NEOLITERALISM
At the 1993 American Translators Association meeting in Philadelphia, Marilyn Gaddis Rose argued that we are seeing, in the theory and practice of translation, a rebirth of literalism, that “taste, or accepted rhetorical norms, in translation appears to have been drifting into a new literalism, rather like that espoused by Walter Benjamin in ‘The Task of the Translator’ 70 years ago” (1993, 266). Not only, she notes, are Lawrence Venuti’s article “The Translator’s Invisibility” (1986) and introduction to his essay collection Rethinking Translation (1992) powerful polemics in favor of what he calls, respectively, “visible” and “foreignizing” translation, but also more and more academic translators, rendering problematic texts by Derrida and Baudelaire and others, are pursuing neoliteralist projects, projects that move deliberately and decisively past “plodding word-for-word translation” to “translating to bring to the target language text the interliminal language that bilingual readers experience between Baudelaire’s French lines and the lines of his translators” (267).
And Rose is largely right: although, as she admits, “the drift into visibility and foreignizing which by the middle of the 1980s we might have expected to prevail stayed in its channel and has not affected the mainstream” (267), it has had a profound impact on academic thinking about translation. Of course, if we were to read this as a recent development, introduced in the eighties—or even in the 1920s by Walter Benjamin—she (or we) would be wrong: literalism, even neoliteralism, has been around as long as translation has been around, at least since Livius Andronicus in the third century before the Christian era, and has been at the uneasy antipodes of mainstream translation theory at least since Cicero in 55 B.C. In his letter to Pammachius (A.D. 395), our seminal statement of sense-for-sense translation, Jerome admits that when translating Scripture, “where even the syntax contains a mystery” ( [395] 1958, 137), he translates word-for-word; and famous medieval commentators on translation from Boethius to Burgundio of Pisa defended literalism against the orthodox encroachments of Hieronymean sense-for-sense translation. Various qualified or modified literalisms continued to inspire fine translators and translation theorists through the Renaissance and on into the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, when literalism was picked up in a major way by the German romantics, for whom it became a rallying cry in a nationalist cultural-political campaign against the assimilative French classicism that then dominated German culture.
What Rose calls neoliteralism—foreignizing without slavish word-for-word rendering—has continued to be the translation theory and practice of choice for elitist intellectuals in the twentieth century as well, from Benjamin in his 1923 essay “Die Aufgabe des Übersetzers,” through Vladimir Nabokov’s aristocratic contempt for the bourgeois reading public in his Eugene Onegin, through Martin Heidegger’s romantic fascism, on into the present, where the novelty of Lawrence Venuti’s foreignism lies primarily in his insistence on justifying it on leftist, materialist grounds. Even the left-leaning Benjamin presented his neoliteralist translation theory in mystical rather than materialist terms; and the neoliteral tradition has been, and continues to be, by and large a celebration of unabashed cultural elitism, scorning the “masses” and their demand for instant understanding on their own terms, addressing translations to a tiny cosmopolitan intelligentsia that reads them not for access to the foreign text (they already possess that) but for a new (yet still worshipful) perspective on it.
There is, I suggest, an important distinction to be made between literalism as a translation practice—where it may take a variety of forms from sheer blundering ineptitude to a radical transformation of the target language—and literalism as a utopian social movement, which is my concern in this chapter on Antoine Berman, and more generally throughout part three, as I work through the theories of Lawrence Venuti and Philip E. Lewis as well. I personally find radical literal translations quite interesting, possibly because I am part of the cosmopolitan intelligentsia to which they are typically addressed; but the social movement that takes literalism as its byword I find profoundly disturbing, hovering as it does always on the very verge of overt fascism—and sometimes, as in the case of Heidegger, plunging boldly over it.
Antoine Berman’s influential book L’Épreuve de l’étranger: Culture et traduction dans l’Allemagne romantique was first published in 1984, and along with shorter pieces of his, such as “La traduction et la lettre” (1985), it has steadily built a loyal following among restless innovators seeking a dramatic alternative to mainstream theories of translation. His name, his titles, his aphoristic pronouncements on alterity in translation crop up everywhere in studies of translation, even—perhaps especially—those that have nothing to do with German romantic theories, or with the history of translation theory. In 1991 TTR—Traduction, Terminologie, Redaction set aside a special issue (vol. 4, no. 2) as a homage to Berman. In the pages of Canadian Review of Comparative Literature/Revue Canadienne de Littérature Comparée (March/June 1992) George Lang based a lengthy review-essay of new books on translation, including my own Translator’s Turn, on Berman’s dialogical approach to translation, modifying in his title the famous phrase Gilles Ménage coined in the seventeenth century to describe the loose translations of Nicolas Perrot d’Ablancourt, les belles infidèles, to fit Berman’s diametrically opposed conception of alterity: “La Belle Altérité: Toward a Dialogical Paradigm in Translation Theory?” In 1992 SUNY Press brought out Stefan Heyvaer’s English translation of the German romanticism book, entitled The Experience of the Foreign: Culture and Translation in Romantic Germany—the translation that provided the major impetus for my remarks.
