The Translator’s Invisibility

The Translator’s Invisibility intervenes against the translator’s situation and activity in contemporary Anglo-American culture by offering a series of genealogies that write the history of present. It traces the rise of transparent discourse in English-language translation from the seventeenth century onward, while searching the past for exits, alternative theories and practices in British, American, and several foreign-language cultures—German, French, Italian.[12] The chapters form an argument pursued chronologically, showing that the origins of fluent translating lie in various kinds of cultural domination and exclusion, but also that translation can serve a more democratic agenda in which excluded theories and practices are recovered and the prevailing fluency is revised. The acts of recovery and revision that constitute this argument rest on extensive archival research, bringing to light forgotten or neglected translations and establishing an alternative tradition that somewhat overlaps with, but mostly differs from, the current canon of British and American literature.

This book is motivated by a strong impulse to document the history of English-language translation, to uncover long-obscure translators and translations, to reconstruct their publication and reception, and to articulate significant controversies. The documentary impulse, however, serves the skepticism of symptomatic readings that interrogate the process of domestication in translated texts, both canonical and marginal, and reassess their usefulness in contemporary Anglo-American culture. The historical narratives in each chapter, grounded as they are on a diagnosis of current translation theory and practice, address key questions. What domestic values has transparent discourse at once inscribed and masked in foreign texts during its long domination? How has transparency shaped the canon of foreign literatures in English and the cultural identities of English-language nations? Why has transparency prevailed over other translation strategies in English, like Victorian archaism (Francis Newman, William Morris) and modernist experiments with heterogeneous discourses (Pound, Celia and Louis Zukofsky, Paul Blackburn)? What would happen if a translator tried to redirect the {41} process of domestication by choosing foreign texts that deviated from transparent discourse and by translating them so as to signal their linguistic and cultural differences? Would this effort establish more democratic cultural exchanges? Would it change domestic values? Or would it mean banishment to the fringes of Anglo-American culture?

Throughout, the emphasis is on “literary” translation in a broad sense (mainly poetry and fiction, but also including biography, history, and philosophy, among other genres and disciplines in the human sciences), as opposed to “technical” translation (scientific, legal, diplomatic, commercial). This emphasis is not due to the fact that literary translators today are any more invisible or exploited than their technical counterparts, who, whether freelance or employed by translation agencies, are not permitted to sign or copyright their work, let alone receive royalties (Fischbach 1992:3). Rather, literary translation is emphasized because it has long set the standard applied in technical translation (viz. fluency), and, most importantly for present purposes, it has traditionally been the field where innovative theories and practices emerge. As Schleiermacher realized long ago, the choice of whether to domesticate or foreignize a foreign text has been allowed only to translators of literary texts, not to translators of technical materials. Technical translation is fundamentally constrained by the exigencies of communication: during the postwar period, it has supported scientific research, geopolitical negotiation, and economic exchange, especially as multinational corporations seek to expand foreign markets and thus increasingly require fluent, immediately intelligible translations of international treaties, legal contracts, technical information, and instruction manuals (Levy 1991:F5). Although in sheer volume and financial worth technical translation far exceeds the translation of literary texts (a recent estimate values the corporate and government translation industry at $10 billion), literary translation remains a discursive practice where the translator can experiment in the choice of foreign texts and in the development of translation methods, constrained primarily by the current situation in the target-language culture.