This book was born out of excitement, a sense that some new and enormously productive things were happening in translation studies in the late eighties and (especially) early nineties, things that were radically centrifugal to the study of translation as it has long been conceived. To be centrifugal is of course to flee the center, to spin off wildly from a nice, tidy orbit in tangential directions—and that is what I felt these new theoretical interventions were doing. The postcolonial studies of translation published by Vicente Rafael, Eric Cheyfitz, and Tejaswini Niranjana from 1988 to 1992; the feminist studies published by Carol Maier, Myriam Díaz-Diocaretz, Lori Chamberlain, Susanne Lotbinière-Harwood, Barbara Godard, Nicole Brossard, Suzanne Jill Levine, Sherry Simon, and others from the early eighties on; Lawrence Venuti’s insistence on tying ancient literalisms or romantic foreignisms not to a cultural elite but to left-leaning dissident practices, beginning with his path-breaking essay “The Translator’s Invisibility” in 1986; the quirky and always brilliant ruminations of Anthony Pym; the list goes on and on. In 1987–88, when I was writing The Translator’s Turn (Robinson 1991c), I felt as if I were the only one who was disenchanted and even disgruntled with what had been done in the field to date, who felt boxed in by unspoken assumptions about the proper limits to theoretical discourse on translation and wanted to bust out. Ironically, even as I worked on that book, feeling cut off, a groundswell of the new work was already beginning to appear—and I missed it, and didn’t go back and read it until my own book was published in late 1990. By the next year, 1991, the groundswell had turned into a flood. This book is about that flood.
Celebratory as I imagine the book to be, however, it is also, indeed primarily, critical. The new work on translation was pioneering, which was cause for enthusiasm; but like all pioneering work it was also fraught with complex methodological and ideological problems. Eric Cheyfitz’s book The Poetics of Imperialism (1991) burst through so many closed doors that my head spun as I read it, but it also remained trapped in disturbing ways in its own negative critiques. If Cheyfitz is right about the colonizing impact on Native Americans not only of translation but of translation theory as well, how can his book hope to be anything but more of the same? Lawrence Venuti’s work opened radical new perspectives on the foreignism urged on all translators by the German romantics; but didn’t he too remain trapped in the same cultural elitism that he deconstructs in them? And what alternatives to elitism are there in a foreignizing project? Is there some way of getting past the domesticating/foreignizing dualism as Venuti and his romantic and postromantic precursors envision it, while still retaining the full force of his assault on the assimilationist cult of fluency?
And so on. Each of the new books seemed full of new possibilities— and bound up with new (and some old) problems. Each seemed more like an interim report back from an ongoing project than like a summa translatologica; more like a transitional statement that was struggling valiantly with the new as it remained partly caught inextricably in the old. And as I read these books I wanted above all to jump into the trenches with each author, to help push the theoretical envelope just a bit farther—to critique them, certainly, to analyze their weaknesses, to deconstruct them, but entirely in the service of advancing the project at hand.
Hence the largely essayistic nature of this book. Rather than launching a systematic general theory of translation of my own (which in any case I had done in The Translator’s Turn) and taking these new books to task for falling short of some imagined universal ideal, I determined to delve deeply into each project, each theoretical intervention, one at a time—launching, in fact, my own critical interventions into theirs. This I wanted to do as much in the spirit of each project itself as I possibly could, without imposing my own notion of the “right” way to theorize translation, but at the same time without simply celebrating or summarizing this work. One of the most useful books to appear in the field in recent years has been Edwin Gentzler’s Contemporary Translation Theories (1993), which takes a far broader view than I do here, examining whole schools of thought about translation in the historical context of the past three or four decades; invaluable as that book is, however, I envisioned a different sort of project. I wanted to move past where these theories have been and what they are now to where and what they might be in the near future. It therefore seemed essential to stay in process with the books I was reading, to inhabit methodologically the same difficult transitional space with them, to slog ahead in that uncomfortable position between the mud and the roots and the boulders of the past that would hold them back and the imagined freedom of movement that they project into the future, and try to take a few encumbered steps myself in their tracks. This meant reading the books critically and disruptively, trying wherever possible to smash unwieldy syntheses, poke mercilessly at problematic idealizations, turn the writers’ critiques back against them, and generally wreak havoc in what are by and large unsettled and unsettling texts to begin with. This approach may occasionally make my readings seem like a slash-and-burn crusade; I hope, however, that my more negative critiques and deconstructions will be taken in the spirit in which I wrote them, as a participation in the individual projects, not as attempts to dismiss or destroy them.
