A Publisher's Vision

EnterText 4.3 Supplement

CHRISTOPHER MACLEHOSE

A Publisher’s Vision

Knowing the work of translators to be meticulous, infinitely painstaking, and one of
ceaseless and intense concentration, I very much like Anthea Bell’s metaphor of the
trapeze artist.1 It is so much more apt than Pushkin’s familiar description of
translators as the carthorses of civilisation. In Pushkin’s time theload of the translator
was perhaps much heavier. Nowadays it is necessarily lighter for all but a few, and
threatens to be lighter still.
When Manya Harari and Marjorie Villiers founded the Harvill Press in 1946
after working together on the Russian Desk in the Foreign Office during the war, they
gave their reason for doing so as wanting to do what they could to restore the bridges
that hadbeen lost between cultures in World War Two. Ever since I read that
declaration in their first catalogue, I have thought of translation houses as builders of
bridges. Now I shall think of them as beneath, and in a remote way supporting, the
translators above.
At Harvill I have tried to find a translator of seventy summers or more,
scholars for whom high wires over the Niagara were a thing ofthe past. Why so
senior? The translation of the mere language is presumably but a quarter of the work
and the more experienced and more deeply read a translator is in the literature of the

Christopher MacLehose: A Publisher’s Vision 103

EnterText 4.3 Supplement

source language—as well as aware of the day-to-day ways and social and political
history—the more readily he or she willrecognise the landscape of literary and
quotidian memory behind the language, the invisible veins beneath the surface of a
text.
Joan Tate, the exceptional ambassador for and tireless translator of a whole
library of valuable books from Swedish, used to say that vocabulary was no more than
a sixteenth part of translation. Guido Waldman, my colleague at Harvill, and himself a
very good translatoralthough only in his sixties, did not share all of my convictions
about translators and was forever finding young, untried ones, and one after the other
they won the best prizes. He favoured the school of the exact translation, but my
preference remains to seek the best reflection of the text in English rather than to
sacrifice a more felicitous rendering in English for the sake of being itsmirror. We
have had instances in which passages of French so florid as to incite merriment in a
precise translation have been—with the author’s blessing, to be sure—made more
plain.
Some authors enthusiastically collaborate in the translation process, and since
a number of them have excellent English it has always been a pleasure to work with
them at the stage of the editing of thetranslation. I think particularly of Cees
Nooteboom working with the translations of Ina Rilke, and of Per Petterson working
with the translations of Anne Born, and one cannot but cite in a category of his own
the ardent attention which Max Sebald gave to his translations. “Give” is as
regrettable as it is deliberate because the time that writers take upon their translations
is unpaid and publishers, Iam afraid, take that for granted. There does come a time,
however, when the fame of a writer catches up with him/her in terms of the number of
translations he or she has to deal with. They land irregularly, sometimes three books

Christopher MacLehose: A Publisher’s Vision 104

EnterText 4.3 Supplement

behind the book the author is now writing, and sometimes four at a time, notnecessarily in languages the author can easily read. By then the writer’s freedom to
devote his or her days, weeks even, to an English translation may simply have run out,
and by then it must be hoped that he has a sufficient trust in his translator and his
publisher’s editors that he can leave his former part in the finalising of the English
text to them—this in spite of how important in other...