In other words

A practitioner describes the love, loss, and limits involved in the fine art of translation

(BRIAN STAUFFER)

The greatest theatrical, literary, and musical works are magnetic - they continually attract reinterpretation and modernization. Mozart's 220-year-old "Don Giovanni" has been updated with bra-and-panty-clad choristers, Shakespeare's 400-year-old "A Midsummer Night's Dream" with rock 'n' roll. Aristophanes's plays have been slangified to hell and back, and Dante's "Commedia" has turned up in every literary style from terza rima to no rima at all.

Which brings me to literary translators and that easy Italian pun, "traduttore/traditore," by which the world knows us. Toss the term into Google and it turns up a website that declares: "Translator, you're a traitor!"

True, no translation can reproduce the full vitality, power, subtlety, and excitement of an original work. And true, too, there are bad translations. But faulty as translations can be, imagine, if you can, a world in which the Bible had remained Hebrew and the New Testament Greek.

Most writers in foreign languages don't worry about treason. Dead writers, of course, can't complain. But living writers without best-selling clout do not live in dread of being betrayed by a translator, particularly if the translation is going to be into English. Ask any translator into English, from any language, about the unsolicited manuscripts and appeals for translation he or she receives. Further, there is Man Booker International Prize winner Ismail Kadare, who writes in Albanian. His works are translated into French, then retranslated into English. When awarded the British prize in 2005, Kadare was asked to choose one or more of his translators to receive the ancillary translator's prize of roughly $28,000. He named only David Bellos, his "retranslator" from French to English. So much for treason squared.

Most reviewers of translated books don't worry about treason, either. In fact they don't seem to know that translators exist. They rarely mention translators' names and generally report on translated books as if the texts were born in English. Reviewers seem unaware that any but certain well-marketed translations, a "new" Proust, Kafka, or Tolstoy, were written in foreign languages.

It is generally suggested to reviewers that a translated work ought to read "naturally and smoothly." While it is true that an English translation of a foreign work should read as if the author were a native speaker of English, this standard lulls reviewers into thinking that smoothly flowing prose is indicative of a "faithful" rendition of the foreign author's words. Yet without reading the original work, no reviewer can be sure that a translator has not gentrified or bowdlerized the original text. Writing in The Guardian in 2005, Adam Thirlwell cited "excellent translations" of Tolstoy's "War and Peace" by Constance Garnett, Rosemary Edmonds, and Louise and Aylmer Maude. But the recent spate of new translations of the novel have called the fidelity of these translations, particularly of Garnett's, into question. We now know that while "sitting in the garden throwing off reams of her marvelous translations," as D. H. Lawrence noted, Garnett was blithely discarding difficult passages and cleaning up unsavory masculine dialogue. Yet it is her first rendering of the doings of the Rostov family that made them beloved to us.

Each of us brings our values, backgrounds, and tastes to every experience, including reading. Up in the higher echelons of culture, diverse judgments and reactions can seem amazingly and exasperatingly cockeyed. Tolstoy found Shakespeare's works "insignificant and empty." Rebecca West found Tolstoy's intellect wanting. Vladimir Nabokov denounced Garnett's Victorian versions of Tolstoy as "a complete disaster." Yet he produced so literal a translation of Pushkin's "Eugene Onegin" that Edmund Wilson considered it devoid of poetry.

We literary translators may be the only people in the world who read a work with as much attention to each word and each punctuation mark as the original author, but we, too, bring our own values, tastes, and backgrounds to a work. Like directors, actors, and musicians, we start out with what we're given - notes on a staff, words on a page. When we discover passion, beauty, or cosmic or comic pleasures in an unknown work, when we find grace, poetry, or depths previously overlooked in a well-known work, we feel not only a desire, but a responsibility to bring them to public attention.

When I judged the Poggioli translation awards, almost every manuscript submitted was begun by a translator armed with nothing more than faith in and love for the chosen material, and a dream of publication. But while awards and grants help subsidize worthwhile translation efforts, they do not guarantee publication. Translators seeking publication of an unknown author must, in their own time and at their own expense, undertake the tedious, costly, and frustrating task of submitting their work to publishers. Letters go unanswered. Manuscripts are held for months, even years, and may be lost. "Translators, not publishers," says Esther Allen, director of the Center for Literary Translation at Columbia and herself a noted translator, "are the ones who keep on pushing until a project finally comes out in English." How long can that take? For my first published translation of a Massimo Bontempelli novel, I can attest to 20 years.

Does my translation transmit Bontempelli's prose perfectly? Probably not to every Italian reader's satisfaction. But neither did I betray him. If his work proves interesting and important to future generations, there will be other translations that offer insights into his style, views, and vocabulary that I may have failed to bring to light. In the 140 years of its existence, "War and Peace" has been translated into English 12 times.

It would be satisfying to think that with every new translation, every catching up with contemporary scholarship and contemporary speech, with renewed scrutiny of every word and thought in any work, we come closer to a perfect and agreed-upon understanding of the writer's message. But that doesn't happen.

As we have through the centuries, we uncover, interpret, and reinterpret to the best of our abilities, and as closely as two languages will permit, the work of brilliant, pedantic, hateful, loving, disturbing, soothing writers, poets, and thinkers, so that readers, no matter how distant in time and space from them, can taste the wealth of their offerings.

Estelle Gilson is a writer and translator. She can be reached at EstelleGilson.com.