MIDDLE GROUNDS
The three theoretical works I ’ve examined so far here in part two, by Lefevere, Pym, and Levine, mark out useful extremes in the systematic versus anecdotal methods debate: Lefevere will only allow the most repressed traces of the personal into his methodology, whereas Pym and Levine submerge the systemic well beneath the surface of their casual, personal address to real people, real translators. What, one might well ask—or who—inhabits the middle ground between these extremes?
Well, Anthony Pym claims that he does, really; most of his work, as he pointed out to me in a letter, responding to an earlier draft of chapter 5, is far more systematic, far less personal, than Epistemological Problems. My book, too, The Translator’s Turn, although frequently both attacked and praised as personal and anecdotal, occupies an uneasy middle ground between the two methodological poles, systematizing translation theories and models historically in part one and taxonomically in part two.
But the fourth book I want to explore briefly here, Myriam Díaz-Diocaretz’s Translating Poetic Discourse: Questions on Feminist Strategies in Adrienne Rich (1985), provides an even better example of the middle ground between systematic and personal approaches—even, as I ’m going to suggest, to a fault, although it is a most interesting and productive fault indeed. Díaz-Diocaretz is described on the back cover of the John Benjamins paperback as “a Chilean poet, critic, translator, and a Research Scholar of the Faculty of Letters at the University of Utrecht,” and like many translation theorists who are graduates of or faculty members at Dutch universities, she is clearly, among other things, a polysystems theorist—also a Jakobsonian communication theorist, concerned with senders and receivers, decoding and recoding. But she is above all Adrienne Rich’s primary Spanish translator, a strong feminist voice in the Hispanic world, an advocate of reader-response criticism, and a deeply self-reflective thinker—and all of this inclines her strongly, it seems, toward a personalized, anecdotal approach. One whole section of her book, in fact, is taken directly from her translator’s logbook (49–54), musings while reading and translating Rich, an approach that clearly pushes hard on her theoretical framework, unsettling it, forcing her to deal far more complexly and problematically with resistant details than she would have without this grounding in her own carefully recorded experiences. But she is also at pains throughout the book to articulate as finely structured a theoretical understanding of translation as possible, using her anecdotal material fruitfully not only to illustrate but also to motivate her theoretical framings. Most important, the theoretical construct that seems to me her most significant contribution to translation theory, the concept that I’ve highlighted in my chapter title—the translator-function—operates in a mediatory middle ground between the large-scale social and ideological systems that Lefevere articulates and the personal experiences that Pym and Levine articulate, building enormously useful conceptual bridges between the two.
As I say, I also find the integration of systematic and anecdotal thinking highly problematic in Díaz-Diocaretz’s book, to the point, I think, of rendering her theoretical framework virtually incoherent. That’s a strong statement, but I think it’s important to begin a reading of Díaz-Diocaretz there, precisely because the theoretical confusions of her book seem so powerfully productive. Her confusions arise, I believe, because something, some such hegemonic force in society as she herself attempts to theorize, doesn’t want her to say what she’s trying to say. This sounds ominous, I know—maybe even paranoid, seeing conspiracies everywhere. But this is not really a conspiracy theory; it’s an ideology theory, an attempt to express the suffocatingly repressive power of ideology, its power to stifle and thwart deviant thought. And the theory of the translator-function gets right to the heart of that power, even though, as I say, Díaz-Diocaretz isn’t quite able to clear away the obstacles that the normative author-function operant in her own thinking processes keeps throwing in her path.
In fact, this experience of being thwarted in our attempts to rethink translation in counterhegemonic ways is almost certainly a shared one in the new centrifugal approaches. Some theorists (Eric Cheyfitz, for example) seem to burst through the ideological obstacles to fresh thought with ease, others (Levine and Díaz-Diocaretz, maybe Robinson too) with great anguish and many stammerings and stumblings along the way; but there are, clearly, monstrous blockages that all of us are dealing with, and it seems to me that Díaz-Diocaretz not only exemplifies the theoretical difficulties those blockages cause, but offers the germ of an explanation for how they work, and how they can be combated.
