I read a review today of Howard Goldblatt's translation of Su Tong's novel My Life as Emperor 我的帝王生涯. The review, by Rong Cai, whom I take to be a non-native speaker of English, ended with the following praise of the translation:

The English translation matches the aesthetic appeal of Su Tong's work masterfully. It is every bit as graceful, vivid, and dynamic as the original. At points the translation even surpasses the original, without sacrificing accuracy. Two examples should suffice. The Chinese description "用一种讥讽的语气对兰妃说 " is rendered as "I heard Empress Peng say to Lady Han, her voice dripping with sarcasm …." Later in the story, the expression "我看见达渔醉醺醺地闯入繁心殿 " is translated as "seeing him weave drunkenly into Abundant Hearts Hall." The italicized words in the quoted not only convey the meaning of the original, they enhance its descriptive power. Examples like these testify to the craft of the translator and the dexterity and care with which he handles the job. Reading the novel in English is a delicious treat.

Such praise tells us as much about the experience of English for a non-native speaker as it does about Goldblatt's method of translation. Translating the image of weaving into a sentence that describes a stuporous intrusion is a departure from the language of the original text for the sake of the English readership's visualization. Removed from the context of its full paragraph, we can't judge it as good or bad--perhaps a nearby sentence involves weaving in a less immediately translatable manner, and Goldblatt makes up for it here--but regardless the gyst seems to be for a target-centered practice of translation. And Rong Cai acts as a target-language reader, responding to the poeticism of the English over the more direct description of the Chinese.

And yet, such a gesture is not in itself reliable. What about that phrase "dripping with sarcasm"? To me, this is a cliché, to be avoided in original writing and to be used with caution in translation. But what is interesting about clichés is that they got that way because of the overt beauty of their descriptive powers: "I'm being eaten alive" would be, without the context of everyone else having said it, an impressively vivid way to describe being attacked by mosquitoes; "a public relations nightmare" could be a frightening concept if the people who uttered the phrase did not vastly outnumber the slight number of people unlucky enough to have bad dreams about public relations. The lyricism of the cliché falls victim to its own attractiveness, and an originally potent expression is undermined not by being inaccurate, but by being overused.

As a native speaker with a trained sensitivity to the language, I respond negatively to "dripping with sarcasm." Rong Cai, however, seems to come to English with more innocent eyes and ears. The question, then, is whether we share her innocence when reading her review of Goldblatt's translation. Can we, like her, appreciate the cliché for its descriptive merit, forgetting about the rot it's accumulated in being passed around by so many hands? Can this phrase transcend its context and arrive at the pure level of poetical judgment? Is this where Benjamin's elusive Reinesprache really resides?

If I say no, that I can't appreciate the cliché for its poetry, it is for reasons that show me both target-centered and source-centered in my judgment of translations. If I can enjoy the addition of "weaving" to the image of a drunken stumble, I do so because as I read English, I employ English standards of quality; and unlike Rong Cai, "dripping with sarcasm" just doesn't cut it for me. On the other hand, I expect translation to be a reflection of what I am not reading--that is, a reflection of the original language--and when I read a cliché, I am never sure if it is a reflection of a cliché in the original, or else a flaw in the translator's execution. That uncertainty prevents me from being able to accept--or even deny--a cliché innocently, as I would if I were reading an original composition. In fact, I still can't tell if Goldblatt wrote "dripping with sarcasm" out of laziness or out of skill: just as another sentence in the paragraph could have employed the metaphor of weaving, so could a nearby sentence in Su Tong's Chinese have relied on a cliché. And if that cliché didn't turn into English well, the translator could now use this opportunity to reflect the author's style, cliché and all, in this sentence. Even if I expect a translation to reflect something else, I do not demand that that reflection come off in a one-to-one correspondence.

Earlier in the last paragraph of Rong Cai's review, from which I took the earlier quotation, she writes:

One can never overstate Professor Goldblatt's contribution to the field. Thanks to his tireless and elegant efforts, many works by contemporary Chinese writers in the mainland and Taiwan are now available in English for students and general readers of Chinese literature.

I certainly agree, and I temper any criticisms--to the extent that they are criticisms--with the knowledge that without Goldblatt's translations, many of us would have much less to talk about.

And as for clichés, when we come across them in translation, they actually stop acting as clichés: rather than passing by without notice, an example of poetic energy gone to waste, they stick. We stop. We pay attention. We examine, appreciate or discard, but in the end, a cliché in a translation is, in fact, no longer a cliché at all.