Goethe said, “Beware of what you wish for in youth because you will get it in middle life”.

If I knew then what I know now, I would not wish to be a translator.

To put it simply, “How many translator millionaires do you know?”

To put it dramatically, why would someone wish to spend his life in The Caucasian Chalk Circle (CCC), where the writer and the reader keep pulling him/her in opposite directions, tearing him/her in half?

The Servant Of Two Masters

Thanks to his/her inevitable failure to meet such expectations, the stigma of infidelity has haunted him/her since the time of the Tower of Babel. When s/he is a ‘targeteer’, the translator is accused of disloyalty to the writer; when a ‘sourcerer’, to the reader; and when a fence-sitter, to both.

Nevertheless, during troublesome periods of my life, it was blissful to read, translated into Arabic, Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, Shakespeare’s Hamlet and Macbeth, Tolstoy’s War And Peace; Dostoyevsky’s Crime And Punishment.

At that time, I was oblivious to the challenges that the translators of these giant literary works had to face, tackling their huge difficulties without any modus operandi. Now I know, hopefully.

The challenges of translating literature have been analysed and discussed by almost all theorists belonging to different translation theory camps: linguistic, cultural, post-colonial and others.

Unsurprisingly, translation scholars have different views and approaches about how literature can travel from the source language (SL) to the target language (TL).

Therefore, many translation strategies and techniques have been offered by translation theorists to literary translators at the ‘wordface’.

Literal versus Free

In a world historically marked with many dichotomies such as ‘good versus evil’ and ‘fidelity versus infidelity’, a dichotomy such as the old ‘literal versus free’ has been destined to dominate translation for centuries.

Even after all the progress achieved in translation studies, these two orientations of translation, in spite of the introduction of many new dichotomies, seem to be the only ones acknowledged of outside the ‘ivory tower’ of academia.

The literal approach has high-profile ardent ‘apologists’ among translation theorists, and the free approach is in no dearth of more ardent authorities among its ‘apologists’.

While no less an authority than Nabokov states, “[i]t is when the translator sets out to render the “spirit”—not the textual sense—that he begins to traduce his author. The clumsiest literal translation is a thousand times more useful than the prettiest paraphrase”, a voice as loud in that ‘ivory tower’ as Nida’s reverberates, “adherence to the letter may indeed kill the spirit”.

At The Wordface

Answering a question about whether he employs a consistent strategy or technique in his translation practice, the very much ‘visible’ Gregory Rabassa, dubbed as the Pope of Translators, whose translation of Garcia Marquez’ One Hundred Years of Solitude was preferred by Marquez himself to his own original Spanish text, said, “I am not sure that I have any technique. I certainly have no strategy (I ammore [sic] of a tactician, if it comes to that) and I am not sure whether I have an approach or not.”

Taking into consideration the multi-faceted nature of the translation process and the multiplicity of intratextual and extratextual factors involved in the translation of literary prose, it can be concluded that, for the purpose of deciding which strategy to employ, the translator is anything but free-handed.

Each of the translator’s hands is held fast by the reader and the writer, who try to pull him/her in opposite directions out of the Caucasian Chalk Circle, where s/he is condemned to this terrible fate.