For Berman, as Heyvaert transforms him, the “pure aim” (1984, 5) of translation is to transform the self in dialogue with the other; “the pure translator is the one who needs to write starting from a foreign work, a foreign language, and a foreign author—a notable detour” (5). Translation that fails to maintain alterity, or succumbs to “the danger of killing the dimension of the foreign” (155)—translation that assimilates the foreign text to reductive and ethnocentric target-language norms, that erases all trace of foreignness, otherness, alterity—is impure or “bad translation.” “A bad translation,” he writes, “I call the translation which, generally under the guise of transmissibility, carries out a systematic negation of the strangeness of the foreign work” (5). And again: “A translation that ‘smacks of translation’ is not necessarily bad (whereas, conversely, it might be said that a translation that does not smack at all of translation is necessarily bad)” (155).
Berman takes this concern with dialogical self-transformation to be the “ethical aim” of translation: he is explicitly concerned with the translator’s ethical growth, growth out of slavish obedience to ideological norms for his (never her) behavior toward the ethos of the “true” or “pure” translator. In order to facilitate this growth, he adds to the ethics a (psycho) analytic of translation, which would coach both the translator and the translation theorist to “localize the systems of deformation that threaten his practice and operate unconsciously on the level of his linguistic and literary choices—systems that depend simultaneously on the registers of language, of ideology, of literature, and of the translator’s mental make-up” (6). This sounds to me like a social psychology, a determination to discover and root out the collectivized (socialized, normatized) forces in the translator’s individual psyche that would “threaten his [not her] practice”—what I would call ideosomatic forces, which Berman claims condition the translator to favor reductive, assimilative, ethnocentric target-language words and phrases over more source-language-like ones.
Berman might be paraphrased, in fact, as imagining a kind of ideological psychomachy—a political-unconscious battle in and over the soul of the translator—between the forces of assimilation and the forces of diversification, in which the former, associated with capitalism and cultural reductionism, are the bad guys and the latter, associated with romanticism and high-cultural cosmopolitanism, are the good. The capitalist forces would stultify growth by reducing everything to controlled images of the collective self, blocking all enlivening access with various cultural Others; Berman speaks for a utopian romantic force, peripheralized and largely silenced by capitalist culture, that would smash the confines within which the capitalized self has been bound and allow the transformative and hence ethically liberatory voices of alterity to come crashing in. But because the “true” or “pure” translator, thus transformed by his (not her) engagement with the Other, remains vulnerable to the forces of assimilation that surround him, and bombard him, and seek to quell him from within and without, he needs a firm ideological vigilance and the analytical tools to back it up, so as to track down and eradicate every trace (new and old) of reductionist hegemony in his psychic makeup.
Like the other postromantic theorists whom Marilyn Gaddis Rose dubs neoliteralists, Berman is adamant about not prescribing literalism;12 his foreignism looks a bit like literalism, reads like it, but differs from it in his willingness to compromise with assimilationist ideals, to write a readable and vigorous target language that nevertheless retains some trace of the source-language text’s strangeness, otherness, foreignness, alterity. Some might call this timid literalism, literalism without the courage of its convictions, especially as Berman is strongly opposed to what he calls “opaque” literalism (186) and I would call radical literalism, translation that pushes the target language as hard as it can toward source-language syntax and semantics. In fact Berman’s opposition to “opacity” puzzles me. Like his romantic and postromantic forebears, especially (most explicitly) Benjamin, he insists on not basing translational decisions on what the reader can or cannot understand—“The task of the translator,” he writes, echoing Benjamin’s title as well as his sentiments, “consists in … drawing the dividing line himself, without any consideration for the reader” (155)— and from where I stand “opacity” looks like nothing so much as a textual reification of some reader’s inability to understand. If he is as unconcerned about reader response as he claims to be, what possible objection can he have to “opaque” literalism?
