FOREIGNISM AND EXCLUDED MIDDLES
“Es ist daher,” Walter Benjamin writes in “Die Aufgabe des Übersetzers,” “vor allem im Zeitalter ihrer Entstehung, das höchste Lob einer Übersetzung nicht, sich wie ein Original ihrer Sprache zu lesen” (1963, 166)—or, as Harry Zohn translates that, problematically (and I want to return to explore its problems in a moment), “Therefore it is not the highest praise of a translation, particularly in the age of its origin, to say that it reads as if it had originally been written in that language” (Benjamin 1982, 79).
Now Benjamin is not exactly a foreignist or abusist like Berman and Venuti and Lewis; he plays for much higher stakes than the ethical growth Berman favors, the dissidence Venuti calls for, or Lewis’s poststructuralist complexity. He is, in fact, far too mystical and messianic for their tastes, even if they all make passing reference or submerged allusion to him, as a kind of honorary precursor who had the right idea but then went off the deep end with it. Berman wants the translator to grow into a mature cosmopolitan understanding of and tolerance for difference; Venuti wants the translator to join in the pitched battle against late capitalism; Lewis wants the translator to be as smart as, and pass on to other translators the reputation for being as smart as, Jacques Derrida. Benjamin wants the translator to save the world.
But here in his opening statement Benjamin does seem to be at least an ally of the foreignists: a good translation isn’t necessarily one that lends itself to being mistaken for an original target-language work. This is the proposition I want to start with here, in order to map out a more positive response to the foreignist movement than I was able to muster in chapters 8 and 9.
Specifically, I want to address the new complexity of Larry Venuti’s take on foreignism and assimilative translation in The Translator’s Invisibility, where he is willing to admit that even foreignizing translation is assimilative, because all translation assimilates source-language texts to a target-language culture. He still wants to claim that foreignizing translations are less assimilative, or perhaps only less harmfully so, than fluent translations, but as I suggested in chapter 9, he remains rather vague on just how this works. It has something to do with throwing up obstacles to a target-language reader’s easy assimilation of a foreign text, but as Venuti never stops to consider the social psychology of reader response, it is hard to say just what kind of communicative engagement is involved. Still, this understanding that all translation is by nature assimilative is an important step toward recovering the middles excluded by the traditional non distributio medii, according to which good and bad translations are those which either (depending on your point of view, mainstream or foreignist) assimilate or refuse to assimilate foreign texts to target-language cultural values.24
Venuti also now accepts a much wider range of strange-sounding translations as foreignizing, no longer merely those that retain traces of the specific foreignness of the source-language text. Now included within the foreignist project are all manner of modernist and postmodernist experiments that break the normative illusion of reality, especially translations that refuse to hide the fact that they are translations, indeed, that celebrate that fact, whether by mixing campy archaic and foreign-sounding words and phrases with a modern slangy target-language register that could not possibly have been written by the original author, or through the use of “social delirium which proliferates psychological states and confounds temporal and spatial coordinates” (1994, 155).
What Venuti still isn’t ready to do, however, is to explore how all this works—how it works hermeneutically, I suppose, from within the interpretive act that makes a given text come alive (or not) for an individual reader. Hermeneutics is not, in any case, Venuti’s metier; he is much more comfortable with large-scale social and political trends, which he is willing to trace in meticulous detail through archival research. I think it is fair to say that archival research into large-scale historical trends is not my metier (though I’ve done it, with a good deal of resistance), and hermeneutics is; so perhaps the best thing for me to do here will be to join forces with Venuti instead of carping at him, to bring my hermeneutical viewpoint to bear on his (and my own) preference for strange translations that nevertheless somehow work in the target language (at least for some readers) and try to figure out just how they work when they do and why some readers reject them.
So let me agree with Venuti that the interesting textual “middles” that he once excluded but has now begun to theorize as foreignizing are all in fact assimilative, all appropriative—they do appropriate foreign “properties,” make them feel like the target culture’s own, for how can a translator do anything but assimilate?—but that they do so without reducing the texts to easy transparency or fluency. In fact, these middles feel natural or intuitively right to target-language readers while not eschewing the linguistic roughnesses that an earlier Venuti claimed, in Rethinking Translation, all such translations eschew: “They [do not] pursue linear syntax, univocal meaning or controlled ambiguity, current usage, linguistic consistency, conversational rhythms; they [do not] eschew unidiomatic constructions, polysemy, archaism, jargon, abrupt shifts in tone or diction, pronounced rhythmic regularity or sound repetitions—any textual effect, any play of the signifier, which calls attention to the materiality of language, to words as words, their opacity, their resistance to empathic response and interpretive mastery” (1992, 4). Many good translations, Venuti and I now agree, revel in all those things he once claimed assimilative translations weed out—but they also read as if they had originally been written in the target language. How is this possible?
