Comparative Journeys: Essays on Literature and Religion East and West

“READABILITY” IS perhaps the most frequently invoked watchword of all translators. It indicates that elusive quality at once defining both the necessary aim and the undeclared pride of the translator: the necessary aim because without it, the rendered text can become even more inaccessible than the original (think of English versions of Kant, Hegel, Gadamer); and the undeclared pride because readability betokens our conviction that translations can be successful, that we can, however momentarily and in whatever limited way, reverse Babel, overcome the confusion of tongues, defy the deity’s imposed fragmentation of human culture and meaning. What is alien and different can be made familiar and comprehensible.

Readability, however, has also acquired a less than positive meaning in the emergent field of description translation studies. For a translator and a theorist like Lawrence Venuti, “the illusion of transparency is an effect of fluent discourse, of the translator’s effort to insure easy readability by adhering to current usage, maintaining continuous syntax, fixing a precise meaning.”¹ In this revisionist view of the matter, the aim at readability inevitably incurs the unpardonable sin of domestication, of rendering innocuous that which is textually different and foreign. To counter this invidious emphasis and practice, Venuti vigorously argues for a form of translation that he labels “foreignizing,” that is, an effort in preserving the linguistic distinctiveness, peculiarities, and idiosyncrasies of the original text in the target language.

As Venuti is quick to acknowledge, his elaboration of these two forms of translation practice is itself based on the praemetial and farsighted idea of the nineteenth-century German theologian Fredrich Schleiermacher that in translation, we can either move the reader toward the author or vice versa.² More than Venuti has done in his stimulating treatment of certain segments of Western translation history, I argue here that this motion involves much more than formal linguistic concerns. Whereas texts related to scientific or commercial enterprises must perforce require the accuracy of informational transmission as the decisive concern for any work of translation, literary texts by definition embody a union of rhetorical and formal considerations. Semantics, in other words, cannot be divorced from aesthetics on the one hand and cultural politics on the other, and thus literary translation conscientiously undertaken can never be simply a matter of code switching. This depressingly mechanistic term favored by many who write on the subject of so-called translation science nonetheless has to be invoked, because it serves at least a useful purpose of pinpointing a recurrent concern of any translator and, by intimate extension, interpreter of texts. Not only must we take up constantly the question of the relative adequacy of one system of codes matching another, but in addition to the perplexing issues of lexical meaning, of equivalency and synonymity, are the elusive but no less real problems of grammatical meaning and rhetorical impact, of the intended or perceived effects of different sets of linguistic signs and codes always presupposed in any act of translation.

My remarks thus far may betray a covert act to reopen the venerable question of whether poetry can be translated, a much debated topic since the time of the Enlightenment down to the present. If I affirm such a desire, I must hasten to point out that I have no intention of rehearsing the familiar ideas of Vico, Croce, Jakobson, and Bakhtin on the uniqueness and complete reflexivity of poetic language, and therefore its resistance to translation. My own experience of learning and writing classical Chinese poetry certainly bears out one premise of these thinkers. Since poetic diction and prosodic structure in much of premodern Chinese verse were determined by the tonal pitch of the words, this feature alone would render such poetry impossible for duplication in any of the ancient or modern Indo-European languages with which I have some familiarity. For that matter, it could not even be duplicated by Asian writers not completely conversant with tonal metrics, as early Japanese and Korean poetry employing the Chinese script readily testifies.

Acknowledgment of such a difficulty, however, is not the same as ruling out any possibility for meaningful translation, but to examine the possible impossibility of translation in a different light. What I want to suggest here is that Western thinkers like Croce and Jakobson perhaps overemphasize the distinctiveness of poetry. I prefer the term literary translation precisely because the problem of “faithful ugliness” or “treasonous beauty,” to use old adages, unavoidably inheres in the translation of both poetry and prose. The advocates of poetic uniqueness, it seems to me, sometimes speak as if complete identity should be the undisputed ideal of literary translation. The point that should at all times be emphasized is not the equivalency of expression or that only a poet should translate poetry, just like a “plant must spring again from its seed,” as Shelley says eloquently, “or it will bear no flower.” My contention, rather, is that a literary translation is always a different flower, a progeny of crossbreeding (to continue the botanical metaphor), because a translated text is always a tissue of similarity and difference, of cultural continuities and contrasts, of opaqueness and transparency. In this sense, readability as the telos of translation is, in my view, what makes the activity unavoidably secular and transgressive.

