The Translator’s Invisibility

In a review published in the Criterion in 1936, Basil Bunting criticized E.Stuart Bates’s study Modern Translation for not keeping the promise of its title, for failing, in fact, to present a modern concept of translation. In Bunting’s view, Bates couldn’t distinguish school “cribs (e.g. Loeb Classics) from translations” that Bunting himself valued, “translations meant to stand by themselves, works in their own language equivalent to their original but not compelled to lean on its authority, claiming the independence and accepting the responsibility inseparable from a life of their own” (Bunting 1936:714). Modernism asserts the “independence” of the translated text, demanding that it be judged on its “own” terms, not merely apart from the foreign text, but against other literary texts in its “own” language, accepting the “responsibility” of distinguishing itself in the literary terms of that language. But as soon as a modernist translation chooses these terms, it can never be an independent work, can never be its “own” insofar as the translation is written in a language coded with cultural values that are fundamentally different from those circulating in the foreign language. Modernism believes that the responsibility of translation is to be independent, but the responsibility assumed in this belief is actually owed to a domestic intelligibility and cultural force that erase, somewhat irresponsibly, the linguistic and cultural difference of the foreign text. For Bunting, this difference wasn’t the important thing in translation, partly because the opportunities to experience it in English seemed to him rare, or simply nonexistent. “No one is truly bilingual,” he wrote, “but it does not matter” (ibid.:714).

Modernism seeks to establish the cultural autonomy of the translated text by effacing its manifold conditions and exclusions, especially the process of domestication by which the foreign text is rewritten to serve modernist cultural agendas. Bunting was aware of this domestication. He praised Edward Fitzgerald’s {189} Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám (1859) because “Fitzgerald translated a poem that never existed, yet by an unforced, natural expansion of Dryden ’s aim, made Omar utter such things ‘as he would himself have spoken if he had been born in England and in’ an age still slightly overshadowed by Byron” (Bunting 1936:715). For Bunting, Fitzgerald embodied the modernist ideal by appearing to translate a poem that “never existed,” but paradoxically the translator drew on preexisting materials: he followed Dryden’s domesticating translation method (which made Virgil a Restoration English poet), and his translation was noticeably influenced by Byron, Byronism, the Orientalism in romantic culture. Bunting’s awareness of this domesticating process was never sufficiently skeptical to make him question his concept of translation, to doubt the autonomy of the translated text, or to wonder about what happened to the foreignness of the foreign text when it got translated. He was interested only in translation that makes a difference at home, not translation that signifies the linguistic and cultural difference of the foreign text.