FOREIGNISM
Since the 1986 publication of “The Translator’s Invisibility,” Lawrence Venuti has been one of the major figures in contemporary U.S. translation theory. Not only have his publications broken new ground theoretically, building powerful historical and ideological cases against what he calls the forced “invisibility” or “transparency” of “fluent” or “domesticating” translation and in favor of what he calls the resistant dissidence of “foreignizing” translation; he has also worked institutionally to win translation studies a more prominent place in the academy, most recently working with several other translation scholars to squeeze a single discussion group on translation out of the serenely antitranslational Modern Language Association. Professor of English at Temple University and a literary translator from the Italian, he has published numerous book-length translations that have received a good deal of favorable attention, even from critics who disagree in principle with his foreignizing approach—evidence perhaps that foreignism isn’t intrinsically the pillowcase full of concrete blocks it is often taken to be, that in the hands of a translator like Venuti it can win over even the staunchest domesticators.
Theoretically Venuti’s range is narrow but intense. He only has the one issue, really, this opposition between domestication or fluency and the normative disappearance of the translator that it requires, and foreignism as a channel of dissidence or resistance to hegemonic norms; but with his restless intelligence and penetrating historical and political insight, he manages to find such endless variety in the historical and ideological exfoliation of that opposition that it rarely sounds as if he is playing on a single string. Here is how he formulates his thesis in his most recent book, The Translator’s Invisibility:
Foreignizing translation is a dissident cultural practice, maintaining a refusal of the dominant by developing affiliations with marginal linguistic and literary values at home, including foreign cultures that have been excluded because of their own resistance to dominant values. On the one hand, foreignizing translation enacts an ethnocentric appropriation of the foreign text by enlisting it in a domestic cultural political agenda, like dissidence; on the other hand, it is precisely this dissident stance that enables foreignizing translation to signal the linguistic and cultural difference of the foreign text and perform a work of cultural restoration, admitting the ethnodeviant and potentially revising domestic literary canons. (148)
This thesis has changed very little in the years he has been arguing it; but Venuti has the intellectual range to bring constant surprises, even to readers who have read a great deal of his work and think they know what he’s going to say next. The attack on fluency is always there, of course; so is the strategic attack on the elitism of the foreignizers and the insistence that foreignism should become a mode of dissident resistance, that “the contemporary English-language translator [should seek] forms of resistance against the regime of fluent domestication” (184). But he pays such close attention to the details along the way, sees and remembers and theorizes so many things that no one else has even noticed, that I always learn from him—always find myself pushed more or less uncomfortably into new perceptions of things I thought I understood.
Venuti’s dissident politics has allied him with a number of new feminist and postcolonial students of translation, such as Jill Levine, Lori Chamberlain, Sherry Simon, Samia Mehrez, and Richard Jacquemond, all of whom he published in his influential 1992 collection Rethinking Translation; also, more loosely, with Vicente Rafael’s Contracting Colonialism, Eric Cheyfitz’s Poetics of Imperialism (1991), and Tejaswini Niranjana’s Siting Translation (1992), especially perhaps the last, which draws on Walter Benjamin’s literalism as a resistant channel of postcolonial retranslation. Like Niranjana’s celebration of Benjamin’s literalism, however, Venuti’s advocacy of foreignism also rather uneasily allies him with a number of cultural elitists whose theories he admires but whose politics he dislikes, especially Friedrich Schleiermacher and Antoine Berman. As I want to suggest in some detail here, this conflict is the bind in the swing of Venuti’s ideological gate: how to distance himself from the aristocratic or hautebourgeois elitism of the vast majority of foreignizers through the ages and transform their preferred method—for so long a channel of contempt for the great unwashed, a means of regulating or even completely blocking popular access to various sacred and classical texts—into a form of grass-roots dissidence, the oppositional translator’s resistance to assimilative capitalist culture.
