Authors: David Bellos

Is That a Fish in Your Ear? (9 page)

Fictions of the Foreign: The Paradox of “Foreign-Soundingness”

For most of the last century, reviewers and laymen have customarily declared in order to praise a translation to the skies that it sounds as if it had been written in English. This is hollow praise, since the selfsame community of reviewers and laymen has often shown itself unable to tell when an alleged translation
was
written in English. All the same, the high value placed on naturalness and fluency in the “target,” or “receiving,” language is a strong feature of the culture of translation in the English-speaking world today. But there are contrarian voices. If a detective novel set in Paris makes its characters speak and think in entirely fluent English, even while they plod along the boulevard Saint-Germain, drink Pernod, and scoff a
jarret de porc aux len-tille
s—then something must be wrong. Where’s the bonus in having a French detective novel for bedtime reading unless there is something French about it? Don’t we want our French detectives to sound French? Domesticating translation styles that eradicate the Frenchness of Gallic thugs have been attacked by some critics for committing “ethnocentric violence.”
¹An ethics of translation, such critics say, should restrain translators from erasing all that is foreign about works translated from a foreign tongue.

How then should the foreignness of the foreign best be represented in the receiving language? Jean d’Alembert, a mathematician and philosopher who was also co-editor of Diderot’s
Encyclopédie
, came up with an ingenious answer in 1763:

The way foreigners speak [French] is the model for a good translation. The original should speak our language not with the superstitious caution we have for our native tongue, but with a noble freedom that allows features of one language to be borrowed in order to embellish another. Done in this way, a translation may possess all the qualities that make it commendable—a natural and easy manner, marked by the genius of the original and alongside that the added flavor of a homeland created by its foreign coloring.
²

The risk of this approach is that in many social and historical circumstances the foreign-soundingness of a translation—just like the slightly unnatural diction of a real foreigner speaking French (or English, or German … )—may be rejected as clumsy, false, or even worse.

In fact, the most obvious way to make a text sound foreign is to leave parts of it in the original. Such was the convention in Britain in the Romantic era. In the earliest translation of the novel now known in English as
Dangerous Liaisons
, for instance, characters refer to and address one another by their full titles in French (
monsieur le vicomte
,
madame la présidente
) and use everyday expressions such as
Allez!
,
parbleu!
, and
ma foi!
within sentences that are in other respects entirely in English.
³Similarly, in recent translations of the novels of Fred Vargas, the lead character, Jean-Baptiste Adamsberg, retains his French rank of
commissaire
in charge of a clutch of
brigadiers
, but he talks to them in English.
⁴Following the same logic of selective foreignism, German officers in most Second World War movies made in Hollywood speak natural English interrupted at regular intervals by
Jawohl
,
Gott im Himmel
, and
Heil Hitler
.

The device may be taken much further, in popular as well as classical works. The dubbed Italian version of
Singin’ in the Rain
, though it performs miracles of lip-synch in the translation of witty patter, leaves the sound track of the title song in the original English. A famous modern production of
King Lear
in Chinese has Cordelia speaking Shakespeare’s lines—she speaks the truth to her father in the true language of her speech.
⁵

In general, however, translations only simulate the foreign-soundingness of foreign works. In fact, the challenge of writing something that sounds like English to speakers of other languages can even be met by not writing English at all.

English is heard around the world in pop songs, TV broadcasts, and so on by millions of people who do not understand the words of the lyrics, jingles, and reports. As a result there are large numbers of people who recognize the phonology of English—the kinds of sounds English makes—without knowing any English vocabulary or grammar. Some forty years ago, an Italian rock star performed a musical routine in which he pretended to be a teacher of English showing his class that you do not need to understand a single word in order to know what English sounds like. Sung to a catchy tune, Adriano Celentano’s “Prisencolinensinainciusol ol rait” is a witty and surprising simulation of what English sounds like—without being in English at all. However, the transcription of “anglogibberish” in textual form represents English-soundingness only when it is vocalized (aloud, or in your head) according to the standard rules for vocalizing
Italian
script. “Prisencolinensinainciusol ol rait,” which can be found on many currently available websites and in some cases with one of its possible transcriptions, is a specifically Italian fiction of the foreign.

It is equally possible to produce gibberish that sounds foreign
to English ears. A famous example is the song sung by Charlie Chaplin in
Modern Times
(1936). Having got a job as a singing waiter, the hapless fellow finds himself on the restaurant dance floor with the band thumping out a French music-hall tune, “Je cherche après Titine”—but he does not know the words. Chaplin dances, mimes, looks perplexed. Paulette Goddard, in the wings, mouths, “Sing!” Our lip-reading is confirmed by the intertitle: “Sing! Never Mind the Words!”

Chaplin then launches into a ditty in Generic Immigrant Romance, which for English speakers only can be represented thus:

Se bella giu satore
Je notre so cafore
Je notre si cavore
Je la tu la ti la toi

La spinash o la bouchon
Cigaretto Portabello
Si rakish spaghaletto
Ti la tu la ti la toi

Senora pilasina
Voulez-vous le taximeter?
Le zionta su la sita
Tu la tu la tu la oi

Sa montia si n’amura
La sontia so gravora
La zontcha con sora
Je la possa ti la toit

Je notre so lamina
Je notre so consina
Je le se tro savita
Je la tossa vi la toit

Se motra so la sonta
Chi vossa l’otra volta
Li zoscha si catonta
Tra la la la la la la

That sounds like French—or Italian, or perhaps Spanish—to an English speaker with no knowledge of the languages, only a familiarity with what French (or Italian, or Spanish) sounds like. The verses have no meaning, and only a few of the words are actual words of French (Italian, Spanish). The point is this: you do not have to make any sense at all to sound foreign. For the ancient Greeks, the sound of the foreign was the unarticulated, open-mouthed blabber of
va-va-va
, which is why they called all non-Greek-speakers
varvaros
, that is to say, barbarians, “blah-blah-ers.” To sound foreign is to mouth gibberish, to be dim, to be dumb: the Russian word for “German” is