But in fact his conception of translation is far broader than his neoliteralist pedigree would suggest; he insists on the translator’s use of “modalities” such as borrowing and neologism, modes “usually no longer classified in the category of translation … but in that of ‘creative transposition,’” saying that “in fact this ‘transposition’ is the very essence of translation, and the former can only be opposed to the latter on the basis of a petty and imaginary (the perfect correspondence, the adequatio), even speculative concept of translation” (190). There is a potential openness here to all forms of transformative translation (except of course reductive, assimilative, ethnocentric ones) that would break down the barriers between the domestic and the foreign, the self and the other; words and ideas flow uneasily across those cuts, contaminating each other, undermining all pretensions of purity. This might be called the Bakhtinian moment in L’Épreuve de l’étranger, which does cite Bakhtin several times.13
And indeed, like Bakhtin, Berman is at pains to distance himself from the romantics’ “metaphysical aims”—from, in Berman’s words, the “search, beyond the buzz of empirical languages, for the ‘pure language’ which each language carries within itself as its messianic echo” (7). Berman’s idea, clearly, not unlike Bakhtin’s, is to tone down or tame or rechannel the notorious messianism of the romantics (here specifically of Benjamin), to secularize and liberalize and socialize it as ethical growth. Berman remarks strikingly, in fact, and strangely, that “the metaphysical purpose of translation is a bad sublimation of the translational drive, whereas the ethical purpose is the surpassing of it” (8).
For what is the “translational drive,” and what would it be to sublimate or surpass it? Is Berman referring to the impulse I have, every time I pick up a Finnish poem I like, to start rendering it into English? Is this the “drive” Benjamin sublimates and Berman surpasses? If so (and I can’t imagine what else it could be, though I remain uncertain that that is quite what he means), what would be the difference between sublimating and surpassing it? He seems to be working with the difference between “pure language” and “pure translation,” the former, Benjamin’s concept, being a kind of cosmic superlanguage that makes translation unnecessary because it transcends linguistic differences, the latter, Berman’s, being more mundanely grounded in the ongoing ethical growth of translators. But both sound like sublimations to me. Berman’s ethics of translation sublimates the “translational drive” into an idealized, utopian, transcendental realm where individual acts of translation (grounded in engagement with alterity) are personally, perhaps socially redemptive, whereas Benjamin’s metaphysics of translation pushes it toward universal redemption; but these seem less like polar opposites than like hierarchical shifts in the metaphoric field of redemption. In fact, Berman’s reference to “bad sublimation” suggests that what he is doing logically is first splitting his “aims” into good and bad sublimations, then mystifying the former as no sublimation at all but a “surpassing” of the drive that constitutes the translator as translator.
Part of Berman’s difficulty here, it seems to me, is his acquiescence in the romantics’ purity fetish: given his rhetoric of the “pure aim” of translation, which, when pursued by the “pure translator,” produces “pure translation,” it is hard to maintain much conceptual distance between his claims and Benjamin’s—which is probably why he feels it so important to derogate the metaphysics of translation as a bad sublimation. Because this recurring emphasis on purity seems diametrically opposed to Berman’s key term, alterity, a generous reading of the book would probably place purity and alterity in some sort of dialectical tension; but because Berman never explicitly sets up such a dialectic, nor does he ever problematize the conceptual proximity and conflict between purity and alterity, nor does he reveal the ideological and emotional background of his grounding belief in the a priori existence of purity, such generosity would require a good deal of ingenuity.
In fact, my sneaking suspicion is that for Berman there is no tension between purity and alterity, that for him alterity is purity, and purity can only be attained through alterity. Alterity is only superficially messy, chaotic, unpredictable; beneath the surface it possesses a reassuring stability—a view that harks back powerfully not only to Benjamin but also to the entire German (post)romantic tradition from Herder and the Schlegel brothers through Heidegger, Gadamer, and Steiner. There is some force, some transhistorical power, that employs the apparently messy interchange of alterity to its own utopian purposes; Hegel called it Absolute Geist; Goethe, das Ewig-Weibliche; Benjamin, Intention; Heidegger, Sein; but whatever its name, it seems capable of ordering the difficult and disturbing, traumatic and transformative encounter with the Other, rendering it pure, stable, safe.