The Translator’s Invisibility, which I propose to take as my text here, is in this sense no surprise: it continues the battle Venuti engaged back in the mid-eighties with the article of the same name and has been fighting indefatigably ever since, and it does so with most of the same weapons. Much of the book is in fact familiar from previous publications, reworked material from articles and conference papers, most of it substantially rewritten for argumentative continuity, moving now from a history of normative fluency through several salutary foreignizing projects (John Nott’s, Francis Newman’s, Ezra Pound’s, Celia and Louis Zukovsky’s, Paul Blackburn’s) to a critique of the dominant notion that a translator must work with an author who feels simpatico. He has also done, and drawn on heavily throughout, a massive amount of archival research in the history of translation, beginning with two chapters on the evolution of normative translational fluency in English translation since the early seventeenth century; he says in a note that the roots of this thinking of course go much deeper, citing my rather cursory attempt in The Translator’s Turn to trace congruent norms back to Augustine and Frederick Rener’s more exhaustive history of translation norms in Interpretatio (316). But Venuti doesn’t seem to be interested in exploring where the ethos of fluency came from, what social needs might have motivated its formation and given it ideological pride of place. It is enough for him that “fluency emerges” (43). I must ask the question, emerges out of what? In the early modern period and by the end of the seventeenth century fluency has become normative, and he establishes that fact beyond a doubt through close readings not only of translations but of translators’ letters and other private documents and contemporary reviews, always read carefully and closely against the backdrop of the social and political history of the era in question. As a history of English translation over the past three or four centuries it is truly an impressive piece of scholarship—one that will make it difficult in the future to universalize translational fluency by repressing its historical evolution. This is Venuti’s “big book,” a work that translation theorists who have admired his shorter work have been waiting for since the late eighties—and without question it was worth the wait.
What has always troubled me about Venuti’s work continues to trouble me about this book, however: its uncomfortable rapprochements with elitism. Venuti says, for example, that he will concern himself exclusively with literary translation, partly because, unlike the scientific-technical translator, the literary translator is relatively free to challenge the hegemonic norms of assimilative capitalism and still make a living—ignoring, of course, the telling fact that in Anglophone countries the literary translator’s living by and large comes from universities, not from publishers, so that rebellious translators aren’t really taking great economic risks—and partly because innovative theories of translation have always arisen out of literary translation (41). I’m not sure how fair this is, but I can’t help hearing a kind of displaced class contempt, here, the upper-middle-class literary translator who lives comfortably on an academic salary looking down on the lower-middle-class technical translator who has to translate, in order to go on paying the rent, whatever instruction manual or technical documentation the fax machine spits out. When he says, late in the book, “A translated text should be the site where a different culture emerges, where a reader gets a glimpse of a cultural other” (306), I assume he means a translated literary text, and that his generalizations about the desirability (should be) of foreignizing translation don’t refer carte blanche to all translated texts. But I’m not even sure he really wants to extend his foreignizing principle to all literary translation: what about mass-market genre fiction, or, even more interesting, advertising translations, which are typically quite literary but almost exclusively controlled by target-cultural norms (often as determined by extensive market surveys)? Should target-language “fluency” and “transparency” not be opposed here also? How? Under what conditions? And what (if any) conclusions should we draw from Venuti’s book regarding technical translation? Are Venuti’s comments applicable only to the highest of high culture, the most elite of elite literature? Can (or should) so-called utilitarian translations ever be sites of cultural emergence? Is technical translation Venuti’s masscult supplement, to put it in Derridean terms, whose exclusion makes it possible (and thus also problematic) to define the elitist main set? If so, it may be necessary for Venuti, at some infinitely deferrable point in time, to tackle the question of technical translation and its possible role in a dissident politics of foreignizing translation.
I don’t want to wax self-righteous about this attitude, however, because I am guilty of it myself; in fact, a lot of my criticisms of Venuti’s elitism in what follows are as much self-criticisms as anything else, attempts to explore my own complicity in the tendencies that bother me in Venuti. But I see in Venuti’s work very little willingness to inhabit the scorned subject position of the lower-class Other, whether by actually translating technical and other despised utilitarian texts himself or by exploring that position imaginatively—by theorizing technical translation, for example, as precisely that area where translators are most hegemonically controlled by the domesticating institution.
