The Translator’s Invisibility

The ethnocentric violence of translation is inevitable: in the translating process, foreign languages, texts, and cultures will always undergo some degree and form of reduction, exclusion, inscription. Yet the domestic work on foreign cultures can be a foreignizing intervention, pitched to question existing canons at home. A translator can not only choose a foreign text that is marginal in the target-language culture, but translate it with a canonical discourse (e.g. transparency). Or a translator can choose a foreign text that is canonical in the target-language culture, but translate it with a marginal discourse (e.g. archaism). In this foreignizing practice of translation, the value of a foreign text or a discursive strategy is contingent on the cultural situation in which the translation is made. For the translator, this value is always cast in literary terms, as a practice of writing.

Foreignizing translation is beset with risks, especially for the English-language translator. Canons of accuracy are quite strict in contemporary Anglo-American culture, enforced by copyeditors and legally binding contracts. Standard contractual language requires that the translator adhere closely to the foreign text:

The translation should be a faithful rendition of the work into English; it shall neither omit anything from the original text nor add anything to it other than such verbal changes as are necessary in translating into English.

(A Handbook for Literary Translators 1991:16)

Because of the legal risk, the considerable freedom of Robert Graves or the editorial emendations of Pound are not likely to be adopted by many translators today—at least not with foreign texts whose copyright hasn’t yet entered the public domain. Since “faithful rendition” is defined partly by the illusion of transparency, by the discursive effect of originality, the polylingualism of the Zukofskys and Blackburn is equally limited in effectiveness, likely to encounter opposition from publishers and large segments of English-language readers who read for immediate intelligibility. Nevertheless, contemporary translators of literary texts can introduce discursive variations, experimenting with archaism, slang, literary allusion and convention to call {311} attention to the secondary status of the translation and signal the linguistic and cultural differences of the foreign text.

Contemporary translators need to develop a more sophisticated literary practice, wherein the “literary” encompasses the various traditions of British and American literature and the various dialects of English. Translators committed to changing their cultural marginality can do so only within the codes that are specific to the target-language culture. This means limiting discursive experiments to perceptible deviations that may risk but stop short of the parodic or the incomprehensible, that release the dérive of cultural discourses in the target language.

Translators must also force a revision of the codes—cultural, economic, legal—that marginalize and exploit them. They can work to revise the individualistic concept of authorship that has banished translation to the fringes of Anglo-American culture, not only by developing innovative translation practices in which their work becomes visible to readers, but also by presenting sophisticated rationales for these practices in prefaces, essays, lectures, interviews. Such self-presentations will indicate that the language of the translation originates with the translator in a decisive way, but also that the translator is not its sole origin: a translator’s originality lies in choosing a particular foreign text and a particular combination of dialects and discourses from the history of British and American literature in response to an existing cultural situation. Recognizing the translator as an author questions the individualism of current concepts of authorship by suggesting that no writing can be mere selfexpression because it is derived from a cultural tradition at a specific historical moment.