If Berman knows that this is what he is doing, he doesn’t let on. These romantic concerns power his rhetoric but remain repressed in his argumentation—an ironic observation, given his repeated insistence on the importance of translation becoming self-conscious. Not only does he seem unaware of the tremendous destructive power of alterity—the fact, say, that as overpopulation, famine, and the displacement of millions of people from their homelands draw increased attention to the unequal distribution of global wealth, the Third World is as likely to overrun and smash French culture (and the rest of the exploitative West) as it is to “enrich” it through cultural dialogue—he also has only a very vague and bland notion of the utopian state to which he hopes alterity will direct the French:
The work to be done on modern French, in order to make it capable of welcoming that literary domain authentically—that is to say, without ethnocentrism—shows quite clearly that we are concerned here, in and through translation, with a participation in this movement of decentering and change that our literature (our culture) needs if it wants to find again an image and an experience of itself which it has partly (though, certainly, not completely!) lost since classicism. (19)
What image? What experience? What is at stake here? Are we talking liberal humanism, multiculturalism, neoclassicism, what?
Ethnocentric French classicism was, of course, the methodological Other for German romantic translation theory, and L’Épreuve de l’étranger fairly pulsates with Berman’s troubled sense that contemporary French culture is still guilty of the German romantics’ charge; the book taken as a whole might well be read as an attempt to atone for French guilt, for the sin of ethnocentrism laid at its door by half a century of German nationalists. Berman wants his French readers to follow him deep into that guilt, into that inner pressure that pushes him toward Germanness as Other, as the foreign. If he can swallow German romanticism whole, without a single protest, without withdrawing from its embarrassing transcendentalism and purity fetishism into the protective spaces of French irony, perhaps he can atone; if he can get his readers to follow him, perhaps French culture too can atone, and growth toward the utopian future of the romantic imagination can begin.
But the only way he can envision that sort of collective transformation is through the coercive politics of “traductology”—a theory of translation less as poetry (the romantics’ messianic agent) than as what Althusser (1970) called ideological state apparatuses:
In fact, one of the axes of traductology is to elaborate a theory of non-ethnocentric translation with a generalized field of application. This theory is both descriptive and normative.
It is descriptive in that it analyzes the systems of deformation that weigh upon any operation of translation and is able to propose a countersystem on the basis of that analysis. It is normative in that the alternatives it defines concerning the direction of translation are mandatory. (186)
A countersystem: this is, clearly, no vision of pastoral anarchy, no freewheeling carte blanche. Berman wants to control translation as absolutely as the normative system that has reigned in the West since Augustine and Jerome, wants the choices made by individual translators to be as mandatory as they ever were for the medieval Bible translator who valued his or her life (and afterlife). And as he makes clear a few lines later, Berman wants to control those choices in much the same way as did the medieval church, by instilling in translators’ heads a generalized operating system that will guide them to empirically correct decisions without having to “descend” (note the top-down metaphor) to the infinitude of contextual variations:
For instance, traductology is not supposed to settle the problems of the translation of Chinese poetry for, if it descended to that level, its task would obviously be empirically infinite. But there is a level where the problems are the same for the sinologist, the specialist of Serbian literature, or of Greek tragedy. This level concerns the problematic of translation itself and the systems of constraints that French (and any great ‘national’ language) poses for translation. This level is that of pure translating competence. (186)
This is purity conceived in terms of a reified and idealized “translation itself” and a reified and idealized French, or “any great ‘national’ language”—as opposed, I take it, to a Third World language or tribal dialect. Here is where Berman’s elaborate anti-ethnocentric framework begins to break down. The goal of translation for Berman is “to open a relation, finally accurate (not dominating or narcissistic), to other cultures, and notably those of what has now become the ‘Third World’“ (181)—and of course it is the Frenchman, the representative of the colonial power, who will do the “opening” and determine the “final” “accuracy” of the relation. How, I wonder, is this not dominating or narcissistic? Berman antici pates, but with far less self-awareness, Eric Cheyfitz’s ideological contortions in The Poetics of Imperialism as he tries to know the position of the Native American, whose cause he is championing against the white imperialist Europeans who also claim to know the Indian; and his claims look increasingly less tenable as Third World voices themselves, from Tejaswini Niranjana in Siting Translation to Samia Mehrez in “Translation and the Postcolonial Experience,” begin to open a new translatological relation with their former colonizers.14