Not that it’s easy: feeling guilty about my own elitism, my own preference for the heady problems raised by the translation of lyric poetry and other difficult texts, in The Translator’s Turn I worked hard to theorize less glamorous forms of translation as well, including pedagogical, commercial, and technical translation (which I had been doing for fifteen years before my first literary translation was published)—and still several reviewers read right through those attempts to my not-so-subliminal preference for literary translation and high-falutin theory, calling the whole book a theory of literary translation. Some of the theorists I currently admire most, especially Anthony Pym, have been working to bridge the theoretical gaps between literary translators who earn a regular salary teaching at universities and translate on the side, for the love of it, and free-lance or corporate translators who must translate to live; these theorists are typically academics who do not love academia and are constantly torn between the easy but often narrow and petty life of the university teacher and the more nomadic but insecure life of the free-lance translator.
But judging from the rhetoric of his book, and of his work in general— which is rhetorically very much of a piece—Venuti seems to have very little ambivalence about the academy, or about his social role as a privileged literary translator and translation theorist. This rhetorical stance is problematic in at least two ways: it is, as I’ve been saying, implicitly elitist, aimed at a small group of scholars; and it is also, even more problematically, complicit in the very fluency Venuti attacks. For as both a speaker and a writer Venuti is remarkably fluent, and unconflictedly devoted to fluency. In his introduction to Rethinking Translation, for example, he attacked the American Literary Translators Association for insisting that presenters at the annual conference not read their papers, calling it a deprofessionalization of translation studies—a shock to me, because I had always sort of assumed that no one really liked listening to read papers, and only read papers at conferences themselves (as opposed to “just talking” them) out of a craven fear of sounding stupid. ALTA’s policy was always one of the things that I liked best about the organization; it’s a policy that I’ve always adhered to anyway, preferring to address the people present and the issues currently on the table rather than read something I wrote weeks or even months ago, even if that means stumbling and stammering and hunting for the right words. But when Larry and I both spoke in the same session at the MLA one year, he commented over coffee afterward that he doesn’t usually like nonread papers, but mine was good: he did, in other words, I suppose still does, truly believe in the academic ritual of reading papers.
But for me, in his terms, not reading conference papers is a foreignizing move: in my ears all read papers sound pretty much alike, smoothly monologic, academically fluent, so univocal and monotonous that I have a very hard time listening, paying attention, staying alert. The verbal current flows over me, soothing me, lulling me to sleep. The only thing that occasionally breaks the monotony is when the presenter interrupts her or his reading to comment marginally, introducing a little metadiscourse (“What I’m trying to do here is …”), adding a second voice to the monotony. Some academic presenters read much too fast—they’re nervous, or they’re afraid they won’t have enough time, so they rush through. This can be kind of interesting, too, though not in terms of content—mostly in terms of spectacle. But Larry isn’t like that. He has a very strong, deep, measured voice, a radio announcer’s voice, a voice full of masculine authority, and when he reads a paper it sounds extremely fluent. His whole being resonates with authority: not just the manifest fact that he is an experienced translator who clearly knows what translators do and why and how they feel while they’re doing it; nor just the fact, equally manifest in his discourse, that he is a thoroughly reliable scholar who always researches his claims meticulously; but also the calm fluency of his discourse, whether read aloud or spoken spontaneously: the impression that he doesn’t have to hunt for words, even esoteric words—words just trip off his tongue, one after the other, in reassuring periodic sentences. So do the individual stages of his argument. He gives the impression of always reasoning syllogistically, never overstating his case, never fudging a premise, never even constructing his argument anticlimactically, letting a strong discussion collapse into a weak conclusion.
This is, I know, a strange (I would want Venuti to say “foreignizing”) tack to take in an essay, one that is probably making you a little uneasy. I’m supposed to be writing about his book, and instead I’m talking about his oratorical behavior. (I want to get back to his writing in a moment.) It’s probably also not clear what I’m trying to say here: I am describing him as a successful academic orator, someone whose public speaking meets all implicit standards for academic success; but I seem to be using it against him. What I’m trying to do, in fact, is work out my vague sense that there is a serious conflict between Venuti’s theory and his theorizing, between his antifluency resistance to hegemonic discursive norms for translation and his fluent nonresistance to hegemonic norms for academic writing. Shouldn’t someone opposed to a hegemonic fluency in one discursive realm be at least suspicious of his own hegemonic fluency in another?