But more of that in a moment. First I want to take a look at Díaz-Diocaretz’s anecdotalism, from the first section of chapter 3, called “A Poem Can Begin/With A Lie. And Be Torn Up.” This is where she personalizes her systemic theory with excerpts from her translator’s logbook, telling us that she begins reading Rich’s Twenty-One Love Poems (1976) through Pablo Neruda’s Veinte poemas de amor y una canción desesperada (1924), in which the male speaker addresses his female lover. But soon the pressures of Rich’s poetic discourse begin to push her past the familiar Chilean Spanish of Neruda, indeed, past the familiar patriarchal male-identified discourse of Neruda, to something new. Let me quote at some length:
Thus I begin to leave Neruda’s sequence behind, suspending the familiar in order to grasp the unfamiliar world of Rich’s poetic sequence. In poem II, the speaking voice becomes more distinct, now as the represented ‘I’ who is at once a poet, a dreamer, a lover. I follow the lyric stream, its rhythms, pauses, I begin to feel the cohesion of that world, and I start translating what gives me the most aesthetic pleasure, from poem II …
You’ve kissed my hair
to wake me. I dreamed you were a poem,
I say, a poem I wanted to show someone …
and I laugh and fall dreaming again
of the desire to show you to everyone I love,
to move openly together …
In my notes I write:
Me has despertado con tu beso
en los cabellos. Soñé que eras un poema,
es decir, un poema que deseé mostrarle a alguien …
y río y vuelvo a soñar
que deseo mostrarte a cuántos amo,
que avancemos libremente, juntos …
I stop and embark on the will to have the poems present, represented in my consciousness, on the search for a bridge between the objects as experience of perception and the thoughts which that perception arouses; to reconstruct the meanings of Rich’s poems and to select the corresponding sense, I must discover the “truth” in each text. My background and culture are different from Rich’s; there may be gaps that might prevent me from inferring those true meanings. Do I dare disturb the poet’s universe? The line “no one has imagined us” keeps resonating. To imagine the lovers, as I go on translating, means also to look for textual clues defining further the speaker’s and the addressee’s gender. (50)
And it is not long before she stumbles over her first unthinking translation of “together,” juntos, which is marked in Spanish for both plural and masculine gender, implying literally two or more men together. True, in “normal” Spanish, the masculine plural is thought of hegemonically as unmarked for gender, so that niños can mean either “boys” or “children” (and niñas means only “female children”), todos can mean either “all of the males” or “everyone/everything”; so too juntos can mean either “men together” or “people/things together.” But like the English “man/men” and “he” when used to refer generically to human beings regardless of gender, this grammatical “rule” in Spanish is specifically a patriarchal form that reflects the normativity of masculine experience in culture: men refer to children as boys because they were once boys themselves, and in their world girls were deviants; men refer to everyone as all males, because in a patriarchal society women count for little; men think of togetherness as implicitly a guy thing, a male-bonding thing (because who knows; what women do when they’re together?). The use of nonsexist discourse has been favored in English publications since the late 1970s or early 1980s, due to steady ideological pressure from the women’s movement; in the Latin world it is just now, two decades later, beginning to take hold, slowly and with great difficulty, especially given the existence in Spanish of grammatical gender, which often assigns masculine and feminine versions of the same noun different meanings. Thus Díaz-Diocaretz feels that she is treading on potentially dangerous ground when she gravitates toward a translation marked for female speaker and addressee:
However, as a translator who is aware of the moral and social tradition and conventions in the Hispanic culture as a whole, in the context of my own horizon of prospective readers, to use the adjective in the feminine plural (juntas) would be more than daring. It would explicitly refer the reader to conceive of the speaker and addressee’s relationship within the homosocial context, which in fact the twenty-one love poems develop. The connotative code indicates association with the word homosexual, and more precisely “lesbian” by implication. This is an obvious interpretative hypothesis I can anticipate the readers of my translation will carry out in their decoding of the text. (51–52)
And here’s an interesting point. Not having been raised in a Spanish-speaking culture, indeed having been raised in the determinedly progressive atmosphere of southern California in the 1960s, I fail to feel the “more than daring” nature of juntas; it seems perfectly reasonable to me, even obvious. After all, Rich is a lesbian poet addressing her female lover; Rich has herself expressed her anger when her poems have been assimilated to “heterosexual romance,” her poems’ addressee taken to be male;9 what better word than juntas? But this is precisely why Díaz-Diocaretz’s personalized discourse is so extremely important: I don’t feel the risks in juntas, but she does. And she is not only the native speaker of Spanish; she is the translator, the individual through whom Rich’s words have to travel en route to Spanish. When I was in Mexico recently, doing a seminar on translation, I asked a few of the participants in my seminar how they would feel about juntas in that context; and while many said categorically that it would send the “wrong” message (“wrong” because too overtly lesbian!), a few, including one male student in his mid-twenties (who had, in fact, lived in the United States for several years), said that obviously juntas was the best translation. Shall we generalize here? Shall we systematize? I suppose the social transformation in the Hispanic world (as elsewhere) that is increasingly making it acceptable, indeed preferable, to avoid sexist genderings in Spanish could be reduced to systemic descriptions. But the initial “feel” for the right or wrong word that the systematizer seeks to reduce to stable laws always comes from individuals, who disagree on grounds that are partly collective and partly idiosyncratic; and the bottom line is still one person’s need to sift through all the competing pulls and pushes of a word choice like this and settle on a translation. Díaz-Diocaretz continues:
