On my desk are two translations of the same short Russian sentence, from the second paragraph of a Chekhov story, and they do not agree about the weather. In one version the evening is “still”; in the other it is “quiet.” A hairline difference, you might say. But stillness is a property of air and quiet is a property of sound; a still evening presses on the skin, a quiet one on the ear; and Chekhov, of all writers, does not deal in interchangeable evenings. Somewhere behind both English sentences is one Russian evening, actual and specific, and I cannot reach it. I have been unreasonably preoccupied by this for three weeks.
The preoccupation is the oldest one in the book, of course. Translation has been declared impossible continuously since antiquity, most famously by people engaged in doing it anyway — the history of the practice is a history of working impossibilists, and the paradox is the profession. The Italians compressed it to a pun, traduttore, traditore, translator-traitor, which is itself untranslatable, making the pun a small proof of its own accusation. I know all this; every reader knows all this; and yet the two evenings sit on my desk, still and quiet respectively, and the old scandal feels fresh as a paper cut.
Here is what the scandal actually consists of, as best I can articulate it. Every language is not a set of labels for a shared world but a particular way of cutting the world into pieces, and no two languages cut in the same places. Russian famously has two words occupying the territory of English “blue,” which means a Russian speaker cannot mention a blue thing without committing to its shade, and an English translator cannot preserve the mention without either adding a commitment Chekhov never made or subtracting one he did. The word is not the unit. The cut is the unit, and cuts don’t travel. Multiply that by every word in the sentence, then by the grammar — Russian tucks aspect into its verbs the way English tucks tense, so that actions arrive pre-sorted into finished and unfinished, a metaphysics smuggled in the morphology — and the wonder is not that translations disagree about an evening. The wonder is that they agree about anything at all.
And they do agree. That is the counter-scandal, the one the impossibility crowd undersells. The translations on my desk disagree about the evening and agree about everything that happens in it — the carriage, the estate, the doctor’s fatigue, the specific Chekhovian sensation of life being simultaneously too long and too short. Ninety-some percent of the story crosses over intact, which should be impossible if the impossibilists were fully right, and the discrepancy demands explanation. My best guess after years of reading translations against each other: literature is written less in words than in the relations between words — pressures, tempos, ironies, proportions — and relations survive transport better than the words themselves, the way a melody survives transposition into a new key where every single note is different. The evening may be still or quiet, but its position in the story’s system — early, deceptive, calm-before — is identical in both versions, and the position is most of what the evening is for.
This is why I have come to distrust the fidelity debate as usually staged — literal versus free, foreignizing versus domesticating, the eternal cage match. The real question a translation answers is not “how close is this to the original?” but “faithful to which stratum?” — the words, the relations, the effect on a reader, the strangeness, the smoothness. You cannot serve all strata at once; the languages cut in different places; choosing is the job. The translator I trust is not the one who claims to have made no choices but the one whose choices form a coherent argument about what the book most is. Constance Garnett argued, in effect, that the Russians were great Victorian novelists; Pevear and Volokhonsky argue they were stranger than that; both arguments produce real books, and quarreling about which is “accurate” mistakes the genre — a translation is criticism performed at the highest possible stakes, criticism you can read on its own.
Which returns me, finally, to gratitude, the emotion the discontents always forget to schedule. I do not read Russian. Without translators, the entire continent of that literature — a third of my inner furniture, honestly — would be a rumor on the far side of a wall. What I possess of Chekhov is Chekhov-through-glass, yes; the glass has a tint; the tint is called Garnett or Hingley or whoever held the pane. But through it I have seen enough to be changed, and “through a glass” describes, if we’re strict about it, every act of reading whatsoever — the original is also a translation, of a mind by a language, and that one loses plenty too. So: two evenings on my desk, still and quiet. Behind them one evening I will never reach, in a story that reached me anyway, across a century, a language, and an impossibility. The evening was probably both. Evenings usually are.