How The Phantom Tollbooth Became French
The art of translating a wordplay-rich classic children's novel
There’s a famous Italian expression about the art of translation:
Traduttore, traditore.
Translating as ‘translator, traitor’, it conveys the idea that to translate a text into another language, you have to betray it. Since words aren’t always one-for-one identical from one language to another, the translator is forced to convey the meaning and ‘feel’ of the original text with whatever words in the target language are at their disposal.
In other words, translation is an exercise in imperfection. The idea of a perfect translation is simply impossible, and no matter how well you translate a text, there will inevitably be some idea or sensory quality that gets, well, lost in translation. Indeed, the fact that ‘translator, traitor’ loses some of the rhythmic qualities of the original Italian — insofar as the word ‘traitor’ has one less syllable than ‘translator’, whereas the words traduttore and traditore share the same number of syllables— supports the very idea it conveys.
Going down the rabbit hole
I was thinking about traduttore, traditore while reading Norton Juster’s The Phantom Tollbooth. Published in 1961, it’s an American…
