Who Translates?: Translator Subjectivities beyond Reason (review)

Who Translates? Translator Subjectivities beyond Reason. Douglas Robinson. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2001. Pp. vi + 208. $59.50 (cloth); $19.95 (paper).

A running joke in Jewish Studies involves the Septuagint, the group of seventy-two scholars who separately translated the bible, and who each, in isolation from his fellows, miraculously produced the same, divinely inspired document. The joke is that the real miracle would have been for the Septuagint to produce the same translation while sitting in one room. This quip posits two extremes: in one the translator lacks subjectivity because he is a passive vessel for divine inspiration, in the other he lacks subjectivity because of his total socialization. Douglas Robinson's primary interest lies in what happens between these two scenarios, at the point where inspiration and socialization intersect. By overcoming binary oppositions in a range of registers, such as biblical exegesis, psychoanalysis, and economics, he hopes to create "disaggregated-agency models" that are "more realistic than the rationalist ones they seek to displace" (195).

This critique of binaries is currently in vogue with scholars who apply cognitive science to the humanities, often in an attempt to replace the theoretical legacies of Saussurian linguistics and Foucauldian discourse. Although his earlier work, The Translator's Turn (1991), helped to pioneer this interest in cognitive theory, Robinson resists the new essentialism that books such as Mary Crane's Shakespeare's Brain (2001) promote. Whereas Crane locates the author in the body and defines the body as the brain, Robinson asks how looking at the translator as an author might complicate this rebirth of authorial subjectivity. He provocatively entertains the possibility that a Finnish translator makes a legitimate claim when he appropriates for himself the authority to cut the ending of King Lear "with Shakespeare's permission" (117). He explains the logic behind such a statement by arguing that spirit channeling provides a useful model for understanding translation. As in his earlier book, he argues that, at "some deep ideosomatic level, Bible translation even today remains the model for all Western thought about translation." ¹ From this claim he derives a three-part definition of spirit channeling as "the possession of channels by discarnate spirits, the possession of the translator by the source author, and the possession of ideological subjects by collective forces" (12).

Although Robinson's interest in channeling as a "metaphorical lens" allows him to justify the case studies he chooses for his project, this metaphor also allows him to elide an engagement with the "real-world complexity" of the translator subjectivities he posits (16, 11). An unsympathetic reader might suggest that the answer to Robinson's question, Who Translates? is: a white, Western man trained in the classical canon with a strong knowledge of German translation theory. Yet he claims a different ambition for his project when he refers to it as a "form of activism" and explains that he "intend[s] pre- and postrationalist in more or less the same radically mixed and imperfect sense as postcolonial scholars speak of pre- and postcolonialism: not as pure states that ever did or could exist, but rather as imaginary ciphers that mark off the boundaries of what we thematize as reason and empire" (14, 13). Does channeling function as a form of mimicry? If so, is his understanding of translation similar to the postcolonial theories of Frantz Fanon, V. S. Naipaul, or Homi Bhabha? Although he discusses the Lacanian "other," Robinson does not discuss Jacques Lacan's influence on theories of postcolonial subjectivity. The analogy between his translation theory and the postcolonial enterprise remains unexplored, and it is up to the reader to imagine the implications of this channeling model for colonial and postcolonial subjectivity. This omission is regrettable because it prevents Robinson from situating his biblical model in relation to such figures as Sacachawea, who interpreted for the Lewis and Clarke expedition, and who exemplifies the centrality to Western translation of "others."

From a feminist perspective, this work...