One evident solution for the translator could be to avoid the equivalent for ‘together’ (‘juntas,’ ‘juntos’) which requires a choice in gender category, with a “safer” substitution of the personal pronouns ‘you and I’ instead of the adjective together. It would then read “que avancemos libremente tú y yo”; either this semantic solution or the one which prefers the masculine plural form (generic) would leave the line, the poem and the sequence, ambiguous as to speaker and addressee, since the generic form is a conventional and grammatically accepted way to indicate the plural for male and female subjects. However, if I selected the neutral, ambiguous form (the plural), I would be cooperating with those who have left what Rich calls the “half world” (1976:27) of silenced and unwanted women “outside the law.” Translating a structure of language, a sentence, a phrase, does not imply necessarily translating a text with its correlations organizing the aesthetic message as it was conceived by the poet. It can be a grammatically correct translation, yet it would convey ‘aberrant’ presuppositions. I am also torn between the poet’s message and the constraints tacitly imposed by the RT [receptor-text] culture, that is, constraints that limit the accepted norms and conventions of a woman’s poetic voice within the Hispanic literary tradition. (52–53)
Díaz-Diocaretz’s book is rich with such examples. My favorite, which I’ll only cite briefly before moving on to an examination of her theoretical framework, is the rainbow:
The rainbow laboring to extend herself
where neither men nor cattle understand. (103)
The problem here is that the rainbow for Rich is clearly feminine, but in Spanish it is grammatically marked masculine, el arco iris. What is the feminist translator to do? Ignore the problem and use the normative masculine gender? This would undermine everything Rich stands for. Díaz-Diocaretz’s solution is to leave arco as is (as opposed, say, to feminizing it, making it arca, which would rather drastically change the meaning of the word—area means an ark, as in the Ark of the Covenant, but also a chest or a coffer, and when it has water in it, a tank or a tower) but to drop the masculine article el from in front of it; then to allow the article to resurface after the noun not as the masculine personal pronoun el, “he,” but as the feminine personal pronoun ella, “she”:
arco iris, ella, está luchando por extenderse
allá donde no comprenden ni el hombre ni el ganado (104)
Through a steady stream of highly particularized examples like this one, Díaz-Diocaretz fleshes out an explicitly feminist theory and practice of translation grounded in the desire to validate and disseminate a woman-identified discourse: the translator “preserves as much of the literal meaning as possible,” she writes, “by offering solutions to apparent contradictions, obscurities, non-determinacies, discontinuities in feminist discourse, with an exploratory attention focused on gender markers which inscribe the author in her own textuality/sexuality” (104).
This much Levine did as well, although without Díaz-Diocaretz’s specific attention to the translation of feminist authors. The series of articles Carol Maier (1980; 1985) has been writing since the early eighties has had at bottom a similar aim. But Díaz-Diocaretz wants to take the matter further: she wants to systematize feminist translation—or rather, to put that more complexly, to theorize translation in terms of, or through the personalized lens of, her own feminist practice. This is a tremendously ambitious project; one that I think fails, but fails in all the right ways. Díaz-Diocaretz wants to take everything she has learned from the structuralist translation theories of jakobson and his group, along with everything she has learned from polysystems theory, mix it up with everything she has learned from Russian formalists like Mikhail Bakhtin and Viktor Shklovsky and French poststructuralist theorists like Michel Foucault and Julia Kristeva and German Rezeptionsästetiker such as Hans Robert Jauss and Wolfgang Iser and a host of other important theorists as well, and filter it through her experience of translating Rich, into a coherent theoretical framework for the study of translation. The book that resulted was originally her dissertation at the State University of New York, Stony Brook (1983), and traces of the dissertation are still present everywhere, especially in her desire to do everything and say everything all at once, without quite knowing how it all fits together; but there is also great virtue, I think, in both her eclecticism and her valiant efforts to bring it all together (juntas, I suppose). Even if she doesn’t quite pull it off, the sheer quantity of divergent theories and ideas and insights in the book, powered by Díaz-Diocaretz’s contagious energy, makes the book highly productive for later scholars in the field.
