The Untranslatable and World Literature
Untranslatability and World Literature are both terms which mean different things to different people. Back in the 1950s, “postformalist” Roman Jakobson disparaged the concept of untranslatability in the spirit of “everything and nothing” is translatable, and claimed that untranslatability was a dogma not unlike other forms of censorship reigning over official culture in the communist Eastern bloc of Europe. Before him, radical modernists like Joyce and Pound would have told us, if they were to use such an adjective as a noun, that the “untranslatable” is an opportunity for invention, for making it new. Current translation scholars like Lawrence Venuti, a translator of Italian literature, emphasize that translation as creative interpretation is the ultimate humanistic task, not only because it keeps literary works alive, but because it is an interpretive act that varies the form, meaning and effect of the source text. Is this a different way of saying the same thing? Is translation theory going in rhetorical circles? The times have changed, but have they moved forward or backward? The implications of such questions are certainly part of the motive for undertaking our volume.
Global and globalization are, respectively, a concept and a process which have come to signify a radical shift, especially since the turn of the current century. The nature of and relations between individual nations and the international community as a whole, in an era dominated by postcolonial and migrational realities, terrorism and eco-disasters, has been transforming from a stable view of what was once considered unquestionably the West and what predictably constituted the East, or, for that matter, North and South. And we no longer speak of what was once defined as “developed” nations (e.g. in Europe or North America) and as the un- or “under-developed” countries (e.g. in Africa, Asia or South America). Perhaps the most defining force in this global reality is the “global” marketplace in late capitalism since the defeat of communism, the last gasp of romantic utopia turned dystopic nightmare.
Our book addresses recent debates surrounding untranslatability and the often contradictory implications of this claim within the postcolonial context of globalization, but Untranslatability Goes Global: The Translator’s Dilemma restricts its inquiry to literary translation—an ideological stance for some—with a central focus on the aesthetics and the ethics of the conditions in which literary translations of contemporary as well as historical works are produced within a changing landscape where terms like “literary” and “classical” and “canon” are no longer absolutes but depend, again, on ideological contexts and perspectives.
To tackle our heterogeneous topic, our volume presents cultural exchanges that take place across various cultures and languages such as Arabic, English, French, Haitian Creole, Italian, Portuguese, Icelandic, Basque and Spanish. In the context of translation and world literature, as Ástráður Eysteinsson has noted, “there are no small languages”; 1 while, in a short volume, we cannot aspire to include all existing languages, we have tried to represent a relatively broad spectrum, keeping in mind that the most pressing areas of exchange engage what (in genre/gender as well as the geo-politics of languages) constitutes marginal and mainstream in the global literary marketplace. And, as we know, the lingua franca around which many translation challenges revolve is English, a language in transit like many living languages—and perhaps more than most as it is constantly impacted by the displacements and ideologies of populations, on the one hand, and, on the other, by technologies and corporate pressures. Today’s English is not Shakespeare’s though it owes much of its richness to his creative genius.
A practice-based exploration of literary translation, our volume provides a platform for the voices of translators and scholars working in many languages, literary and cultural contexts, spotlighting the often unseen but no less creative—or political—process of translation, again, with an eye for the ethical as well as the aesthetic stakes of untranslatability today.
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World Literature is part of Modernity. Like World Literature, Modernity is a system in the making, a process, not a product: because they have been contrived to name what, by definition, eludes conceptual certainties, Modernity and World Literature are malleable, but vague, terms that account for a counterpoint of ever-changing synthesis and exclusions, consecration of classics and great books, openness to the absorption of literature in translation, and the consumption of literature that exposes the reader to different worldviews. “Modernity cannot be identified with any particular technology or social breakthrough,” writes Adam Kirsch. “Rather, it is a subjective condition, a feeling or an intuition that we are in some profound sense different from the people who lived before us.” 2
Within this ever-changing dynamic, World Literature has to incorporate periodically this sense of difference (and not only gain but loss) and, therefore, could be construed not only as the sum of all books, of all great books, of all classic books, but of books that are or can be read as literature, of books that have circulated (in translation or not) beyond their national sphere. They have become as David Damrosch stated in 2003, “windows on the world,” “a writing that gains in translation,” thus supporting the view that works of world literature are those that “take on a new life” when they appear in another language or move across national borders. 3 By possessing the latter definition (like a golddigger staking a claim), Damrosch both expanded on and opposed the supposedly “traditional” (now no longer popular) definition of World Literature as a fixed, stable product.
