The Translator’s Invisibility

Translation is a process that involves looking for similarities between languages and cultures—particularly similar messages and formal techniques—but it does this only because it is constantly confronting dissimilarities. It can never and should never aim to remove these dissimilarities entirely. A translated text should be the site where a different culture emerges, where a reader gets a glimpse of a cultural other, and resistancy, a translation strategy based on an aesthetic of discontinuity, can best preserve that difference, that otherness, by reminding the reader of the gains and losses in the translation process and the unbridgeable gaps between cultures. In contrast, the notion of simpatico, by placing a premium on transparency and demanding a fluent strategy, can be viewed as a cultural narcissism: it seeks an identity, a self-recognition, and finds only the same culture in foreign writing, only the same self in the cultural other. For the translator becomes aware of his intimate sympathy with the foreign writer only when he recognizes his own voice in the foreign text. Unfortunately, the irreducible cultural differences mean that this is always a mis-recognition as well, yet fluency ensures that this point gets lost in the translating. Now more than ever, when transparency continues to dominate Anglo-American culture, ensuring that simpatico will remain a compelling goal for English-language translators, it seems important to reconsider what we do when we translate.

Chapter 7. Call to action

The translator is the secret master of the difference of languages, a difference he is not out to abolish, but rather one he puts to use as he brings violent or subtle changes to bear on his own language, thus awakening within it the presence of that which is at origin different in the original.

Maurice Blanchot (trans. Richard Sieburth)

In the brief but provocative essay “Translating” (1971), Blanchot inverts the conventional hierarchy wherein “the original” is superior to the translation. He considers the foreign text, not as the unchanging cultural monument in relation to which the translation must forever be an inadequate, ephemeral copy, but as a text in transit, “never stationary,” living out “the solemn drift and derivation [“dérive”] of literary works,” constituting a powerful self-difference which translation can release or capture in a unique way (Blanchot 1990:84). This assumes the foreign text to be derivative, dependent on other, preexisting materials (a point made by Sieburth’s decision to render “dérive” as two words, “drift and derivation”), but also dependent on the translation:

a work is not ready for or worthy of translation unless it harbors this difference within itself in some available fashion, whether it be because it originally gestures toward some other language, or because it gathers within itself in some privileged manner those possibilities of being different from itself or foreign to itself which every living language possesses.

(ibid.)

In negotiating the dérive of literary works, the translator is an agent of linguistic and cultural alienation: the one who establishes the {308} monumentality of the foreign text, its worthiness of translation, but only by showing that it is not a monument, that it needs translation to locate and foreground the self-difference that decides its worthiness. Even “classical masterpieces,” writes Blanchot, “live only in translation” (ibid.). And in the process of (de)monumentalizing the foreign text, the translator precipitates equally “violent or subtle changes” in the translating language. Blanchot cites “Luther, Voss, Hölderlin, George, none of whom were afraid in their work as translators to break through the bounds of the German language in order to broaden its frontiers” (ibid.:85).