Context N°22
The term “translation” has undergone significant semantic transformation in recent years and has become a key concept in current debates on language, literature, and culture. A recent volume titled Cultures of Translation (Stierstorfer and Gomille, eds., Cambridge, 2008), features essays that position translation as the central analytical term for the contact of cultures. Thus, translation studies have become a rapidly expanding field that examines the close relationship between language and culture, language and art, and broad questions of intercultural exchange. In academia, the field of translation studies is growing in scale and expanding in scope, while other areas in the humanities are experiencing some decline. The Modern Language Association has proclaimed that translation “is the most important concept in cultural theory today.” The Society for the Humanities at Cornell made the theme of translation and its metaphorical multiplicity a focus of its activities for 2006–2007. The Shelby Cullom Davis Center for Historical Studies at Princeton will spend 2008–2010 working on the “problem of cultures and institutions in motion.” The interdisciplinarity of translation studies invites innovative approaches to pedagogy by merging the creativity and discipline of the practice of translation with the body of translation theory, and channeling these into a debate with other areas of the humanities and the social and political sciences. As translation educators, we are invited to teach students to understand and communicate new global realities. Translation theory is reformulating the parameters of cultural studies, post-colonial studies, and the field of comparative literature—in short, reframing the very notion of the humanities.
The 2008 PEN/IRL report on literary translation, edited by Esther Allen, surveys the current conditions of literary trade around the world, providing dramatic data on its imbalance.(1) It is common knowledge that the United States ranks very low in the numbers of translated books published each year. A 2007 report published in the New York Times stated that only 2–3% of books published in the U.S. are translations, as compared with 27% in Italy.(2) The PEN report reveals that of the approximate 100,000 new literary works published in China each year, only about 100 are translated and exported out of the country. This data draws attention to the role of reception theory in translation and comparative literature studies—ranking among the most intriguing and complex issues in literary study today. Ranging from the closely textual to the broadly psychological, and from the work of individual authors to the attitudes and stereotypes one culture has about another, studies of the reception and influence of an author or text—how they are apprehended or interpreted by a given reader or culture—inevitably involve the scholar in a multitude of compelling, if elusive topics. Though very present, and often of critical importance, the interplay of influence and reception is complex and difficult to evaluate, even when limited to writers and readers within their own linguistic communities or national traditions, as is the case with Clarice Lispector and her literary progeny in Brazil, or with Faulkner and his legacy in the United States. But when the dynamic exchange that characterizes this process involves writers and translated texts from a different and little-known culture—particularly one judged to be inferior or inconsequential by the receiving culture—the likelihood of misinterpretation becomes much greater. This has been the basic problem plaguing the reception of Latin American literature in the United States, a superpower whose culture has, with few exceptions, tended to disparage or dismiss the work of writers and intellectuals from Brazil and Spanish America. As Richard Nixon once expressed it, in a comment directed at a then very callow Donald Rumsfeld, “Latin America doesn’t matter . . . people don’t give one damn about Latin America.”(3)
Flying in the face of such chauvinism, gifted translators like Gregory Rabassa became the intermediaries whose work would, in the 1960s, begin to enlighten English-speaking North America about its Spanish- and Portuguese-speaking cousins to the south. Long ignored or repressed but still volatile questions of political self-determination and intervention, economic exploitation, race, class, gender, identity, and respect were suddenly being exposed by authors such as Borges, Neruda, Paz, Amado, and Lispector, as the three Americas, North, Central, and South, found themselves forced to deal with one another in new and unsettling ways. Thanks to the efforts of these translators, an extraordinary process of New World cultural exchange was begun, one that epitomizes what scholars now refer to as “transculturation,” a very fluid, and, ineluctably, destabilizing arrangement in which both the dominant and the non-dominant culture find their own senses of identity transformed, along with their attitudes and stereotypes regarding the other. As Waïl Hassan points out, though Esther Pratt uses the term transculturation to examine the power structures that bind the colonizer to the colonized, and that dictate the terms of their relationship, it also interrogates those “modes of active agency that seek to transform the stereotyped identities of hegemonic discourse.”(4) Both of these issues speak directly to the heart of what Earl Fitz has named the inter-American project, which most definitely calls into question the nature of existing New World power structures and the various discourses that have sustained them. A prototypical form of comparative literary study, the field of inter-American literature grows out of this restive and contentious transcultural matrix, one characterized by profound linguistic and cultural differences and defined to an exceptional degree by the issues of influence and reception. Translation has played a crucial role in the conception and development of the field of comparative literature.