As I say, he also writes fluently—so fluently as virtually to smooth over his polemics in favor of foreignism and the left-leaning regimen of cultural/political resistance that he attaches to it. Academics are traditionally not supposed to write polemically, because polemics imply interest, bias, hence distortion; even as those norms begin to erode, as academic writing (at least in some disciplines) becomes at once more personal and more political, the rhetorical ideal mandates letting the evidence speak for itself, never becoming demagogic. And Venuti never does. He has been waging this battle against fluency for over a decade, now, and he never allows himself the slightest rhetorical heat, the slightest public sign that he is angry or frustrated or fed up. His writing remains as implacably and inexorably fluid or fluent as a freight ship in the middle of its channel.
Venuti says early on in his book that he plans to historicize translation, especially the hegemonic practice of fluent translation, along Foucauldian lines: “Genealogy is a form of historical representation that depicts, not a continuous progression from a unified origin, an inevitable development in which the past fixes the meaning of the present, but a discontinuous succession of division and hierarchy, domination and exclusion, which destabilize the seeming unity of the present by constituting a past with plural, heterogeneous meanings” (39).
And it is true that Venuti has built some discontinuities into his historical narrative; certainly after the second chapter the narrative is not seamless. Part of the problem, however, is that Venuti does seem to want to make a more or less traditional historicist argument, to the effect that norms of translational fluency were introduced into Anglo-American culture at some determinate point in the past (early seventeenth century), subsequently became established as the only acceptable approach to foreign texts, and continue to dominate the field today—not a particularly destabilized or heterogenized image of the present.
An even bigger problem is that Venuti’s historicizing discourse is so fluent that it is extremely difficult to remember his intended heterogeneity. The book is argumentatively counterhegemonic, tracing the suppression of dissident voices under the dominant regime of fluency, but rhetorically quite hegemonic, undermining dissident claims by suppressing its own centrifugal impulses, its own polyvocity, its own stammers and stutters and lost trains of thought.
At one point Venuti cites Deleuze and Guattari approvingly on major and minor languages, calling Ugo Tarchetti’s literary project “a minor utilization of a major language” (160). If Venuti’s foreignizing project is in Deleuze and Guattari’s terms a minoritarian one, an exploration and resistant exploitation of the marginalized or minoritized ethos of nonfluent translation, then it might well be characterized as the exact opposite of Tarchetti’s: a major utilization of a minor language, a majoritarian plea for minoritarian translation. Francis Newman and William Morris do archaic renditions and get forgotten as minor talents, but Matthew Arnold calls for fluent translations and wins eternal fame as a major theorist of translation. Fake archaism, as Deleuze and Guattari would say, is a minoritarian device for “send[ing] the major language racing” (105). But Venuti is too much the major(itarian) theorist to celebrate marginality, as Deleuze and Guattari do; he wants foreignism to be majoritarian.
Or does he? I guess I don’t really know. Maybe it’s just that (what I take to be) his majoritarian fluency makes it sound as if he does. He says throughout that he wants to transform foreignism, which has long been an elitist channel for the rejection of dominant populist discourses, into a form of multicultural or “ethnodeviant” resistance to ethnocentrism; but his own discourse remains so hegemonic, so majoritarian, so academically fluent that it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that the elitism of previous foreignizers doesn’t really bother him that much. Just how “radical” or “oppositional” a subject position does he want to inhabit? Proletarian, feminine, subaltern? Popular, populist, lay? Crazy, delirious, schizzed? How much hegemonic authority does he want to retain while adopting this “resistant” or oppositional position?