In the first place, many texts that were originally written in the target language revel in those things, too. This is the simplest objection to the polarization of familiarity and strangeness that translation theorists both hegemonic and counterhegemonic have perpetrated, and thus a good place to start—though it will only lead us to more complicated problems, and thus more interesting formulations. I grew up with e. e. cummings’s poetry and feel quite comfortable with the superficial strangeness of
pity this busy monster, manunkind,
not.
or
anyone lived in a pretty how town
(with up so floating many bells down)
spring summer autumn winter
he sang his didn’t he danced his did.
In The Translator’s Invisibility Venuti singles out Ezra Pound as a foreignizing translator, because his translations flouted rules of poetic decorum established for English verse; but note that even Pound’s original poetry has a strangeness that feels eerily right in English:
Hang it all, Robert Browning,
there can be but the one “Sordello.”
But Sordello, and my Sordello?
Lo Sordels si fo di Mantovana.
So-shu churned in the sea.
Here we have the “current usages” and “conversational rhythms” that Venuti earlier associated exclusively with translational transparency, but they are usages and rhythms that collapse quickly into what Jean-Jacques Lecercle (1990) calls the “violence of language,” the nonsensical “remainder” that is typical of ordinary speech but can never be reduced to the tidy syntactic or semantic patterns of formal linguistics. “But Sordello, and my Sordello?”—what does that mean? I don’t know, but my ignorance doesn’t bother me; it feels right. Then—a foreignizing touch that almost makes this passage sound like a “bad” translation—we go into Provencal, Sordello’s language (an actual foreign language in an English poem!), which I don’t understand; but I’ve lived and traveled abroad enough not to be too bothered by that either. Finally, perhaps associationally, like the uncannily natural progression of a dream or a Monty Python sketch, we shift to So-shu churning in the sea, which I need a footnote to tell me refers to Chuang-Tzu, but why Pound gives us the Japanese transliteration of the Chinese name, and what churning in the sea has to do with anything, I have no idea.
This is the kind of foreign strangeness that the German romantics and their recent avatars want translators to produce in the target language— but it is from a poem originally written in English, which moreover sounds strangely familiar or domestic to at least one target-language reader (who was, to be sure, raised on modernist poetry). What happens, then, when a poem is not originally written in English—is written, say, in Provençal by Arnaut Daniel—but when translated into English sounds as if it had originally been written in English, and also sounds strange, and strangely familiar?
To begin to formulate a hermeneutical explanation of this strangely assimilative middle ground, let’s glance back at that quote from Benjamin that I began with, and Harry Zohn’s rendering of it. Zohn’s translation of Benjamin is universally despised by postromantic Germanists because it is so assimilative and thus so un-Benjaminian; Zohn calmly ignores Benjamin’s own strictures, so that his translation of Benjamin’s text into English reads as if it had “originally been written in that language” (79). What Benjamin would almost certainly want, what his foreignist followers demand is not slavish literalism, but some feel of the strangeness of the German text in the English, some sense of the flow of Benjamin’s ideas in German without radical assimilation to English syntax. In the sentence I began by quoting, for example, Zohn’s most significant syntactic assimilation is the resequencing of the main clause so as to bring the “not” up to where it seems most natural in English: “it is not the highest praise of a translation.” Benjamin sets it up differently: “Es ist daher, vor allem im Zeitalter ihrer Entstehung, das höchste Lob einer Übersetzung nicht, sich wie ein Original ihrer Sprache zu lesen” (166), which sounds a bit like cummings’s “pity this busy monster, manunkind, / not,” or, as I would prefer, like Wayne and Garth’s now-famous negation on Wayne’s World, the original Saturday Night Live sketch and the two explosively popular movies: “It is therefore, before all in the time period of its origin, the highest praise of a translation—NOT!—that it reads like an original of its language.”
But notice what I’ve done here: rather than fetishizing strangeness or foreignness as an awkward or difficult obstacle to easy English appropriation, I’ve assimilated Benjamin’s elitist postromantic German text to an extremely anti-elitist masscult American text, a text that typically gives us the “un-English” NOT! after a chipper parody of elitist academic discourse. This ruins the high seriousness of foreignism as it has long been conceived, of course (though not, significantly enough, foreignism as it is most recently conceived by Larry Venuti); the interesting problem that it poses for the theory and practice of foreignism is that, serious or not, it is a perfect example of the kind of fidelity to foreign syntax that the foreignists have tended to favor. Does a foreignizing translation have to be serious, respectful, and worshipful to count? Historically, probably so; foreignism, along with its precursor literalism, began as a channel of worship for quasi-sacred texts, Greek classics for the Romans, the spiritual writings for the medieval church, Greek classics again for the German romantics. But must it be in principle as well?