Damrosch’s view could support, on the other hand, the concept as an ongoing, fluid process in which world literature could as well represent a struggle between prestigious metropolitan centers (Europe) and peripheral ones (i.e. the Middle East and the Far East). In his view world literature could be used as a hermeneutical tool, a way of reading (“distant” or not), reinterpreting, and assimilating foreign literatures and cultures. Hence, when translators participate in this process conscientiously, translation is largely a positive phenomenon that may lead to increased consumption of the original works, cross-cultural understanding, and a general enrichment of world literature itself.
In 2013, Emily Apter argued against the translation of literary works in such a manner that effectively combines them into one world literature accessible and understandable to all. For Apter, “world literature,” while claiming to increase cross-cultural understanding, in reality homogenizes non-Western texts, appropriating other cultures for Western readers. Within this framework, translation is in danger of being appropriation, of being an “error” or “abuse,” or, from a less polemical, more tolerant Apterian perspective, merely an inevitable result of the transfer of textual knowledge from one culture to another. So we have Damrosch overcoming national barriers and cultures through translations, which often constitute “windows on the world,” opposed by Apter criticizing commercialized cultural differences and questioning, hence, the reliability of the translations publishers allow readers to access. Jumping on the Apter bandwagon, but with her own agenda, Gayatri Spivak stresses that World Literature is instrumental in the homogenization of national cultures through market-oriented translations—into English, for the most part. These are the most salient examples of the wide and fractious theoretical field of World Literature: two recent anthologies, World Literature in Theory (2014) and The Routledge Companion to World Literature (2011), are available for readers to examine the discussion in detail. In Untranslatability Goes Global, literary scholars and translators reflect on the abovementioned notion of appropriation— in its many varied strategies—that often shapes the translations we read and produce. Each chapter examines the ethical stakes of authorship and exchange as translators deal with translation’s parameters in a world in turmoil amid forces of postcolonialism and globalism.
Our first chapter examines untranslatability from the nuts-and-bolts pragmatics of translation. Alfred Mac Adam’s “Pragmatic Translation” locates the origins of translation in the idea of exchange. In any exchange, despite philological and philosophical questionings of equivalency, be it translation or barter, equivalencies are established. These are usually metaphoric in nature. Indeed, even our concept of money is metaphoric, in the sense that we say a number of coins or slips of paper are the equivalent of a hamburger or a house. The metaphoric nature of exchange means we are dealing in arbitrary fictions whenever we establish, in the case of translation, linguistic equivalencies. No matter how hard we try to be “accurate” or “faithful to the original,” we inevitably create something vastly different from the model we seek to emulate in a different language. To put these ideas to the test, “Pragmatic Translation” examines the translation into Spanish of Philip Roth’s 1977 novel American Pastoral. Roth’s ability to shift levels of diction, to pass from conversational, slangy American English to more refined forms in the twinkling of an eye creates difficulties for translators not familiar with the America he reconstructs in his novel. The paper enumerates simple errors and gross misconceptions simply to show that the best intentions in translation often produce aberrations. Equivalency has been a central dilemma of translation, and whether argued by linguistics or translation theorists, the question of equivalency may be most profitably approachable and elucidated in discussion, as in this essay, on a case by case basis.
