Translation is a matter of life and death — and not only because it is poorly paid. That’s the thrilling, rather chilling, message of this wonderful history by translator and interpreter Anna Aslanyan, who blesses jaw-dropping and entertaining tales with an insider’s insight. “It’s much like dancing on ropes with fettered legs,” wrote 17th-century poet John Dryden on translating Ovid’s Epistles. Dryden, Aslanyan and fellow practitioners have danced on ropes for centuries, risking their lives, becoming entangled in diplomatic and legal battles and, on occasion, changing the course of history.
We are thrown straight into tricky cold-war-era exchanges between Russian leader Nikita Khrushchev, US presidents John F Kennedy and Richard Nixon and others, when a rash of new or newly relevant words, such as sputnik, disarmament, deployment and blockade, challenged the superpowers’ interpreters. On Khrushchev’s first visit to the US, in 1959, his interpreter, Viktor Sukhodrev, displayed great ingenuity and diplomacy in conveying his boss’s bombast, ignorance or “extemporaneous forays into Russian folk wisdom” by discreetly correcting him and providing acceptable equivalents.
Khrushchev was obviously impressed on his visit to IBM in California although keen to show he had not fallen for capitalism: “Every kulik praises his own bog,” he said dismissively. But how to translate “kulik”, a type of bird, for his hosts? “He extricated himself,” Aslanyan writes, “with the impromptu ‘Every duck praises its own pond’; one of his American colleagues used the dictionary definition, ‘snipe’; a newspaper report offered another variant, featuring ‘snake’ and ‘swamp’. The next day another paper ran a story headlined ‘Cold War between interpreters’.”
Among 20th-century leaders, Stalin was the interpreters’ dream (assuming they stayed alive), speaking in short, clear sentences and regularly praising his translator, Vladimir Pavlov. Pavlov was self-effacing, choosing not to be photographed with the protagonists, unlike many of his peers, but still shared the professional hazard of all interpreters: hunger. As the leaders wined and dined he was whispering in Stalin’s ear.
The 1945-46 Nuremberg Trials of leading Nazis showed how complex translation could be in an era of emerging technology. The equipment in the multichannel, simultaneous translation booths included miles of cables, hundreds of headsets and dozens of switchboxes, and arrived just five days before the trials. Thirty-six interpreters, “a motley crew” of ghetto survivors, refugees, journalists and academics, worked in German, French, English and Russian. Despite the chaos and unparalleled stress, and English-speaking defendants interfering with the translations — Hermann Göring complained that interpreters were biased or wrong in explaining the meaning of the “Final Solution” — the course of justice proceeded.
Aslanyan traces the origins of the translator-diplomat back to the Ottoman dragoman figure, particularly Alexander Mavrocordato, born to Greek parents in 1641, “a polyglot who knew Ottoman, Persian, Arabic, Greek, Latin, French, Italian and probably also German and Romanian”. He became a linguistic, cultural and political intermediary between east and west, negotiating peace between the Habsburgs and the Ottomans.
Translation has been a risky business since at least the dragoman era. During the 19th-century “Great Game”, when the UK and Russia competed to carve up central Asia, Aslanyan tells us, Britain’s Alexander Burnes and Russia’s Alexander Griboedov were both hacked to death in the line of linguistic duty.
History’s more flamboyant translators provide the book’s great colour and joy. I loved the story of Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi and his Italian-Russian translator Ivan Melkumjan. Only someone as flashy as Berlusconi himself could do his interpreting, and when he was introduced to Melkumjan, an Armenian opera singer, he met his match. Melkumjan’s success in conveying Berlusconi’s jokes and extravagant linguistic flourishes took him to the top table, amusing even Russian president Vladimir Putin.
Aslanyan is an enthusiastic storyteller interested in extracting the lessons from history for her profession: understanding cultural context, a country’s laws and politics and interpreting the spirit, register or intention of the author are as essential as clear and logical language. She also gives us the whole glorious history of human communication in this relatively short volume, sketching out varied theories of translation from St Jerome to Umberto Eco.
She outlines today’s dangers to her trade: frontline translators, as in Afghanistan, are still risking their lives; inadequate translation in courts jeopardises justice; translation and interpreting across the world are underfunded and under-appreciated; and the UK’s decline in language-learning and cultural narrowing are hindrances to the country’s interests.
For example, the 2018 Brexit white paper was, she writes, “in parts translated spectacularly badly . . . Many Europeans believed that the fiasco illustrated how badly the UK government was prepared for Brexit and how little it cared about Europe.” Translation is at the heart of human understanding — and misunderstanding.
Dancing on Ropes: Translators and the Balance of History by Anna Aslanyan, Profile Books £16.99, 272 pages
Rosie Goldsmith is director of the European Literature Network
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