Another issue altogether is whether Wayne and Garth’s NOT! qualifies as un-English, as “foreign.” Could it usefully be thought of as itself a foreignizing translation of German academic discourse? It does probably still feel alien, syntactically malformed, therefore (potentially) foreignizing, to many native speakers of English—especially those who don’t watch Saturday Night Live, who don’t like or don’t approve of that kind of humor, who would find Wayne and Garth’s breezy populist anti-academicism repellent. Because I never miss an SNL if I can help it, and have taken my kids to see both movies, and use the Wayne-and-Garth NOT! all the time in everyday speech, it feels very English to me. Once again, a reader-response approach to foreignism throws a good many wrenches into the essentialist works. Do we have to say that Wayne and Garth’s NOT! is foreignizing for readers A, B, and C but is not foreignizing for readers X, Y, and Z? Or would we rather cling to some vestige of essentialism by insisting that readers A, B, and C are better (more representative, more educated, more sensitive) readers than X, Y, and Z, so that in its stable transcendental essence Wayne and Garth’s NOT! is foreignizing?
The excluded middle between static strangeness and static familiarity that I am working toward, here, is a dynamic sliding between strangeness and familiarity, a becoming-familiar that yet retains an air of alterity— an appropriation that I want to compare to a physiological sense called proprioception, that sense that makes us feel our body as our own. This connection occurred to me recently while reading Oliver Sacks’s 1985 book The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, a series of wonderful case histories that attempt to explore what it must feel like to be plagued—or, in many cases, blessed—with various neurological losses and excesses, transports and simplifications. Sacks tells the story of Christina, for example, who suffered damage to her proprioceptive fibers and couldn’t feel her own body:
The sense of the body, I told her, is given by three things: vision, balance organs (the vestibular system), and proprioception—which she’d lost. Normally all of these worked together. If one failed, the others could compensate, or substitute—to a degree. In particular, I told of my patient Mr. MacGregor, who, unable to employ his balance organs, used his eyes instead…. And of patients with neurosyphilis, tabes dorsalis, who had similar symptoms, but confined to the legs—and how they too had to compensate by use of their eyes…. And how, if one asked such a patient to move his legs, he was apt to say: “Sure, Doc, as soon as I find them.”
Christina listened closely, with a sort of desperate attention.
“What I must do then,” she said slowly, “is use vision, use my eyes, in every situation where I used—what do you call it?—proprioception before. I’ve already noticed,” she added, musingly, “that I may ‘lose’ my arms. I think they’re one place, and I find they’re another. This ‘proprioception’ is like the eyes of the body. And if it goes, as it’s gone with me, it’s like the body’s blind. My body can’t ‘see’ itself if it’s lost its eyes, right? So I have to watch it—be its eyes. Right?” (47)
I had that experience once myself, briefly: in for a cystoscopy, I was given a spinal block and a curtain was rigged at my waist, so I couldn’t see what was being done to me. When the operation was over, I watched over the curtain as a nurse lifted a leg across my field of vision from left to center, then lowered it beneath the top of the curtain. I panicked: whose leg is that? It took me a moment to realize that it was my own—that I couldn’t feel it and therefore didn’t recognize it as attached to me. Sacks tells many such stories, like the one about the man who awoke horrified to find a strange leg in bed with him, threw it out on the floor, and was even more horrified to find himself flying after it—because it was attached to him!
Where all this begins to connect up with translation, though, is in Sacks’s sixth chapter, on prosthetics and the strange proprioceptive phenomenon of the “phantom”—which Sacks defines as “a persistent image of memory of part of the body, usually a limb, for months or years after its loss” (66) —and the striking fact that, as Sacks quotes Michael Kremer as saying, “no amputee with an artificial lower limb can walk on it satisfactorily until the body-image, in other words the phantom, is incorporated into it” (67). If we take this, provisionally, as a metaphor for translation, the translation would be the prosthetic device—an artificial, mechanical contrivance designed to replace a textual limb “lost” through the target-language reader’s inability to read a text in the original language—that only comes to feel real, native, strong enough to “walk on” or live through, when a proprioceptive phantom is incorporated into it.