Against those thinkers who have argued—not without persuasiveness—that translation is impossible, that infidelity and betrayal are inevitable, I would assert that translation can work from an equally audacious premise that the secrets encoded in a particular linguistic and cultural tradition can be penetrated, disseminated, and shared. That premise acquires its sharpest relief from the biblical myth of Babel, for translation must proceed from the assumption that no language can lay claim to the hegemony of an original Edenic speech, of embodying the primal unity of a single lip. Even in the thought of Walter Benjamin, who has articulated an eloquent thesis of a pure, archival language based on the Genesis account of God’s primal speech of effective creativity wherein revelation (Offenbarung) coincides with expressibility, the actual language of human history is one of loss and deterioration. According to Benjamin, linguistic being, because of its very spiritual interiority (geistige Inhalte), is what suffers decline and deprivation after the Fall.³ Thus for humanity as we know it, we have, in Jacques Derrida’s words, only “the irreducible multiplicity of idioms.”⁴ Nevertheless, the translator is not content to abide in equating multiplicity with confusion. We may be scattered on the face of the earth, but we are always striving to overcome, as it were, the fact and effects of linguistic diaspora. We are not the hissing and incommunicative inmates of Milton’s hell. Because the biblical deity who disrupted the alleged primal oneness of human speech ironically also inaugurated the necessity of translation as human task and work, humankind must toil with the recognition, as Eugene Eoyang has put the matter so boldly, “that translations are what saved the original from oblivion.”⁵ In the lexical, semantic, grammatical, and contextual aspects of philological labor, we dare to seek to bridge the gulfs of geography and time.

To the extent, however, that this bridge is always erected on language, itself an ineradicable index to the dispersed particularism of human culture, this artifact finds its best symbolization in the Tower of Babel itself, for it, too, can never be finished.⁶ That is the pathos of translation, a part of what I would consider its true impossibility, and the pathos has something to do also with readability, the ideal of translational transparency that would always ironically mask and distort the foreign text.

It is customary for practitioners and critics of translation to argue how each generation must start again to find its own definitive version of a classic text, and the reason for that is precisely because human language is a wholly historical, and thus temporal, phenomenon. Readability as an ideal of translation not only seeks linguistic fluency, as Venuti alleges, but it also perforce privileges the present and the prejudices of the present. A contemporary translator has little choice but to adhere to “current usage,” for to undertake deliberately a rendition of a foreign text designed for the readership of the past would be an absurdity. In other words, for translation to be successful, it cannot avoid targeting the present audience, however defined, as the ideal audience, but this Sisyphean attempt to seize the moment in reception renders translation forever impermanent.

I want to illustrate what I am trying to get at by recounting briefly a production of Wagner’s Tannhäuser by the Chicago Lyric Opera that had the whole city, and even national critics, buzzing in excitement in the 1988–1989 season. Determined that a contemporary setting would better serve their avowed purposes of prodding the audience to think about the characters in the musical drama, the director Peter Sellars and translator John E. Woods set about to transfer the story of Heinrich Tannhäuser’s sin and redemption from the thirteenth century to the twentieth, in which the titular hero had been transformed from a knight errant (Ritter) into, of all people, a televangelist! Venusburg in this case became a sleazy seaside motel illumined by prancing beach boppers and flashing neon lights; die Sängerhalle auf der Warburg took shape as Robert Schuller’s Crystal Palace in California; and the valley fronting the city was relocated to a waiting room with striking resemblance to part of Chicago’s O’Hare airport.

