What is the creative aspect of literary translation?

Why translations fall
flat

In fact Queneau’s work offers an excellent
example of many of the potential pitfalls into which a literary translation can fall.
I’ll list a few of the literary qualities Queneau is known for that make his work such
dangerous material for translation:

1. Puns/wordplay,
jokes. Humor is incredibly subtle and often culture-specific, while plays on words are
obviously specific to their original language. An equivalent has to be found in the new
language and sometimes these simply don’t work or need to be cut, or a completely
different play on words has to be invented to retain the liveliness of play. In such
cases, the translator and editor might have to decide which is more important to the
passage, the literal sense of the phrase or the playfulness that it brings to
bear.

2. Slang & colloquialism. Probably the most
important issue with slang is timeliness—will the approximate slang chosen by the
translator remain relatively current? With some translations you can almost identify the
year, if not the month, in which it must have been translated. Another issue is
appropriateness to the situation in the book, and here the problem is often that a
translator will “clean up” the foul language in the original, often without even
realizing, simply because he or she is not comfortable using such foul language, even
though the original writer was. This happens more often than one would expect, and
translators tend to realize it only after an editor has pointed it out.

3. Translating a baroque style. How do you make the
translation sound baroque rather than just awkward and clumsy? This is typically a
systematic problem, and the translator of such a work has to be extraordinarily creative
and resourceful, or else should not attempt the
translation.

4. Purposeful awkwardness in the original that
simply does not work in the new language, that falls flat. You can try to convey the
sense of awkwardness in other ways—by subtly referring to it, for instance, or moving
direct dialog into indirect, etc.—although sometimes you simply have to leave the
passage out. In leaving it out, you lose something, but then in any translation you
always lose something. The important thing is that the translation not call attention to
itself in a way that will destroy the reader’s experience of the
book.

5. Cultural, historical, and geographical references.
If references are not obscure or difficult for the original audience, they should not be
obscure or difficult for the new audience. Of course there are real limits to the extent
to which it is possible to make such references familiar, but certain simple tricks can
contextualize for the reader without damaging the reader’s experience of the book. For
example, you can add an inconspicuous explanatory phrase, or mention that So-and-so is a
“town,” or add the word “Avenue” where it was left out of the original. Here as
elsewhere the translation editor has to assume the position of the reader, and should
consider the overall experience of reading the original and how best to approximate that
experience for readers in English.