For the translation studies educator in the United States, there are significant problems to overcome. The stubborn monolingualism of the country, coupled with its traditional disdain of foreign-language study and cultural arrogance, has produced a kind of warped and enervating insularity, leading to increased isolation within the world community and a diminution of respect in the eyes of our hemispheric neighbors. A serious imbalance, or disconnect, has resulted from this lamentable situation. By way of the American example, educated Latin Americans tend to know not only English but French as well, and like their Canadian counterparts, they typically know a great deal about the United States, its literature, history, and culture, while we in the United States know very little about them. This level of ignorance about the interconnectedness of New World history poses a serious complication for the reception of Latin American or other world literatures in the United States, since truly productive cultural exchange cannot develop if only one side of the discussion knows enough to comment intelligently on the other.
In the absence of intensive and required foreign-language instruction in our schools and colleges, and the cultural, political, and historical instruction that would accompany it, only translation finds itself in a position to help offset our deeply rooted provincialism and connect us with the rest of the world. “Without translators,” as David Remnick observes of this problem’s literary ramifications, “we are left adrift on our various linguistic ice floes, only faintly hearing rumors of masterpieces elsewhere at sea. So most English-speaking readers glimpse Homer through the filter of Fitzgerald or Fagles, Dante through Sinclair or Singleton or the Hollanders, Proust through Moncrieff or Davis, García Márquez through Gregory Rabassa.”(5) In purely literary terms, it is evident that the growing influence of world literature in the United States is a direct function of the work done by its translators.
Interestingly, many of these same points are increasingly being made by progressive-minded English-department faculty. J. Hillis Miller, for example, has called for a new focus on what he terms the “literatures of the Americas,” a project that will rely heavily on translation, while in a 2005 PMLA article, Robert Scholes argued for a reconceptualization of the humanities by emphasizing our need to regain our sensitivity to language, grammar, and style—and their importance to both the generation of meaning and the act of interpretation—to study more foreign languages (if only to better understand our own native language and the ways it shapes our view of reality), and, citing arguments made in Death of a Discipline by the eminent comparatist Gayatri Spivak, to “learn how other people think and how they see us.”(6) But to do this in any serious fashion, Scholes rightly warns, “we need to know how their languages represent the world,” a statement that, if taken at face value, would seem to call for a radical reappraisal of how we educate our students, and particularly with respect to the importance we place on foreign-language instruction. Such an understanding of how a foreign language represents the world can only be achieved by intense and sustained foreign-language study in school: beginning, ideally, in grade school and continuing unabated throughout one’s formal education. Reading foreign literature in translation is the second-best option, although it is important to bear in mind that no matter how meticulously accomplished a translation may be, it simply does not offer the same range of experiences as reading a text in its original language. It is one thing to read the novel we know as One Hundred Years of Solitude, but it is quite another to read Cien años de soledad, and it is yet another thing to read the two together, comparing and contrasting the linguistically driven Weltanschauung that each projects (Rabassa’s English versus García Márquez’s Spanish) and contemplating the similar and different ways these worldviews are developed, transmitted, and, above all, interpreted. The serious reader needs to be aware of the historical and sociopolitical consciousness that the language of each version generates, as well as the manner in which it manifests itself, the mysterious ways the style of each text works upon the reader and manipulates a response to it, both as cultural documents and as semiotic systems. It would seem to be incontrovertible, therefore, that the newly language-sensitive educational process championed by Scholes (who, terming it “textuality,” advocates its forming “the base or center of our enterprise”) and Spivak inevitably must involve a potential translator’s rhetorical skills at least as much as those of the original author, whose work, in all its stylistic and semantic complexity, the translator is seeking both to interpret and recreate in the most complete and accurate manner possible.
Although he does not mention it specifically, Scholes’s recommendation that we need to know how the languages of other people represent the world, how they shape reality and imbue it with both ontological and epistemological significance, comes very close to reaffirming the sine qua non of comparative literature as both academic discipline and intellectual pursuit—its insistence, at the graduate level, that its practitioners possess fluency in at least two languages other than their native tongue, and that their doctoral programs involve a full slate of grammar and literature classes in these languages. When coupled with proper methodological training and a solid grounding in theory, this strong foundation in foreign language study and in the study of literary texts in their original language prepares the translation student to chart the healthy development of the field well into the future, and to teach and conduct research as a comparatist par excellence.