It was clear from both the production itself and interviews that Sellars saw in the escapades of the American televangelist Jimmy Swaggart many parallels to Tannhäuser’s story. To help underscore the siege of contraries warring in the hero’s soul—the archetypical struggle between selfless, spiritual love embodied in Elizabeth and the carnal pleasures proffered by Venus—the poet-translator Woods accentuated both the overt and the tacit sexual suggestiveness of Wagner’s text. Thus in the whispering harmonies opening the drama, the choral invitation

If the reaction of the audience was an effective gauge of the opera’s communicative power, then the audible gasps and titters at the surtitles accompanying the performance would compel one to conclude that Sellars had scored a resounding triumph. Here is someone who understands what readability or transparency means for so large and complex a work as Tannhäuser, and I must report that there were, for me as well, magical moments created precisely by the production’s contemporary touches: the camp meeting setting that greeted the return of the prodigal hero in act 1, the utterance of Wolfram’s lovely prayer (“o du, mein holder Abendstern”) against darkening skylines silhouetted with jumbo jets that were to bring home the pilgrims, the savage satire of American religion by uplifted rifles and shotguns in the Crystal Palace’s congregational singing.

It was the stated aim of Sellars that Jimmy Swaggart’s story should act as a catalyst for people to think about the plight and enigma of Tannhäuser without getting bogged down in the details of religion. After witnessing the entire performance, however, I submit that the details of religion were precisely the elements that made the Sellars’s staging less than totally satisfying. The difference between the original and the updated version of the opera is the difference between thirteenth-century Catholicism and fundamentalist Protestantism in late twentieth-century America. In both cases the temptations of the flesh and the reckless betrayal of true love and trust may possibly be similar, but Jimmy Swaggart’s religious ethos knows neither the intercessory merit of the holy Virgin nor the piacular benefits of pilgrimage, let alone papal pardon dispensed by the blooming of a wizened staff. That was why the audience at Chicago greeted with giggles and guffaws Tannhäuser’s loud declaration at the end of act 2, “Nach Rom!” No translation there was necessary, but a moment of supreme poignance and crisis had now only the effect of ridiculous incongruence.

This brief excursion into an operatic text and performance will, I hope, begin to clarify some of my thoughts about readability in translation. Confronted by the perceived otherness of the text, the translator is always tempted to neutralize, to render it innocuous or less conspicuous by diction and syntax that supposedly speak more to the target audience. This is, as the distinguished music critic Andrew Porter also remarked in 1988 when he reviewed several Wagnerian productions (including Chicago’s), “too blunt a way to supply ‘relevance.’ It implies a contempt for contemporary audiences, deemed to be without historical awareness, unable to comprehend life’s basic symbols or catch any allusion that is not spelled out. It turns opera—potentially the highest, subtlest, and most potent of all arts—into something ‘instantly’ communicative.”⁷

If Porter’s critique of such practice in the staging of opera and the translation of operatic texts seems cogent and warranted, this kind of critique is no less applicable to a good deal of English reception of Chinese literature. Until only recent years, many Western and Chinese translators seem to have been dominated by excessive concern, if not contempt, for their contemporary audiences. They have been more than willing and forthright in deciding what would be appropriate or appealing for readerly consumption. This notion of a rather ill-defined and unexamined cultural essentialism could thus become a powerful criterion for determining what to translate and how to translate, always clouded by the rather myopic assumption that certain practices, concepts, or expressions of one culture can never be understood or appreciated by another. Consideration of this ilk would lead them to make the assertion, not unlike some unctuous waiter in a restaurant, that “you don’t want to order this dish. Only the Chinese will enjoy it!”

My observation, let me hasten to say, does not intend to dispute the widely held conviction in our time that any act of literary translation has to be the product of conscious, and thus conspicuous, choice. Even the compilation of an anthology in a single language, according to this view, is itself already a process of deliberate choosing that often also betokens intellectual, political, and economic considerations. This kind of acknowledgment duly registered does not mean, however, that one can at once resolve the problems of inclusion and exclusion, of fidelity or falsification—in sum, of readability understood as the desire of instant communicativeness that confronts every literary translator. That was certainly the case when I worked on The Journey to the West.