The essayistic nature of the book also means that you can start reading just about anywhere and proceed from there at will, following your interests. The book might be read as a series of introductions to individual authors and texts, or to groups of texts and issues; and there is no reason why those introductions need to be read in precisely the order I’ve given them here. If I were picking this book up in the bookstore or library, for example, I would probably turn first to the two last essays, on phantom limbs and abuse; putting them last reflects my assumption that the book more or less culminates in these two essays, a positive and a negative take on the present and future of translation. I would then go back and finish the foreignism section, then read the chapters on Pym, Cheyfitz, and Díaz-Diocaretz. And I freely encourage you to chart your own path through the book as well.
The book’s loose essayistic structure does not mean that it is unstructured, however. The three parts into which I have divided the chapters reflect my sense of the larger groups of issues that individual books deal with—especially, perhaps, the first and third parts, which are more tightly and coherently organized than the second. In fact, only the third part deals with anything that might be considered a coherent “school” or “camp” in the field of translation studies; the authors discussed in parts one and two will most likely be surprised at whom they’ve been grouped with, since the organizational principles I’ve used there reflect topics (rhetoric and grammar in part one) and methodologies (systemic and anecdotal in part two) that are not commonly used to group translation theories. To me they seem not only crucial but much more telling than the usual groupings: Cheyfitz, for example, usually thought of as a postcolonial theorist (which he undoubtedly is), is much closer in his conception of the topics and issues at hand to Rener and Copeland than he is to, say, Rafael or Niranjana, other postcolonial theorists of translation.
Part one, “Remapping Rhetoric and Grammar,” showcases three very different takes on the importance of that ancient division for the study of translation. It is astonishing to me now that it should have come as such a surprise that the tensions between rhetorical and grammatical approaches to language were historically formative for the study of translation, and they remain extremely useful today as well. But until the appearance of Frederick Rener’s Interpretatio in 1989, Eric Cheyfitz’s The Poetics of Imperialism in 1990, and Rita Copeland’s Rhetoric, Hermeneutics, and Translation in the Middle Ages in 1992, it had never occurred to me. This recovery of rhetoric and grammar in a field long dominated by segmentation theories (whether to translate sense-for-sense or word-for-word) is so critical that its importance cannot be overstated. Even while disagreeing with and largely disapproving of Rener’s approach, for example, as I read him I kept feeling the salutary force of his emphasis on grammar and rhetoric—hence his inclusion here.
Part two, then, delves into an important methodological tension I continue to feel in these centrifugal theories between systemic and anecdotal approaches, between scientific and personal approaches—between on the one hand large-scale abstractions, which have the virtue of covering more ground both historically and geographically, of explaining local details by reference to systemic descriptions; and on the other of full-bodied local explorations, which have the virtue of filling in the experiential details that the more global approaches ignore. Both approaches are concerned with what happens in translation—specifically, in the work I’m interested in, what happens socially in translation—but they conceive the nature of social “happening” in very different ways. I will be taking André Lefevere’s book Translation, Rewriting, and the Manipulation of Literary Fame (1992a) as an example of the view from above, the attempt to rise to a high enough level of abstraction that specific translational details (of which his book is appealingly full) make an immediate global sense. And I will be taking three books, Anthony Pym’s Epistemological Problems in Translation and Its Teaching (1992), Suzanne Jill Levine’s The Subversive Scribe (1991) and Myriam Díaz-Diocaretz’s Translating Poetic Discourse (1985) as examples of the view from within: the individual theorist’s attempt to explore his or her own actual experiences of translating (and of reading translation theory) fully enough to generate an expanding ripple of turbulence in the surrounding systems, so that his or her discussions of other people’s systemic theories of translation are always tested back against what it feels like to translate, to be a translator.
Part three is my second sustained attempt to come to terms with foreignism—my first being the long third chapter of Translation and Taboo. My inability to let go of this particular approach to translation is probably due to Larry Venuti, since his tenacious advocacy of foreignizing or “visible” or nonfluent translation quickly became (and has remained) for me a kind of burr under my saddle, at once fascinating and irritating— something that has both attracted and dismayed me, so that I haven’t been able to leave it alone. Larry is one of the most intelligent and sophisticated new centrifugal thinkers about translation, well read in critical theory, a meticulous researcher of a given historical or cultural scene, and willing to take great argumentative risks to make a bold and transformative point—and yet he begs so many interesting questions that I find it difficult to keep up with all that he isn’t saying. And I’m still not satisfied: every time I read through the pieces I’ve written about his work and the work of people he admires (Schleiermacher, Benjamin, Berman, Lewis) I see more that needs to be explored, worked out, developed.