In fact the normative and purificatory control that Berman would wield over “dialogical alterity” renders that dialogue and that alterity highly problematic. What alterity is possible when every relation with an Other must be purified of all retrograde elements—when purification is regarded as the sine qua non of the confrontation with alterity? What dialogue is possible when every relation with an Other must be opened and controlled by the educated, white, middle-class European male speaker?15 Berman’s history of German romantic translation is not just a period study, not just a look at a handful of theorists and translators and poets who wrote two centuries ago in the geographical middle of Europe; it is a polemical teleology cast anxiously into the future, picking up Berman and his privileged group and sweeping them along with it: “Hölderlin’s translations, for their part, inaugurated a new epoch in the history of Western translation that is still in its initial stages. In that sense,” he continues in the next paragraph, “our study may appear to be an archaeology of European translation, centered on its key phase at the dawn of the nineteenth century” (175–76). The archeology begins with Luther, of course, rather than with Cicero or Jerome or Augustine, or, for that matter, with Salutati or Bruni or Dolet (the mystified Renaissance mainstream), or even the uncomfortably and explicitly politicized mainstream from Thomas More and William Tyndale to the Earl of Roscommon. Luther begins the archeology because it is centered in German romanticism, and Luther anticipates that center, whereas Bruni and the others anticipate more politically correct and thus more culturally dominant strains of translation that are retroactively peripheralized by that center. This is a power move disguised as a teleology, which is in turn disguised as an archeology. By setting up European translation as a trajectory from Hölderlin to a utopian future of dialogical alterity, Berman thematizes everything else—the whole range of self-effacing and culturally reductive translations that keep the capitalist machine functioning properly (au propre), scientific-technical, legal, commercial, advertising translations, a fortiori those highly ritualized areas of translation such as weather reports that seem to lend themselves to machine translation, in fact all translations that deviate from the pure ethical aim of translation and thus kill translation by draining the alterity that is translation’s lifeblood—not only as bad translation but as no translation at all. Only the highest literary translation is true translation, translation proper; and among literary translations, only those that foreignize the target-language text as Hölderlin did truly propel us as a civilization toward the ethical utopia Berman envisions.
And there is something powerfully and insidiously attractive about this claim for modern intellectuals, the political action committee for utopian literalism: it seems to provide an aura of otherworldly justification for what we do, for our high-cultural concerns as opposed to the dehumanizing impetus of capitalism that flourishes all around us. In fact Berman’s deification and narrow high-cultural definition of “authentic experience” as aura is a move that Walter Benjamin himself, wrapped up as he was in the utopianism of this group, identified as protofascist; it is an implicitly political move, an attempt, through the displacement of “modernity” by an ancient mystical or romantic authenticity that is the exclusive possession of a few intellectuals, to gain political ascendancy for our group over the Philistines, the commodity capitalists, who have peripheralized us.16 “His two famous verses,” Berman writes of a couplet by Brentano, “obviously do not allow a translation, at least a literal one, without losing their aura” (118); and it is this “aura” that Berman insists most strenuously that we retain, this aura—not the bedraggled voices of African writers, certainly not the voices of advertisers, technical writers, meteorologists, or business correspondents—that Berman regards as the true alterity, the pure alterity, with which “we” must engage in dialogue.17
Tied in with this, as Lawrence Venuti has shown persuasively (1991), is Berman’s (like Heidegger’s) mystification of the politics of translation—his willingness to discuss German romanticism purely in terms of texts, of transtextualities, of philosophical positions, and not at all in terms of political or ideological undercurrents. He works hard, for example, to dissociate romantic appropriation (Zueignung) from the political annexation Nietzsche attacked: “Romantic agility and Goethean curiosity,” he states flatly, “are not Will to Power” (1992, 46). When he discusses Schleiermacher’s hermeneutics, therefore, it is all “understanding” (147)—not the anxious attempts of an upper-middle-class intelligentsia to shape Prussian cultural politics to its own ends. But Schleiermacher, as Venuti reminds us, “is enlisting his privileged translation method [which is Berman’s as well] in a cultural political agenda, wherein an educated elite controls the formation of a national culture by refining its language through foreignizing translations” (1991, 131). The French translators whom Schleiermacher and his fellow high-culturalists attacked as assimilationists served as a common enemy in a nationalist project aimed at reorganizing German culture around the privileged but peripheralized elite represented by the romantics: a negative exemplar whom all good Germans could comfortably despise, and from whom they could then transfer their contempt back onto the romantics’ true enemy, the German masses’ desire (now thematized as “French,” non-German) to have everything served up to them in familiar guise. By despising the “French,” Germans would toss out their cultural pablum and enthrone the romantics as their new cultural despots. None of this surfaces in Berman. Berman is too wrapped up in the same elitist project to notice such things.
Another question altogether is what Berman’s theory of translation does for and to his English translator, Stefan Heyvaert, who, like André Lefevere, is a native speaker of Dutch. Heyvaert has a better ear for English than Lefevere, but translating into English still provides him, unmistakably, with the experience of the foreign, and this interests me: what difference does it make for Berman’s theory, and for Heyvaer’s application of that theory, when the translator is not a native speaker of the language into which he or she is translating?