I can never forget the shock I received nearly forty years ago when I first picked up Arthur Waley’s highly acclaimed translation of that novel, retitled Monkey: Folk Novel of China. Although I was immediately moved by the supple beauty of the translator’s English, I was at the same time beset by a recurrent question: how could this be the same novel that had captivated my attention since boyhood? Not only was Waley’s version drastically abridged, but there were also radical revisions of language and vast omissions of terms, episodes, recurrent poetic passages—all features the removal of which could vitally affect both textual integrity and meaning. Waley, as far as I know, never gave a succinct reason for the way he treated this Chinese narrative, but his brief allusion in his preface to the fact that the narrative was frequently read in abridged versions by the Chinese themselves might explain in part how he regarded the nature of the text. Clearly, the need for the foreign reader to behold the text’s totality was not deemed paramount.

The remarks by Hu Shi

, whom Waley enlisted to write an introduction to the translation, however, shed further light on possibly the conception of the narrative held by these two men. Although Hu had been a pioneer in the modern critical study of classic Chinese fiction, and although his highly influential essay of 1923 contributed enormously to our knowledge of the textual history and formative stages of this particular text, Hu’s peculiar notion of what The Journey to the West is about also betrays his bias. “Freed from all kinds of allegorical interpretations by Buddhist, Taoist, and Confucianism commentators,” he declares in the introduction to Waley’s version, “Monkey is simply a book of good humor, profound nonsense, good-natured satire, and delightful entertainment.”⁸

No doubt there is some truth to Hu’s characterizations, but no one, I think, who has read every line of the full-length narrative (or, for that matter, even some of the so-called abbreviated versions in Chinese) can consent to say that the book is simply that of Hu’s reductionist description. Above all, the reader may wonder if the religious interpretation of the narrative has been the result of arbitrary imposition or percipient response to the text’s language and rhetoric. Prior to the twentieth century, every annotated edition of the full-length narrative that I know of has treated this work as a developed and sustained religious allegory, a text of veiled mysteries that would divide its readership into the ignorant masses on the one hand and the fellowship of the few discerning cognoscenti on the other, an esoteric manual with a secret code that transforms it into a veritable sacred text itself.

In retrospect, Hu’s remark in Waley’s translation can certainly be construed as part of modern China’s reaction toward its own history, particularly its own religious culture, as the vast majority of intellectuals caught up in the zeitgeist of the May Fourth Movement tended to regard any form of traditional religion as nothing more than superstition. That antipathy has its basis in factors of both history and class. To the extent that many of the intellectuals at the time continued to subscribe to the values and outlook of traditional Confucianism, they simply wrote off anything non-Confucian as popular and thereby hopelessly benighted. The view of the Confucian scholar-official, abetted by escalating contact with Western civilization that began with the arrival of Matteo Ricci and colleagues in the seventeenth century, was that religion had to be identified with the beliefs and practices of the people. Confucianism itself was spared such an appellation, for they denied that the way of Ruism, as Confucianism was liked to be known to its adherents, could have something essentially common to such traditions as Buddhism and Daoism. Such a view of the matter, I should point out, was actually an article of Jesuit apologetic theology as much as Chinese elite self-understanding, but it was promoted as well by nineteenth-century Protestant missionaries. To this day, this characterization of Confucianism as a form of ethical humanism that is essentially secular persists in the attitude of many contemporary Chinese intellectuals and Western sinologists. Thus, to the further extent that late Qing and early republican savants tended to regard their own intellectual tradition as also hopelessly unscientific and unprogressive, it might have been exceedingly difficult for them to acknowledge that editors and commentators of the previous centuries, with fanciful noms de plume like Master Intuiting the One (Wu Yi Zi

), could present a proper understanding of a text like the Xiyouji to the twentieth-century reader.

That Waley titled his translation Monkey: Folk Novel of China should by itself tell volumes. That title is not without immense irony, since Wu Cheng’en, the putative author, is also prominently mentioned on the cover of Waley’s book. Wu, however, is no more to be equated with some member of the “folk” than the intricate and encyclopedic content of his book, for Hu Shi’s essay of 1923 has already firmly placed the putative author amid the scholar-official class of late Ming. Subsequent research has shown that Wu Cheng’en, if indeed the true author, happened also to be an extremely erudite individual, even though he was less than successful in officialdom. In a real sense, therefore, Hu’s sweeping indictment that “for centuries the book had been damaged by monks and Daoists” has also inflicted its own kind of injury, because the modern reception history of the Journey has been, until only recently, characterized by its resistance to the presence of religion. Despite the nearly unanimous tendency of criticism of the previous three centuries to read the tale as an elaborate allegory of either Neo-Confucian self-cultivation or a Daoist journey in physiological alchemy, Chinese critics after Hu Shi focus their discussions almost exclusively on the novel’s explosive and pungent satire.

