literature between form and content. The translator supplies not content, but form, and he is usually attracted to translation by the opportunity to work with form. Similarly, lawyers love process; they don’t decide what cases to bring or what deals to negotiate, but are attracted by the opportunity to accomplish them, to take them through the necessary processes. Like the lawyer, the translator has to put aside his personal differences with the substance of what he is processing. His job, his fiduciary responsibility—to use legal jargon—is to go through the process of re-languaging it.
Process versus substance, form versus content, are distinctions made by legal and literary theorists, but for lawyers and translators they are matters not to be fought over polemically, but rather to be balanced time and time again. The profundity of these concepts comes from accumulation, the piling up of experience, rather than from theoretical excavation.
The process of translation is a trial, from beginning to end: discovering and building the evidence (knowledge of the author’s works, of the cultural and artistic context of his works, and often of his life); interpreting the evidence (figuring out what the original means and what’s most essential to it, and then determining the range of alternatives); and making numerous judgments and decisions. It’s not particularly ironic that one of the books to be featured in this book, one of the most procedural novels of our century, that is, one in which process is most substance, is Franz Kafka’s Der Prozess, translated into English as The Trial.
A legal education, followed by legal practice, leads one to value words as commitments, to see one’s job as the representation of another, and to prefer process over substance, form over content. One cannot be a first-rate translator without all this, but it’s not really a very practical way to prepare. And in the real world it’s hard to pass by a hefty legal income, especially with all the school loans to repay. So where do literary translators come from? What kind of backgrounds do they have in the real world? Unsurprisingly, translators — whether professors or laypeople — get into translation for a variety of reasons and come into it from a range of directions.
One of the most peculiar factoids about translators is that
almost no translators are children of translators. Lawyers’ children
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