There is so much here, in fact, that I’m experiencing some difficulty deciding what to focus on; the more I read and think about Díaz-Diocaretz’s book, the more convinced I am that another whole book could (and perhaps should) be written about it, unpacking and unfolding the many suggestive ideas in it. But I will restrain myself, lodging only the passing disclaimer that the theoretical “center” I find in the book, the translator-function in its dual roles as the omniscient reader and the acting writer, is only one of many potential centers—and making also the recommendation that you seek out the other centers for yourself.
Chapter 2 in Translating Poetic Discourse is entitled “The Translator-Function,” and it is divided into two sections, “The Translator as Omniscient Reader” and “The Translator as Acting Writer.” In fact, she broaches all three concepts earlier, promising definitions later; but the definitions are not forthcoming in the chapter supposedly devoted to them, and even when they finally do come—in her conclusion, 150 pages later— they still leave me more or less completely confused. Not only the chapter devoted to the translator-function but also the entire book seems to be an attempt to define the concept associatively, maybe metonymically, like a game of charades or twenty questions (is it bigger than a bread box?). Having read Foucault’s “What Is an Author?” 1 assume Díaz-Diocaretz is deriving the translator-function from his concept of the author-function, and in fact that article does appear in Díaz-Diocaretz’s bibliography; but Foucault is never mentioned in the chapter that introduces the concept, and only some of her tangential descriptions of it connect up with Foucault’s theory. Later, in chapter 3, she refers to Adrienne Rich’s “author-function activity (a term I borrow from Foucault 1979 as a parallel to translator-function)” (59). This seems to imply that the translator-function came first; then she found Foucault’s article and borrowed his concept as a useful parallel to her own. Although this seems unlikely, it would explain my vague sense that the translator-function as she imagines it has vast networks of associative links that have nothing to do with Foucault.
Certainly some of what Díaz-Diocaretz calls the translator-function comes out of Foucault—or rather, to put that more precisely, the notion assumes what vague conceptual shape it has for me largely through my reading in Foucault. For Foucault in “What Is an Author?” the author-function is a social construct projected onto the author’s verbal traces (name, titles, words) by some social group, either “the society” as a whole or some smaller collective that regulates the normative understanding of its members ideologically. This author-construct is a “function” because it invariably serves some social purpose: it becomes a focus or an organizer of ideological activity, encouraging various directed forms of emulation, warning people against various kinds of social deviancy, regulating admiration and disgust, loyalty and rejection, and so on.
For example, Adrienne Rich’s author-function for American society at large might be positively construed as a “confessional poet” or as a “love poet,” channeling and modeling both a certain kind of individualistic concern for one-on-one love relationships (unmarked for sexual preference, but implicitly heterosexual, because that is the social norm) and a searching self-disclosure widely affirmed as essential for “communication.” A hegemonic reader conditioned to “like” or “appreciate” or “admire” the author-function called Adrienne Rich might, in other words, be thereby guided to read her as a normative exemplar of telling the one you love (implicitly a person of the opposite sex) how you feel.
Or that function might be negatively construed as “lesbian poet” or “radical feminist,” channeling hegemonic warnings against various kinds of deviance from heterosexist patriarchal norms. A hegemonic reader conditioned to this negative author-function would probably not read her actual words—the)’ would occasion too much ideologically channeled anxiety and disgust for that—but would “know” her (actually only her author-function) as a lesbian poet, and thus as a powerful example of the kinds of sick, perverted trash that is being called “art” by a godless liberal establishment (in the United States, for example, Senator Jesse Helms against the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities).
For a lesbian or radical feminist group, finally—possibly even for the liberal intellectual/artistic “establishment” that Jesse Helms rails against— her author-function would clearly be different, directed at social ends like group solidarity and pride. A straight liberal reader conditioned to this positive gay author-function would read her, discuss her, mention her in order both to express and to feel solidarity with gays; a lesbian reader conditioned to it would read her (etc.) in order to overcome internalized traces of the culture’s destructive homophobia and to enhance personal and collective self-esteem in being lesbian.
