Why translation criticism is justified should not require further explanation this far into this book. All the usual reasons that can be put forward to justify any other type of art criticism also apply to the efforts of translators. The difference is that certain historical circumstances have established a tradition of turning a blind eye to these particular artists and pretending that they do not exist. What is more, many critics and editors are not unaware that translation criticism would be justified. The general situation is more a kind of collective act of repressed thought.
So why does nothing change? Besides the historical explanations already presented, there are some practical factors.
Lack of space is one, at least when it comes to book reviews (which, however, are not the only form of literary criticism). Book reviews are rarely long and should mostly consist of explaining and assessing what the author has contributed. Translation criticism also has a tendency to take up space: you wish to quote or refer to something, both in the original and in translation, and it quickly becomes a problem, given the limited space a reviewer has to work with. Such circumstances undoubtedly limit how in-depth criticism in newspapers can be. At the same time, these obstacles are not insurmountable, as demonstrated on the rare occasions when a reviewer actually treats the translator’s efforts in a reasonably acceptable way. Outside the newspapers—in literary journals, in academia, in the literary blogs sometimes depicted as the future of literary criticism—lack of space is not an acceptable excuse.
Another reason is the greater effort involved. Of course, the critic already has a lot on their plate and doesn’t want to take on another task. Assessing a translation may also seem risky, maybe because it requires you to be a bit more specific than the assessment of the author’s contribution. What’s more, it may seem time-consuming—you envisage having to read the entire original and study it in depth too, which seems to double your workload in one fell swoop. It’s not that bad, though. If you have just refreshed in your mind what can happen in the translation process, there’s no need at all to spend as much time on the original as on the translation to have an opinion on the latter: the patterns often appear quickly for those who care about looking for them. In any event, “I can‘t say anything about the translation because the translation’s all I’ve had time to read” doesn’t make sense as an excuse.
The editors of culture pages bear a large share of responsibility for things being the way they are. Obviously, they too are satisfied as long as they do not have to take on another task. Maybe they think this is something their readers or listeners don’t care about, that clicks on the culture articles would stop if critics were to write about translation? But how do they know, when they haven’t tried? In any event, little is done to secure even the most rudimentary conditions for translation criticism. Reviews of translated works are generally assigned without the editors first checking that the critic in question knows the source language. The editors rarely, if ever, help the reviewer get hold of the original text, even though publishers would certainly be willing to email the text if someone asked for it. And even though there are two artistic achievements to be assessed, it is not standard practice for a review of a translated work to be slightly longer than a review of a Swedish original (in reality, it’s usually the other way round).
The question of translation criticism inevitably becomes a question of resources. If an editorial board doesn’t pay extra for the critic to assess the efforts of translators, the critic probably won’t. And the editorial boards can always cite shrinking resources as an excuse for not getting their critics involved in the topic. While not wishing to detract from the challenges of cultural journalism in today’s digital world, we should probably ask ourselves whether “shrinking resources” are really any more than an excuse in this case? If so, can anyone remember a time when “shrinking resources” weren’t a problem for cultural journalism? Somehow it’s still survived—and if you think it’ll continue to do that, you’re back to square one. Because when will it ever be the right time otherwise? Will it rain gold coins on cultural journalism in the future? Or is Swedish translation criticism forever impossible because resources and column space must always be allocated in exactly the same way as now? How come at some point we began making space for criticism of design, computer games, radio summer programmes and sports galas?
A curious literary critic, cultural editor or ordinary reader may still find that translation criticism seems cumbersome. Where to start? What to look for? Aren’t there a lot of pitfalls? And aren’t translators a bunch of unusually sensitive souls, prone to knee-jerk retaliation against completely justified criticism?
(Another interesting question is whether all translators really want critical attention. A lot of them quite enjoy being able to weave their illusions in peace and quiet, safe from critics’ reviews . . .)
First, anyone who wants to assess a translation should avoid reading the translation as if it were an original. The text you are reading is the result of a certain interpretation of the original. Something of that ought to be noticeable in a book review or even in a purely private assessment of a translated novel.
Comparison with the original is the usual method of discovering what has happened in the translation. This does not need to be all that time-consuming and will certainly give the reader a clear, in-depth view of the original work. A good approach is to select a couple of passages that are interesting in terms of style or content and compare the original and translated versions. Then you can weigh up the positives and the negatives of what you find, and there you have a basis for your assessment.
