“And formless Chaos — neography…”: Must the translator comprehend the meaning of words being translated?

It would seem that the question, whether a translator must comprehend the meaning of words being translated, has an obvious answer: and how else? However, it turns out that in those instances where one limits oneself to transcribing the terms under translation, it is possible to avoid comprehension. Possible, but not necessary. This is shown in our article through the example of an episode from Charles Nodier’s novel The Story of the King of Bohemia and his Seven Castles (1830). This Sternean novel, which borrows both its title and many devices from The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, was never translated into Russian; the author of this article is preparing a translation that will appear in the series “Literary Monuments”. Nodier likely surpassed Sterne in destroying the traditional structure of the novel: his narrator is divided into three characters (the writer Théodore, the pedant Don Pic de Fanferluchio, and the jester Breloque); one chapter is wholly made up of onomatopoeias; a single, consistent narrative is replaced by the competition of various genres within the novel; and within these inserted genres the syntagmatic axis is replaced by the paradigmatic: Nodier concatenates strings of dozens of names, verbs, adjectives, and even a listing of 188 different insects. Among the inserted texts there is the “Eulogy to Mistress Slipper”; it is called a work of genius, yet this cannot be verified, since the one who was reading it aloud fell asleep from boredom and the “Eulogy” burned up in the flame of a candle. While mourning the loss, the narrator lists thirty-five inventions bearing names which end in “-graphy” (cacography, technography, steganography, etc.) and which, in his opinion, are useless, since the “Eulogy to Mistress Slipper” is no longer extant. Now then, strictly speaking, in order to translate these thirty-five “-graphies” the translator does not need to comprehend their meaning or even to know whether they existed in reality or were thought up by the inventive author. At the same time, the problem of whether the “-graphies” are real is not a purely formal one: our comprehension of Nodier’s novel depends on how it is solved.

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