And Díaz-Diocaretz seems to me—she never spells this out—to be blending something like this Foucauldian notion of the author-function with a polysystems approach similar to the one I explored in Lefevere in chapter 4. If I’m right, this would make the translator-function a social construct created and wielded by the target culture as a vehicle for the “reliable” or “faithful” or “accurate” (i.e., ideologically regulated) transfer of foreign texts for domestic use. This initial approximation of the translator-function’s meaning for Díaz-Diocaretz is apparently confirmed by passages like this one:
The translator may contribute, unknowingly or not, to the suppression of a text or to its diffusion, according to an ideological reading of the textual strategies of the ST [source text]. By way of example, the theological Diego de Cisneros undertook the translating responsibility of Montaigne’s Essays, at the request of an Inquisitor; the task took around three years (1634–1637). In his exercise of translator-function, Cisneros eliminated portions of the text, modified others, especially the propositions he found “heterodox.” (29)
Or again: “The translator-function becomes normative, providing a ‘competently accepted’ interpretation which may result in a loss; this interpretation implicitly appeals to canonized aesthetic or ideological norms” (30). And at one point she enumerates the four operations by which the translator-function organizes source-language information in the target language: (1) the didactic (teaching the target-language reader through notes, morals, and other textual commentaries); (2) the corrective (“adapt[ing] the interpretation to the reader’s ‘literary competence”’) (38); (3) the polemic (arising out of the TF’s resistance to specific aspects of either the source-language text or the target-language culture that is expected to receive the translation in a certain way); and (4) the preventive (modifying the text so as to introduce partial or total censorship or suppression) (38–39).
This sounds very much like Foucault. But this construction of Díaz-Diocaretz’s understanding of the translator-function is complicated by the patent fact that she is most centrally concerned in the book with her own work (and similar work by other translators) with a North American poet whose radical feminist and lesbian voice is presumably not wanted in Chile and generally (hetero)sexist Latin America; and this problematizes a Foucauldian conception of the translator-function. What “inquisitor” or other representative of social hegemony created the antihomophobic translator-function exercised by Díaz-Diocaretz? Is her translator-function normative? Or is it personal, oppositional, dissident? It seems to be both, in different contexts; but Díaz-Diocaretz never quite addresses that bothness. She typically refers to the translator-function as “he/she,” not “it”—it’s a person, perhaps a persona, but always gendered. Sometimes it sounds like what Jacques Lacan would call the translator’s “subject,” a self-projection for public consumption. “The translator [and here the context suggests she means the translator-function] is no mere phantom; he/she is a presence incorporated in the author’s discourse, yet not as an invisible or untraceable figure or a voiceless first person whose existence becomes totally reduced or hidden in the translating process” (31)—as what, then? Again:
The translator-function spells out the assumptions and operations that lead from text to interpretation. He/she organizes the text diachronically (e.g., existing moral codes, literary conventions, author’s position), or synchronically, identifying points of discord. The translator as reader [still the translator-function, I presume] identifies the conventions that underline various interpretations; he/she can rearrange the codes that generate a different sort of interpretation as a safe option, or can maim texts to adapt them thoroughly to traditional and respectable enterprises. (31)
“Such interpretative factors,” she concludes, “may have interesting effects” (31), which is, of course, putting it very mildly indeed. Here again the translator-function seems to be normative, collective, a hegemonic agent instilled in the real translator’s activity by the target culture; but elsewhere she refers to “the translator-function’s (TF) subjectivity”:
Let us start with a simple definition: subjectivity includes personal preferences and choices, misapprehensions, aversions guided or defined by prin ciples which include ideology and aesthetics. Aesthetics, within this framework, refers to the elements selected as appropriate for the structure as a verbal sequence, such as acceptance or rejection of a given rhythmic or rhetorical figure (aversions and avoidance of cacophony, repetition, or certain rhyming patterns). The aesthetic selections are closely linked with ideological choice, but the former are determined more by the text’s structure than the translator’s beliefs, since a particular decision may arise because of the norms or deviations of norms in a certain historical period. The complexity emerges when the ideological factor and the acknowledgment of the TF’s addressees interact. (37)
Which ideological factor? Whose acknowledgment? And above all, who selects the aesthetic elements? Who considers them appropriate? Who links the aesthetic selections with ideological choice—and where did that choice come from in the first place? Her depersonalizing rhetoric—“a particular decision may arise”—suggests a poststructuralist focus on the hegemonic or institutional or ideological (generally, supra-individual) control of decisions that each individual translator may want (because he or she has been conditioned to think this way by liberal ideology) to believe are made personally, individually motivated and willed; but Díaz-Diocaretz is also addressing the problematic of subjectivity, here, and without considering the conflicted structure of subjectivity within a poststructuralist and above all postbourgeois, postindividualist ethos.10 What ideological agents within the individual subject “make” these decisions? What internal battles are fought over the decisions that “arise”?
