For a practicing translator and/or translation student, the veritable explosion of new theories regarding translation must appear bewildering. There are new university programs being established in the United States—at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, to name just one— in addition to fine existing programs at Columbia, Iowa, Kent State, Arkansas, Pennsylvania State, and the State University of New York, Binghamton. Internationally, the field has exploded with programs in Leuven (Belgium), Tel Aviv (Israel), Warwick (United Kingdom) Turku (Finland), Salamanca (Spain), Göttingen, Leipzig (Germany), and Vienna (Austria) leading the way. Increasingly important research is being conducted in “postcolonial” countries, including Minas Gerais (Brazil), Montréal (Québec), Santiago (Chile), and Beijing (China), that merits serious consideration by all scholars. New journals are springing up, such as Target (Belgium and Tel Aviv) and The Translator (United Kingdom); major publishers and university presses are starting new book series, including Routledge (United Kingdom and United States), Rodopi (Holland), Göttingen (Germany), and The Kent State University Press. Important international conferences are being established, such as the joint Maastricht (Holland)-Lódz (Poland) colloquium on “Translation and Meaning,” now held every five years, or the “Scandinavian Symposium on Translation Theory,” now having met four times, with their massive proceedings. With all this material on translation being generated, it may seem at the moment impossible for any one person to keep up.
In What Is Translation? Centrifugal Theories, Critical Interventions, Douglas Robinson provides both a useful survey of recent developments and insight into some of the problems facing the field of contemporary humanistic/literary translation studies. With intelligent, critical readings, he covers the most influential books to appear in the field in the last decade. In part one, titled “Remapping Rhetoric and Grammar,” Robinson discusses Frederick Rener’s Interpretatio (1989), Eric Cheyfitz’s Poetics of Imperialism (1990), and Rita Copeland’s Rhetoric, Hermeneutics, and Translation in the Middle Ages (1992), the selection of which may seem slightly surprising in a book on contemporary translation, considering their concern with rhetoric, grammar, and hermeneutics. In this historical section, however, Robinson traces common assumptions, held by theorists from Rome through the nineteenth century, about how language functioned. Although most contemporary scholars discredit the importance of such ideas, Robinson argues that they remain in the “collective intellectual operating system,” albeit unconsciously, and therefore need inclusion in the new translation studies models.
In part two, “Inside Systems,” Robinson confronts perhaps the most substantial theoretical development in the field, that of polysystem theory, a model for studying the position of translated texts within cultural systems posited by Israeli scholars Itamar Even-Zohar and Gideon Toury. The theory has been embraced by a whole generation of Dutch and Belgian scholars in addition to postcolonial studies students looking at the role of translation in “emerging” cultures. The texts Robinson covers in this section include André Lefevere’s Translation, Rewriting, and the Manipulation of Literary Fame (1992), Anthony Pym’s Epistemological Problems in Translation and Its Teaching (1992), Suzanne Jill Levine’s Subversive Scribe (1991), and Myriam Díaz-Diocaretz’s Translating Poetic Discourse (1985). Despite advances, however, systems theory has certain flaws, such as its advocates making certain claims of their “objectivity” when analyzing translated texts, which Robinson is quick to point out. In part three, “Embracing the Foreign,” Robinson focuses more in depth on one form of the new translation studies, one that embraces what might be called “strategies of resistance,” that is, strategies frequently employed by marginalized groups in any given culture. Texts chosen for inclusion in this section are Antoine Berman’s L’Épreuve de l’étranger (1984) [translated as The Experience of the Foreign (1992)], Lawrence Venuti’s Translator’s Invisibility (1994), and Philip Lewis’s article “The Measure of Translation Effects” (1985). Robinson intervenes at this point, providing both a critical reading and constructing his own metaphorical narrative, one that provides an opening for highly original insights. In his conclusion, “Neural Networks, Synchronicity, and Freedom,” Robinson surprises his reader with a turn to developments in machine translation, making a startling suggestion connecting postcolonial theories of translation to reasons why Robinson feels that a quality machine translator will never be built.
The texts Robinson selects for discussion are indeed “new” in every sense of the word. A paradigm is shifting; two thousand years of translation studies based upon the faithful versus the free axis is being unseated, and the field will never go back. The contemporary explosion in literary theory, with all the postmodernisms, poststructuralism, postcolonialisms, has also led to a boom in translation theories. Translation, perhaps because it has always been concerned with the recovery and representation of meaning (or the impossibility thereof), has much to contribute to ongoing discussions of literary and cultural studies. Despite the newness and theoretical difficulty of much of the material he covers, Robinson presents his arguments in a user-friendly, thoroughly accessible style. As a result, cultural studies students, practicing translators, professional literary scholars, and translation theorists will find this book highly informative and provocative.