I certainly have a personal stake in this, as much of my academic writing since the mid-eighties has constituted an assault on the hegemonic reductionism—what Venuti would call the fluency—of academic discourse, which universalizes truth by depersonalizing voice and syllogizing argument. I started by writing dialogues and epistolary pieces and Wittgensteinian numbered notes, and at first my experiments remained tame enough to be publishable. But in 1985—the year my dissertation was published, the year that, sick of reading my own arrogant elitist discourse in page proof, I began to rebel against academic fluency—I wrote ten different experimental pieces and only the first four or five were published. The others had moved beyond the pale. For the next few years I kept pushing and pushing, writing stranger and stranger things that were still academic but never “fluent” (and never published)—fragments of my verbal imagination that kept spinning out of control, that I wanted to keep spinning out of control, precisely in order to escape the deadening straitjacket of discursive regulation, hegemonic fluency. By the fall of 1987 I decided I had gone far enough—and gone unpublished long enough—to have discovered what I wanted to know about myself as an academic and about the social and cultural institution that gave me my spending money and a good deal of my identity. And so I set about trying to reassimilate my “academic” voice to the norms of academic writing, and that semester wrote The Translator’s Turn, which didn’t appear until late 1990, three years later. I even used a taxonomy—which, even ringed round as it was there by self-undermining metacommentary, would have been unthinkable for me a year or two before—and of course was praised by academic translation theorists for the taxonomic chapters, which they called “the most valuable part of the book,” while being lambasted (at least by theorists; translators loved it) for my slangy, conversational style and my radically mixed registers, which I thought of as a kind of discursive nomadism: never stay in one place rhetorically for more than a page or two lest the mental straitjacket of “truth” slip into place. In fact, the book as published was much more controlled, much more academic—much more “fluent”—than the book I wrote, which I had toned down twice in response to negative criticisms from otherwise favorable referees, and which the copy editor had further brought into line with traditional academic discourse.
With this history behind me, then, Venuti’s massively fluent assault on fluency arouses all my suspicions. Is it possible that the congruence between the fluency of his academic discourse and the fluency of the translations he attacks is all in my head—or that the congruence is there but somehow tremendously irrelevant? Could I be exaggerating the significance of what I take to be Venuti’s uncritical complicity in the very thing he attacks? Is there some plausible explanation that will allow him to retain both his desired image as a rebel and his dignity and authority as a privileged academic translator and theorist?
I don’t know. I have no desire to dismiss his work, or even to dislike or disrespect it; I think it is enormously important and admire it greatly. But I remain troubled in it by what seems like either a debilitating blindness or a damning hypocrisy—and I wish I knew what to make of it. Is he really, deep down, an academic elitist who likes foreignism because it has long been the method of choice among cultural elites—because it excludes the hoi polloi who buy their translations (if at all) in the literature section at Waldenbooks—and who dresses his elitism up as a resistant or dissident challenge to authority from below rather than from above, from the populace or the masses rather than from the intellectual and artistic elite, only because rebellion from above is implicitly fascist?
Or, alternatively, is his commitment to foreignism actually weaker than he claims? His translations of Tarchetti all through the dissidence chapter (4) seem only sporadically foreignizing to me (but then maybe I’m not quite clear on what foreignism is, exactly?): there is no modernist freeplay of signifiers, a Derridean (non)concept that Venuti associates with foreignism; there are no popular or folk forms; there is no “violent disruption of domestic values that challenges cultural forms of domination” (146–47); there is certainly no “social delirium which proliferates psychological states and confounds temporal and spatial coordinates” (155). In fact, Venuti’s translations read pretty fluently to me. There is the occasional foreignizing moment, as when Tarchetti says of French books in Italy that “la loro speculazione si é tuttor rivolta alla diffusione di romanzi osceni,” and Venuti translates: “their investment is always aimed at the circulation of obscene novels” (157). Is this enough to render a translation foreignizing, the use of a word like “investment” for “speculazione”—a word that doesn’t quite work idiomatically in English? I suppose it would be; but why are there so few of these moments in Venuti’s ample translations from Tarchetti? Wouldn’t this be the perfect place to showcase a foreignizing translation method? Certainly Venuti indulges in no radical in-your-face foreignizing, no aggressively minoritarian foreignizing, whether through strict literalism or delirium or archaism or regional dialect or mixed registers or whatever else—and why not? Because it would have been inappropriate in a scholarly book? Because Venuti is leery of committing the imitative fallacy? Or because he has a rhetorical commitment to fluency that tends to override his theoretical commitment to nonfluency?