Equally problematic are the “omniscient reader” and “acting writer” aspects of the translator-function—especially, I suppose, the omniscient reader, as I could never figure out what Díaz-Diocaretz meant by “omniscient.” The term “omniscient reader” is borrowed from the reader-response work of Iris M. Zavala, but Díaz-Diocaretz never summarizes Zavala’s concept for us, even in passing, leaving us once again to guess at meanings.11 At one point she says, intriguingly, that “the translator’s omniscience involves knowledge of a text’s existence,” and that “the text conveys the suggestion that it has an author other than the translator himself” (25). Here the “knowledge of a text’s existence” seems to promise a retheorization of the obvious that will help us get past a blockage; but Díaz-Diocaretz quickly segues into other matters, Bakhtin on the wandering word, and the promise is lost.
Elsewhere, Díaz-Diocaretz discusses possible translations for “deviant” in Rich’s usage; she considers desviado, descarriado, but claims that (besides being marked masculine) these words have misleading connotations, desviado pointing to degeneracy, descarriado to madness. Hence: “A non-omniscient reader who would select one of these lexical units would violate the poet’s textual strategies. A translator who wishes to write a more accurate meaning and who wishes to put to practice the author-function spectrum would have to consider the option marginadas, suggesting ‘put on the border,’ or marginated” (63)—or, well, marginalized. What is strange about this systemic rhetoric, though, is only partly that it seems to be a mystification and euphemization of “I think marginadas is better.” All along, as I say, I had been wondering in what sense any reader could ever be considered omniscient; but I had tried to fit the term into my vague sense of the theory as a whole, telling myself that “omniscience” was not meant as an objective characteristic of a real reader or translator but as one facet of the ideal model called “translator-function.” In this formulation, which is not Díaz-Diocaretz’s but my own best guess, the real translator is able to access a broader range of knowledge about the source-language and target-language authors, texts, cultures, and readers by channeling the “omniscient reader” aspect of the “translator-function.” As I read on I still had only the vaguest sense of what that might mean, but it seemed intuitively like a step in the right direction—away from trying to imagine any real reader as omniscient. But now she refers to “a non-omniscient reader”—what am I to make of that? Are we still operating in the realm of ideal models, here? Is a non-omniscient reader a kind of counterideal, an actantial aspect of a bad translator-function? Or is it, as it unfortunately seems to me, a description of real readers? Could it be that Díaz-Diocaretz means by “a non-omniscient reader” someone who doesn’t know enough about Adrienne Rich? If so, and I find myself hard put to believe otherwise, the term “omniscient reader” serves only to mystify the survival in Díaz-Diocaretz’s theorizing of traditional knowledgeability requirements for the translator.
And what does it mean to “put to practice the author-function spectrum”? Is this just another jargonistic mystification of the traditional notion of fidelity? Could we paraphrase Díaz-Diocaretz to be saying “an ill-informed reader who translated ‘deviant’ as desviado or descarriado would be deviating from Rich’s intention; a translation more faithful to her intended meaning would be marginada”? Or does “author-function” still carry with it some vestige of the meaning Foucault gave it? (Or should I say some vestige of the meaning which an omniscient reader would attribute to Foucault’s author-function?) As I began to suggest earlier, the only way Rich’s “author-function” (in Foucault’s sense, as my “omniscient reader” construes it) could be taken as deliberately excluding connotations of “madness” and “degeneracy” from her use of “deviant” would be through the elucidation of a social group that constructs her as simultaneously lesbian and as sane and moral: a radical lesbian or other oppositional group, some group that works to recondition its members to perceive their own and other people’s gayness in positive (“sane,” “moral”) terms. In Foucault’s terms, any reference to Rich’s author-function that does not specify the social group projecting it will implicitly refer to some such monolithic group as “the United States of America” or “all English-speakers”—an ideologically conservative (specifically in this case homophobic) collective for which lesbian “deviancy” emphatically does connote both madness and degeneracy. Is there anything left of Foucault’s idea in Díaz-Diocaretz’s conception of “author-function spectrum/activity,” or does she really mean by it roughly “authorial intention”?
Díaz-Diocaretz seems, in other words, to harbor a powerful strain of essentialism that resists the social and ideological relativism of Foucault’s formulations, according to which the author-function is whatever a social group says it is, and keeps returning her forcefully to the normative prescriptivism of the “old” translation studies. There is a sense in which Díaz-Diocaretz seems to be saying, behind all her fancy theoretical vocabulary, something like “The good translator had better know a lot about her/his source language author and work in sympathy with that author’s intentions to transfer the intended meaning accurately to the target language”—in other words, nothing particularly new or earthshaking.
But this seems to me a transitional problem, not a substantive one: a problem arising out of those mental and emotional blockages that a normative author-function creates to thwart Díaz-Diocaretz’s oppositional understanding of translation. Reaching toward a new and counterheg-emonic translation theory grounded in a deep sense of social power and various forms of small-group resistance, Díaz-Diocaretz finds her path littered with distractions, obstacles, stumbling blocks that keep her from giving her articulations their full oppositional force. What better ideological revenge on the would-be counterhegemonic thinker than the emptying out of her dissident categories, so that they seem new while still saying and doing the same old hegemonic things?