Many of Heyvaert’s renditions are patent applications of Berman’s principle that the translator should give the reader the experience (l’épreuve— Heyvaert always gives the French word in brackets)18 of the foreign without opaque literalism: “Such a theory is highly desirable, and it is in effect being developed today from different fields of experience” (1992, 85), “contrary to the attempts of the age” (90), “and it is even Schleiermacher who probably managed” (143), and of course the very Germanic reference to W. Benjamin, F. Schlegel, G. W. Hopkins, and the rest. All this is understandable English, but sounds alien in fairly obvious ways, precisely what Berman says he wants. But other strange-sounding renditions are not so obvious.
For example, take Heyvaert’s expansion of the English conditional would: what difference does it make for a Dutch translator of French into English whether he expands would into the territory of the subjunctive, following contemporary colloquial North American English, or into the negative shading of an affirmative subordinate clause negated in the main clause, following Berman’s French? Here is Heyvaer’s use of the would-have subjunctive: “The translation of the approximately fifty words for bread in the region of Aix-en-Provence would pose ‘insoluble problems’ if ‘a French novel of some merit would have the world of baking in this region as its setting’” (189; emphasis added). Here is an example of the use of would to import main-clause negation into an affirmative subordinate clause: “But this does not at all mean that the poet would be abandoning the Greeks” (162; emphasis added).19 Both of these feel alien to me; both give me the experience (l’épreuve) of the foreign. But the former feels foreign because of my age, class, and educational background (younger Americans, especially of lower class and less education, regularly use “would have,” writing it “would of,” in place of the subjunctive “had”), whereas the latter feels foreign because I have never heard a native speaker of English use it.20 Would Berman consider both of these translational decisions equally good, equally steeped in alterity?
And what about the kind of “foreignizing” impact that writing in the “foreign” language of academic discourse has on the native speaker, and the transferred impact of native speakers’ “errors” along these lines on the foreigner who hears them? Colloquial North American English does not retain the standard distinction between adverbial as and adjectival like in clauses like “like I said,” but in academic discourse beginning writers are asked to make it—a distinction that is, like most academic discourse, foreign to them. Heyvaert, like (not as) most Americans, uses “like” where standard English would use “as”—“just like in late Romanticism we encounter” (39), “just like we did with translation” (121), “exactly like in German” (169)—which again feels alien to me but would probably feel assimilative or reductive to Berman, because it is grounded in colloquial North American English. But then Heyvaert also overgeneralizes “as,” using it adjectivally where both standard and colloquial English would use “like”: “As many others … we have sought” (19). Is this because English is a foreign language for him, or because he has read so many papers by American students for whom academic discourse is a foreign language that he has begun to write like them?21
And what about the SUNY Press copy editor? This is the kind of “error” that copy editors specialize in; they love pouncing on adjectival “as” and adverbial “like.” How did these incidences get past the censor? Did Heyvaert insist on the alterity of his text and convince his copy editor of the necessity of leaving strange-sounding phrases in place?
More radically still: what would Berman say about typos and punctuation problems? Do these count as “alterity” too? Some of the typos in the book are relatively uninteresting—for example, “every literature grows bored if it not refreshed” (65)—but others raise crucial questions regarding the application of Berman’s principles to actual translation. What about “Mallarmé’s translations of Poe’s poems has sometimes …” (110)— is it singular or plural?—and, on the heels of that one, “Po&sie” (178), poetry as Poe & sie, German sie as singular and plural? And what about the foreign-looking “schizofrenia” (158), spelled “schizophrenia” ten lines above, and, as if in anticipation of the onset of schizoid behavior, the return of repressed institutional regimens four pages earlier in “And what is an uniformed reader?” (154)? The use of “an” before “uniformed” is a common mistake among nonnative speakers of English, since the [ju:] sound that begins the word is not immediately obvious in its written form; but the error here seems more than a typo, more than a printer’s devil, more than Heyvaer’s or a compositor’s booboo. What is the relationship between the “uninformed” and the “uniformed” reader? Do only prison guards and psychiatric ward nurses wear uniforms, or can the prison and hospital garb of the repressively “uninformed” schizophrenic be considered a uniform too?22 The “foreignizing typo” turns the passage into a kind of (anti) romantic poem, plagued by a polysemy that reveals what it most wants to conceal, its own complicity in the prison house mentality it ostensibly deplores.
