The Translator’s Invisibility

In view of these cultural trends, it seems inevitable that transparency would become the authoritative discourse for translating, whether the foreign text was literary or scientific/technical. The British translator J.M. Cohen noticed this development as early as 1962, when he remarked that “twentieth-century translators, influenced by science-teaching and the growing importance attached to accuracy […] have generally concentrated on prose-meaning and interpretation, and neglected the imitation of form and manner” (Cohen 1962:35). Cohen also noticed the domestication involved here, “the risk of reducing individual authors’ styles and national tricks of speech to a plain prose uniformity,” but he felt that this “danger” was avoided by the “best” translations (ibid.:33). What he failed to see, however, was that the criterion determining the “best” was still radically English. Translating for “prose-meaning and interpretation,” practicing translation as simple communication, rewrites the foreign text according to such English-language values as transparency, but entirely eclipses the translator’s domesticating work—even in the eyes of the translator.

The translator’s invisibility is also partly determined by the individualistic conception of authorship that continues to prevail in Anglo-American culture. According to this conception, the author freely expresses his thoughts and feelings in writing, which is thus viewed as an original and transparent self-representation, {7} unmediated by transindividual determinants (linguistic, cultural, social) that might complicate authorial originality. This view of authorship carries two disadvantageous implications for the translator. On the one hand, translation is defined as a second-order representation: only the foreign text can be original, an authentic copy, true to the author’s personality or intention, whereas the translation is derivative, fake, potentially a false copy. On the other hand, translation is required to efface its second-order status with transparent discourse, producing the illusion of authorial presence whereby the translated text can be taken as the original. However much the individualistic conception of authorship devalues translation, it is so pervasive that it shapes translators’ self-presentations, leading some to psychologize their relationship to the foreign text as a process of identification with the author. The American Willard Trask (1900–1980), a major twentieth-century translator in terms of the quantity and cultural importance of his work, drew a clear distinction between authoring and translating. When asked in a late interview whether “the impulse” to translate “is the same as that of someone who wants to write a novel” (a question that is clearly individualistic in its reference to an authorial “impulse”), Trask replied:

No, I wouldn’t say so, because I once tried to write a novel. When you’re writing a novel […] you’re obviously writing about people or places, something or other, but what you are essentially doing is expressing yourself. Whereas when you translate you’re not expressing yourself. You’re performing a technical stunt. […] I realized that the translator and the actor had to have the same kind of talent. What they both do is to take something of somebody else’s and put it over as if it were their own. I think you have to have that capacity. So in addition to the technical stunt, there is a psychological workout, which translation involves: something like being on stage. It does something entirely different from what I think of as creative poetry writing.

(Honig 1985:13–14)