InChapter 2, husband and wife Val Vinokur and Rose Réjouis discuss translation and collaboration. Vinokur entertains a dialogue between collaborative translation and untranslatability in the context of a recent project with Réjouis. While puns, culturally specific idioms, and the complex political history of minor and major languages are typical zones of untranslat-ability, Vinokur also considers, in his essay, untranslatability as something that begins in the source language, specifically in the exploitation of the source language to enrich the target language. That is, what has not yet been translated in the target language is by definition untranslatable, whether as a claim or prognosis for possible or impossible dialogue, as a human need, or as a process of loss and mourning. Vinokur sets out to show how co-translation in particular offers a pragmatics of traversing these zones of untranslatability. Vinokur and Réjouis’ co-translation reflects a belief that translation should be what they term its literary intonation, should bring to life the “feeling” it evokes in a reader. Here they follow up on the concept, discussed in The Subversive Scribe, of reproducing an effect which is an affect as well. To arrive at such a feeling, they ask, first, what resources are in the source text?—sometimes a baldly literal translation may best convey the literary idiosyncrasy of the original. Their second question asks what resources are in the target language?—after all, English is incredibly flexible with respect to tone, idiom, neologism and rhythm. Instead of viewing the differences between languages exclusively as a problem, they see both languages as offering solutions, or as Réjouis wrote about their process translating Haitian author Marie Vieux-Chauvet’s Love, Anger, Madness from the French: “We take turns. When I defend the original, he defends the translation. When he defends the original, I defend the translation.” Aiming to introduce new paradigms, Rose Réjouis’s complementarydiscussion addresses the question: What exactly do we mean by collaborative translation? Collaboration leads one to think more deeply about theory and practice, and about the tension between the two. Along the lines of The Subversive Scribe, Réjouis situates translation theory in relation to the pragmatic sphere of translations meant for a general readership, to show that there is a gap, often unacknowledged, between the myths described in every translation theory and the creative, improvisational and heterogeneous nature of the bricolage that defines most translations. Réjouis relates this pragmatic sphere to the broader, if more abstract, sphere of liberal ideology, reviewing how sometimes the incommensurability between languages is not the contingency attendant upon an unlikely meeting, but rather a consciously chosen political position. In this context, and here she quotes Richard Rorty, translation is an inherently social task: crucial in reaching “those who do not speak our language” as well as to “the demonstration of a common human nature.” She concludes by suggesting that the premise of translation and, indeed, of collaboration, is that we are not alone in the world. Theory, practice and collaboration provide frameworks within which to argue for opportunities for our words as well as for our works to supplement each other. There is room in the world for all kinds of translations, as well as for the elusive synthesis that occurs in translation as process and product.
From the pragmatics of the translation act, the following chapters direct a more focused lens on the effect of the translator’s voice and on the notion of the translator as author. As Rainier Grutman writes in “The Self-translator’s Preface as a Site of Renaissance Self-fashioning: Bernardo Gómez Miedes’ Spanish Reframing of his Latin ‘mirror for princes,’” prefaces are among the most conspicuous “places” where translators’ voices can be heard. They provide a stage to perform authorship, a privilege rarely extended to translators, certainly within a commercial context, who cannot claim intellectual ownership of the book they rewrote in a new language. Unless, of course, the translation is a self-translation, carried out by the author of the original. This paper focuses on Early Modern Europe, where the preface as we know it came about as a by-product of the print medium, but raises issues that remain relevant for the study of translation and self-translation in today’s post-colony and global marketplace. Miniature masterpieces of rhetoric, Renaissance prefaces are spectacular (and specular) sites of what Stephen Greenblatt has termed “self- fashioning.” Using the Iberian example of Bernardino Gómez Miedes’ twin “mirrors for princes” (1582–1584), written in Latin and subsequently translated by himself into Spanish (for two different sons of King Philip II of Spain), Grutman shows how the exercise of self-translation enabled this ambitious clergyman to position himself as an agent. Turning his seemingly uncomfortable situation as an Aragonese in between realms and languages into a key position as a go-between, Gómez Miedes succeeded in fashioning himself as the ultimate middleman, most notably in the prologue to his Spanish self-translation.