In my reading of Berman thus far, I have been highlighting an eschatological movement in his argument, a postulation of purity within and beyond alterity that allows him to reintroduce romantic messianism into an ostensibly antimetaphysical traductology—that allows him to imagine an ethical utopia whose projected demands require the imposition of coercive norms on translation in the present. This movement toward utopia and redemption is one that I take to be focal to neoliteralism in all its romantic and postromantic guises: one calls for better translation, as narrowly conceived along foreignizing lines, only in order to save one’s country from retrograde forces (the bad kind of alterity, the Others one wants to have nothing to do with); and one wants to save one’s country, finally, in order to save the world.
But let us suppose for a moment that all this eschatological intensity I’m sensing isn’t really there; let us suppose that all Berman’s talk of purity is just a manner of speaking, a careless (perhaps simply overblown) way of saying “the best.” Suppose, in other words, that for the neoliteralists the “true” issue, I want to say the “purest” issue, is truly and purely the ethical impact of translation on the target-language reader and culture. Suppose that, as Berman argues, a reductive, ethnocentric translation will stultify target-language readers and the target-language culture as a whole by lulling them into an unthinking, uncritical sleep, soothing them with easily digestible pablum with no lumps, no spices, no surprises, nothing that might upset or worry them, and that this is a project in which the translator ought not to participate—that the translator’s job should be to wake people up, to rub their noses in the unknown, the uncanny, the strange and the foreign, in anything and everything that lies beyond their ken. Let us grant them, in other words, their strongest ethical claim. Having done so, can we agree that neoliteralism, foreignism, the strange feel of the foreign language in the target-language text, is the only, or even the best, way to accomplish that goal?
I think not. In fact, I think it is one of the worst. Several spots in Heyvaert’s translation make this clear. For example, in rendering Berman’s discussion of the use of the word “translation” in French ordinary language, Heyvaert gives us this: “This notion is based on everyday language: ‘I have translated my thoughts as follows …’; ‘I have given my version of the facts’; ‘I don’t manage to translate what I feel’; etc.” (85). Everyday English does use “translate” and “version” in many senses unrelated to cross-linguistic communication, but these ain’t them—these just sound awkward. More, they sound awkward in an immediately recognizable way, which, because it is so immediately recognizable, so tediously familiar, so easily identified, undermines the very foreignizing effect Berman wants to achieve. They sound, in fact, like textbook English—like the kind of pompous, insincere English prose that textbook writers generate when they imagine themselves writing to a generalized audience defined by relative youth and ignorance. It is, in fact, a subtly punitive rhetoric, the rhetoric of educational authorities intent upon (surprise, surprise) stultifying students’ innate love of learning by depriving them of natural language used in real-world contexts—by surrounding them with an artificial language used neither by the students nor the textbook writers themselves, an alien interlanguage specially created to bridge the gap between the writer’s world and the reader’s world in subtly irritating ways.
Foreignism, it turns out, isn’t foreign at all; it’s the language of parents lecturing, teachers teaching, ministers preaching. It is the language of authorities imposing an alien set of behavioral norms on a subordinate group—a condescending doubletalk that wields alterity like a velveteen stick. It is what V. N. Voloshinov ([ 1930] 1975) called the “alien word”— an authoritarian discourse drawing on rhematic and rhetorical repertoires of foreign languages and alien registers of the native language in order to mystify priestly power.23
What then would shock the students into sitting up and taking notice? What would have a similar effect on target-language readers not only numbed by reductive translations but also annoyed into half-repressed resentment by earnest translationese? How about: “Hey, bottom line, people: uninspired marketing strategies translate as decreased market share”? Or: “Yeah, well what’s your version, asshole?” The neoliteralists’ well-meaning arguments to the contrary, readers are shaken far more effectively out of their “stupor”—if we have to follow the neoliteralists in positing stupefied readers—through radical and aggressive domestication of the source-language text than through timid foreignism, which is one of the most powerful stupefactants around.
The fact is, the assumption that a phrase has to be alien to startle us into an awareness of alterity is grounded in a naïve realistic epistemology according to which old (or realistic, or familiar) information is always ground and new (or fantastic, or alien) information is always figured. This epistemology, which dominated literary-critical discussions of realism in literature for decades, would predict that bringing a real bear on stage at the end of Shakespeare’s Winter’s Tale would be less striking than dressing an actor up in a bear costume, because the bear is a real bear and the actor is a fake one. Obviously this is not the case. If a real bear comes on stage, the audience immediately starts wondering whether it’s dangerous, how it was trained, whether it’s going to defecate on the floor, and the like: the “real” bear in effect breaks the illusion of reality and returns the audience to a sense of the problematic and overlapping natures of reality and artifice. The realer the bear, the greater the cognitive dissonance (at least on stage, where artifice is ground), and thus the greater the shock value. In the same way, the “translate” and “version” sentences I just made up are more strikingly colloquial in English than Heyvaert’s, thus less likely to have come from Berman’s pen, thus more flagrantly artificial, thus more likely to force the reader to face up to the discontinuities involved in the act of translation.
