Cut the cards!

Are some jokes/puns untranslatable?

Bugs Bunny Rides Again (1948)

One of the many joys of working on ancient Greek comedy is also one of its many headaches. How jokes, especially ones which rely on word-play (which is most of them), should be translated has been a common problem for students of Greek comedy. Translators of Aristophanes usually try and solve the problem with one of three main approaches: a substitute joke, an intruded gloss, aporetic recourse to a 'literal' translation. The substitute joke replaces the original joke with a more familiar one (dictated by the intended audience) but which is hopefully still related to, or inspired by, the original one. The intruded gloss tries to retain as much of the original joke as possible by 'smuggling in' the information a modern reader/audience needs to understand that joke. Intruded gloss is the term used by Douglass Parker and William Arrowsmith, two translators of Aristophanes from the U.S. (for those interested, Parker's article on this is a fairly pleasant and informal read). The literal translation is perhaps more common in a purely academic context, but even Henderson's translations of Aristophanes for the Loeb Classical Library often opt for choices which are more creative than accurate. Of course, terms like 'accurate' are actually quite subjective here, and depend on the perspective of the translator and the reader. One reader might consider the literal translation the most accurate, whereas another might appreciate a translation which diverges a little from, say, the syntax of the original but better captures its effect in English and so on and so forth. Accordingly, all of these approaches (and there are more) are equally valid. Someone looking for information about life in classical Athens might be badly misled by a translation intended for performance, whereas the modern drama student might be left baffled and frustrated by a translation which piles on the parochial particulars.

I could go on to discuss the fascinating issues which centuries of translations of Aristophanes dredge up but I'd rather turn to a much more general problem. I've always maintained, with a sort of inverse Socratic wisdom, that nothing is untranslatable - or at least I think I have since the rump of my undergraduate days. These strongly held convictions were given the chance to express themselves a few months ago in the pub. Having asserted that there was no such thing as an untranslatable joke, I was promptly challenged (I wish pints had now been wagered) by my colleague over at halieutica79808358. Here's his description of the joke:

In Dutch, you use the verb 'to shake' (schudden) for the expression 'shuffle cards' (kaarten schudden). So then, since Belgians are proverbially stupid, there's a well-known joke where you shake a deck of cards in your hand and say that you are 'shuffling in a Belgian way' (Belgisch schudden).

For the prospective translator there are two main components here. First we have a pun on the verb 'schudden' and secondly that the Dutch take the Belgians as their standard target for 'stupidity' jokes which are common in almost every language/culture. In antiquity, for example, Boeotians, Thessalians, and Abderites (Democritus begs to differ) were all proverbially stupid. The Belgian problem is thus easily resolved and the butt of the joke in Dutch needs only to be swapped out for a similar target in one of many given English-speaking contexts. Americans, for example, would be a fairly easy target, at least outside the U.S. But the English verb 'shake' has little to nothing to do with cards. The third component is the physical action of shaking the cards which acts as the punch-line by activating the incorrect meaning (here the basic or literal meaning) in the context of playing a game of cards.

I have to admit I was stumped and may have stormed off to the bar for yet another porter. I was vindicated a few days later. While shirking my actual research I happened upon a scene from the Marx Brothers' film Horse Feathers (1932). The Marx Brothers were my all-time favourites as a child, and thankfully their filmography was considered sufficiently dated to no longer be inappropriate for a nine year-old (Horse Feathers is a pre-Code film!! ). I had completely forgotten about one of Harpo's classic physical puns in that film. The Marx Brothers' films almost always have puns which rely on objects or actions, and Harpo's mischievous literalism is often the source of them. Walking past two card-players in a speakeasy, one of them says 'cut the cards.' Harpo promptly whips a hatchet out of his jacket and hacks the deck in two before sauntering off with a trademark whistle. There it is folks! The joke gets reused in Bugs Bunny (1948), and - I am reliably informed by Wikipedia - by the Three Stooges in Ants in the Pantry (1936)

Horse Feathers (1932)

The key to translating the joke from Dutch into English is finding a word used in card game parlance which can be misinterpreted in its primary sense and then acted upon for humorous effect. Harpo's 'cut the cards' is frankly a bit silly, the kind of thing people would groan at nowadays but it replicates each of the main components of the Belgisch schudden joke in an English-speaking context. There are of course other translation options, the practice of burning cards in poker for example has lots of potential, and might actually be a more amusing way of telling the joke since it's more plausible for a person to have a lighter on them then a hatchet (though it's often a bit touch and go in the smoking area these days).

Horse Feathers (1932)

Obviously, solving the translation problem my friend challenged me with doesn't actually prove that there is no such thing as an untranslatable joke or pun. But the story as a whole does throw the problem into some useful light. Any act of translation is always going to involve some loss in meaning. This is not necessarily a bad thing, and the destruction that translation entails can sometimes give birth to new meaning as well, i.e. someone setting a card on fire in a game of poker! Humour, but puns especially, are often singled out as unique when it comes to questions of translatability. The kinds of arguments that can be made against my solution to 'Belgisch schudden', i.e. that I have not actually translated the joke since I abandoned the action of 'shaking', can actually be levelled at the translation of pretty much any phrase from one language to another. There is no such thing as a one-to-one or perfect translation , choices will always have to be made. If jokes like these are untranslatable then so is everything else. The idea that word-play is untranslatable has only arisen because the challenge it presents makes the fundamental problems of translation more obvious than perhaps they would be otherwise.

The proof of this is perhaps found more clearly when attempting to translate in the other direction, that is from one's native tongue into another language. Even people who are fluent speakers of their second or third language often inadvertently create hilarious jeu de mots out of what should be an innocuous statement. A pretty excellent example occurred on a breakfast show in the UK a while back. The guest is an Italian celebrity chef, who, when informed that his dish would be like a 'British carbonara' if it had bacon, responds indignantly that if his grandmother had wheels she would've been a bike. The point of the proverb, which our star has translated from the Italian (se mia nonna avesse le ruote, sarebbe una bicicletta/carriola) directly into English, is that it's stupid to say something would be like something else only on the condition that we change something about it; the proverb is much pithier. In the UK, 'the village bike' is used as derogatory term for a promiscuous woman, and one could simply refer to a woman as a 'bike.' The chef perhaps knows exactly what he's doing, but the incident shows how common everyday words often acquire connotations in one language that the equivalent word simply does not have in another.

Maybe, sometimes, translating jokes is actually a little bit easier.