IF YOU SEE THE TRANSLATOR, DON’T SHOOT By Steven G. Kellman *** The Montréal Review, July 2026 |
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“People love to hate translators!” *** In 1901, when Constance Garnett transposed the Russian text of Анна Каренина into the Victorian English of Anna Karenin (note her spelling), she was performing an act of what would later be called – and reviled as – “cultural appropriation.” Because language is an expression of culture, all literary translation is in fact cultural appropriation, the conversion of one culture’s discourse into the words of another culture. Whether one agrees or not with Vladimir Nabokov’s complaint that Garnett was “totally lacking verbal talent” (Nabokov 38), she possessed the power to reassemble great Russian novels into a fastidious Englishwoman’s verbal clusters, non-Cyrillic words that were noticeably more demure than Tolstoy’s, Dostoyevsky’s, and Gogol’s Russian ones. Although the Oxford English Dictionary dates the first use of the term “cultural appropriation” to 1945, the practice was common even before Roman society abducted the Greek deities, renaming Zeus as Jupiter, Hera as Juno, Athena as Minerva, Aphrodite as Venus, Ares as Mars, Poseidon as Neptune, et al. Each of the thousands of translations of the Bible alters the Gospel through the prism of the target language. For languages as distant from Hebrew and Greek as Basque, Cherokee, Igbo, Pashto, and Quechua, translators usually offer analogous idioms rather than word-for-word equivalences. They import and domesticate the sacred texts into the target cultures. The differences among translations into the same language demonstrate varied purposes of appropriation. Among dozens of English versions, the Douay-Rheims Bible of 1610 advances Roman Catholic theology, whereas The King James Version of 1611 was designed to support the Anglican Church. It is precisely because appropriation entails alteration that translation has encountered antipathy. Tampering with the words of a holy text has been condemned by some as sacrilege. An exception is the Book of Mormon, which the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints claims is itself a translation by Joseph Smith of golden plates inscribed in “reformed Egyptian.” Since Smith is said to have returned the plates to the Angel Moroni, the English translation is the sole remaining sacred text. In most other cases, however, translation poses a challenge to the authority of the holy word. Since Muslims believe that the Qur’an was received verbatim by the Prophet Muhammad in a series of revelations from the Angel Gabriel, it is the Arabic text alone that carries divine authority: “It is an Islamic dogma that the Quran cannot be translated. This is to say that Allah revealed it in Arabic, and the Arabic language itself is the body of his words” (Maruta 177). When a version shows up in another language, Muslims tend to call it an “interpretation” rather than a “translation.” In medieval Europe, translating the Vulgate (the authorized Latin translation of the Bible) into a vernacular language meant ignoring the Church’s authority and providing lay Christians direct access to the word of God without the mediation of priests. When John Wycliffe and his followers made the Bible available in Middle English, Pope Gregory XI and his successor, Pope Urban VI, persecuted them. After Wycliffe’s death in 1384, he was declared a heretic, and his writings were banned. In 1428, by order of Pope Martin V, his corpse was exhumed and burned. Although that should have been a stark warning to any other aspiring translator, a little more than a century later, William Tyndale became another translation martyr, the victim of hostility toward transposing Scripture into a language that ordinary people could understand. While in exile in continental Europe, he drew directly from Hebrew and Greek to produce the first printed Bible in English. He cited that Bible in attacking Henry VIII’s attempt to secure an annulment of his marriage to Catherine of Aragon and in his writings about the divine right of kings, free will, and Church authority. In 1536, Tyndale was convicted of heresy and executed by strangulation, after which his body was burned at the stake. Most other translators have met more peaceful ends, without attracting much public attention. Throughout literary history, translators have conducted their business offstage. Exceptions would include “The River Merchant’s Wife: A Letter” (1915), most of whose readers, unaware of its source in Li Bai, think of it as a poem by Ezra Pound; “The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyám” (1859), which has entered the canon of English literature as the work of Edward Fitzgerald; and “When You Are Old” (1893), known generally as a poem by William Butler Yeats, rather than a loose adaptation of the French of Pierre de Ronsard. However, titling his survey of the history of translation The Translator’s Invisibility, Lawrence Venuti noted how often the translator of a text remains anonymous, absent from the title page and not even identified at all. When the aim is to produce a book that reads as if written in the reader’s own language, all traces of translation are avoided. The merest hint of a translator – like the intrusion of a boom mic into a Hollywood drama – becomes, at best, an embarrassment. As Venuti observes, “The more fluent the translation, the more invisible the translator, and, presumably, the more visible the writer or meaning of the foreign text” (Venuti 1). Machine translation is often far from fluent, but the identity of the translator is an algorithmic abstraction given names such as Google Translate, DeepL Translator, Baidu Translate, and Yandex Translate. Artificial intelligence extends the tradition of invisibility exemplified by the seventy-two anonymous Hebrew sages who, according to legend, produced the Septuagint. Nevertheless, the translator of Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses into Japanese lost his invisibility, and his life, in 1991. Hitoshi Igarashi had remained relatively obscure after rendering Avicenna’s The Canon of Medicine (1989) in Japanese. However, following