At the same time, while I’m busy hurling Venuti’s accusations of fluency back at him, my reader-response sympathies make me wonder whether there even is such a thing as fluency—whether fluency isn’t just a reification of someone’s response, a reification that may only work for that one reader. Maybe for other readers Venuti’s academic discourse, including that in his translations from Tarchetti, isn’t fluent? He tells a couple of personal anecdotes in the book; could some readers construe that as a foreignizing breach of academic decorum? He writes in his sixth chapter that “trans parency occurs only when the translation reads fluently, when there are no awkward phrasings, unidiomatic constructions or confused meanings, when clear syntactical connections and consistent pronouns create intelligibility for the reader” (287)—but for what reader? Syntactic connections that seem clear to me often confuse my students, who sometimes take a passage’s meaning for the exact opposite of what I see. Do we have to say that clear syntactical connections only create intelligibility (and thus by definition are to be regarded as clear) for an ideal reader, a normal or normative reader—someone, in fact, who looks uncannily like me (or Venuti, or whoever is doing the reifying)?
Because Venuti needs to distinguish “fluent” from “nonfluent” translations in some stable way (and of course he isn’t alone in this—this reification is at least as old as Western rationalism, indeed is a key to rationalist hegemony), he needs to reify black marks on white paper as agents that impose their meanings, their intelligibility, even their “readings,” on readers conceived as the passive recipients or recorders of those effects: “when the translation reads fluently,” “when clear syntactical connections … create intelligibility for the reader” (287). I wonder: would Venuti’s concept of fluency survive a rigorous reader-response critique? And what would survive? Let me try to answer that question in two takes, the first following the more individualistic or idiosyncratic lines laid down by Norman Holland and David Bleich and others, the second moving past that into a more socially oriented reader-response theory.
(a) Clearly, if radically individualistic reader-response theorists like Holland and Bleich are right, fluency is a reified fiction and Venuti’s claims about it depend on the (repressed) construction of an ideal reader not unlike himself. Whatever is fluent for Venuti, whatever flows in his mind’s ear, is essentialized as fluent, period—not only fluent for everyone but fluent in itself. A text that Venuti or some other hegemonic academic reader is willing to call fluent (because that’s how it feels) is treated as if “its” fluency were an intrinsic characteristic, a property of the text. If there is someone else, even one person (and a fortiori if there are thousands, even millions), who finds the text nonfluent, difficult, strange, odd, foreign, that person is simply not a good reader—lacks the requisite education or reading skills to discern the intrinsic fluency of the text, which is there, always, just waiting to be perceived. Undo those repressions a little and it becomes evident that these “bad” readers are “bad” because they deviate from the implied reader-ideal; undo them a little more and it becomes evident that those readers’ inadequacy stems from their deviance from the reifier him- or herself. Keep on undoing the repressions that motor this reification, as Holland and Bleich and others do, and you will end up insisting that it is impossible, essentially speaking, to domesticate or foreignize a translation, because domesticity and foreignism, or fluency and nonfluency, or invisibility and visibility, are reader-generated effects that the translator cannot reliably or predictably control. I said that Venuti’s own translations of Tarchetti sound fluent to me; Venuti presumably intended them to be read differently, as examples of foreignism, but like all authors (indeed, like all utterers) he is incapable of controlling the way I interpret his words. Someone else may agree with Venuti and call those translations foreignizing; as the author of this book I can’t control the way you read Venuti, or the way you read me.
What can we salvage from Venuti’s theory through this approach? To put it in the terms of The Translator’s Turn, domestication and foreignism are turns the translator makes away from the source-language text toward the target-language reader, with no guarantee that the reader will follow the turn, or read it as the translator intended. Domestication and foreignism are the translator’s heuristics, useful as ways of organizing or prestructuring a turning; they are not (or shouldn’t be, and ultimately can’t be, at least without a repressive naturalization of reificatory fictions) standards for judging the relative success or failure of the target-language text.