Robinson’s thinking about translation has always been extraordinarily original. In 1991 his book The Translator’s Turn hit the field like a shot from a loose cannon. Its hermeneutic approach reminded some scholars of George Steiner’s After Babel (1975), from under whose shadow “the new translation studies” had been trying to escape for years. Robinson’s subjective prose style, range of ideas, tremendous erudition, and proposed pragmatics did not seem to fit in any particular school of thought—not a traditional Anglo-American literary translator approach, nor a modern linguistic approach, nor any of the trendy literary critical approaches, and certainly not a Low Countries’ “Manipulation School” approach. Adjectives attempting to describe the book ranged from “idiosyncratic” to “mystical,” but no one knew how to categorize, control, or make use of the ideas in the book.
In What Is Translation? Douglas Robinson continues to defy traditional conceptual thinking about translation. I think he likes it that way. He takes aim at some of the most prominent theorists, indeed, some of the people I most admire, including the North American scholar Lawrence Venuti and the late Belgian theorist André Lefevere. Robinson reads such theorists symptomatically for the “schools” they represent, pointing out his disagreements with some of their underlying assumptions. For example, when Robinson reads Lefevere’s work, he raises questions regarding the emphasis upon codification of poetic norms and the theorization of literary systems. Whenever Lefevere writes, “Once a poetics has been codified” or “codification takes place at a certain time,” Robinson asks questions such as what happens to translation practice in the process of codification? Does it get lost in some middle ground between system and nonsystem? Does not practice always already precede theory? And if so, does “presystem” belong to “system”? Even those theorists Robinson most admires, such as the Australian theorist Anthony Pym or the Chilean feminist theorist Myriam Díaz-Diocaretz, do not escape his critical aim.
Robinson has an uncanny ability to get right to the root of certain problems and lay them out on the table. One of the critiques Robinson raises concerns a contradiction in the very way translation studies came into being. On the one hand, recent scholars argue that the field has been marginalized by literary and linguistic studies in general, and that it should be considered a legitimate academic discipline with all the methodological rigor of any other academic field. One is reminded of the difficulty of the emergence of many new academic fields in the humanities. Until quasi-scientific methods of study are established, it is very difficult to convince deans, provosts, and chancellors to support new disciplines, especially with the new departments they often require. The proponents of successful new translation studies programs in Europe and in the United States have been forced to argue the systematic rigor and research possibilities of the discipline. On the other hand, the new translation studies is also defined by rethinking translation in a counterhegemonic fashion. Thus the new scholars almost by definition oppose traditional methodologies for studying translated texts. Scholars entering the field seem actively involved in attacking those very institutions—the publishing firms, the literature programs, and the linguistics departments that support translation—from which they derive their livelihood. Robinson is clearly aware of the catch-22 that envelops his project as well; wishing to be included in the progressive wing of the field, he aims his heaviest artillery at the very figures who have been instrumental in putting translation studies on the map.
Clearly Robinson’s work does not fit easily into any pre-established category. But if we were to attempt to place his work along an axis, with “systematic” (read structuralist) at one end and “personal” (read poststructuralist) on the other, Robinson’s work would fall somewhere in between, yet more closely allied to what he terms the personal. Not surprisingly, those whom he most criticizes (Lefevere, Venuti) he locates in the systems theory camp, and those he seems to most admire (Díaz-Diocaretz, Pym) fall into the personal camp. Indeed, Robinson often adopts an anecdotal, subjective rhetorical style in his writing, the self-consciousness of which suggests poststructuralist sympathies.
Robinson’s most significant contribution to the field is his courageous ability to ask the tough questions about everyone’s work. For example, when discussing Antoine Berman’s L’Épreuve de l’étranger: Culture et traduction dans l’Allemagne romantique [translated The Experience of the Foreign: Culture and Translation in Romantic Germany (1992)], a text that has influenced a whole generation of North American scholars (including Philip Lewis and Lawrence Venuti), Robinson is not afraid to ask about the connection of strategies advocating “foreignizing” methodologies to rising feelings of nationalism. For many who admire Berman’s work, such questions may seem unfair, and the charges of “elitism” and “nationalism” may seem unsubstantiated. Nevertheless, the connections among radical translation practices, modernism, and nationalist movements, although troubling for some of the more “progressive” scholars, need serious consideration. Without agreeing with all of Robinson’s conclusions regarding the political implications of those who advocate foreignizing strategies, I welcome the debate that will no doubt ensue.
