In Translation. Translators on Their Work and What it Means ed. by Esther Allen and Susan Bernofsky (review)

A collection of eighteen essays composed by contemporary authors and translators—must there still be an impermeable conceptual boundary dividing the two?—about the many dimensions of literary translation, this anthology is a welcome addition to English-language scholarship in translation studies. The interdisciplinary contributions address a variety of audiences: literary translators and their students; scholars of translation studies; literature, linguistics and literary theory; and indeed any instructor of literary works in English translation. One could also imagine several essays being deployed in (foreign) language for reading knowledge courses to tease vastly more source-language cultural and linguistic context out of texts. From Ted Goossen and Haruki Murakami to Catherine Porter and Jason Gruenebaum, contributors’ reflections on the process of translating literary works from many languages into English are written in a scholarly but accessible style. This should make their inclusion in a classroom, whether graduate or advanced undergraduate students, also quite suitable. Finally, it is to the editors’ credit that they solicited commentary on works translated from many non-European languages.

The essays, nearly all of which originally appeared in other publications from 2003-2011, are arranged under the headings “The Translator in the World” and “The Translator at Work.” An introduction by editors Allen and Bernofsky, both translators and literary scholars themselves, effectively conveys the issues at stake with particular attention to the primacy of English as a means of worldwide communication today: “The English-language translator occupies a particularly complex ethical position,” negotiating “a fraught matrix of interactions.” The act of translation into English can homogenize individual foreign literatures and cultures, as well as exclude certain cultural voices from the global conversation if no English publisher is found (xvii.) The point is not wholly original, but in selecting essays focused on specific ethical dimensions of translation, the English reader is invited to read these essays differently than in their originally-published context. Moreover, “To perceive the translator as endowed with agency, intent, skill, and creativity is to destabilize the foundations of the way we read…to see two figures where our training as readers, our literary upbringing, has accustomed us to seeing only the author” (xix.) In drawing the reader’s attention both to the act of literary translation and to its product, and linking these to the act of reading, the editors admirably if indirectly illustrate another valuable point: The necessity for students, professors and researchers to reflect on the fact that one’s “primary source,” if a translated text, requires additional modes of analysis than a text composed in one’s native language and from a familiar cultural context or scholarly tradition.

One could select any of the essays to demonstrate the “complex ethical positions” encountered by translators into English today, but three will suffice: Alice Kaplan’s Translation: The Biography of an Artform (67-81) skillfully addresses “the lived experiences of translators” from the perspective of one who has both translated French works into English and had her own memoir translated into French. Her narrative crisply describes at times uplifting, at times intractable collaborations between living authors, their translators, and publishers’ representatives against the backdrop of English as the primary language for today’s international publishing industry. Maureen Freely’s essay Misreading Orhan Pamuk (116-126) describes even more wide-ranging effects of her choice of certain English phrases in the translation of Pamuk’s novel Snow (2004). These engendered not only stylistic disagreements with Pamuk, but also conflicts and threats from within the Turkish diaspora and the Turkish “deep state” (activists associated with military officers). While most may recall analogous reactions when Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses appeared in 1988, the uniquely Turkish dimension in connection with Freely’s English translation of Pamuk’s novel is of special value here. Finally, Jose Manuel Prieto’s On Translating a Poem by Osip Mandelstam (127-142) is a masterful demonstration of important cultural and literary knowledge uniquely imparted...