A better example might be constructed by translating a passage out of Luther’s “Sendbrief vom Dolmetschen,” the arche of Berman’s romantic archeology and a major German voice for radical domestication:
Denn ich halte dafür, Sankt Lukas als ein Meister in hebräischer und griechischer Sprache habe das hebräisch Wort, so der Engel gebraucht, wollen mit dem griechischen “kecharitoméni” treffen und deutlich machen. Und denk mir, der Engel Gabriel habe mit Maria geredet, wie er mit Daniel redet, und nennet ihn “hamudóth” und “isch hamudóth,” vir desideriórum, das ist, “du lieber Daniel.” Denn das is Gabrielis Weise zu reden, wie wir im Daniel sehen. Wenn ich nun den Buchstaben nach, aus der Esel Kunst sollt des Engels Wort verdeutschen, müßte ich so sagen: Daniel, du Mann der Begierung, odern, Daniel, du Mann der Lüste. O, das wäre schön deutsch! Ein Deutscher höret wohl, daß “Mann,” “Lüste” oder Begierungen deutsche Wort sind, wiewohl es nicht eitel reine deutsche Wort sind, sonder “Lust” und “Begier” wären doch besser. Aber wenn sie so zusammengefasset werden: Der Mann der Begierungen, so weiß kein Deutscher, was gesagt ist, denkt, daß Daniel vielleicht voll böser Lust stecke. Das hieße denn fein gedolmetscht. Darum muß ich hier die Buchstaben fahren lassen und forschen, wie der deutsche Man das ausdrückt, was der Hebräische Man “Isch hamudóth” nennt: so finde ich, daß der deutsche Mann so spricht: Du lieber Daniel, du liebe Maria, oder: du holdselige Maid, du niedliche Jungfrau, du zartes Weib und dergleichen. (1963, 23–24)
I’m sure St. Luke brought all his mastery of Hebrew and Greek to bear on finding the best possible Greek word, kecharitomeni, for the angel’s Hebrew word. And the angel Gabriel probably spoke to Mary as he did to Daniel, whom he called hamudoth and isch hamudoth, vir desideriorum, which is to say, “dear Daniel.” That’s the way the angel Gabriel talks, as we see in the Book of Daniel. Now if I wanted to translate this like the jackasses insist, literally, I’d have to say “Daniel, you man of desires.” Doesn’t that sound great! Of course, “man of desires” is perfectly recognizable English. The only problem is that it means something rather different from what the angel Gabriel meant, like “O Daniel, who lustest after women” or “Hey, horny Daniel.” Pretty wonderful translation, huh? If I let the letters go on their merry way and try to determine what the Hebrew speaker meant by isch hamudoth, I find that the true meaning is something like “Dan my man,” “sweet Mary,” “June honey,” “you great big gorgeous hunk of a man,” and the like. (1997, 87–88)
Here it is almost impossible to imagine Luther having written “Hey, horny Daniel” or “Dan my man” or “you great big gorgeous hunk of a man”— let alone having referred to a phrase as being “perfectly recognizable English”—and that cognitive dissonance has precisely the alienating and unsettling effect Berman and others mistakenly claim foreignizing translations have. Personally, I’d rather have opaque literalism than either timid domestication or timid foreignization, and in their insistence on a little foreignism the neoliteralists are finally very timid, unwilling to go for broke, too cautious to hurl their translations in the faces of editors (who might decide not to publish) or readers (who may decide not to buy the book). Radical literalism, not just word for word but morpheme for morpheme, affix for affix, creates an almost unreadable text that a highly trained bilingual reader reads like Finnegans Wake—unquestionably a specialized taste, but one that, because it is unreadable to the uninitiated, is ineffective in the authoritarian project of stupefaction to which the neoliteralists unwittingly, or at least without admitting it, lend their support. Disturbing domestication of all sorts, from archaized and modernized to overtly propagandistic renditions, can be read, enjoyed, and raged at by everybody; as such it still remains the most effective way to unsettle the complacent reader.