This would constitute a tentative explanation of how a foreign text can be appropriated strangely into the target language: what makes any text feel “at home” or “one’s own” in any language is not the mere fact that it was written (originally or otherwise) in that language, nor the mere fact (or illusion) that it was written in the kind of reductively and unproblematically fluent or transparent idiom that normative linguists like to reify as ordinary language—but the incorporation into it of a proprioceptive phantom, some nexus of felt experience that charges the text, any text, with the feel of reality, of “one’s-ownness,” of proprioception. A text that is charged with that felt experience—by individual readers, by groups of readers, by whole cultures—will feel real whether it is an original or a translation, whether it is domesticated or foreignized, whether it is easy or difficult to read. A text that is not charged with that felt experience will be like my leg above the curtain, like Christina’s body: a dead thing, a foreign object.
The advantage of thinking about appropriation along these lines is that it shifts our conceptual center of gravity from the intrinsic properties of texts to the reader’s active construction of meaning—a shift similar in import and ideological history to the one Sacks himself models from the traditional neurological thematization of the patient as an object to be prodded and tested and diagnosed in terms of objective deficits, to the empathic construction of the patient as a complex experiencing subject. In the reificatory intellectual traditions of the West, a phenomenon only becomes real when it can be thematized as inert, a thing: a text to be analyzed in terms of its forms, its structures, its properties; a patient to be diagnosed in terms of its (not her or his) symptomatologies, its syndromes, its deficits.25
Still, if thinking of a translation as a prosthetic device that must be infused with a proprioceptive experiential phantom solves some problems, it raises far more. For one thing, it seems to perpetuate the old hegemonic conception of the translation as an artificial substitute for the original as real thing—and in fact only seems to supplement that conception with a mystified illusion of reality that is manipulated through art or science, like the real-seeming prosthetic arms in science fiction movies like The Return of the Jedi or Terminator 2, so real that we’re shocked when we see they’re prosthetics. For another, even if we stick closely to the neurological event and see the phantom not as artifice but as a body image generated by our proprioceptive sense—no less real than the sense of our limbs that we have before they’re amputated (or anesthetized)— how exactly would that work with translation? If a translation becomes “real” by having a phantom incorporated into it—which would be a process sort of like Pinocchio becoming a real boy?—whose phantom is it, and who does the incorporating?
Let’s consider the possibilities. Suppose the translation is a dead thing, black marks on the page, that has to be “brought to life” by a reader, infused with proprioceptive meaning by a real person. It would then make an enormous difference for our understanding of translation as prosthetic and as phantom limb if the real person bringing the inert marks to life were (a) the author, (b) the translator, or (c) the target-language reader.
From the author’s point of view first, then: here we have to imagine a person who has written something that isn’t yet “enough” in the “original,” is somehow significantly “absent” or, to stay with the leg analogy, inadequate for “walking on”; and who has another language that somehow wants to overpower or supersede the original. This might be the case with Samuel Beckett writing in French—wouldn’t his original have an English phantom? English was his native language, French was a foreign language that he wrote in originally in order to break the unconscious (somatic) hold his native language had on him; wouldn’t Waiting for Godot then have “become real,” even before he wrote it, by having En attendant Godot’s English phantom incorporated into it?
When I was living in Finland I was once asked to write an introduction to a collection of student essays in Finnish and complied with a piece called “Hyvä lukija!”—or, in the phantom title that my native English instantly generates (even when I’m not writing for readers who have no Finnish), “Dear Reader.” When the collection came out, I read through my piece, which had been lightly edited, and discovered that in the editing process a certain construction had been rendered ambiguous, so that it could easily be read to mean the opposite of what I intended. I suppose you might say that the editor had a phantom text that he or she needed to incorporate into mine. Be that as it may, a year later a similar collection was brought out in Swedish, and the editors of that later collection decided to include my introduction in Swedish translation. I was sent a draft of the translation for approval; because I have almost no Swedish, my inclination would ordinarily have been to sign off on it sight unseen, but something, some phantom, wouldn’t let me. I knew already how susceptible that one edited construction was to misreading; I knew, to put that differently, that in that one place (that I knew of; there must have been countless others), due to the ambiguity introduced by the editor, the Swedish translator would have been faced, in a sense, with two phantom texts, the one I wrote and the one the editor wrote. That’s not quite it, but it’s almost it; I suppose the competing phantoms that I imagined the translator facing were both my phantom, my sense of the conflicting interpretive constructs the translator might put on the passage, a sense growing out of my engagement with the passage when it first appeared in print and tried to figure out how the editor could have done such a thing. In any case, I checked that one spot carefully, despite my almost total ignorance of Swedish, using my German and what little I’d learned about the differences between Swedish and German—and it seemed to me that the Swedish translator had translated the other phantom, the editor’s phantom, not mine (but remember that all this was my phantom as the reader of my own text!). So I took it to my wife, who reads Swedish, and checked it with her; she agreed, and helped me construct a new translation for that one passage that fit my phantom better, and I sent that off to the editor of the volume with a note explaining what I wanted, which was for the translator to redo the passage not exactly as my wife and I suggested (as neither of us is good enough at Swedish to dictate a translation), but to take our retranslation as a signpost to an alternative textual phantom and translate accordingly.
