By Mursi Saad El-Din The establishment of the National Centre for translation is a great event that should be met with joy by all Egyptians. The head of the Centre is Dr Gaber Asfour who was the brain behind the One Thousand Books project when he was secretary- general of the Supreme Council for Culture. I, personally, have always been pre-occupied with the problem of translation. One of the reasons is, perhaps, the fact that my father was himself a translator. I have written many times about the problems of translation and I though I have finished with its discussion. Not so: translation, as always is a perennial problem. I have referred several times to the PEN international meeting held in Rome in 1961, when the problems surrounding translation were discussed. Any translation, as JG Weightman, a professional translator, pointed out, supposes a choice, if only because it is impossible to translate any major literature in its entirety into another language. This choice, he continued, "is determined partly by the accidents of personal taste among publishers, readers, sometimes by social or and political prejudices, and very often by commercial considerations". Weightman explained the problems that face translations thus: in most countries, he argued, a translated book has to take its chance in the marketplace along with none translated titles. And it is normally handicapped from the start by a number of factors, by the strangeness of the contents and the style which, however good, will lack the flavour of the original. There is also the problem of that the translator must be paid in addition to the author. I was reminded of the problem of translation when I read an article in the culture supplement of the Sunday Times, "Trapped by translation", about the current performance by the Oxford stage company of Chekov's The Cherry Orchard. In this article Dominic Dromgoole, who is directing the play, quotes samples of dialogue in the play rendered into English by different translators. His argument centres around an important principle, already discussed during the PEN Rome Forum: how close should a translation be to the original text? He gives as an example a few lines of dialogue in Act II between Trofmov, the loquacious revolutionary, and Anya who at 17 is "enjoying a long hot summer and her first feelings of womanhood". It is hardly necessary here to go into the details of what is, after all, a well-known play. Enough to say that the writer is directing a new translation by "Sam Adamson, a young playwright who has previously written a translation of Chekov's The Three Sisters ". Dromgoole directed this version of The Three Sisters a few years ago. Adamson's translations appear to have upset "the purists, the custodians of English Chekov". While Dromgoole believes that translating Chekov into any language is a tall order he goes on to say that "it is a particularly acute problem in England where there has been a century of misunderstanding about the Russian." The study of translations from any given period can provide valuable insights into the literature of the language into which the works are being translated which is perhaps why Chekov was included as part of the English literature course when I was a student at the Faculty of Arts, Fouad 1st University (now Cairo University). Yet as Dromgoole points out the Chekov who apparently enjoyed "writing plays in smooth, mellifluous style about the sadness of the fading aristocracy", is very much an English invention. Yet "every time you think we might have advanced beyond this peculiar Victorian takes, you stumble across another deadly production of English Chekov." Dromgoole describes Chekov's plays as "untamed yet kind, but for some reason we have chosen to render them as domesticated and remote," and he is against what can be termed the 'Anglicising' of Chekov. Finally he asks the important question: "Is there a correct way of approaching a translation?" His answer is "no". Translation, in his opinion, is a creative act, it doesn't admit any rule. "You have to love the original, to honour it; you have to bring yourself and your own time and your own language halfway towards it. And you have to make sure you don't impose any pattern, social or political or aesthetic, on an independent life that only wants to stay free," Dromgoole says.
