The above is a Turkish rendition of a quote generally attributed to Charlie Chaplin. Literally, it says something like: "Life is tragedy in tight spaces, comedy in wide angle."

The original, apparently, goes like this: "Life is a tragedy when seen in closeup, but a comedy in long-shot."

I've been thinking a lot about translation recently.

The train of thought was started by this quote from Frere d'Ame (Soul Brother):

"To translate is never easy. To translate means to betray around the edges, to horse-trade, to barter one sentence for another. To translate is one of the only human activities where people are forced to lie about the details in order to report the truth as a whole. To translate is to take the risk of understanding better than others that the truth of the word is not one, but double, even triple, quadruple or quintuple. To translate is to move away from the truth of God, which, as everyone knows or thinks s/he knows, is one."


"Caution: Watch your children. Deep water." Really?

Likewise, Haleh Liza Gafori writes, in the Introduction to Gold, her inspirational version of poems by Rumi: "Translation, especially of poetry, is always a form of interpretation."

Here, she discusses the translation process. A Farsi speaker herself, she also discussed the ghazals with her mother, whose grandmother had been a storyteller. Some lines can be translated literally, but some require interpretation (and, of course, not all will agree with any given interpretation). It is also necessary to be familiar with Sufi philosophy, and alert to the way the meaning of words changes. Yet Rumi is still very accessible, she maintains, despite the eight-century gap in time.


To the point: "Yedikule Fortress restoration." The picture's nice too

Although I found Gafori's rendering extremely beautiful, I'm not really in a position to judge the translation. But others definitely rate it.

Elizabeth T. Gray, for example, herself a translator from Farsi, refers to the "contested space" that translations from this language currently inhabit. Not only are there the usual issues of translations -- does "faithful" equate to "literal" or to "free"? -- but here in particular there is also the question of decontextualization: "Lifting the 'universal poet of transcendent love' away from the historical and theological roots of his work -- the approach taken by most popular Western translations since the 18th century -- can be seen as colonial hubris, wishful thinking, religious prejudice, or scholarly ignorance." Gafori, in Gray's view, is not only eminently qualified to translate Rumi, but "also has a gift for creating free verse lines in English that capture much of the beauty and paradox in Rumi’s original". Poet and translator Sibelan Forrester comments: "Robert Frost famously said that poetry is what gets lost in translation, but that’s true only when it isn’t really a translation, when it’s just a prosy retelling. This book of Rumi’s work brings the poetry home alive." For Maria Popova, similarly, Gold reflects "the Nobel-winning Polish poet Wislawa Szymborska’s lovely notion of 'that rare miracle when a translation stops being a translation and becomes… a second original'".

Given the art form that translation represents, therefore, I was slightly horrified to read about a general slowness to acknowledge translators and their creative contribution... (And the source of that article, by the way, is Words Without Borders, which aims to promote the translation and publication of contemporary international literature: "Our publications and programs open doors for readers of English around the world to the multiplicity of viewpoints, richness of experience, and literary perspective on world events offered by writers in other languages." OK, so you have to be able to read English... Even so, it's a noble enterprise, I think.)

I can't remember which of my newsletters pointed me in the direction of another fascinating translation story (and to a much more professional and informative Language Log than mine...). This entry on "The Great Translation Movement" actually points back to an article in The Diplomat by Chauncey Jung. Appalled by the pro-Russian/anti-Ukraine Chinese-language material that was flying under the radar on the international scene, an anonymous group of Chinese dissidents "created a Twitter account to collect social media messages that support radical ideas and Russian war activities, and translate them to English, Spanish, Japanese, Korean, and other languages... Translating materials from Chinese media and social media is not a completely new task... However, the Great Translation Movement created a new channel for internet users around the world to see the rarely discussed dark side of the Chinese internet... [and] to examine many outrageous propaganda materials and the outcomes of those propaganda efforts." Needless to say, the Chinese authorities are not impressed. But the Movement reckons it has already clocked up some successes.

Anyway, inspired by all this, I thought I'd do my own bit of translation comparison, just for fun. Murder on the Orient Express. Four versions. More on that soon.


"Enough." There's something very poignant, I think, about this thin scrawl...