The momentum reached its zenith in the decades after the creation of the PRC (People’s Republic of China), in 1949. Sanctioned by Chairman Mao’s general endorsement of China’s vernacular literature, much of the mainland’s interpretation of the text tends to follow a crude Marxist paradigm and reads the story as the rebellion of popular heroes (e.g., Monkey) against all forms of feudal oppression. Mao’s special fondness for the book itself led him to his own brand of allegory. Writing in his favored classical mode of poetry, Mao likened himself in a well-known heptasyllabic regulated poem to the Great Sage Sun, who would wield the thousand-pound cudgel to rid the cosmos of all fiends and miasmas, all authorities and potentates.⁹ Spurred by the chairman’s approbation and appropriation of the taxonomy devised by the famous modern writer Lu Xun, books and articles on the Journey inevitably name it as “the fiction of gods and demons [shenmo xiaoshuo

],” though that designation does no more than to identify the presence of such creatures in the text. The developed criticism of the narrative often gets bogged down by an anomaly: what to do with the rest of the novel’s ninety-three chapters after the first seven celebrating Monkey’s obstreperous heroics in Heaven. How will the chairman’s allegory accommodate Monkey’s defeat and imprisonment by the Buddhist patriarch, or the hero’s unquestioned submission to Buddhism after his release and his unrelenting devotion to the mission of scripture seeking? Questions like these in turn point up another irony not unfamiliar to all of us engaged in the study of linguistic texts. It is not only translation but interpretation as well that tends to privilege the present.

Part of the present, as far as the Journey is concerned, is fortunately constituted by the work of some scholars living beyond the limiting confines of PRC governance and its most restrictive decades. When I began work on the tale in the early seventies, I had already followed the lead of Japanese annotators and tracked down a great deal more of the sources and citations of Daoist writings in my translation. In 1985, the Australian scholar Liu Ts’un-yan (Cunren), in a series of five long essays, detailed exhaustively all the possible textual references and allusions to Quanzhen texts structured in the novel.¹⁰ The unprecedented documentation of sources led quickly to the reinterpretation of the Journey by academicians in Europe, the United States, Japan, and Taiwan, and some of these publications might have made their way back into China. Thus the publication in 1992 of a small volume of essays by Wang Guoguang

in Shanghai significantly titled Xiyouji bielun

¹¹ betokens a sort of breakthrough for mainland Chinese criticism of the novel that radically departs from immediate scholarly antecedents. Although the critical discourse of Wang studiously avoids the use of the word “religion,” advocating instead that the novel’s allegory springs from the topoi of athletic and hygenic harness of vital energetics (qigong), his study nonetheless represents the most thoroughgoing and systematic correlation of the first half of the narrative with the Daoist canon. Stimulated by Wang’s discussion and model, Wang Gang, then a doctoral student at the University of Chicago, published an essay that searched out more Daoist sources and parallels, thereby taking this line of inquiry to the novel’s conclusion.¹²

The scholarly contribution of the two Wangs is of special merit, for prior to their painstaking labor, even the editors and commentators of the previous century had neither documented the ideological bases of their assertions nor made clear how their interpretation could enhance the reader’s understanding of plot structure or narrative logic. Why do we have to have all those episodes of captivity and release? Does not the invariable construction of demonic ambush, perilous imprisonment, and eventual triumph by means of frequent assistance of deities get a bit repetitious and wearisome? Given our modern emphasis that the true art of telling a story consists in making one part motivate another, the seemingly random, episodic structure of a novel like the Journey may offend, precisely because it seems to indicate again otherness as cultural inferiority, that the Chinese text just does not measure up to work by James or Proust or some other exemplum of the great Western canon of modern prose fiction.