With a newly translated classic, this is simple—just borrow the older versions and compare. In fact, it is strange that such comparisons are so seldom made when a classic is retranslated, that it is not obvious for a Swedish critic to compare the new version with at least one of the older variants, to try to put into words the differences and to ask themselves what the new interpretation means for the reader or what it says about how the framework for interpreting the author’s work has changed over time. For example, when Ulrika Wallenström’s new translation of Thomas Mann’s Doctor Faustus was published in 2015 by Albert Bonniers Förlag, only a few reviewers managed to get through the great work in question at all, but among those who did, none (as far as I can discover) critically assessed the translator’s very tangible contribution. There was certainly praise—yes, exuberant praise. But no criticism. No writer tried to describe what Wallenström had actually done, even though a reader who knew no German could have described some of the fingerprints Wallenström had left on this Doctor Faustus: it would have been simple to say something pertinent about her very personal imprint on the text by looking at the older translations.
A good way of getting a quick idea of what the translator has done is to compare the formal differences between original and translation. Is the translation significantly longer or shorter than the original? If so, what’s the reason? How has the translator handled the length of the author’s sentences and the use of punctuation marks? Are the original shifts in tense preserved? Swedish needs more verbs than many other languages—is the translation too noun-heavy? Such things may seem boring, especially if you’re in a hurry, but they often do the trick: the translator’s handling of the original’s formal aspects indicates how she has reflected the style and spirit of the work. This kind of comparison makes it possible to quickly see whether the translation has features of stylistic neutralization or whether, on the contrary, the translator has made an effort to preserve odd stylistic features. And if so—have they become too odd in the Swedish, even if well translated in themselves?
A recurring feature of poorer translations is the tendency towards lack of nuance and to generalization, for example, when “a weeping willow” turns into “a tree”, “bluetit” turns into a “small bird”, or when the adjectives do not extend past the most obvious dictionary entries, so that the characters are constantly “worried” but never “anxious”, “on edge” or “frit”. Has the sharpness of the nuances and richness of the language generally been preserved? What about the imagery and metaphors? Does everything fit together properly? The translator’s ability to keep the nuances alive is often evident in dialogues. Are they stilted when they weren’t originally? Or has the translator, on the contrary, injected life into dialogues that were rigid and lifeless in the original?
The interested reader who asks these kinds of questions and summarizes their observations will soon get a picture of what the translator has done; suddenly, the contours of the invisible demiurge appear.
There are also some typical mistakes that every translation critic should avoid. Fault-finding has already been mentioned: the petty search for typical mistakes. By the middle of the twentieth century, it was not uncommon for critics who cared to comment on a translator’s efforts only to do so when the translation had obvious shortcomings. A lot of space could then be devoted to simple misunderstandings, minor issues could be scrutinized with great care, and the translator hung out to dry as a blunderer and cultural vandal. That kind of sadistically pedantic criticism is rarely meaningful. If a translation really is poor, there is no need to devote time and attention to it, and if that cannot be avoided, then problems can be noted without being nasty about them.
More common today is also another form of fault-finding: cases where the critic fixates on a displeasing interpretation of a single word and devotes all the limited word count available for the translator’s efforts to that alone. While this might be justified for a central word that could influence the reader’s interpretation of the whole work, works and words of that kind are firstly very rare and, secondly, reviews like this almost never involve such key words, but instead just one word in the crowd that the critic got hung up on. Reviews should avoid citing specific individual examples from the text, as they too easily become focused on details instead of the artistic whole. If a translator has settled on a stylistic level that feels inappropriate, of course that should be mentioned and described. Then again, you can almost always decide not to comment when nuance has been lost from a single word where that doesn't result in any parallel loss of crucial meaning.
Clichés always get in the way of precision. Anyone attempting to describe the work of a translator should therefore avoid the most hackneyed expressions, words such as “rendering”, “true to the original” and “flawless”. When clichés of that kind appear, it’s almost always a sign that the critical judgement lacks accuracy. Even when the critics understand that the translator’s work is, for example, “a heroic achievement”, they do their utmost to avoid describing what the achievement actually consists of. In Madeleine Gustafsson’s study, about a quarter of all reviewers gave what she called “one-word reviews”, where the critics thought that they had exhaustively described the translator’s contribution with a signle word: the translation was “sensitive”, “sterling”, “idiomatic”, “smooth”, “impressive” or “excellent”. As you can see, these one-word reviews often seem like non-committal pleasantries.
That’s better than nothing, but it’s not translation criticism. Rather, the cliché is a way for the critic to get out of the actual task: write “true to the original” so you don’t need to think about what the translator has actually done.
