LITERARY THEORY AND TRANSLATION
With the exception of Anthony Pym, who was originally trained as a sociologist and later strayed into poststructuralist thought, all of the paradigm-busting translation scholars presented here came to the field from literary theory. Literary theorists, after all (that much-disparaged crew), were the ones to begin challenging theocratic assumptions about the critic’s instrumentalization as the medium by which the author conveys his Olympian intentions to the reader, back in the twenties in the Soviet Union, with Russian formalism, and in the thirties in the United States, with the New Criticism—which by the fifties had cut itself free from both authorial intention and reader response in the important papers of Wimsatt and Beardsley, “The Intentional Fallacy” and “The Affective Fallacy.” The sixties, seventies, and eighties then saw an explosion of theoretical assaults on even the surviving remnants of medieval theocracy in the New Criticism, from the psychological decenterings of the author and the reader in psychoanalytical and reader-response criticism to the historical, political, and ideological demystifications of the text and its social production and consumption in deconstruction, feminism, Marxism, and the New Historicism.
And the pioneers of the new centrifugal approaches to translation, especially in the United States, for the most part cut their critical teeth on this theoretical upheaval: they (we) are baby boomers taught the New Criticism in high school and college (an orthodoxy by the late sixties and seventies), hurled willy-nilly into the theoretical fray in grad school in the seventies and eighties, hired as multiculturally literate junior professors of English and modern languages and comparative literature to write and teach criticism for a living but somehow compelled to translate on the side, inspired at some point to integrate their/our vocations and avocations and read up on translation and to discover the stifling pre-New Critical authoritarianism and prescriptivism of translation theory. How could this be? How could medieval theocracy have survived so long and so strong in this adjacent field when it was so roundly abused and assaulted in our own?
And so this group has turned its collective hand to the renovation of translation theory from within, bringing its subversive theories of language, culture, society, and politics to bear on a tradition that with a very few exceptions was still fixated on formalistic structures of equivalence. That fixation will probably continue; the early reviews of these new books suggest that the old guard considers them beyond the theoretical pale, irrelevant to translation practice as narrowly defined, and therefore irrelevant also to translation studies. Whether these new approaches to translation are but a passing fad, as normative theorists believe and hope, or whether what we see passing is not a fad but an ancient theocratic ideology—the next decade or two will tell.
Jill Levine tells us in The Subversive Scribe that G. Cabrera Infante and she “once considered writing a book together, partly because he thought I had too much of an ego to be a mere translator, and yet I have feared to tread where he dares” (1991, 46); but in some sense that is precisely what she has done in this book, not only treading where he dares but bringing her “too much of an ego” to bear on the problems facing the “mere translator,” that neutral instrument of the hegemonic source text. Personal, self-reflective, bouncing restlessly between the punning ego’s “too much” and the “mere translator’s” self-denigrations, The Subversive Scribe is an astonishing and explosive tour de force. Levine is steeped in critical theory and quotes Freud, Lacan, Benjamin, Derrida, De Man, Brodsky, and others with a kind of casual insouciance that bespeaks both her easy familiarity with their complex problematizations of language and culture and her unease at bringing these big guns to bear on what often seem to her to be trivial problems, such as what to do with a difficult word. She also delights in what she calls “second-grade jokes,” like “Off the Cliff by Hugo Furst, Yellow River by I. P. Daley, Twenty Years in the Saddle by Major Assburn” (23), a list sent to Cabrera Infante by a narrative persona whose name should probably have been Lawst N. Translation. Levine shifts registers with gleeful abandon; this is not a book for stylistic purists who demand a depersonalized academic nonvoice. Levine lives her book, and her two languages, with her whole body.
A big part of the attraction of the book is Levine’s freewheeling passage through her collaborations with marginalized and eccentric Latin American novelists such as Cabrera Infante, Severo Sarduy, and Manuel Puig—her stunning transformation of the “this is how I did it” genre of translation theory into a big boisterous rumpus full of cartwheels and barked shins, childish shouts of joy and sudden fits of dejection. But another big part, and certainly her greatest strength as a subversive translation theorist, is her often excruciating self-awareness, from the personal revelations of the introduction to the almost bitter self-recriminations of the epilogue. In the first section of part four, for example, she states the purpose of her book and then goes on to discuss her (partial) sense of failure as a translation theorist:
The title The Subversive Scribe and what follows—with an ironic smile underneath—is meant to jolt the reader out of a comfortable (or uncomfortable) view of translations as secondary, as faint shadows of primary, vivid but lost, originals. Originals and translations, acts of communication, both fail and succeed, both fulfill and subvert the drive to communicate. The word aspires to be the same, to be as complete as its object (be it another word or a primal reality), but is always, to greater or lesser extent, a fragment, an approximation. To dramatize this I have purposely focused on writers and writing that speak explicitly of the original’s self-betrayal. More significantly and prior to this written mediation, I gravitated toward such writers and writing.