Moving from the Renaissance to contemporary poetics, Odile Cisneros takes us “From the Rockies to the Amazon” to examine somewhat marginal cultures in the global arena as well as ‘North-South’ confrontation in the translations of experimental Canadian poetry for a Brazilian audience. Cisneros follows here a new path, the process of compiling and translating the first-ever anthology of experimental poetry from Canada to be published in Brazil. She begins by providing the reader with background regarding previous attempts to translate this highly textured writing into Portuguese as well as a brief examination of the literary relations between Canada and Brazil to help elucidate the difficulties involved in selecting and translating the texts that conform this anthology project. Editorial decisions are explained on the basis of the necessity of domestication (thinking of Schleiermacher’s definition), that is, to create a narrative of the experimental scene in Canada that would resonate with Brazilian audiences, sophisticated from the poetic point of view, but not necessarily familiar with Canadian authors. The various threads that emerged in the editorial process included the diversity of Canadian experience and identity (Native, immigrant, women) and Canada’s oral traditions, language-based poetry, environmental concerns and critiques of capitalism. An analysis of concrete examples of work by poets such as Christian Bök, Derek Beaulieu and Oana Avasilichioaiei illustrates the editorial and translation challenges that were part and parcel of this project. The reasons behind selecting and excluding certain poets and texts are explained, and the importance of collaborative editorial and translation work in this kind of project is emphasized. Anthologies almost always have their ideological thrust, whether or not recognized as such by the anthologist(s).
Within modern poetics, Proust is of course a canonical subject, which however Dominique Jullien contemporizes with her discussion of Lydia Davis’s new translation. In her trenchant discussion of “The Way by Lydia’s,” Dominique Jullien studies the latest English translation of Marcel Proust’s novel, published in England in 2002 under the title In Search of Lost Time. She focuses on the first volume, variously titled Swann’s Way or The Way by Swann’s (more on this variation later), translated by the award-winning translator, poet and short story writer, Lydia Davis. The translation of the multi-volumed edition, published by Penguin Books, is the collective work of seven translators distributed across the English-speaking world, and the general editor is Christopher Prendergast, himself a well-known scholar of 19th century French literature at King’s College, Cambridge. This important translation, Jullien informs us, offers a good case study for several key issues of translation studies. Jullien begins by examining the curious legal conundrum plaguing the American edition, which fell prey to the infamous Mickey Mouse Law. Next, given that the new translation was hailed as a Proust for our time, she presents certain hypotheses regarding the periodic retranslation of classics. Comparing the titles of the volumes—translated literally in the new Penguin version, in contrast to the poetic but supposedlyunfaithful translations by Scott Moncrieff—leads to some interesting paradoxes on literalness, which surprisingly coincide with those thematized by Proust himself in the second Balbec episode of Sodom and Gomorrah. Lastly she turns to one of the key themes of our book: the symbiotic relations between translating and writing; here she explores how Lydia Davis’s choices as a translator intersect and resonate with her work as a writer, whose terse and minimalist style harks back to Samuel Beckett rather than to the ample and melodious Marcel Proust.
Guy Bennett, a contemporary of Lydia Davis and a poet in English who works with Italian and sees translation as a Poundian “transcreational” act, writes about “what happens letting words dance from one language to another” in an essay relating his experience translating clessidra: il ritmo delle tracce, a 1992 collection of verbo-visual poetry by Italian neo-avant-garde poet Giovanna Sandri (1923–2002). He defines the challenges Sandri’s work poses for the translator, who must respect the formal shapes of her poems and their spatial articulation on the page while rendering their semantic meanings. The author quotes extensively from his correspondance with the poet at the time of the translation, reproducing several of her typescript annotations and analyzing her suggested changes to his English versions. These range from alternate wordings to rewrites of individual lines or stanzas. Additionally, in two cases, the poet recommends that entire poems be revised and completely recast in their passage into English, resulting in what must be considered a second “original” text. The article concludes with observations on self-translation and how we might delineate differences between translation and—can we say it?—the more authorial activity of self-translation.
Expanding from the focus on the links between translation and original writing, Béatrice Mousli plays upon a common metaphor of artistic creation “through the mirror” to discuss the translation of what she calls “ autofiction,” suggesting more emphatically the thin line between translation and original, and that all texts are translations in the sense of displacements, versions, or (as Foucault suggested) heterotopia. Reading and translating Olivia Rosenthal’s We’re Not Here to Disappear meant, for Mousli, questioning the nature of the text itself. Fiction? Non-fiction? “Récit,” says the cover of the French edition, leaving us with a bouquet of possible meanings, and no answer. In the mid-seventies, French novelist and critic Serge Doubrovsky, working in his New York office, came up with the term “autofiction” to designate a fiction written out of “events and facts strictly real.” Another concept, maybe more familiar to American readers, is the concept of biomythography, coined this time by Audre Lorde to describe Zami: A New Spelling of My Name and defined as a way of “combining elements of history, biography and myth.” This book in a way epitomizes what a literary hybrid work could be; by examining more closely the making of We’re Not Here to Disappear, we might conclude that biomythography, as defined earlier, would be the applicable term for Rosenthal’s work.