By making the long tale of Monkey’s birth and rebellion, through the enlistment of the human monk and renegade deities as his disciples, to the protracted trek to the Western Heaven a self-consistent and plenary allegory in which the successive stages of an adept’s alchemical self-cultivation is given unambiguous representation and embodiment, the critical labor of the two Wangs not only clarifies structural linkage but also directly reinforces the notion that serious study of China’s religion(s), where appropriate, must presuppose the ongoing work of literary and cultural criticism. Just as the student of Milton today cannot be satisfied with merely tagging that poet’s theological outlook as Puritan or Reformed but must be prepared to grapple with the nuanced differences in a subordinationist Christology or Arminian infralapsarianism in the doctrine of election, so the sojourner in the vast textual territory of historical China cannot afford to overlook or ignore its complex religious landscape of many hues and shapes.

Although this essay is not the occasion for rehearsing in detail how each episode of the Journey may be seen to constitute and support the overall narrative as an allegory of alchemical self-cultivation, I can conclude with the assertion that taking religion seriously in the case of this novel has the paradoxical effect of retrieving historicity by attentiveness to contemporaneity, of preserving foreignness in the very quest for readability.

Concerning the narrative’s historicity, Hu Shi’s damning remark on all those Daoists and Buddhists simply reveals his own ignorance of a certain segment of China’s religious history. Until only the recent decades, the meticulous and painstaking investigation of historical Daoism in its salient textual, institutional, and ritual aspects has rested during the last two centuries largely in the hands of Japanese and French savants, reinforced then powerfully by such contemporary historians of Chinese science as Joseph Needham and Nathan Sivin. Research by all of these scholars has recovered for us several major Daoist conceptions of life and the cosmos that are crucial for our understanding of a narrative allegory like the Journey: namely, that life from the moment of birth is a journey to decline and death; that this journey can allegedly be arrested, modified, or even reversed by the intervention of medicines, drugs, physiological activities and their combination; that one cardinal tenet of Daoism is the belief in the soteriological function of the human body, wherein anatomy is imagined and consequently imaged territorially and hierarchically as a landscape replete with towering peaks and plunging ravines, with winding rivers and even palatial edifices; and finally, that the process of Daoist self-cultivation is portrayed as a protracted agon with different gods and demons resident in the human body, an exercise fraught with dangers induced by faulty mentoring, erroneous methods, or lack of proper concentration.¹³ Readers familiar with the Journey will immediately be able to see linkages between these Daoist notions and the linguistic content of the fictive narrative. It is, however, the cumulative gain of present scholarship flourishing literally in three continents that, I would argue, serves to temper that sense of historical remoteness in the content, the conceptual and religious otherness that seems to impede the progress of its own native readers. In other words as well, it is the willingness to entertain seriously the indispensability of so arcane a religious system as Daoist alchemy that now seems to have attained readability for both the interpretation and translation of the Journey.

I hope my remarks have succeeded in a modest way to demonstrate the sort of costliness incurred in ascertaining the proper reception for translation. The costliness is usually factored as careful attention to language, but after our experience of the so-called linguistic turn in virtually most, if not all, of our intellectual enterprises, the avowal that language is all can mean a huge slice of culture. An extended process of minute reckoning with the language of the text, in fact, has taught me a valuable lesson, not merely of translation, but of criticism as well.

Before he died, Hans van Buitenen, a Chicago colleague who achieved global acclaim for the towering but unfinished undertaking of a complete translation of the India epic Mahābhārata, once tried to encourage me (when I was feeling particularly despondent about how slow my own progress was) with this remark: “A translation, if properly done, is the best ‘close reading’ one can do.” Even before I finished my project, I had begun to appreciate the acumen of this lamented friend.

I should point out that I’m not trying to argue that literary criticism and translation are the same thing. Many critics, even if they enjoy sophisticated command of different languages, can be poor translators, and the same is true of translators when it comes to criticism. Nonetheless, I would wager that just the experience of trying to replicate or represent a text in its totality in another language can be a most enlightening method of training someone how to read a text. The demand for understanding, and thus for interpretation, is literally continuous—from the simplest word to the most baffling kind of stylistic eccentricity, cultural and historical oddities, semantic, syntactic, and grammatical ambiguity, and (for me) most difficult of all, the tone and mood of certain kinds of linguistic constructions.

