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I liked these a bit better, but they all endedtoo abruptly; none felt dramatic enough to serve as a final phrase for thestory.It wasn t until I d puttered about in this sentence for several weeksthat it occurred to me I could solve the problem by recasting the sen-tence entirely.This was like the moment of inspiration that promptedSchlegel to insert a German flavoring particle into a line of Shake-speare.I realized that the main difficulty with the word context wasthat it wasn t a rhythmically appropriate word to end the sentence on; if Icould rearrange the final part of the sentence, I thought, maybe the ca-dence might be differently balanced.So I decided to try translating the man sieht ( one sees which I d rendered without much forethoughtas we see ) differently so as to turn context into the subject ratherthan the object of its phrase; then it would no longer have to conclude theEnglish sentence.I tried The story keeps on going, and the beauty of acontext appears to us and the beauty of a context reveals itself. ThesePart II: The Translator at Work228 were all near misses.Then it occurred to me to try the passive voice: and the beauty of a context is revealed. Immediately it was obvioushow much better this version was.For one thing, the story (and book)now ended on the suggestive, luminous word revealed, with a stress onthe final syllable to underscore the finality.For another, the phrase wasnow ambiguous in the same way as Walser s German, with the words acontext referring both to contexts in general and to the particular con-text at hand.Both Schlegel s translation of the line by Shakespeare and mine of asentence by Robert Walser aspire to the same thing: achieving thatunity of sense and sound that characterizes all good writing.This doesn tnecessarily mean matching the original author s work syllable for sylla-ble, rhythmically or otherwise.But the translation does have to find arhythmical identity and integrity that will convince readers they areencountering a genuine piece of writing.When we experience a text as well written, it will never be with the thought that the author first de-cided what she wanted to say and then looked around for the words toexpress it.Ideally, the what of a statement arrives on the page togetherwith the words to embody it sense accompanies sound, sound accom-panies sense.This is what Walter Benjamin describes in his essay TheTask of the Translator as an organic relationship: the language of anoriginal text, he writes, is like the skin of a fruit that has grown togetherwith it, while that of the translation is like royal robes draped about it.When people complain about translationese, it s generally because theyfeel this sound/sense unity has not been achieved.In my translations, this unity tends to arise during the process of re-vision, which is where the real work of writing occurs.Blocking out therough contours of a sentence or a paragraph is a preparatory exercise tohearing the text s heartbeat in the cadences of its phrases.To immerseoneself fully in the work of translation is to become a medium, transcribinga text that exists only as a sort of phantasm in the translator s imagination:the text that is just like the original but written in a different language.Revising means listening to a potential text, hearing it amid all the rhyth-mical detritus of inadequate versions.With each successive draft, thetext draws closer to the ideal form it will inhabit when its transformationis complete.The process of repeatedly subtracting whatever isn t working,replacing it with stronger material, is difficult to grasp, describe, and teach.In the end, it is a matter of learning to calibrate dissatisfaction, to judgewhen a sentence can still be improved on and when a solution perfectTranslation and the Art of Revision229 or imperfect should be left to stand.The best translators are particularlysuspicious of the intermediate drafts of their work, of their own abilityto produce good enough translations.And the point of all this dogged labor and persistence? To give theimpression of effortless-sounding rightness.Although the vision in revi-sion implies something visual, revising has less to do with somethingseen than with something heard: the text s voice.Voice is the crux of alltranslating.Hearing it happens on a noncognitive level, but approachingthe text cognitively while listening can help.Are the dominant vowels ina passage bright, soft, or dark? What about the consonants? Sharp andjagged, or sonorous and smooth?Syntax too requires attention, as different languages have differentways of assembling sentences.Sometimes the best translation is one whosesyntactical structure bears little resemblance to that of the original.Atthe same time, it is important to be conscious of the order in which infor-mation arrives.Every sentence is a journey that begins with a particu-lar phrase or image and takes the reader somewhere.So what does theitinerary of a particular sentence look like, and where does it lead?When I am revising, I pay particular attention to endings: the endingsof phrases, sentences, and paragraphs.In writing poetry, it goes with-out saying that a line s final word carries particular weight; the sameholds true in prose.I often work to sharpen my sentences by endingthem on a strong note, even if this means deviating from the syntax ofthe original.Style can go soggy in translation.It is important to counteract thissoftening trend whenever feasible.This might involve exaggerating cer-tain stylistic features in fact, I believe that emphasizing and under-scoring a text s characteristic attributes is crucial to good translation, away of turning up the volume on a key aspect of a sentence or phrase tosolidify the writer s voice in the translation.I put this technique intopractice in the final sentence of my translation of Hermann Hesse s novelSiddhartha (Modern Library, 2006), concluding a scene in which Sid-dhartha s companion Govinda realizes that Siddhartha has attained en-lightenment.My first draft of the sentence looked like this:Deeply he [Govinda] bowed, down to the earth (ground), before theone motionlessly sitting there, whose smile reminded him of every-thing that he had ever loved in all his life, everything that had ever inall his life been dear and holy to him.Part II: The Translator at Work230 Tief verneigte er sich, bis zur Erde, vor dem regungslos Sitzenden,dessen Lächeln ihn an alles erinnerte, was er in seinem Leben jemalsgeliebt hatte, was jemals in seinem Leben ihm wert und heilig gewe-sen war.This sentence in German has a feeling of balance and suspension, inlarge part thanks to the chiasmus at its center that unfortunately doesn twork so well in English (Hesse writes the equivalent of: in his lifeever . . .ever in his life ).In revising the sentence, I looked for ways tocompensate for the weakened chiasmus and create the sense that all thesearching and frantic motion we have seen throughout the novel hasgiven way to stillness and peace. Holy is not the final word of the Ger-man text.Because of German syntactical rules, the last words of Hesse sbook are the equivalent of had been. But it seemed to me that ending thesentence (and book) on the resonant word holy would underscore thepeace that lies at the end of Siddhartha s quest
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