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Reviewed by:
  • Surprised in Translation by Mary Ann Caws
  • Tim Conley
Caws, Mary Ann. Surprised in Translation. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2006. Pp. ix+ 145.

“Surprise” is, etymologically, an instance of borrowing from the French, the language which Mary Ann Caws has been passing through and back for many years now as an accomplished translator and anthologist. The root meaning of “surprise” is “to overtake,” and anyone who has made any significant effort at translation can appreciate Caws’s use of this word in connection with that practice that seems like a schizophrenic struggle for identity and mastery. It is to just such people that Surprised in Translation will mean and give most: those of us who perversely enjoy screwing up our brows, trying to come up with a passable French term for the English “lump” (Caws punningly refers to “the truly massive importance” of this word: one failed option for her is massif, which “loses the tangible point” [67]) or debating between the clunky “woman of mine” and the too-liberal “my love” for “ma femme” (129).

This is a disarmingly slender and elegant book, a meditation more than a rigorous argument or critique, a loose-legged amble rather than a march. If it seems unwilling to foray into the wilder thickets of theoretical considerations of translation as such, it is also pleasantly free of jargon. It belongs, I think, on the same shelf with Gregory Rabassa’s If This Be Treason (2005), and though it is not quite a memoir in the way that Rabassa’s book is, Surprised in Translation does provide a similar, yet somewhat indirect overview of a translator’s career. Caws’s touchstone writers (Mallarmé, André Breton, René Char) are here even if, given her long association with the surrealists, the party itself does seem curiously under-represented, only brought into focus [End Page 218] as an afterthought, in the book’s last six pages. (A shame, it seems to me: a full-length study could be done on surrealism and translation.) The challenges in translating and those in the translations of Virginia Woolf, Ezra Pound, and Yves Bonnefoy are brought out for careful inspection, author with tuning fork at the ready.

Caws praises “imagination” in translators and translations, a quality all too typically and all too often supposed unnecessary or even dangerous by those who would characterize translators as servile, to be neither seen nor heard. Given her playful introduction about parrots and recent insights into animal perception, it is a little strange that Caws makes no mention of Nabokov, who asked

What is translation? On a platterA poet’s pale and glaring head,A parrot’s screech, a monkey’s chatter,And profanation of the dead.

Nabokov would probably disapprove of almost every translation act in Caws’s book (her own and others) for their “smoothness.” The most vehement proponent of what we might label “crunchy” translation, Nabokov calls for a nearly deafening sounding of cultural and linguistic difference, full of dissonance, awkwardness, and as many explanatory notes as possible. Such a position is so extreme as to appear, at first blush, irrational, but when Caws writes, “I want to make a claim for the truest translation as recognition” (118), she reveals the temptation against which Nabokov firmly sets himself: the temptation to domesticate the foreign, to negate difference in favour of “recognition.”

Recognition is, by Althusserian lights, a very charged word, and it seems the very antithesis of surprise. In the midst of a very fine analysis of Mallarmé’s approach to Tennyson (which includes engrossing discussion of differences of lighting in “Mariana” and of the funereal turn of “le rayon de soleil gisait” from “sunbeam lay” [43]), Caws draws from Michael Rifaterre’s 1983 essay, “On the Prose Poem’s Formal Features,” and makes this general suggestion:

What is triggered by whatever anomaly the reader may sense as a block to understanding in the text is a recognition of some intertext, something read or seen before or after the study of the text and found in the reader’s mind. A syllepsis, or a word interpretable in two senses, often gives the clue to this...

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