Translation is not a matter of words only: it is a matter of making intelligible a whole culture. Poetry is what get lost in translation.
There is but one truly serious philosophical problem and that is suicide. It echoes Kafka’s bleak aphorism: A first sign of the beginning of understanding is the wish to die.
There is another objection that we can legitimately bring against adoption. Unlike many novelists, Jane Austen never gives a clear pictorial image of her heroines or heroes. All we know about Emma Woodhouse is that she has hazel eyes. This is an artistic decision on Austen’s part. It enables the reader to construct their own image. If, however, one watches the 1996 film of Emma, Gwyneth Paltrow’s face will probably impose itself on every subsequent re-reading of the novel. It’s a very nice face - but it’s not what Austen wanted.
Translation, it is said, echoing an Italian proverb, is ‘betrayal’. Is adaption, more even than translation, inevitably something of a travesty? Or is it an enhancement? Or an interpretation that supplements our own understanding of the text? Or an invitation to go back and read the original? It can, of course, be any or all of those things. What is fascinating, though, is the question of where adaption, with its partnering technologies, is going. What will happen, as it will in the not-too-distant future, where thanks to new technology we can enter a virtual world of the literature that interests us - with our sense organs (nose, eyes, ears, hands) activated? When we can literally get ‘lost in Austen’, not just as spectators, but as players? It will be exciting. But still, one doubts it would entirely please Miss Austen.
Bradburry thought this was a very bad thing. Books, he believed, made people think. They were stimulating. The TV set did the opposite. It was a narcotic. And, sinisterly, TV made possible a power over the population that no dictator had previously enjoyed - a ‘soft tyranny’. Universal mind control.
What is fascinating about Fahrenheit 451 is that like other dystopian literature it is both right and wrong. Bradburry’s pessimism about TV is plainly wrong-headed. TV has enriched, not impoverished, culture. Bradburry’s dystopian alarm is one of many illustrations of the mixed feelings that society always has about new technologies.
The basic idea of Kipling’s poem is clear enough. Empire is the imposition of a white civilisation on people who are, and will always be, ‘half devil and half child’. The act of empire is essentially benign. It is a ‘burden’ undertaken with no thought of national gain and, most poignantly, no expectation of any thanks from those inferior races lucky enough to be colonised by the white man.
The strong exact what they can, and the weak suffer what they must.
A trigger for all this was needed. Why did what we (but not they) call the ‘novel’, the ‘new thing’, emerge at this particular time and in this particular place (London)? The answer is that the rise of the novel took place at the same time and in the same place as the rise of capitalism. Different as these two things may seem, they are intimately connected.
America did not sign up international copyright until 1891, which meant the USA was free to plunder British and other nations’ literary work.
‘Thou’ and ‘thee’ sound old-fashioned now, but back then they were informal ways of addressing someone of lesser standing than yourself, like a child or a servant; ‘you’ was used more formally.
A further important point needs to be added here. Literary epics - those, that is, which are still read centuries (millennia, in some cases) after they were composed - chronicle the birth not of ‘any’ nation, but of nations that will one day grow to be great empires, swallowing up lesser nations. In their later maturity empires cherish ‘their’ epics as witness to that greatness. Epics certify it. Linguists love the following conundrum: ‘Question: what’s the difference between a dialect and a language? Answer: a language is a dialect with an army behind it.’ What, then, is the difference between a long poem about a primitive people’s early struggles and an epic? An epic is a long poem with a great nation behind it - or, more precisely, in front of it.
How best, then, to describe literature? At its basic level, it is a collection of unique combinations of twenty-six small black marks on a white surface - ‘letters’, in other words, since the word ‘literature’ means things made of letters. Those combinations are more magical than anything a conjuror can pull out of his top hat. Yet a better answer would be that literature is the human mind at the very height of its ability to express and interpret the world around us. Literature, at its best, does not simplify, but it enlarges our minds and sensibilities to the point where we can better handle complexity - even if, as is often the case, we don’t entirely agree with what we are reading. Why read literature? Because it enriches life in ways that nothing else quite can. It makes us more human. And the better we learn to read it, the better it will do that.