There is the old adage ‘If you can’t say something nice, don’t say it at all’ which is at least worth taking a deep breath and considering before revealing your thoughts.  On the other hand, if you don’t tell the truth how will you, yourself, be trusted?

I’m talking about a book here, not a neighbor I’m sharing a church pot-luck with. Though, it is not the book itself, it is a particular translator’s rendition of that book, and I have to say it: the English version of A Mind At Peace, Ahmed Hamdi Tanpinar’s 1949 Turkish novel, is all but unreadable.  I’ve never said that about a translation before; I don’t like to say it.  I wouldn’t say it if I could wiggle out of it but after the first 10 pages I started skipping  to 10 other pages and not one was without problems.

Sure you can read it in English, just as you can ride up a centuries old, unmaintained, cobbled road in buckboard.  You’ll get to your destination but you won’t be happy.  You’ll need a hot bath, an Excedrin and good  night’s sleep.

Here are the opening lines:

“Mumtaz has not set out on a substantial walk since his paternal cousin Ihsan, a brother to him, had succumbed to illness.  Aside from tasks like summoning the physician, taking prescriptions to the pharmacist to be filled, and making calls from the neighbor’s telephone, he’d while away the measure of the week at his cousin’s sickbed…..”

later…” An entire household slept and woke with the remorse of Ihsan’s affliction.”

or,”Mumtaz again rose to sorrow from sleep that train whistles had bloodied with altogether different anxieties.”

That’s enough for now.  These are all understandable but so is, to a degree, tourist pidgin in any big city in the world.  It’s not enough that an important novel be understandable; it must become a novel in its own right, singing, swaying, punching, surprising in English (French, Russian, Mandarin….) as it does in the original.

If the original is as awkward as this English, then there is another problem at hand.  How to translate Faulkner’s Benjy into Catalan, or Vietnamese?  Excellent translators will wrestle with that.  They may fail, or succeed but according to the requirement that Benji stay Benjy and still be understood.

My guess is that Erdağ Göknar,the translator, and professor of Turkish Studies at Duke, is not a native English speaker; in fact I suspect he didn’t begin speaking it until after the onset of puberty, and then not in an English speaking country.  I’m sure he is quite understandable in front of the class or would be an interesting dinner or drink companion, in English.  What is clear to me is that his rendition of A Mind at Peace does not make the mark of a good, much less excellent, translation into English.

What to do? Get help!

The Pevear’s, with their recent translations into English of many of the great Russian classics, have it figured out. Larissa Volokhonsky, as I have heard it, speaks no English.  Her husband  Richard Pevear does, as well as the Russian to talk to his wife.  Through exhaustive collaboration, they have come up with highly praised renditions of Dostoevsky, Gogol, Tolstoy, Chekov and others.

I myself collaborated with a Spanish poet and translator for several months.  It was a rewarding, indispensible, tough undertaking and began with mutual admissions of knowing that we did not know what we wished we knew.  In the end we both produced work which, without the other, could not have been done, or at least, done as well.

My unhappiness is that a translation like this puts a moat around an important work which will not disappear for a generation or so, preventing us from reading an important Turkish novel.

It’s interesting that Göknar is cited as the translator of Orhan Pamuk’s “My Name is Red.”  I’ve read two Pamuk novels, “The White Castle,” and “Snow.” I wasn’t pulled in by either and although I didn’t find “Snow” a compelling novel, it wasn’t because of Maureen Freely‘s translation, which doesn’t miss a beat. The characters trapped in the snow of Kars and the tensions between Islamic and Western values speak just like Turks whose native language is English. With evident bonafides like the translation of Pamuk’s first entry into the English reading world, I’ll give Göknar another try and see how “My Name is Red,” reads.

If it avoids sentences like this — “With an extremely cruel and hangdog face he’d made a mockery of himself,” — I’ll be happy.