This thwarting can perhaps best be illustrated through a close look at the moment in her concluding chapter, “Translation and Women’s Studies: Problems and Perspectives,” in which Díaz-Diocaretz finally defines the translator-function fully:
Much more important than the consideration of the translator as an individual, whether male or female, is an understanding of a meaning-generating network called translator-function defined as including: (1) the individual and the corresponding concrete circumstances (2) a given socio-cultural context (3) a particular interpretive operation (4) a specific reading role (5) the translator’s relation to source and receptor-text (6) a specific writing role (7) the textual features through which the activities as omniscient reader and acting writer become evident or traceable and by means of which the receptive disposition of the readers of the translation is designed. The modes of integration of all these properties is [sic] what constitutes the translator-function. (151)
Happy as I am to have these properties spelled out, after trying to guess at them all through the book, I’m afraid I still don’t know what they all add up to—just how their “modes of integration … is what constitutes the translator-function.” There is a conceptual laxness or diffuseness about this list of “inclusions” that makes it difficult for me to guess at its “modes of integration”: Is the translator-function just a grab bag of individuals, circumstances, contexts, operations, roles, relations, and features (they’re all “included” in there somehow), or is it a complexly active ideological agent that regulates these things in socially purposeful ways?
For example, Díaz-Diocaretz says that the translator-function “includes” the individual, and it “includes” the corresponding concrete circumstances; just what does this mean? Could we paraphrase that to mean that the translator-function controls or channels or uses the concrete circumstantiality of the individual—perhaps even constructs the individual as situated in specific circumstances? This would mean that when we speak of the translator-function’s channeling through the individual, we mean not the romantic individual, the individual as holistic godlike being, but one functional circumstantiation of the individual.
If we make that adjustment in Díaz-Diocaretz’s formulation, then, it makes sense to modify (2) as well, to mean not that the translator-function includes a given sociocultural context but is always contextual, that it always operates in and through a given sociocultural context. I’m not sure what it would mean for the translator-function to “include” specific interpretive operations, either; it sounds vaguely formalistic, like a list of the functions a computer program will perform, without a sense of how they are performed and why, and when, and by what .exe and .com files. It would make more sense to me (though maybe just because I’m still thinking this thing through Foucault) to call the translator-function the collectivized agent in the translator’s head that performs, guides, and oversees those interpretive operations. Similarly, I would want to see the translator-function controlling reading and writing roles and constructing the translator’s relation to source-language and target-language texts.
The last “inclusion,” textual features, is the hardest for me to fathom, probably because any talk of textual features seems to me so uncritically essentialist and formalist—a naive reification of actual human response. Indeed Díaz-Diocaretz’s own reader-response remarks suggest that she doesn’t necessarily believe in the existence of textual features either, apart from the interpretive activity of a reader, which constitutes black marks on white paper as “a text”; and her suggestion that the translator-function “includes” textual features only insofar as those features act as traces of various interpretive activities points us back to a constructivist viewpoint. But from that constructivist viewpoint it would make more sense to say that the translator-function includes interpretive activities as reflected in or reified as textual features—not the other way around, the way Díaz-Diocaretz has it, that the translator-function includes textual features as traces of interpretive activities. Does she really believe that the translator-function is, or has, or includes textual features?
In an explicitly Foucauldian (or maybe just Robinsonian) paraphrase of Díaz-Diocaretz, then, the translator-function would be a collective social construct projected onto (and educated into) any given translator in order to conform his or her professional activity to hegemonic norms— an ideological force that mediates between societal norms and individual behavior, because it is social and political in its origins but psychological and personal in its operation. So far this would fit polysystems theory perfectly; indeed, it would help explain how polysystems theory works at the micro level of individual translator decisions. The target culture, in this conception, conditions its translators to translate only those authors that it considers worthwhile, and to translate them in accordance with normative methods that it believes will best serve social utility. Through the translator-function, that is, the society shapes and guides each individual translator in his or her concrete circumstances and sociocultural context; regulates his or her selection and application of specific interpretive operations, adoption of specific reading and writing roles, and relation to both the source-language and the target-language texts; and coaches real readers to reify its operations not as brainwashing or mind control, but as neutral, objective textual features. Through the translator-function, the society conditions the translator to an idealized omniscience that sees everything the society considers normal (and thus normative) and ignores everything that it considers deviant. Hence, for example, the possibility of translating “together” as juntos, or of women reading Rich’s poems to their male lovers: the address to a lesbian lover is deviant, therefore nonexistent, therefore descriptively and repressively “(to-be-)unseen” by the omniscient reader. And through the translator-function, the society controls the way in which the translator acts as writer, specifically by conditioning him or her not to think of himself or herself as a writer at all—merely as a translator, as the neutral instrument or vehicle of the source-language text’s meaning.
