The tall windows on the second floor of the French Embassy’s Cultural Services were flung wide open one recent mild evening. Waning late-afternoon light filled a large room, turning its yellow walls cadmium orange. Joy-drunk birds in Central Park competed with the traffic sounds below as guests stood around in an adjoining reception area chatting and sipping Veuve Cliquot and eating tuna tartare served in miniature ice-cream cones. The occasion: the award ceremony of the French-American Foundation and Florence Gould Foundation’s Twenty-fifth Annual Translation Prize.
After everyone was seated in the yellow room, a group of panelists—Alyson Waters (moderator), David Bellos, Lydia Davis, and Lorin Stein—took up the subject of the evolution of French translation over the past twenty-five years. They touched on such things as why smaller presses publish more books in translation than the big houses (the books are cheap to produce and are often translated by way of love, in-house, cutting costs even further; the larger houses have bigger fish to fry); the fact that just three per cent of books currently published in English are books in translation, of which only a fraction are from the French; why that number is so small (not a lot of great literature or philosophy or significant social theory coming out of France nowadays); the shaming fact that most in the American media (including many literary reviewers) cannot read in a second language; the role of the translator as cultural gatekeeper and curator (it is often the translator who suggests and vouches for a book’s worthiness to publishers); the importance of the French language as a cultural pipeline (the French translate everything, from virtually any language: Estonian, Japanese, Hindi, Hopi, Hungarian, you name it; hence many foreign books in English come to us only by way of translation from the French); which books the panelists would like to translate or retranslate: Lorin Stein (the poems of Apollinaire); Lydia Davis (the third volume of Michel Leiris’s “The Rules of the Game”; she’s done the other two); David Bellos (“La Vie de Romain Gary”).
During a Q. & A. following the discussion, a member of the audience stood up and asked whether the panelists had any response to a Times editorial by Lawrence Summers, the former president of Harvard, in which he suggested that the study of foreign languages at the university level was not necessarily crucial going forward, owing to, among other things, the strides being made in machine translation.
At this, David Bellos grew nearly apoplectic (origin early seventeenth century: from French apoplectique or late Latin apoplecticus, from Greek apoplektikos, from apoplessein “disable by a stroke” see: apoplexy): “Ohhh, God, I— I mean, everyone’s allowed to go off the rails every now and then, but, I mean—really,” he said indignantly. A brief discussion in refute among the panelists ensued, and then it was time for another champagne break.
I hadn’t read the Summers editorial yet, but I thought about it on my way back to Queens on the 7 train to Jackson Heights, wishing I knew what all the people around me were saying and reading, in Spanish, Korean, Russian, Chinese, Urdu, Bengali, Tagalog, Pashto … When I got home, I called up the piece and found the offending paragraphs:
Not surprisingly, these few words have already received considerable pushback. Apart from the obvious practical benefits of speaking more than one language in a globalized world, studies suggest that bilingualism confers tangible cognitive benefits to children and the elderly alike. Still, I found Summers’s statement so astonishing, and, in its strange way, fascinating, that I decided to ask a few of the translators who were present that night to respond to it more fully. I wrote to David Bellos, Lydia Davis, and Arthur Goldhammer (who shared this year’s translation prize for nonfiction with Richard Howard; Marina Harss won the fiction prize). Below are their slightly edited responses.
David Bellos had this to say:
Arthur Goldhammer wrote:
And Lydia Davis weighed in the other day, writing:
Illustration by Laurie Rosenwald.