For MA, MFA, and doctoral students, translations may be used to round out or expand a reading list, they might serve as the focus of an influence or reception study, or they might facilitate a close comparative reading of a translation and its original text to ascertain what was gained and what was lost, linguistically, aesthetically, and culturally, in the process of translation itself. This latter form of translation scholarship, when amplified with notes and full analytical discussions of the myriad decisions that the translator makes when interpreting the original text, can often be very successfully developed as a doctoral dissertation, as can a close comparative study of the various translations that may exist of a single source work, such as Borges, Neruda, or Machado in their various English versions. Rainer Schulte has argued for such an approach in his recent essays on the close reading of translations of German poetry. For the graduate student, translations should not be used as a substitute for working in the original language; though for the undergraduate major, who must also take upper-level literature courses in at least one foreign language, a course or two involving literature in translation (particularly if one deals with non-Western literature) is not only permissible but desirable. While the place of translation in the undergraduate curriculum is thus somewhat expanded and more flexible, for the doctoral student who intends to work professionally in literature, the issue is different, since the ability to work with texts in their original language must be regarded as an absolute requirement, just as it is for all translators and scholars of translation. Just as close comparison of translations of the same work is a good avenue for translation scholarship, re-translation is an area that belongs in the translation-studies curriculum. Examining what is involved in bringing a text not only into a new language but also into a new era is a specialty that encompasses translation history as well as audience analysis. Re-translation projects are demanding and require an understanding of genre, audience, register, and all the formal properties of a text.
Another promising area of study in the graduate translation curriculum is that of translation criticism, a genre of critical writing that is not taught or practiced enough in the United States. The growing body of translated literature cannot find its audience without the type of scholarship that prepares a translation critic with the concepts, terminology, and critical acumen to adequately address the work of translation as both an exercise in scholarship and creative writing. Translated literature is rarely adequately reviewed, and when its translator or the process of its translation do receive mention, this is often with generalities that do nothing to illuminate the quality of the work itself.
Yet another specialty that needs development is the discipline of translation editing. Martin Riker, in his article in CONTEXT 21, offers thoughts on the editing of translated literature: the publisher of translations must address, he says, the issue of “what . . . a translation [must] achieve . . . Do we prioritize word-for-word accuracy with the original, or do we say that what is more important is that the spirit and the particular energy of the original be conveyed, rather than just the words.”(7) The similarity of the translator’s task with the creative writer’s art suggests that the translation curriculum should place some emphasis on the development of both reading and writing skills. Collaboration between translation and writing programs, as well as between translation studies and publishers, such as the one between the University of Illinois Center for Translation Studies and the University’s Creative Writing Program, as well as with Dalkey Archive Press, are promising models of collaboration. The practice of instituting readings into the extra-curricular activities of a translation program can go a long way to forging ties between translation and creative writing departments.
A new specialty not to be overlooked is the field of audiovisual translation, one of the most complex and dynamic areas of the translation discipline, including the fascinating subject of translating films, video games, and other media. Film translation, encompassing subtitling, dubbing, and voice-over, is a highly technical skill that is in great demand.
Further, terminology studies, which include mastery of terminology theory, terminological research methods, and computer-assisted translation tools, are a core competency in today’s translation curriculum. Like other areas that are key to translation studies, the field of terminology has links to other, older fields, such as semantics, lexicology, and lexicography. With the explosion of these new fields of knowledge, there has been a need for a vast number of new terms to encompass as-yet unnamed concepts. It is argued that the terminologist works on the front lines of the advance of knowledge, as she devises appropriate terms for evolving concepts. Moreover, for any concept in one language, an equivalent must be found in another, and since every language reflects a new view of reality, a system of equivalent concepts must be founded on respect for the integrity of the languages concerned. A sister discipline to terminology is ontology, the branch of philosophy dedicated to the study of the nature of reality and its basic categories and hierarchies. A grasp of this discipline allows students of translation to gain a sharper understanding of the specialization field in which they are working, and typically they will develop their own ontology-based terminology databases. The translator specialized in terminology also must work within a system of international standards and be aware of the relevance of the ISO (International Standards Organization) and other such institutions to the task of translation.
In terms of arriving at a philosophy of teaching translation, Gregory Rabassa, considered by many to be the “translator’s translator,” offers wise counsel. He engages in the concept of the Other—not in the sense that late-twentieth-century literary theory embraces it, but to explain his fundamental philosophy of translation. “Otherness is the foundation of translation in almost every sense of the world. The translator must become the author’s other, his Doppelganger . . . at the same time the translator must turn the author into another possibility of his own existence.”(8) Getting into someone else’s skin, the art of role-playing, is one of the most compelling lessons that Rabassa teaches us. Intuition comes into play here, and Rabassa’s keen sense of what makes a good writer, or a good translator, has guided him in discovering talent where most would have overlooked it. One of the greatest gifts he gave to his graduate students in translation was to introduce us to as-yet undiscovered Latin American writers (from both Spanish- and Portuguese-speaking America) and to encourage us to work with them. He gave us the tools and the confidence to approach these authors. He taught us not to let awe stand in the way of initiating a creative relationship, and to respect our own talents in initiating the dance with our “others.”