If Rosenthal definitely includes elements of history and biography in her narratives, she doesn’t shy away from myths, dreams and fantasies either, introducing them seamlessly in the weft of the texts, without any stylistic warning, as a way to show us that they are part of life, of our lives, of her life, of the matter that shapes us and shaped her.
Innovative genre variations, or genre bending, as a particular dilemma for translators who are situating complex texts in new temporal or cultural environments, are given a stunning twist in Viola Miglio’s discussion that follows Mousli’s. Here Miglio explores the uncanny encounter in 17th-century Iceland between emerging English and baroque Spanish, which somehow come together in Jon lærði ’s quasi-journalistic so-called “True Account of the Shipwreck of the Spaniards and their Slaying.”
Building on our discussions of collaborative translation and the authorial shadow side of the translator, the authors in our anthology all study particular literary cases to examine the play or conflict of translation as a creative mediation that occurs between the local and the global. Our anthology moves toward its conclusion on a note germane to today’s geo-political concerns, with an informative article by Canadian Nicole Côté, titled “Leila Abouleila’s The Translator, a Translational Text?” The inevitable appropriation of another culture and language through translation could lead as much to the forwarding of conservative ideas as to the renewal of a literature through new values, cultural and literary.
Leila Aboulela’s The Translator hovers over both possibilities. Indeed, it displays a strong ideological bias while, at the same time, its translational angle softens these aspects, given that translational texts, as Hassan contends, “emphasize the complexity of cultural and linguistic negotiation […], show the limits of translation, and construct new models of identity based on cultural exchange.”4 The Translator pushes for the recognition of Islam as the solution not only for first or second generation Muslim immigrants who, like the protagonist Sammar, face discrimination regarding race, class, and sex, but also for non-Muslim White Europeans, as the conversion of Rae—which Sammar makes mandatory to marry her—exemplifies. This aspect of the novel shows how ideology seeks to translate the other into the values of the self, which is the dark side of translation. By doing this however, Aboulela subverts the now conventional plot of multiculturalism, deflating the expectations of the Western reader by having Sammar forego a hybrid identity. Côté argue that The Translator is also a translational text in that it displays the various shades of openness and prejudices existing in individuals addressing each other across cultures, nations, languages and religious faiths through the lens of translation. This recognition of the other, however limited, ultimately allows for some kind of transformation.
Last but not least, Icelandic translation scholar Gauti Kristmannsson tackles the field of translation studies today, between the parameters of discussions which support, on the one hand, the validity of untranslatability and the preservation of local culture, and, on the other, the related conceptsof globality and world literature. He suggests that the fields of Comparative Literature and Translation Studies need to find a more harmonious discursive space, and hence to recognize how they are dealing—via complementary perspectives—with the same dynamic and creative process.
By collecting and presenting these diverse yet communicating meditations, we hope our volume will contribute—by bringing attention to the complex interface between practice and theory, translator and author, local and global, as well as between languages themselves—to transformations, or at the very least will bring forward new questions and approaches in the field of translation studies.
We would like to thank the following colleagues for their knowledge, guidance and encouragement: Michelle Woods, Jorge Luis Castillo, Viola Miglio, and especially Dominique Jullien for her invaluable contributions throughout the editing process. We are also grateful to the University of California, Santa Barbara Division of Humanities and Fine Arts Departments, the Interdisciplinary Humanities Center and the Dean of Humanities for generous support.
1. Eysteinsson made this remark during a talk at UCSB on January 23, 2015.
2. Adam Kirsch, “What Makes You So Sure? A New History of Modern Philosophy,” New Yorker (September 5, 2016), 71.
3. David Damrosch, What Is World Literature? (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003), 289.
4. Waïl Hassan, “Leila Aboulela and the Ideology of Muslim Immigrant Fiction,” NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction 41, no. 2 (2008), 304.