The two discussions in the book that do not directly address specific theoretical works published on translation from the mid-eighties to the mid-nineties are chapter 10 on phantom limbs and the conclusion on neural nets. The main impetus behind chapter 10 was in fact a book that had nothing to do with translation, Oliver Sacks’s 1985 The Man Who Mistook His Wife For a Hat, a wonderful tour de force of neurological grotes-queries that immediately struck me as an infinitely productive set of heuristics for new thinking about translation. I offer it here as a tentative solution, or pathway toward a solution, to the narrow dualizing of the foreignizers: foreign or domestic, visible or invisible, strongly abusive or weakly assimilative. The conclusion was similarly born out of my reading in a book unrelated to translation, William Allman’s Apprentices of Wonder (1989), about neural network technology, which got me to thinking in new ways about machine translation and its implications not only for the study of translation, but for the future of the human race as well.
A word about inclusions and exclusions. I have attempted to include for discussion works published between 1985 and 1995 that are representative of what I take to be new and centrifugal approaches to translation—but that is a complexly and problematically tendentious category that by necessity excludes works published in the same period that seem to this writer (a) more “centripetal,” more typical of traditional approaches to translation, or (b) less representative of the exciting new approaches than the ones I have chosen. There is an inevitable subjectivity about all such choices, which I deplore as much as any reader who protests the exclusion of theorists X, Y, or Z; but I do not see any principled escape from it. I am told by linguistic scholars of translation that the new work in that branch of the field is excitingly innovative and moves decisively past the old paradigms; from my admittedly biased point of view, however, this new linguistic work seems very much in the same theoretical mold as, say, Catford and early Nida, and thus more typical of traditional approaches. Similarly, I have chosen to highlight the feminist work of Suzanne Jill Levine and Myriam Díaz-Diocaretz, thus neglecting or excluding—and tacitly seeming to dismiss as uninteresting—interesting work by, say, Carol Maier, Lori Chamberlain, Susanne Lotbinière-Harwood, Nicole Brossard, or Barbara Godard. In these cases and others like them, I apologize for any implied or inferred slights, and hope that someone else will give the theorists I’ve excluded the attention they deserve.
Other exclusions have more to do with my own failings than with my understanding of what’s “old” and what’s “new” in the field. I have read Hans Vermeer and Justa Holz-Mänttäri in German, slowly and laboriously, given the lamentable state of my German; since Justa was my colleague in the translation studies department at the University of Tampere in Finland, and I met Hans several times through her, I have also had long discussions of the skopos and Handlung approaches to translation with their prime movers, and consider those approaches unquestionably part and parcel of the “centrifugal theories” and “critical interventions” I explore here. Unfortunately, my German isn’t up to the kind of close critical reading that I have sought to give the other texts I’ve studied here. I once translated into English twenty or so pages of Justa’s book Translatorisches Handeln (1984) and her comment on my translation was that my misunderstandings were so serious as to make the translation not worth editing. I have, consequently, been chary of tackling either that book or Reiß and Vermeer’s Grundlegung einer allgemeinen Translationstheorie (1984) here. The “translation as cannibalism” approach of the de Campos group in Brazil also interests me enormously, from what I have read about it; but since I have no Portuguese, I will have to wait for an English translation.
Finally, after much thought I decided not to include a discussion of Tejaswini Niranjana’s 1992 book, Siting Translation, because I have written on her at length elsewhere1 and did not want to repeat myself here.
My debts in the book are many. Most of the people whose work I write about have responded to it, by letter, by fax, by phone, or face to face at conferences; thanks especially to Frederick Rener, Rita Copeland, Eric Cheyfitz, Anthony Pym, Jill Levine, and Larry Venuti, whose comments on my comments have in many cases led to substantial reformulations of my responses. Thanks also to the editors who originally solicited or accepted for publication some of the essays that appear here (substantially revised for continuity): Stuart Gillespie and Bob Cunningham at Translation and Literature (chapters 1 and 3), George Lang at The Canadian Review of Comparative Literature (chapters 2 and 8), Susan Green at Genre (chapter 6), Marilyn Gaddis Rose in Translation Spectrum II (chapter 10), and Jane Zorrilla at The ATA Chronicle (conclusion). A host of other friends, colleagues, and translation scholars have responded to my work in enormously helpful ways as well, including at least Bill Kaul, Sherrie Gradin, Robin Bodkin, Carol Maier, Mike Doyle, Bill Park, Danny Weissbort, Fred Will, Tejaswini Niranjana, Geoff Harpham, Paul Hopper, Helen Lane, Peter Krawutschke, Jonathan Lethem, and Eileen Sullivan. Working with Mona Baker on her Encyclopedia of Translation Studies and The Translator not only has had a steadying effect on my rather volatile personality, but also she has put me in touch with numerous wonderfully intelligent and creative people in the field, most notably Anthony Pym. Peter Bush adopted me at an ALTA meeting one year and decided not only to publish a piece of mine in the Translators Association journal, In Other Words, but to bring me to the U.K. for a conference at Warwick, where I met many people who until then had been mere names to me. Thanks also, as ever, to my wife Heljä and my daughters, Laura, Sara, and Anna, translators all.