The Translator’s Invisibility

In Trask’s analogy, translators playact as authors, and translations pass for original texts. Translators are very much aware that any sense of authorial presence in a translation is an illusion, an effect of transparent discourse, comparable to a “stunt,” but they nonetheless assert that they participate in a “psychological” relationship with the {8} author in which they repress their own “personality.” “I guess I consider myself in a kind of collaboration with the author,” says American translator Norman Shapiro; “Certainly my ego and personality are involved in translating, and yet I have to try to stay faithful to the basic text in such a way that my own personality doesn’t show” (Kratz 1986:27).

The translator’s invisibility is thus a weird self-annihilation, a way of conceiving and practicing translation that undoubtedly reinforces its marginal status in Anglo-American culture. For although the past twenty years have seen the institution of translation centers and programs at British and American universities, as well as the founding of translation committees, associations, and awards in literary organizations like the Society of Authors in London and the PEN American Center in New York, the fact remains that translators receive minimal recognition for their work—including translators of writing that is capable of generating publicity (because it is prizewinning, controversial, censored). The typical mention of the translator in a review takes the form of a brief aside in which, more often than not, the transparency of the translation is gauged. This, however, is an infrequent occurrence. Ronald Christ has described the prevailing practice: “many newspapers, such as The Los Angeles Times, do not even list the translators in headnotes to reviews, reviewers often fail to mention that a book is a translation (while quoting from the text as though it were written in English), and publishers almost uniformly exclude translators from book covers and advertisements” (Christ 1984:8). Even when the reviewer is also a writer, a novelist, say, or a poet, the fact that the text under review is a translation may be overlooked. In 1981, the American novelist John Updike reviewed two foreign novels for The New Yorker, Italo Calvino’s If On a Winter’s Night a Traveller and Günter Grass’s The Meeting at Telgte, but the lengthy essay made only the barest reference to the translators. Their names appeared in parentheses after the first mention of the English-language titles. Reviewers who may be expected to have a writerly sense of language are seldom inclined to discuss translation as writing.

The translator’s shadowy existence in Anglo-American culture is further registered, and maintained, in the ambiguous and unfavorable legal status of translation, both in copyright law and in actual contractual arrangements. British and American law defines translation as an “adaptation” or “derivative work” based on an “original work of authorship,” whose copyright, including the {9} exclusive right “to prepare derivative works” or “adaptations,” is vested in the “author.”[3] The translator is thus subordinated to the author, who decisively controls the publication of the translation during the term of the copyright for the “original” text, currently the author’s lifetime plus fifty years. Yet since authorship here is defined as the creation of a form or medium of expression, not an idea, as originality of language, not thought, British and American law permits translations to be copyrighted in the translator’s name, recognizing that the translator uses another language for the foreign text and therefore can be understood as creating an original work (Skone James et al. 1991; Stracher 1991). In copyright law, the translator is and is not an author.[4]