“Is That a Fish in Your Ear?’’ (the title promises some beautiful absurdity; rather disappointingly, it’s only the nickname given to the earphones that simultaneous translators wear), is an extended, passionate, and detailed account of what translation does and how it does it. It grounds itself in an irrefutable point. Where would the Bible be without translation - a succession of them, in fact: oral Hebrew to written Aramaic to Greek to Latin and of course to King James, root and glory of English literature?
Impossible not to break in myself. How else would I possess the poems of the Russians Anna Akhmatova, Osip Mandelstam, and the Polish Zbigniew Herbert? Whatever may be lost, it’s certainly not poetry. (Bellos calls it the “ineffable,’’ acknowledging that nothing can replace for him the rock-cracking German of the opening line of Rilke’s “Duino Elegies.’’) The most piercing of Bellos’s war cries is that translation at its best is not subordinate writing, but writing. Re-creation as a form of creation. So much so that Constance Garnett remains my Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy; and subsequent translations, usually deemed an improvement, will always be impostors. It’s more than a matter of Heraclitus with his “you can’t bathe in the same river twice.’’ It’s that you can’t go over Niagara Falls twice. Garnett gave me my shove 60 years ago.
Bellos traces a form of translation back 5,000 years to the bilingual word lists incised in Sumerian clay tablets. For the most part, though, it was oral before it was written. The Romans didn’t have it; they simply imposed Latin. In the Middle Ages this remained a bridge language between the various European vernaculars; even today there is a half-hour news program in Latin on Finnish radio.
