Translations

128 LETTERS IN CANADA 1994 tout Ie monde (Guerin), propose un programme, fonde sur les principes enonces par Stanislavski, ou une serie d'exercices sur Ie mouvement, la voix et l'interpretation, Ie personnage, Ie jeu, Ie costume et Ie maquillage menent a la realisation d'un spectacle que l'on voudrait autre que conventionnel et, nous l'esperons, ala formation d'un public sensibilise aux grandes question soulevees par l'ecriture dramatique et sa mise en scene. Translations JANE KOUST AS Octavio Paz once stated, 'The history of different civilizations is the history of their translations. Each civilization, each soul, is different, unique. Translation is our way to face the otherness of the universe and history.' Like Paz, other contemporary scholars have stressed the importance and relevance of translation as a gauge of a given society's treatment of, and reaction to, the 'other' culture. William Barnstone's The Poetics of Translation (Yale University Press 1993) opens with this quotation from Paz's work, and Rainer Schulte and John Biguenet's Theories of Translation (University of Chicago Press 1992) proposes a compendium of 'important statements on the function of literary translation ' (postface) and its social history. Paz suggests, as do the abovementioned authors, that the study of the way in which a society translates and selects the material to be translated provides important insights into prevalent attitudes in the target culture. In other words, the 'way to face the otherness of the universe' is greatly determined by the 'soul' or the social, cultural, even political norms of the target culture: while it may well 'save you from your contemporaries' (Kenneth Roxton, quoted in Barnstone), translation is nonetheless influenced by them. Translation theory, principles, and scholarship have thus focused on the history, implications, and validity of the accuracy versus adaptation, traduttore versus traditore, beautiful versus faithful debate, or, as Barnstone states the xenophile/xenophobe dichotomy: these being 'ways to face otherness.' From Aristeas, a Greek-speaking Jew who argued for perfect accuracy in his Letter of Aristeas, circa 130 BC, to Edward Fitzgerald, who, in 1851, vaunted his translations of Persian poetry, claiming 'It is an amusement to me to take what liberties I like with these Persians,' translators and translation scholars have argued for and against fidelity to either the source or target language. Whether it be Matthew Arnold arguing that the translation should appear to be from 'an English hand' or Vladimir Nabokov claiming that 'the clumsiest translation is more useful than the prettiest paraphrase,' scholars are clearly divided over what they perceive to be right or wrong ways of translating literature. TRANSLATIONS 129 Arguments, however, which attemptto Identify what Douglas Robinson calls 'an ideal map of procedures (to be) followed by the human translator ,' as well as more recent linguistics-oriented research, which proposes a cognitive, rational, logical, and analytical study, ignore the role of poetic creativity in literary translation. In his study The Translator's Turn Gohns Hopkins University Press 1991), Robinson upholds the translator's right 'not only to be alive, be a real person with deeply felt experiences, but to become more alive, feel experience more deeply and to channel feeling and experiencing through translating.' Translation thus becomes a 'humanizing activity.' Robinson claims that it is now the translators' turn to work 'intuitively, personally and without guilt,' that is to say, to choose freely the turns they take. This idea of choice is not altogether new to translation theory. In an address entitled 'Methoden des Ubersetzens' delivered in 1813, Frederich Schleiermacher, rejecting the dogmatic 'right or wrong' methods proposed by his predecessors and contemporaries, stated, 'either the translator leaves the writer alone as much as possible and moves the reader towards the writer or he leaves the reader alone as much as possible and moves the writer towards the reader' (quoted in Schulte). In his study French Canadian and Quebecois Novels, Ben-Z. ~hek, cautioning English readers against poor translations, quotes John O'Connor's similarly 'middle ground' definition of a good translation: neither an enlightened forgery nor an immaculate duplication, it is rather 'an authentic counterpart of the source text, providing the reader with one work in two languages, not with two fully...