Philip Roth’s Transdisciplinary Translation

In translation, as in psychoanalysis, I try to adopt an ethics of respecting and maintaining the Other (or otherness), not attempting to reduce the Other to the same.

—Bruce Fink, 2012

In the fall of 2015, we discussed what it would mean to bring together some of the most respected minds in Roth Studies, scholars who have been writing about Roth for over a decade, with scholars just starting out. The goal was to unite everyone to attend a three-day seminar at the American Comparative Literature Association Conference, a conference that Harvard University hosted the following spring. In order to produce a coherent proposal for the ACLA, we needed to articulate what over-arching qualities linked our colleagues.

In addition to being avid readers of Roth and fascinated with theoretical inquiry, they share a commitment to dialogue, debate, and, above all, mentoring relationships. Given this latter quality—one of mutual interest in helping develop the next generation of Roth scholars—we thought it would be remarkable to unite everyone for lively debate that continued from one day to the next to the next. That we could further this conversation via a special journal issue seemed at that time only a fleeting possibility.

Given such lofty goals, we also, necessarily, discussed how to make a convincing case for the acceptance of a seminar on Roth in particular, admittedly a singularly American author who, on the surface, seems as interested in representing America as he is uninterested in taking up theoretical questions, an important focal point of the ACLA. And even after persuading the ACLA and each other of Roth’s relevance to an international and theoretically grounded audience, we remain, to this day, aware of persistent claims of Roth’s insularity —most recently articulated as Roth’s “narcissism”—which has become the ultimate criticism of this persistently relevant author.

As recently as October 2016, for example, Liel Leibovitz wrote for Tablet a review of the film adaptation of American Pastoral subtitled, “Not even Ewan McGregor can turn the author’s narcissism into a relatable work of art.” Later, Leibovitz writes that a profound “sense of self-centeredness, ironically, grows clearer with each of the author’s attempts to stride past the preoccupations of his youth and into bigger, bolder books that wrestle with the meaning of America.” The criticism mirrors the 2008 remarks surrounding predictions about the Nobel Prize that year. Although permanent secretary of the Nobel prize jury, Horace Engdahl, did not name names in his overview of the trends in American literature, everyone believed he was referring to Roth when he proclaimed: “[t]he US is too isolated, too insular. They [. . .] don’t really participate in the big dialogue of literature” (qtd. in Crouch).

The criticism of Roth’s “insularity” or even “narcissism” seemed perhaps too easy, even stereotypical, as Sidra DeKoven Ezrahi would later argue in a rejoinder to Leibovitz published in Tablet in December of 2016. Using the final scene of The Human Stain as an exemplary case of Roth’s ethics in terms of the tension between humanity and time, Ezrahi argues: “The ultimate emblem of this relinquishing of the future while gesturing to the artifice of eternity is the frozen pond covering the river’s flow at the end of The Human Stain.” In other words, for Ezrahi, even the Rothian scenes that emphasize the natural world, as at the end of this important novel, look outward rather than inward in their worry about the continuous flow of human connection, forebodingly threatened, as revealed by the image of frozen water.

For us, one of the most important ways in which Roth continues to look outward and may best be defended against charges of narcissism is his persistent pursuit of dialogue—with other writers, thinkers, and researchers—and the lively debate this has inspired in both literary studies and other disciplines. As a result, we chose for our seminar the title “Philip Roth’s Transdisciplinary Translation” to highlight some of the stellar work in Roth Studies emerging from around the globe, from several national traditions and disciplinary points of view...