Second Finding: A Poetics of Translation

EIGHT: Authorship, Ownership, Translatorship

[342] Authorship, Ownership, Translatorship chapter eight Authorship,Ownership,Translatorship Dans une œuvre, c’est le ‘monde’ qui, à chaque fois d’une façon autre, est manifesté dans sa totalité. —antoine berman Toute action de l’esprit est aisée si elle n’est pas soumise au réel. —marcel proust Les jugements, chez eux, précèdent l’expérience. —milan kundera Moins il y a de faits et de tests empiriques, moins il y a de contraintes sur nos théories et plus il y a de place pour l’idéologie. —jean bricmont Überzeugungen sind gefährlichere Feinde derWahrheit als Lügen. —friedrich nietzsche a view that has currency in some quarters is that translators have a legitimate claim to authorship of the target texts they turn out.The handmaidenly ethos that used to be so prevalent in translation studies has given way to stentorian claims for ownership. Where the Vestal once pridefully flaunted her effacement, we now have the Tenore di Forza, centre stage, belting out “calls to action.” (This was inevitable, perhaps, given the dialectics of fashion.1 ) Undoubtedly the most sustained push for authorship comes from LawrenceVenuti:“the closeness of the relation between translation and foreign text should not be taken as implying ...that the translation is not an independent work of authorship” (1998, 61).2 A key element of Venuti’s argument, the thrust of his push for equating translatorship with authorship, would seem to be his contention that both foreign text and translation are derivative. One can only agree with assertions such as the following: Both foreign text and translation . . . consist of diverse linguistic and cultural materials that neither the foreign writer nor the translator originates, and that destabilize the work of signification inevitably exceeding and possibly conflicting with their intentions.As a result, a foreign text is the site of many different semantic possibilities that are fixed only provisionally in any one translation,on the basis of varying cultural assumptions and interpretive choices,in specific social situations,in different historical periods . Meaning is a plural and contingent relation, not an unchanging unified essence, and therefore a translation cannot be judged according to mathematics-based [sic] concepts of semantic equivalence or one-to-one correspondence. (1995, 17–18) . . . neither the author nor the translator is conceived as the transcendental origin of the text . . . human action is intentional but determinate. (1995, 24) But when he equates this to the assertion that both foreign text and translation are derivative (these are indeed the words I have replaced by the ellipsis in the first of the above quotes),Venuti—whether it’s sophistry or Überzeugung—collapses an enormous range of meaning into a single, undifferentiated point,obliterating in the process both the qualitative and the quantitative nuances between the neutral and pejorative senses of the word derivative—“that which derives from” as opposed to “that which, wedded to the already-said, is insipidly lacking in originality.” Venuti’s insistence on equating translatorship and authorship is assuredly counter-intuitive: it is hard to see how the translator of, say, Faulkner, could claim ownership of plot, setting, world view, semiotic structurings, and the like—in a word, of the deep- and macrostructures to which novels owe their survival even in inept translations.(Indeed,the fact that world view, semiotic macrostructures, and the like survive [343] [Authorship, Ownership,Translatorship] unscathed is what allows a handful of Swedes,year after year,to award the Nobel Prize to authors translated from a wide range of languages—some of them quite “peripheral”—with which none of them may actually be conversant.) Of course its counter-intuitiveness doesn’t necessarily make Venuti’s assertion wrong: some of the most powerful models of reality— quantum mechanics is a case in point—are profoundly counter-intuitive. What gives these models their power, though, is their fit with the real they model,and the real world spin-offs they generate,for good or for ill: quantum mechanics made semi-conductor theory possible, and semiconductor theory made the silicon chip possible, and silicon chips made possible the IT boom, the “new economy” with its irrational exuberances and spectacular crashes. But the counter-intuitiveness ofVenuti’s assertion doesn’t necessarily make it right either.What counts at the end of the day is the fit with reality (yes, the real)—not the frisson of bating the good burghers. Yes,writing (like science,like all forms of...