On Cormac McCarthy’s Death: Translation and the English Language

Like many of you, I grew up reading fiction. I just consumed it, devouring everything I could get my hands on. In junior high, it was tons of fantasy and sci-fi, and it seems like I'd whip through entire series in no time flat (Piers Anthony was a fave), so that I was always searching for something new.

In high school it got trickier because I was looking for headier material, and I didn't really have anyone to suggest the kinds of things I wanted to read. I still read a lot, but running into authors like Vonnegut and Kundera were godsends, and I read just about everything they wrote.

Things got a little easier in college because I was finally surrounded by people who read the kinds of books I had been yearning for. I read really widely, but among others, I remember reading just about everything that Murakami wrote, but he wasn't alone.

Throughout this time, I generally had an affinity for works of literature in translation, having an unfounded prejudice against authors like Dickens and Austen, who seemed the height of boringness to me (this would later change). But hand me anything in translation, and I was game.

It wasn't until graduate school that I read my first Cormac McCarthy. In a "lowbrow" twist, the only reason I did so was because I loved the movie No Country For Old Men, and I discovered it was based on a book. Reading that book sent me down a rabbit hole of reading tons more Cormac McCarthy.

In my many years of reading literature in translation, I was often annoyed by the idea that you had to (or should) read authors in their native tongues, because something is often lost. This usually struck me as a kind of bourgeois snobbishness (and still sometimes does), and this idea is even worse in academia, where it acts as a kind of gatekeeper (and is probably even less relevant there, where content rather than style typically matter more).

But when I read Cormac McCarthy's All The Pretty Horses I changed my mind (only a little bit). And my mind changed because McCarthy showed me what could be done with the English language: how language could be used in new and inventive ways, and how style can sometimes be an integral part of the story. And I don't think that this aspect of his book - the way he plays with the form of the English language - is something that can be translated, because it's innate to the English language. Content translates much more readily than style.

I still think that McCarthy should be read in translation and that most of the time not much is lost in translation, including in some of his other books. But I'm grateful that McCarthy helped me see what could be done with the English language, a language and a culture I had written off as provincial and boring, but about which I now know better.