Whereas the critic’s activity perforce must focus on only selected aspects of a text for discussion, for whatever generalization he or she wishes to make (complete repetition of a text is recitation, not criticism), a translator in principle does not enjoy that privilege. Nothing in the text—no matter how trivial or how difficult—should ever escape the translator’s notice: like the conscientious musician, he or she must “perform” every note set down on the score by attending to the text’s every detail (written or implied). The work of translation, I would like to think, has made me a better critic in the sense that it has helped me to be more alert in “seeing” and “hearing” what seems to be conveyed by the signs.

Whereas, secondly, a critic also has the privilege of enumerating the various options of what a particular portion of a text may mean—indeed, undecidability, ambiguity, self-contradiction, or infinite deferral may be the most desirable feature of today’s critical fashion—the translator again does not enjoy such latitude of discourse. To preserve the translated text from fragmentation, from disintegrating literally into no sense or nonsense, the translator is obliged to make continuous sense of the text—that is, to choose a particular, and thus normative (if only for a fleeting moment), reading of the text that seeks to wrest some form of semantic coherence, if not permanence, out of the source text’s latent polysemy. That choice, of course, is subject to all the vicissitudes of the translator’s historicity and to the resources of the target language. But the translator cannot accept the luxury of deferred meaning; that’s an indulgence for the Derridean critic. To accomplish his or her task, the translator has no choice but try to “fix the precise meaning,” in Venuti’s phrase, even though he or she may realize constantly that this choice is but one of several possibilities.

If this brief reflection on a Wagnerian opera and on my own work on The Journey to the West has taught me anything, it is the realization that translators like Schleiermacher and Venuti are right in insisting on the necessity to foreignize a translation. We should not allow the regard for beholding the past in this instant to supersede the importance of preserving a sense of otherness even in the rendered text, but paradoxically, the act of preservation may involve an honest reckoning with the pastness of a text as a historical artifact. “The first translation of a work,” wrote Richard Howard in an article of the New York Times Magazine five or six years ago, “always errs on the side of trying to make the work readable, of trying to naturalize the work and make it not sound like a translation. We can afford now to be a lot more direct.” That directness, I should argue, must derive from the historical and linguistic specificities of the source text, and our attempt to convey a feeling of it can succeed only if we reject, in Barbara Johnson’s words, “the separability of style and thought and the priority of the signified over the signifier.”¹⁴ To acknowledge this as our ideal is to affirm the paradox—the possible impossibility, the unity of history and contemporaneity, the foreign and the readable—in the act of translation. Faced with the heady prospect of recovering the ancient and the alien for the edifying perusal by our contemporary, we may find Wagner’s words particularly seductive. “The incomparable thing about myth,” he once wrote, “is that it is true at all times, its content eternally inexhaustible.”¹⁵ That may be the case, but once myth must find expression in such a temporally and culturally conditioned medium as language, it is not always so easy to disentangle the true from the peripheral, the eternal from the merely ancient, the dancer from the dance.

2. Friedrich Schleiermacher, “Über die verschiedenen Methoden des Übersetzens,” Philosophische und vermischte Schriften (Berlin: Reimer, 1838), 2:207–245. One passage pertinent to his highly influential thesis is as follows: “What of the genuine translator, who wants to bring those two completely separated persons, his author and his reader, truly together, and who would like to bring the latter to an understanding and enjoyment of the former as correct and complete as possible without inviting him to leave the sphere of his mother tongue—what roads are open to him? In my opinion there are only two. Either the translator leaves the author in peace, as much as possible, and moves the reader towards him; or he leaves the reader in peace, as much as possible, and moves the author towards him…. The difference between the two methods … must be immediately obvious. For in the first case the translator tries, by means of his work, to replace for the reader the understanding of the original language that the reader does not have. He tries to communicate to the readers the same image, the same impressions he himself has gained—through his knowledge of the original language—of the work as it stands, and in doing so he tries to move the readers towards his point of view, which is essentially foreign to them.” The English text is found in André Lefevere, ed. and trans., Translating Literature: The German Tradition from Luther to Rosenzweig (Assen, Neth.: Van Gorcum, 1977), p. 74.