Many of the questions Robinson raises will have implications for the future development of the field of translation studies as well as repercussions beyond. For example, how anyone can ever access “the other” is an epistemological question that troubles scholars in many fields, including the new literary translation studies. Despite disclaimers, Eric Cheyfitz’s book The Poetics of Imperialism (1992), for example, tries to understand the other (this time, the perspective of certain Native Americans). Cheyfitz attacks traditional methods of translation, viewing translation as another kind of colonizing tool in the imperialist project of the European colonizers. Cheyfitz’s work has had enormous influence on new historians working in translation and on postcolonial translation theorists. The contradiction that troubles Robinson is that while attacking traditional methods of translation, Cheyfitz actually depends upon those very methods, for Cheyfitz does not speak any Native American language. Indeed, he offers re-versions of the “colonized” versions without access to the source text. While trying to give voice to that which has been silenced or repressed, Cheyfitz uses an interpretive hermeneutic very similar to the traditional translation hermeneutic he criticizes. Robinson asks, How does one understand the position of the other without speaking the other’s language? What kind of “authority” does Cheyfitz, or any other Western postcolonial scholar, invoke in such instances? How should bilingual translators, who have spent much of their careers living in “other” language and cultural systems, react to some of the prescriptions of the new historians?
Trying to categorize Robinson’s position in this veritable explosion of theories is difficult, given the range of his erudition. Yet the questions mentioned above implicitly reveal one location from which his position derives: that of the practicing translator. Although Robinson is clearly well read in theory, and often makes suggestions and contributions of his own, What Is Translation? is primarily written from the perspective of the practicing translator—one well versed in both literary and technical translation. Some of the most delightful passages begin with Robinson’s checking of theoretical claims against “the time I was translating a chainsaw operation manual into Finnish” or “when I was working on drafts of Finnish poems.” He also talks about his moods—for example, his “arrogant moods,” when he would rather be flashy while translating—that are yet to appear as factors in any translation theory I have seen, but which no doubt all practicing translators have experienced.
According to the most established scholars in the field, research in “the new translation studies” purportedly is proceeding along three lines of investigation: (1) theory, (2) history (often called descriptive studies), and (3) practice. Ideally, scholars in all three branches should exchange ideas and mutually help one another as the field as a whole develops. When translation studies was born as a discipline, which most agree was over twenty years ago at a 1976 colloquium at Leuven, Belgium, scholars suggested that before anyone begin making claims about theory, more “empirical data” documenting what practicing translators actually do in specific situations needed to be collected. Although descriptive studies has made progress, only the tip of the iceberg has yet been revealed. At the same time, theories have proliferated, often with little connection to or regard for empirical research. The most disturbing lack of mutual interaction has been between scholars in the theory and practice branches. Practicing translators have tended to reject developments in theory as highly prescriptive, that is, academics telling translators how they should translate. Scholars in the theory branch have been equally indifferent to contributions of practicing translators, finding most essays highly subjective, that is, translators making claims to justify the particular and often idiosyncratic strategies employed by the translators themselves.
One of the significant contributions of What Is Translation? is that Robinson opens a dialogue between the practicing translators and the theoreticians. Part 3, “Embracing the Foreign,” could be described as an extended response to claims posited by three leading translation theorists: Antoine Berman, Lawrence Venuti, and Philip Lewis. For example, in his prodigious Translator’s Invisibility (1994), Venuti traces the history of literary translation during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in Anglo-American cultures, arguing convincingly that the dominant trend has been for translators to use methods that conform to the dominant poetics of the receiving culture. Against this, however, he juxtaposes another translation history he calls “foreignizing translation,” one in which translators refuse to conform to the dominant poetics by developing affiliations with strategies employed within marginalized literary movements. Borrowing the term “abusive fidelity” from Philip Lewis’s article “Vers la traduction abusive” (1980) [translated “The Measure of Translation Effects” (1985)], Venuti argues convincingly for the importance of this other history for signaling difference, for revising the canon, and for importing new literary devices and techniques. In short, in terms of the politics of translation, Venuti is convincing in suggesting that traditional translation in Anglo-American cultures has tended toward the conservative, conforming to both the dominant poetics and political norms, and that foreignizing translation has tended toward the progressive, opening spaces for new ideas, concepts of alterity, and literary innovation.
