Translations

In pretty typical fashion, I can’t give my two cents on all the hullabaloo over  the New South’s recent edition of Huck Finn without taking a long, winding, meandering way to the point

So ‘ll start like this: half a millennium after the invention of movable type, we take it absolutely for granted that the particular arrangement of printed letters in a word is more than a representation of a sound, but something real in itself.  Something that there’s a right and a wrong way to do, a standard way and deviants.

Never mind that all oral languages are dynamic, even ones with a written counterpart. In the age of the internet forum and the text message, we’re forced to confront illusion that even printed language can ever be fixed. Spell-check be damned; now that text and type are so ubiquitous–now that the power to arrange type is held in the very palms of very young hands, via their mobile devices–not only the arrangement of letters in words, but the meaning of words, shifts more quickly than it’s ever been able to before in a literate society.  And here we find ourselves, scrapping over whether the literal text of a perennial classic can be tampered with.

One thing that much of the outrage over the “white-washing” of Huck Finn’s language misses is that Mark Twain’s original is still widely available.  And I think it will be until its language is no longer intelligible to the reading public, or until there is no more reading public to speak of. This is the most important thing to keep in mind: that the new edition exists alongside many other editions, the vast majority of which are entirely faithful to the original text.

You can pick your flavor, but I just can’t help but to see it as a valuable thing for there to be the possibility of variety. Because I see it, also, as a question of translation. If any of the millions of world readers who take their printed word in a language other than English have had the benefit of enjoying Mark Twain, they’ve done so using texts that were forced to abandon some of the author’s essential sensibilities, rendering his aesthetics as best they could given an entirely new context.  What Chinese character roughly translates to: “person whose brown skin renders him less of a person”?

As an object, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn has long ago joined the ranks of objects like the King James Bible–texts with whom most English speakers who have inherited certain ways of thinking about themselves are passingly familiar without ever having actually read, whose presence on the shelf of a household is meant to signify a certain amount of basic cultural literacy or legitimacy.  King James’s version of the Good Book, itself a translation, has since been further translated–into other versions of the English language–many times over.

And there’s a similar usefulnesss in re-translating another canonical English text to a new social context. I’m in total agreement with the oft-stated persepctive that the issue with the use of the word “nigger” in the book is America’s deep discomfort with itself and refusal to confront the truths that it operates on. As a fan of words, I’d also never deny  that the fascinating word at issue still has great usefulness, relevance, and yes, at times even merit. So you won’t find me on any “Ban the N-Word” wagon.

But there are no complaints when someone like Flaubert is re-translated into English. That’s of course because the re-translation is a new rendering of an original text that is itself inaccessible to the English-reading public. But consider that an English-language text like Huck Finn, so often banned in its own country, so often the subject of controversy in the classroom (just because there’s a child in it doesn’t mean it’s for children), and (let’s dare to be really honest here) having, at its heart, a social dynamic so particular to the uniquely American interpretation of race that it certainly confounds readers who haven’t grown up with our society’s assumptions–is in fact inaccessible, in its original form, to many readers in the context of our 21st century global culture, especially young ones. And surely the man whose seer’s scry was so spot-on that he imagined, correctly, that we’d still be interested enough in his work one hundred years after his death for him to release his autobiography at that time to wide reception could forgive us for finding new ways to keep his most beloved classic socially accessible.

Vive la difference is all I can say.