(b) But this individualistic approach ignores the extent to which the users of a specific language are regulated by hegemonic forces within the language community, shaped or programmed in such a way as to take reifications for reality—in this case to take reader response for intrinsic textual property. This is the collective control of language that I called “ideosomatics” in The Translator’s Turn—and it is indicative of Venuti’s attitude toward such a perspective, I think, that in his review of The Translator’s Turn he called it “mystical biologism.” I presented it specifically as a highly politicized form of social psychology, a way of exploring the collective regulation of individual responses to language and the ideological repression and naturalization of that regulation so that language, any text, seems to be the active party and the human respondent or interpreter its passive recipient. But because I claimed that ideology is stored in each individual body (where else could it be stored and still have an impact on behavior?), Venuti derogated it as “biologism”; because I showed how ideosomatics is channeled intuitively, subliminally, he called it “mystical.”
In any case, whether we theorize it somatically or otherwise, this social psychology casts a rather different light on the reification of response as fluency or domestication than the individualistic reader-response approach I outlined above. It should be obvious, for example, that Venuti’s implied (or repressed) ideal reader is modeled not simply on himself but on an entire social class of readers: educated readers, readers who have been trained, hegemonically, to read in certain ways, readers whose responses to specific texts are their own, certainly, but only under the aegis of various regulatory forces in society that want them to read in that way, and to reify their responses as textual properties. A text that an educated reader like Venuti calls fluent “is” fluent, therefore, not intrinsically, but ideologically: it is constructed as fluent by an elite group that has been programmed to read and articulate in specific ways. And anyone who is unable or unwilling to read in those ways is classed as an inferior reader: not merely different, as the pluralistic ethos of liberalism would have us believe, but worse. The implied ideal reader that lurks subliminally in Venuti’s reifications is hegemonically elitist, dedicated to collectively regulated responses that are by (social) definition superior to those of people who fail to read as he does.
There is an added wrinkle here, in that in his theory and practice of foreignism Venuti claims to be combating capitalism. As he conceives the social situation, there are two conflicting forces at work: dominant capitalist mass culture that would impose hegemonic norms of fluency on everyone, especially all translators, and resistant anticapitalist high culture, which would fight back with various forms of foreignism. This seems at odds with my suggestion that Venuti is regulated by the same hegemonic forces that he resists—but it’s not. The complicity I see and the resistance he stresses are both there, but work on different levels. He may disagree with capitalist hegemony over the proper extension or use of fluency; but he agrees implicitly with that hegemony over the nature and existence of fluency. His book is a concerted attempt to argue that what hegemonic forces in society call “fluent” translations are not necessarily (the only) good or valuable ones; but he never interrogates the hegemonic construction of fluency. In his view, what hegemonic forces coach him to reify as fluent is fluent. What those forces coach him to reify as awkward or “bad writing” or “translationese” he revalorizes as “foreignizing”—but he does not challenge the reification, only the relative social value of its by-products (fluent and nonfluent texts). “Bad” translations have been redefined as “good” translations, but they still have the same textual properties they were subliminally (ideosomatically) assigned by the hegemonic forces Venuti wants to resist.
Would this be clearer in a diagram? Let’s see:
| Hegemony | Counterhegemony |
| 1. reification | idiosyncratic response |
| 2. fluency ideal | other (or no) ideals |
| 3. fluent writing | nonfluent writing |
On each level, here, a counterhegemonic impulse is split off from a hegemonic response and discarded, and the hegemonic response that remains is carried down to the next level, where the splitting and discarding begins again:
1.Readers are trained to reify their responses to texts as the intrinsic properties of those texts, and those who fail or refuse to do so (our students, for example) are called “bad” readers.
2.Readers trained to reify responses as certain specific textual properties, to reify texts in hegemonic ways, use the ideal of fluency as a yardstick by which to measure the relative success or failure of a text, whereas other readers either go on using a whole variety of other yardsticks (as when a nonfluent text is preferred to more fluent ones because it confirms its readers’ prejudices) or operate largely without standards, reading any old thing that comes along, any old way.
3.Texts that are reified as fluent are published and praised; those that are reified as nonfluent are not published or, if they are, attacked as awkward or stilted, or as bad translations.
