How to read like a translator

When someone asks Damion Searls how he “chooses” words for a translation, he likens it to asking a reader how they “choose” what Mr. Darcy looks like when reading “Pride and Prejudice.” Neither is so much a choice, he says, but a response shaped by the text.

“We’re not translating the words that are there. We’re having a reading experience, and then we’re giving a version of that that someone who reads English can then have,” Searls ’92 told the audience that recently packed the Barker Center’s Plimpton Room to hear the acclaimed translator. “This is why there are no perfect translations or ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ translations, just like there’s no wrong way that Mr. Darcy looks.”

Searls, who works from German, Norwegian, French, and Dutch, has translated Nobel Prize winner Jon Fosse, Proust, Rilke, Nietzsche, Thomas Mann, and Max Weber. He discussed his philosophy, which he outlines in his 2024 book, at a lecture co-hosted by the Department of Comparative Literature, the Department of Philosophy, and the Mahindra Humanities Center’s Rethinking Translation Seminar.

The day before, Searls led a translation workshop with three Ph.D. students from the Harvard Kenneth C. Griffin Graduate School of Arts and Sciences in Comparative Literature’s Secondary Field in Translation Studies.

“Whatever you think translating is, it’s some kind of reading and some kind of writing joined together,” the former Adams and Dunster House resident said. “Reading explains a lot about translation, and if you unpack what reading is you’re going to get most of the way to the philosophy of translation.”

Searls said translation isn’t that different from other forms of writing in English, which require the same skills. However what distinguishes translation is the way translators read, a close reading that engages deeply with a language’s structure.

When “reading like a translator,” Searls said he must identify which linguistic elements can be omitted in English and which are intentional stylistic choices by the author. When translating Uwe Johnson’s “Anniversaries,” for example, he noticed frequent “not this but that” constructions (“the train leaves at not 7:00 but 6:00”), which are more common in German than in English.

While it would be easy to rephrase for smoother English, he realized Johnson used this pattern deliberately to express a personal vision and “slowly hone in on the truth.”

“We can’t just erase it because it’s not just the German language: It’s him, the author,” Searls said. “Every writer is using the resources of their language to do what they want to do, and as translators we have to do the same thing with an entirely different body of resources.”

In “The Philosophy of Translation,” Searls draws from French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s ideas about perception to describe how translating happens, arguing the “living bond” that exists between people and objects also exists between translators and the language they are reading.

Just as a person immediately recognizes a chair, understands its purpose, and is prompted to sit by the object’s existence, Searls told the audience, translators also immediately recognize written language when they read it, understand one of its purposes is to be translated, and are prompted by the language to produce the translation.

Searls also described his process when approaching a new translation, which is usually to do a slow and precise first draft, which allows him to revise later versions without referring too much to the source material. He’ll sometimes read the book beforehand, but more frequently translates as he goes.

“It feels intuitive. I just keep revising it and trying to make it sound good,” Searls explained. “As much as you can avoid looking back at the original will help you direct your attention to: Does this sound like it should sound in English?”

One key to a smooth translation is keeping associations similar for readers in both languages, Searls said. While translating Fosse’s “Septology I-VII,” he encountered a reference to Gula Tidend (literally “Gula Times,”) a now-defunct newspaper published in a small town outside the city where the main character lives.

When Searls asked Fosse about the name, he learned that “gula” is an old verb meaning strong wind, and also referred to a medieval Norwegian region, the birthplace of the oldest body of laws in the Nordic countries. Fosse left the choice up to him, so Searls settled on “The Northern Herald,” which evokes medieval heraldry and the northern wind.

Most importantly, he said, his translation avoids disrupting the sentence’s flow by making English readers pause to wonder about the words in the title.

“It seems like this example of the translator being really subjective, but from my point of view, I was just reading,” Searls said. “At first, when I read Gula Tidend I didn’t know how to read it. I didn’t understand what it was doing in the book, why it was there, how it fit together. Then I looked up the words, talked to the author, and got to the point where I could read it. Once I got there, I was totally faithful.”

An audience member asked Searls how to reach the point of feeling like a skilled enough reader to translate. He responded that while some believe mastering the source language is necessary for translation, he sees more nuance. Though he knows Norwegian well enough to translate Fosse, he said, he wouldn’t necessarily feel comfortable translating just any Norwegian book.

“It’s also true that there are different kinds of expertise in the world. You don’t want to err so far in that direction that you become a sort of gatekeeper, saying that until you have a Ph.D. you’re not allowed to translate a book, because maybe you bring other things to the table,” Searls said. “It seems like a very good example of do your best and try to get better.”