Sympathy for the Traitor

March 26, 2018
With impressive breadth and scrupulous detail, translator Polizzotti (Revolution of the Mind) offers a manifesto about what translation is, what it should be, and why it is important. His primary claim is that “literary translation serves a purpose somewhat adjacent to the roles of cultural reeducation or global unity that we tend to assign to it.” Instead, he suggests, translation should “safeguard those distances it supposedly is meant to bridge,” not by “keeping cultures apart” but by making sure “the contact produces sparks rather than suffocation.” His book functions as a short but representative introduction to the millennia-long debate about whether a translation should be absolutely equivalent to the source text or take liberties with the original phrasing to capture the work’s “spirit.” Polizzotti’s examples include St. Jerome’s translation of the Bible from Hebrew to Latin, Walter Benjamin’s critical essay on the craft of translation, and various historical instances of mistranslations with major geopolitical ramifications (such as Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev’s famous boast “My vas pokhoronim,” translated by his personal interpreter as “We will bury you,” which historians have since suggested might more accurately be rendered as “We will outlast you”). Polizzotti’s book is suffused with expertise and displays his decades of experience in incisively capturing the nuances of an esoteric discipline, while also offering a passionate defense of his trade’s larger value.

May 15, 2018

Polizzotti (publisher & editor in chief, Metropolitan Museum of Art; Revolution of the Mind: The Life of André Breton) is credited with more than 50 translations, including works by Gustave Flaubert, Marguerite Duras, and Nobel Laureate Patrick Modiano. The title of this book presents a twined allusion--to the Rolling Stones' "Sympathy for the Devil" and to the Italian patronym "traduttore, traditore" (translator, traitor). Purists maintain that translation is a linguistic and cultural betrayal and appropriation of the original. Polizzotti admits that translations are inherently tainted and biased, but he rejects the conservative practice of slavish fidelity to original style, cadence, and rhetoric. His manifesto proclaims that translation, borne of linguistic, historical, and cultural empathy for context, must be an interpretation and representation of the initial work, resulting in a felicitous and creative rendering of that text. His argument is reinforced with numerous examples from translated works and commentary on the controversies of translation practice, including machine translation, the ethics of translation, and political correctness. VERDICT An important contribution to the craft of translation.--Lonnie Weatherby, McGill Univ. Lib., Montreal

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