Although Robinson seems to admire Venuti’s work, especially for the liberating effect on constraints imposed upon translators (such as its quasislavish demand of fidelity to the source-language text), he questions the progressive nature of the latter part of Venuti’s theory. Showing that Venuti’s theory is not that “new,” indeed, pointing out that foreignizing strategies date back as far as the development of Roman culture, Robinson takes a hard look at assumptions underlying some of the new translation studies theories, including the assumption that traditional, transparent translation is conservative and weak, and that the new, “abusive fidelity” translation is innovative and strong. Robinson articulates his reactions to Venuti’s theory in the form of a series of questions: Who is abused in such a translation situation? The source-language author, the source-language text, or the source-language culture? Perhaps, poses Robinson, it is actually the target-language reader, text, and culture being abused. Indeed, Robinson often reverses Venuti’s terms, suggesting that conservative translators who uncritically adopt norms underlying “traditional” translation may be equally, if not more, “abusive” than translators who use strategies endorsed by the new translation studies theorists. Again, Robinson’s questioning destabilizes many translation studies scholars’ definitions of literary and cultural norms. If certain structures of physical and emotional abuse (think in terms of a feminist critique of the family or workplace) are refigured in theory to be normative or ordinary, then the abusive behaviors become precisely those of subservience/faithfulness that do not deviate from the (hidden) abusive norm. Opening up room to think about what often takes place out of sight, both socially and linguistically, Robinson lays bare a system of theory that uncannily reinforces a kind of patriarchal system whose victims have remained silenced. In Robinson’s words, this section of the book explores the “ordinariness of abuse, the usualness of abuse,” and its repercussions.
Whether right or wrong, Robinson’s work pushes both the theorists’ and the practitioners’ thinking on translation. During the course of his meditation on abuse and translation, Robinson asks probing questions about violence in language and the social and psychological effects such strategies have on the reader (victim?) and translator (perpetrator?). Most important, his thinking is not mere abstract philosophical musing; as mentioned above, he always checks his findings against his experience as a practicing translator. While engaging Berman, Lewis, and Venuti in dialogue in part 3, for example, Robinson continually back-translates his more abstract ideas and compares them with his own translation of Huojuva talo (“Tottering House”), a stage adaptation by Maaria Koskiluoma based on Maria Jotuni’s 1936 novel. The play, about a man who batters his wife and children, was successfully staged at the Southern Theatre in Minneapolis in March and April of 1994, and both the translation and the production received fine reviews. Ironically, Robinson employed several strategies in his translation that are endorsed by those very scholars he is critiquing in this section. For example, Robinson adopts such “foreignizing” strategies as maintaining foreign word order and translating idioms in a word-for-word fashion rather than searching for the English equivalent. Although Robinson was nervous about whether his translation would be acceptable, the actors loved it. The stilted and disturbing foreignized version actually worked. From the first reading, everyone— directors, actors, and writers—knew they had a play on their hands.
Robinson does not refer to his translation of “Tottering House,” however, in order to congratulate his abilities or to illustrate someone else’s theory. Instead, in what I find the most complex and strongest section of his book, Robinson refers to this translation in order to perform a kind of double writing, both questioning the theories upon which the new translation studies is based and drawing analogies to a culture of abuse present in both Finnish culture at the turn of the century and North American culture today. As Robinson spins his argument, he pulls threads from translation theory, from translation practice, and from a form of close reading that perhaps only a translator could realize. Here he creates a kind of allegory in which the translator becomes one (or several) of the abusive characters in the play. At first sight, it may appear that Robinson is setting up a rhetorical device in order to abuse Venuti and Lewis, but the matter is not that simple. Robinson also implicates himself (and all translators) in his construction. As the web grows larger and Robinson makes connections to the source-text culture, the source-text author, the target-text reader, and, interestingly, the source-text reader (seldom factored into translation theory), we find ourselves in the middle of a compelling narrative sequence, not itself an argument, but one with important theoretical implications. As Robinson’s fiction plays itself out, multiple twists and surprises arise that will challenge all readers’ thinking, regardless of their familiarity with the field.
Whether Robinson’s What Is Translation? will be understood as theory, criticism, or creative writing, I am unsure, but that is clearly also part of his project. In the space between theory and practice, between criticism and creative writing, Robinson has found room to raise questions and challenge our thinking. Some may argue that this book is a mere metaphorical construct divorced from concrete concerns in the field. I find his meditation in this in-between space a fruitful one that allows new and insightful perspectives on some of the most difficult problems facing translation theorists and practitioners today. Problems of fidelity, voice, and agency continue to haunt translation theory, despite attempts to “get beyond” them. With What Is Translation? Douglas Robinson solidifies his presence in the field in a genre unique unto itself, one that not only enables new insights to appear but also allows him to slip away from falsifying conceptual categories.