The Translator’s Invisibility

The power of Blanchot’s suggestive observations can be released if we translate them yet again (after Sieburth’s translation and after the version presented in the foregoing commentary), situating them more locally, taking into account the material determinations of cultural practices. The difference that makes a source-language text valuable to Blanchot is never “available” in some unmediated form. It is always an interpretation made by the translator, not necessarily open to every reader, gaining visibility and privileged only from a particular ideological standpoint in the target-language culture. Every step in the translation process—from the selection of foreign texts to the implementation of translation strategies to the editing, reviewing, and reading of translations—is mediated by the diverse cultural values that circulate in the target language, always in some hierarchical order. The translator, who works with varying degrees of calculation, under continuous self-monitoring and often with active consultation of cultural rules and resources (from dictionaries and grammars to other texts, translation strategies, and translations, both canonical and marginal), may submit to or resist dominant values in the target language, with either course of action susceptible to ongoing redirection. Submission assumes an ideology of assimilation at work in the translation process, locating the same in a cultural other, pursuing a cultural narcissism that is imperialistic abroad and conservative, even reactionary, in maintaining canons at home. Resistance assumes an ideology of autonomy, locating the alien in a cultural other, pursuing cultural diversity, foregrounding the linguistic and cultural differences of the source-language text and transforming the hierarchy of cultural values in the target language. Resistance too can be imperialistic abroad, appropriating foreign texts to serve its own cultural political interests at home; but insofar as it resists values that exclude certain texts, it performs an act of cultural restoration which {309} aims to question and possibly re-form, or simply smash the idea of, domestic canons.

Blanchot is theorizing an approach to translation based on resistance, and as his examples and the occasion of his essay make plain (it is a commentary on Walter Benjamin’s “The Task of the Translator”), this is an approach that is specific to the German cultural tradition. The theory and practice of English-language translation, in contrast, has been dominated by submission, by fluent domestication, at least since Dryden. Various alternative approaches have indeed existed, including Dr John Nott’s historicist opposition to bowdlerizing, Francis Newman’s populist archaism, and the polylingual experiments of Ezra Pound, Celia and Louis Zukofsky, and Paul Blackburn. Judging from their reception, however, these alternatives fell victim to their own foreignizing tendencies: their strangeness provoked harsh criticism from reviewers, and they went unread or even—in Blackburn’s case—unpublished, relegated to the margins of British and American culture, neglected by subsequent translators, translation theorists, and literary scholars. For the most part, English-language translators have let their choice of foreign texts and their development of translation strategies conform to dominant cultural values in English, and among these values transparent discourse has prevailed, even if in varying forms.

Yet alternative theories and practices of translation are worth recovering because they offer contemporary English-language translators exemplary modes of cultural resistance, however qualified they must be to serve a new and highly unfavorable scene. The domesticating translation that currently dominates Anglo-American literary culture, both elite and popular, can be challenged only by developing a practice that is not just more self-conscious, but more selfcritical. Knowledge of the source-language culture, however expert, is insufficient to produce a translation that is both readable and resistant to a reductive domestication; translators must also possess a commanding knowledge of the diverse cultural discourses in the target language, past and present. And they must be able to write them. The selection of a foreign text for translation and the invention of a discursive strategy to translate it should be grounded on a critical assessment of the target-language culture, its hierarchies and exclusions, its relations to cultural others worldwide. Before a foreign text is chosen, translators must scrutinize the current situation—the canon of foreign literatures in English, as well as the canon of British {310} and American literature, set against patterns of cross-cultural exchange and geopolitical relations (for a powerful example of this sort of cultural diagnosis, see Said 1990).