As a corollary to the view of the translator as the author’s other, and of a translation’s basic “otherness or “difference,” Rabassa’s position on translation theory is both succinct and instructive: the product of a lifetime of professional experience and critical thought. In an interview with Harry Morales, he comments: “I am very cautious about theories that lie outside the natural sciences, where there are fewer unknowns. Having started out in physics in college, I learned to be skeptical of quick solutions and observations. I don’t think there are any theories to be had about translation, or about anything artistic and literary for that matter. Most of what is called theory nowadays in those fields is a developed notion or sometimes even wishful thinking.”(9) He continues in his 2007 memoir, If This Be Treason: Translation and its Dyscontents, “Although I am rather amused at the idea of a theory concerning something I do in a completely untheoretical way, I am nonetheless pleased at the attention it is getting from these serious minds.”(10)
One of Rabassa’s most famous pronouncements about his work is that no translation is ever final. His thesis in If This Be Treason is that translation “is impossible. People expect reproduction, but you can’t turn a baby chick into a duckling. The best you can do is get close to it.” He echoes Walter Benjamin’s belief that “no translation would be possible if in its ultimate essence it strove for likeness to the original,” and that “while a poet’s words endure in his own language, even the greatest translation is destined to become part of the growth of its own language and eventually to be absorbed by its renewal.”(11) Rabassa has been developing this point for many years. In explaining why he has never been satisfied with the “final” versions of translations he has done, he concluded that “while a novel may have a final form, such is not possible with translation, even when it is the work of a single translator.”(12)
With specific reference to the status of translations within the world of letters, Rabassa has had this to say: “I have always maintained that the proof that translation is an art is that it cannot be taught; you can teach a craft, but you cannot teach an art. I have given courses in the making of translation, but most of what we did was to examine the work of translators and that of each other. I found that I could tell the students what not to do but could not tell them what to do.” Rabassa told William Kennedy that “Heaven sent or hell bent, according to the critic, translation is really something apart from the other arts. But it is, indisputably an art. It follows, it serves, it is the squire of the arts, but it was Sancho Panza who made Don Quixote possible.”(13)
The practice of teaching and performing translation work has reinforced our view that the translation profession works to overcome cultural prejudice, ignorance, and provincialism, and replaces these with the kind of knowledge and understanding that enable people to see each other, and perhaps themselves, in a new light. It is the most generous of professions, in that the translator must work not to promote her own work as much as to bring a source text to a new audience. This generosity is richly rewarded, because in adopting this ethic, the translator experiences creative growth. This refreshed point of view emphasizes the commonality of our experience while also recognizing and celebrating the innumerable differences that make us unique, as individuals and cultures. The newly revived discipline of translation studies, profoundly comparative in nature, is providing new energy to the humanities, and is rapidly transforming our old notions about cultural as well as academic boundaries.
Sections of this essay are from Elizabeth Lowe and Earl Fitz, Translation and the Rise of Inter-American Literature. Gainesville, Florida: Univ. Press of Florida, 2007. These sections are reprinted with permission from the University Press of Florida.
notes
1. Esther Allen, ed. To Be Translated or Not to Be. Barcelona: Institut Ramon Llull, 2008.
2. Jascha Hoffman, “Data: Comparative Literature.” The New York Times Book Review, 15 April 2007: 27.
3. Quoted in Michael Reid, “The Battle for Latin America’s Soul.” The Economist, 18 May 2006, http://www.economist.com/displayStory.cfm?Story_ID=E1_GJQPVNR (accessed September 11, 2008).
4. Waïl Hassan, “Agency and Translational Literature: Ahaf Soueif’s The Map of Love,” PMLA 121, no. 3 (May 2006): 753–68.
5. David Remnick, “The Translation Wars,” New Yorker, 7 November 2005: 98–109.
6. Robert Scholes, “Presidential Address 2004: The Humanities in a Posthumanist World.” PMLA 120, no. 3 (May 2005): 724–33.
7. Martin Riker, “Notes Regarding the Editing of Translated Literature,” CONTEXT, No. 21:12.
8. Gregory Rabassa, “Gregory Rabassa,” in Contemporary Authors Autobiography Series, 9:191. Detroit: Gale Research, 1989.
9. Harry Morales. “You Can’t Say ‘Ain’t’ in Spanish—or Can You? A Conversation with Gregory Rabassa,” Hopscotch: A Cultural Review 2, no. 4 (2001): 116–27.
10. Rabassa, If This Be Treason: Translation and its Dyscontents, New York: New Directions, 2007: 45.
11. Walter Benjamin, “The Task of the Translator.” Translated by Harry Zohn. In Schulte and Biguenet, Theories of Translation, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992: 71–82.
12. Gregory Rabassa, Treason, 32.
13. William Kennedy, “Gregory Rabassa and the Art of Translation.” Quest 5, no. 7 (September 1981): 67–69.
