Lessons of Babel   /   Summer 2025   /    Thematic—Lessons of Babel

Translation and Taste

Learning how to have good taste means learning to translate.

Blake Smith

THR illustration; (Arendt) dpa picture alliance/Alamy Stock Photo; (Denneny) Robert Giard, © Estate of Robert Giard.

Translation suggests that there are many ways of being good—but no sure method. A sentence in a foreign language can be translated successfully into our own by a number of different English sentences, none of which will replicate the original’s literal meaning, play of sound, or range of connotations. The number and variety of possible “good” translations, and the impossibility of making any singular perfect translation, may make us suspicious about ever placing a definite article “the” in front of “good.” Translation can be the beginning of a moral education by which we are awakened to the undeniable reality of goodness (there really is something good in good translations) and to the strangely multiple, perhaps irreconcilably diverse, forms in which goodness appears. 

Although informed both by logic and the illogical codes inherited from history (such as the grammars of the languages concerned), translation is characterized by a degree of freedom—and uncertainty—for which these codes cannot provide sufficient orientation. Its success can never be secured in advance. It is, rather, similar to a set of activities such as assembling an outfit, decorating a room, or planning a party. These are operations that can go (embarrassingly and expensively!) awry, and, when they succeed, seem to have pulled off a uniquely fitting and somehow surprising match between social expectations and the personal character of the doer. 

Such operations, in other words, require taste. Taste mediates apparent contradictions. It names an individual’s capacity (you might have great taste in wine) and also an object’s quality (“This wine has a great taste”). It can seem to refer to an objective, even transcendent and superior source of value, as if the good taste of a taster or thing tasted were either self-evident, or an avatar of an invisible but no less undeniable “the good.” But we also use taste to mean something like a mere whim. I might excuse myself from giving my (low) opinion of your favorite novel by saying it’s just not to my taste (de gustibus non disputandum est). And, between these two extremes, taste also can be construed as something like the family resemblance among a community of fellow enjoyers (people with, for example, the “same taste” in movies). 

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