By LAWRENCE VENUTI [Exchanges] – Especially in the United States, where relatively few translations are published, even fewer are reviewed as translations, and only an infinitesimal receive any recognition as literary works in their own right. When readers give any thought to translation, they tend to imagine it as mechanical, something that a computer might do, given the right software. Or they view it as esoteric, trafficking in a knowledge they don’t possess (namely a foreign language), uncertain whether to apply the term “art” or “craft,” honorifics that, in any case, fail to illuminate. Translation occupies a unique place in our culture: it is a kind of writing where, as a rule, misunderstanding meets neglect.
After translating fifteen books into English, mostly from Italian, after collaborating with many different publishers, large and small, commercial and university, after reviewing a steady stream of translations for newspapers and immersing myself in the growing academic industry of translation studies, certain truths have become self-evident. Translation is transformation. A translation can never reproduce a literary work, even though it is routinely read as if it were precisely that work. A translator offers no more than an interpretation, one possibility among others, which is both less and more than the foreign text. Merely to be readable, a translation must obviously be written in a language with which the reader is familiar. To go beyond readability, however, to enable a powerfully engaging experience, the language must somehow be appealing to the reader, who, it can’t be overemphasized, is not the reader for whom the foreign text was written. How can a translator avoid transforming it?
From this point of view, time-worn yet still unquestioned clichés prove to be utterly false. Take “traduttore traditore,” the Italian slur wherein the very name of “translator” is turned into a pun on “traitor.” Translation can be considered treachery only if one naively assumes that it can and should communicate a foreign text in some direct, untroubled way. Such loyalty is impossible, even if the translator consults a dictionary for every foreign word. That would just widen the spectrum of semantic possibilities, splintering the foreign words into so many scintillating chips of ice that start melting as soon as any interpretive heat is applied to them. Whereas the translator’s task is to freeze meaning in a form that is intelligible and interesting in another language and culture. The inevitable thaw occurs as the translation warms to the touch of different readerships, its charm dissolving with changes in literary taste, ultimately creating a demand for a new version.
Consider a more favorable image of translation, the idea that it is “a labor of love,” usually cited as the translator’s primary motive because the labor does not earn a subsistence wage.
Continued at Exchanges | More Chronicle & Notices.
