himadri (Argumentative Old Git) is irritated by Nabokov casually dismissing Tagore as a mediocrity, and I can see why. Criticise novelists and playwrights and other prose writers if you like; but I don’t think we can dismiss poets who wrote in a language we do not read. More is lost in translation. 

(I am of course talking about poets who are highly esteemed and influential). 

Anyway, Happy New Year!