The Subversive Scribe also both succeeds and fails: The reader may agree that the translations of these writers are continuations of the original’s creative process, and that these translations (and their discussion) perform a critical act as well, but such may not be the case with all translations and translation discussions. In all honesty, I can only speak for my own experience and hope that others find familiar repercussions, though the textual journeys they take may lead them down different paths. (167)
And she’s right: her subversions of Latin American fiction do often sound like special cases, subversive renditions of subversive authors who demand subversion and thus in some sense co-opt it. “Cabrera Infante was adamant, however, about faithfully translating his sometimes faithless, and even ruthless, literary parodies” (93)—so how is she subversive? (We’ll see Philip Lewis confronting this problem in conjunction with his theory of “abusive fidelity” in chapter 11.) She does say on the next page that “as subversive collaborator I still sought a compromise” (94), fighting Cabrera Infante’s vision of the translation in order to impose her own; but even this scenario belies the impression given by the book’s title of the wily translator undermining the original author’s godlike authority. As Levine says explicitly, she has gravitated toward subversive writers whose subversions authorize and justify her own. What would she do, or have the reader do, in translating a more mainstream author, especially a dead and deified one who is not available either physically or ideologically to authorize deviations from normative translation modes? And what about the advertising copy, the instruction manual, the legal document? Just what is the extension of Levine’s scribe’s subversion? To the extent that her book merely produces a witty series of exceptions to the traditional rule, and thus can be thematized by that tradition as proving the rule, she has failed to subvert mainstream translation theory; she has only become a token deviant within it.
If this sounds harsh, it is not nearly as harsh as Levine is on herself. In her feminist epilogue, for example, she confesses her own self-betrayal as a woman “fallen under the spell of male discourse, translating books that speak of woman as the often treacherous or betrayed other” (181); and although she sees Puig, Sarduy, and Cabrera Infante as somehow ideologically feminine writers who undermine the father tongue “in perhaps more corrosive, radical ways, digging into the root (route) of hypocrisy, into language, the very matter in which consciousness is inscribed” (182), and thus herself as woman translator participating in that antipatriarchal project, she refuses to let herself off that easily. She has, she says, translated a few short works by women, but “my main work as a translator has been as handmaiden to the discourse of male writers. But what is really the problematic issue here is this catchword handmaiden, the gender-identified term and role that has been assigned to translators, male or female” (183). She quotes Albert Bensoussan in French on the translator as woman, as handmaiden, and then translates him into English, loosely, subversively, retonalizing his playful acceptance of the feminization of the translator with her own anger and anxiety—and, interestingly, without quotation marks, so that the translation stands as both Bensoussan’s statement of the ideological norm and her own inward and no-longer-quite-passive deviation from that norm: “The translator is secondary, enslaved, nay raped by another’s words; the translator does not belong to himself but is alienated from his own language; the author creates himself, the translator remains secret. The translator is only a voice of passage. The translator is female, even if she is sometimes a male” (183).
This subversive act of translation is somehow emblematic of Levine’s method in the book: not so much Utopian as anti-antiutopian, she inhabits the interstices of traditional translation with a twist, a subtle subversive spin that constantly leaves her open to (her own and others’) accusations of complicity in the ideological norms she is passing on, but also keeps her in ideological movement around and beyond those norms, weaving and unweaving a web of illusion that both extends and exposes the norms. She ends, in fact, on an overtly Utopian note—
If somehow we learn to de-sex the original vis-à-vis its translation, particularly in our postmodern age, when originality has been all but exhausted, if we recognize the borderlessness or at least continuity between translation and original, then perhaps we can begin to see the translator in another light, no longer bearing the stigma of servant, of handmaiden. (183)
—but throughout the book her insights are far less stable, more nomadic, shifting, sniperlike, living the delirium tremens of translation theory as a displaced person:
The subject, everyone and no one, Sarduy commented to Rivera, is expelled: “The I is no longer a monolith but a crossroads, a series of ephemeral, unconnected elements.” … Sarduy perceives a unity behind cultural diversity; the bricoleur joins fragments to create the illusion of a monolith, be it a protagonist or a novel, to expose at the same time its fragmentation.
Translation. upon fragmenting that self-conscious illusion to create yet another illusion, exposes, parodies the creative process of the “original,” a process of conversions and of apparent disconnections. (176)
As both translator and translation theorist, Levine becomes an outlaw or barbarian who lives within society, within civilization, as a kind of internal exile, a “translooter,” as she says in one of her many brilliant coinages, who expresses the pain or discontent of civilization. If “traditional translation practices reveal a fear of the other, a need to turn the alien into the familiar” (16), subversive translation practices reveal the anxieties and frustrations and hurts inflicted through society’s alienation of the familiar. “We are reminded,” Levine goes on, “that translation is a manipulative political act, that language—always ‘scarred’ by its politico-historical context—can be manipulated to censure the foreign” (16), and one of the things censured is the foreignness of the native translator: the Jewish girl from New York who goes to Spain during college and assimilates herself to a foreign culture, then returns “home” to a toxic culture shock that she attempts to express, and perhaps exorcize, in and through her translations.