the fatwa issued by the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini against anyone involved in the publication of Rushdie’s allegedly blasphemous novel, Igarashi, its translator, was stabbed to death outside his office at Tsukuba University in Tokyo. A few days earlier, the book’s Italian translator, Ettore Caprioli, had managed to survive a violent attack in his apartment in Milan. The author, Rushdie himself, was stabbed repeatedly onstage at the Chautauqua Institution in 2022. Visibility can be hazardous for either the author or the translator. Both translation and espionage are most effectively conducted covertly, and both entail split allegiances. C.K. Scott Moncrieff did gain some fame as the first translator of Marcel Proust’s seven-volume novel into English, but he also served as a British intelligence agent in fascist Italy. Until his duplicity was uncovered, Corporal Daniel James, who served as interpreter for General David Richards, the British commander of NATO forces in Afghanistan, was providing confidential intelligence to Iran, the country of his birth. While working as an interpreter for Nazi officers in her native Brittany, Jeannie Rousseau was passing on to the French Resistance information about the German occupation. By spying on behalf of their native countries, Moncrieff, James, and Rousseau could be said to have been acting as patriots. However, in combat zones in which military forces rely on local interpreters to communicate with the native population, the old Italian bromide traduttore traditore (the translator is a traitor) frequently applies literally. The Nahua woman known as La Malinche who served as interpreter – and consort – to Hernán Cortés has long been reviled for her complicity in the Spanish conquest of Mexico in the early sixteenth century. In the seventeenth century, during mounting tensions between the indigenous Wampanoag and the Pilgrim colonists that would culminate in King Philip’s War, the bilingual Wampanoag John Sassamon attempted to serve as intermediary between the two sides. Resentment of Sassamon’s apparent treachery toward his own people led three Wampanoag men to murder him. Likewise, native speakers who assisted U.S. military forces in both Iraq and Afghanistan were often regarded as turncoats by their compatriots but also held in suspicion by the troops they were helping. They often paid with their lives for the mere appearance of collusion with a foreign invader. Even before the United States abandoned Afghanistan to the Taliban, the International Refugee Assistance Project “estimated that an Afghan interpreter was being killed every 36 hours” (Frail). The title of George Packer’s 2008 play Betrayed seems to echo the hoary adage about translators as traitors. Drawn from Packer’s reporting from Iraq for The New Yorker, the play follows two Iraqi translators caught between a country that regards them as traitors and another that finds them useful but is indifferent to their fate. Since no one loves the translator, losing their invisibility could mean losing their lives. Armed with only a poem and a dictionary, translators smash through national boundaries. They are the foes of those opposed to the global literary marketplace. Amanda Gorman entered that marketplace on January 20, 2021 with a histrionic poem titled “The Hill We Climb” that she read at the Capitol in Washington at the presidential inauguration of Joe Biden. Though only 723 words long, it was published by Viking as a 32-page book, with a foreword by Oprah Winfrey, and became an immediate bestseller in the United States. At twenty-two, Gorman was the youngest poet ever to read at an inauguration, and her dramatic presentation a few weeks after an attack on the Capitol aroused considerable interest throughout the world. Her book has to date also been published in Dutch, French, German, Italian, Spanish, and Swedish editions. Surveying the rapidity and pervasiveness of translation in the contemporary literary marketplace, Rebecca L. Walkowitz argues that many works are what she calls “born translated” – written to exist simultaneously in several languages. Goethe’s dream of Weltliteratur has been realized in a world in which a work of literature is readily available in many of the languages of the world. Because of its brevity, its simple vocabulary and syntax, and banal imagery (The poem concludes: “For there is always light, if only we’re brave enough to see it./ If only we’re brave enough to be it”), “The Hill We Climb” seems born translated. However, at least two translations of it have been born troubled. The Amsterdam publisher Meulenhoff, with Gorman’s approval, commissioned Marieke Lucas Rijneveld to translate “The Hill We Climb” into Dutch. At twenty-nine, Rijneveld, who identifies as non-binary, had become the youngest author and the first Dutch author to win the prestigious International Booker Prize, for a novel called The Discomfort of Evening. Rijneveld’s age, accomplishment, and rebelliousness made them seem what Meulenhoff called the “ideal candidate” to take on this translation. However, the choice was attacked on social media and in print. In de Volkskrant, Janice Deul called Rijneveld “an incomprehensible choice.” Deul, a Dutch activist and journalist, argued that the appropriate translator should, like Gorman, also be “a spoken word artist, young, female and: unapologetically Black” (Deul). The publisher issued this response to the growing opposition to its choice of translator:
However, those similarities between translator and author were not enough. A day after accepting the assignment, Rijneveld, who is White, backed out, replaced by Zaïre Krieger, a spoken word artist in both Dutch and English; like Gorman, she is Black. The Catalan publisher Univers, which had hired Victor Obiols to translate Gorman’s poem, soon dismissed him; he was both the wrong race and the wrong gender for the assignment. Rijneveld was apologetic about the discord caused by her choice as translator. Like defendants in the Moscow Show Trials who blamed themselves for bogus crimes they were accused of, Rijneveld deplored the benefits of White privilege and withdrew from the project, explaining:
The irony is that those who endorse racial category as a legitimate basis for choosing a translator contradict Gorman’s own words when she writes that “. . . to put our future first, we must put our differences aside” (Liu, line 23). What qualifies a person to be a literary translator other than bilingualism and a facility with words? To disparage translation as cultural appropriation unless the translator comes from the same background as the author would be to insist that only Russian nobles can translate Pushkin, only neurasthenic Jews can translate Kafka, and only blind bards can translate Homer. Furthermore, each of us is a compound of many qualities – race, gender, class, age, nationality, education, ideology, height, weight, etc. To privilege one of those qualities, race, and make it the basis for choosing a translator is unwarranted. It seems foolish to demand that Chinua Achebe be translated into Japanese by another Black. Moreover, the fundamental premise that the best translator is the one who has the most in common with the author is moot. For one thing, its logical extension would be an insistence that autotranslation – in which author and translator are identical – is the only satisfactory translation. When Samuel Beckett, Karen Blixen, André Brink; Ariel Dorfman, Jhumpa Lahiri, Vladimir Nabokov; and others have translated their own work, the result has often been remarkable, but not even Nabokov was polyglot enough to render Lolita in Hindi, Catalan, and more than a dozen other languages in which it has been published. Nor are authors necessarily more skilled at translation than anyone else. Translators have been discarding their own invisibility in part because they want their presence to be acknowledged. Books do not spontaneously spring forth in multiple languages but rather by the agency of particular individuals. A movement has been gaining momentum – and the support of some publishers – to include the name of the translator on the covers of translated books. But translators’ visibility has also meant that they have become targets of attack in the wars over cultural appropriation. Since translation is interpretive performance, the case of Amanda Gorman has collided with the taboo against whitewashing, casting White actors in non-White roles. Laurence Olivier’s performance, in blackface, in the lead in the 1965 film Othello now seems a bit icky, as does Natalie Wood’s impersonation of the Puerto Rican Maria in the 1961 West Side Story, Alec Guinness and Anthony Quinn as Arabs in Lawrence of Arabia (1962), and Jeff Chandler as Cochise in Broken Arrow (1950). Yet acting is inherently an exercise in negative capability, in becoming an Other. The relevant question should be how well the Gentiles Bradley Cooper and Helen Mirren impersonate, respectively, Leonard Bernstein in Maestro (2023) and Golda Meir in Golda (2023), not that they dare to do it at all. Whereas screen actors stand in front of a camera, literary translators sit at a keyboard. They are usually far removed from public gaze. To the general reading public, even the most famous translators – e.g., David Bellos, Edith Grossman, Stephen Mitchell, Gregory Rabassa – are usually less well-known than the authors they translate, even when they share billing on the cover of a book. John Keats’s sonnet “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer” celebrates a powerful translation of The Iliad and The Odyssey, and it acknowledges the translator, Chapman. However, it does not even mention his first name. If John Chapman – whose rendition of Homer is rarely read today – is known at all now, it is because of the Keats poem. The most influential translation in English is known for the monarch who commissioned it, James I, rather than the forty-seven scholars who labored from 1604 to 1608 to produce an English version of the Bible. None of them is usually credited anywhere in the book. Lancelot Andrewes is the only one of its translators who might be remembered today, because T.S. Eliot devoted an essay to him, not as a Biblical translator but as the author of sermons that “rank with the finest English prose of their time, of any time” (Eliot 290). In strained relationships, it is not uncommon to accuse an interlocutor of misinterpreting what one said. “That is not what I meant at all,” someone complains to Eliot’s Prufrock. “That is not it, at all.” During the 2011 corruption trial of Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich, lead prosecutor Reid Schar used one of Blagojevich’s own statements to insinuate that he was seeking a bribe in exchange for appointing someone to the Senate seat vacated by Barack Obama. The defendant angrily shot back: “With all due respect, Mr. Schar, you’re twisting my words” (“Blagojevich”). However, translators are in the business of twisting words. If they were obliged to be totally faithful to their source, they would simply repeat it verbatim, as if the most accurate translation of “To be, or not to be, that is the question” into Bulgarian is: “To be, or not to be, that is the question.” But reiteration is redundancy, not rendition. To translate is to transfer what is expressed in one culture into the terms of another. By its very nature, that is cultural appropriation. Appropriators vary in their purposes and talents, which is why new versions of Don Quixote in English keep appearing year after year. There have been at least four new renditions – by Adrian Mitchell (2010), Charles J. Schmitt (2018), Tom Lathrop (2020), and Jonathan Rutherford (2020) – since Ilan Stavans surveyed twenty translations of the Cervantes novel in 2015. Readers should expect translators, regardless of their identity, to be accurate, adroit, and respectful of their sources. Translators expect neither calumny nor glory.
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Art Note: David Hammons, African American Flag, 1990. The American flag rendered in the Pan-African colors of red, black, and green — translation as transformation, appropriation as counter-appropriation. From the exhibition Project a Black Planet: The Art and Culture of Panafrica, MACBA – Museu d'Art Contemporani de Barcelona, November 6, 2025 – April 6, 2026.
