There is a hoary Cold War joke about a newly invented translating machine. On a test run, the CIA scientists feed in ‘The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak’, press the button to translate it into Russian, and then re-translate it into English. It emerges as ‘The vodka is passable, but the meat is putrid.’
Our modern translating machine is Google Translate. It takes more than one transmutation to scramble the Biblical quotation: however, if you shift it through Russian, Azerbaijani, Chinese, Hungarian, Tamil and Haitian Creole into French, you can get ‘J’aime la chair, elle était faible.’ Since the original is usually quoted by dieters reaching for a fourth cream bun, this, paradoxically, might in practice be accurate enough.
Adam Thirlwell would probably think so. His latest book is based on a wonderfully ingenious but intrinsically frustrating idea. He has enticed 48 internationally renowned writers into a multi-lingual game of Chinese Whispers. Twelve short stories or pieces are translated into more than 60 ‘multiples’, transmuting from or into English, Danish, Dutch, French, Swedish, German, Hungarian, Icelandic, Japanese, Spanish, Urdu, Hebrew, Italian, Arabic, Portuguese, Serbo-Croat and Chinese.
There will be few, if any, reviewers who can read all these languages. Thirlwell’s format, however, switches every other translation into English, so that 60 per cent of the final text will be comprehensible even to the most monoglot Brit.
Still, much of the point is lost if one cannot see how or why the distortions take place between these English versions. And if you were hoping, as I was, to glimpse the rough seams of what is truly difficult to translate between cultures, Thirlwell’s brief to his distinguished writers exacerbates the frustrations of one’s ignorance.
He describes his enterprise as an ‘experiment’; but it is one in which none of the factors are fixed (he does not even provide the reader with the 12 original pieces).The
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