If this is the case, however, if society controls translators this effectively— and I think it is undeniable that it does—how do translators like Díaz-Diocaretz manage to resist hegemonic control and translate “deviant” or “dissident” texts like Rich’s in deviant and dissident ways? Where does that counterhegemonic (and hence also counterintuitive) translation together = juntas come from? Certainly not from Hispanic society’s normative translator-function, which is presumably the voice that whispers in Díaz-Diocaretz’s ear that juntas in this context is “more than daring.” Where, then, does she find the strength to whisper back, “All right, then, I’ll be more than daring”?
An expanded conception of the translator-function might explain this possibility of counterhegemonic translation by pointing to the existence and influence not only of a main hegemonic group, “society” as a monolithic whole, but of oppositional social groups as well—and insisting that these dissident groups operate by constructing for their members, and conditioning them to work through, new oppositional author-functions and translator-functions. The impulse to translate “together” as juntas, for example, obviously comes to Díaz-Diocaretz not out of the blue, but from the women’s movement, possibly from a Chilean or South American or North American or international lesbian community, which has successfully managed to instill in her functioning as a translator the impulse to reflect Rich’s homosocial address in her Spanish renditions. This is not simply a personal rebellion against dominant heterosexist norms; it signals the birth, out of an emergent social group, of a new translator-function, which circumstantiates and contextualizes the individuals that channel it in new ways, creates and controls for those individuals new interpretive operations, new reading and writing roles, new intertextual relations, new textual features.
To be sure, the old hegemonic translator-function is not thereby utterly displaced, banished, superseded; indeed, it is probably impossible to get rid of entirely. But its commands fade in the translator’s ears; translations like juntos for two women together come to seem not normal and obvious but bizarre, alien in comparison with the obviously correct juntas. The hegemonic voice still sounds in the translator’s head, but dimly, as if from a great distance; instead of enforcing instant obedience, it occasions a little snort of impatience, even, eventually, an indulgent smile, as if for some ancient childhood folly that is no longer even embarrassing.
All of this is finally to suggest that Díaz-Diocaretz’s book is most powerfully a study of the tensions and conflicts between various hegemonic and counterhegemonic translator-functions: between those that coach her to be faithful to patriarchal homophobic culture and those that coach her to be faithful to dissident feminist lesbian culture; or, to put that differ ently, between a normative translator-function that constructs Rich’s author-function as “female love poet” (strategically unmarked for sexual preference) and a deviant translator-function that constructs that author-function as “lesbian love poet.” Both make large claims on Díaz-Diocaretz’s actual practice as a translator; indeed, both (types of) forces or voices, normative and deviant, have to be reckoned with by every translator, although in an infinite variety of ways. For some translators it may be no more than a conflict between a word that feels more correct but flat and a word that feels more alive but wrong. The powerful ideological charge to translatorial decisions, which traditional theories of translation studiously mystify as this or that technical (semantic/syntactic) problem, may not always be apparent to the translator, but it is always present.
And once a translator begins, like Myriam Díaz-Diocaretz and other feminists or leftists or postcolonial subjects, to unmask the ideological tensions and conflicts that plague their practical work as translators, specific “technical” decisions expand into ever-widening ideological circles and become monstrously problematic. Do you “foreignize” your translations (as the theorists in part three will name the process) propagandistically, remaining insistently faithful to an oppositional source-language author—or, more problematically still, to an oppositional ideology that the source-language author would have despised—and in the process alienating large portions of your potential target-language audience? Or do you surrender to hegemonic power, to the normative translator-function that keeps telling you to toe the line, and produce easily assimilated target-language texts that undermine your integrity as a target-language writer—indeed, as a human being?
This ethical choice is everywhere tangible in Díaz-Diocaretz’s book, even when she cannot articulate it, even when she can only feel it operant in her translations. It is an ethical choice that troubles many of the new translation theorists, and by troubling them (us) seems to define the new approach(es). It is a choice that, because it was always mystified before, repressed beneath technical considerations that always tacitly presumed the translator’s conformity to social norms, is only now becoming a choice—only now being perceived as a decision that the translator, and the translation theorist, must face.