At each level it is also possible, of course, to intervene counterhegemonically, inhabiting the scorned and discarded pole of the dualism and seeking to revalorize it positively. This is where it becomes clear how Venuti can thematize his own hegemonic reifications as counterhegemonic: he is resisting hegemony on a very low level, accepting the top two levels and only beginning to challenge dominant norms in the third. Thus:
1.Reader-response theorists (especially of this second, more politically oriented stripe) might be taken to be intervening counterhegemonically on the right side of the first level, resisting reification (as my theory of ideosomatics did) by identifying it as a power fiction imposed on readers from above, and calling (as my theory of idiosomatics did) for a general recognition of the unregulated variety of reader response.
2.My experimentation with nontraditional academic discourses might be taken to be intervening counterhegemonically on the right side of the second level, resisting the fluency ideal by exploring various alternatives (counternorms) to universalized and depersonalized voice, such as the fragmentation and open-endedness of thought and conversation. And, finally:
3.Venuti’s campaign for foreignism might be taken to be intervening counterhegemonically on the right side of the third level, accepting the hegemonic division of texts into fluent and nonfluent but resisting the hierarchy of values that derogates the latter in favor of the former—calling instead for a recognition of the latter (or at least specific instances of it) as foreignizing.
What might be salvaged from Venuti’s theory in this latter reader-response approach might be a deidealization of fluent texts as the first step in a larger attack on the hegemonic regulation of reading (and translating). One of the reasons I am continually drawn to Venuti’s work despite my reservations is that I do believe his interventionist politics are sincere, and necessary; my reservations come from my nagging sense that they don’t go far enough, and remain blind to their own complicity in what they attack.
But as I say, I raise these troubling issues not in order to diminish or dismiss Venuti’s achievement but to address a problematic that I feel in my own work as well—which may be quite simply that to theorize is by definition to adopt a superior position in regard to the people and the issues one is theorizing. Maybe all theorists are necessarily elitists: we claim to know what practitioners are doing better than they do themselves—even when we count ourselves among them. The Translator’s Turn was both theoretically and rhetorically a far more populist/anti-elitist book than The Translator’s Invisibility—but I too am powerfully drawn to various alienating and foreignizing techniques that enable me to demonstrate my discursive power over hegemonic norms, and took great pleasure in confining what Venuti calls translational fluency to two tiny sections, one on metonymy, the other on introversion and extroversion. Everything else in part two of that book, the tropes and the versions, was a radical exfoliation of what Venuti was already calling foreignism (though I didn’t know it at the time)—foreignism not in the narrow sense of literalism, closely following the contours of the source-language text, but in the broad sense, articulated in this new book more fully than ever before, of getting in the reader’s face, enhancing the oddness and alienness and difficulty of a translation in order to thwart hegemonic attempts to assimilate it to a faceless bureaucratic pablum.
The thorny question remains: Where does the translator or translation theorist get off assuming that he or she knows whose face needs to be gotten into? Much as I cherish my own rebelliousness, much as I like to thematize my own interventionist ethos in terms of that rebelliousness, it is difficult to escape the awareness that intervention implies a position or attitude of moral superiority from which both to intervene and to justify the necessity of that intervention. And despite the solidarity I (want to) feel with the oppressed, I feel silly trying to portray myself, a successful, white, middle-class American male with a Ph.D., as some kind of honorary postcolonial subject. I don’t know what to do about this, except to live with the discomfort it causes and to be as aware as possible of the debilitating contradictions in my own position; certainly the alternative offered me by hegemonic society, becoming Matthew Arnold (say, E. D. Hirsch), is not a viable one.
And I suppose that what troubles me most about Larry Venuti’s work, finally, is that he seems less troubled by those contradictions than I am—a personal confession that probably, according to the norms of academic fluency, has the effect of vitiating my claims. But then those claims were vitiated by my own doubts long before I failed to articulate them with proper academic rigor and decorum. As I hope I’ve made clear (but how will I ever know?), my aim here has not been to build an airtight case against Larry Venuti, whom I like personally and admire professionally, but to muddy some waters whose clarity has been artificially maintained with chemicals—to undo some theoretical repressions in order to explore some of the concealed and conflicting determinants of our theorizing about translation today.