A more recent experience, which is still mostly in my head (my proprioceptive sense), involves the possible translation of my book The Translator’s Turn into French, a language that I know about as well as I do Swedish. A week before this writing I received a postcard from Robin Orr Bodkin in France, saying that he was translating sample passages from it to show to French publishers, hoping to convince one of them to publish it. My ignorance of French makes it difficult for me to imagine what the translation will be like, what French readers will see in it; and I find that as I try to imagine it, the phantom French readers that haunt my imagination keep turning into Finns! This is almost certainly tied not only to my fourteen years in Finland and fluency in Finnish, but also to the fact that I cannibalized The Translator’s Turn from an earlier book that proved unpublishable, a bilingual book in English and Finnish called “The Tropics of Translation/Kääntämisen kääntöpiirit.” I wrote it first in English, then translated it into Finnish, with the intention of publishing it in both languages, face à face; but as I did the Finnish translation, I found that my different conception of my Finnish audience kept pulling the Finnish text away from the English, kept “turning” it in interesting new directions, and I willingly followed it, eventually trying to work my way back to the English, but sometimes only after eight or ten pages of “new” or “divergent” writing. For me it was a way of exploring, and of demonstrating, the practical significance of the translator’s “turns” that I was theorizing in the text—a way of practicing what I preached. But nobody would publish it: the Finnish was too exotic for Anglophone publishers, and the book as a whole was too unscholarly for Fennophone (academic) publishers (and too scholarly for Finnish trade publishers). I remember thinking then that, given the existence of books like Derrida’s Spurs (1978b), I would have had no difficulty publishing it in the United States if only the other language had been French. How ironic, then, that I should cannibalize the English sections for The Translator’s Turn, get it published, and then have it translated into French—in effect making that phantom English-French bilingual book come true! Even more ironic that the English-French book was, and remains, a very faint phantom, almost a will-o’-the-wisp; in fact, the French translation will be impossible for me to walk on; it’ll probably feel more like Derrida’s leg than mine, “Des tours du translateur.”26 Meanwhile the strong phantom, the one that feels like an amputated leg that should still be there, with the painful hangnail that wasn’t taken care of before the leg was cut off—the English-Finnish book—shows no sign of taking on prosthetic reality.27
Now suppose the operative textual phantom is the translator’s, a target-language phantom for a book experienced as one’s own in the source language. Here the prosthetic/phantom analogy seems to break down, because for the translator (as for the author who never imagined her or his work in another language), nothing’s been amputated. If anything, it’s an additive process, like fitting a patient with a prosthetic device he or she has never experienced as necessary, or even possible, and trying to convince her or him that it’s essential. But no, that would be the translator-as-doctor; what about the translator-as-amputee? What limb has the translator lost that s/he feels as a phantom and wants to infuse into the prosthetic target-language text?
I don’t know. What I do know is that when I pick up a book of Finnish poems, say Paavo Haavikko’s Sillat (1978), I can’t read in the poems without starting to translate them in my mind; and that when a poem resists my efforts to translate it, when the pressure of translation begins to make it feel flat or banal, cheap or superficial, I lose interest and turn the page. In translating I make the poem mine, assimilate it to my own experience, my proprioceptive sense of myself in the world, a process that involves a continual expansion of that proprioceptive sense through immersion in the other. I “reject” a poetic limb and turn the page not because it’s alien— the alienness of these poems, an uncannily familiar alienness, like a voice to me out of a dream, is what makes them feel so alive to me—but because its alienness feels unreal, contrived, merely clever, unfelt. But then I stumble onto a poem like this one, and I feel a receptive shiver go through me, a feeling that I know this poem, or it knows me:
Pimeys odottaa. Vieras odottaa.
Kartoittamattomien ulottuvaisuuksien merellä
maailmana maailmojen veroisena
haaksirikkoudun muita maailmoja vastaan.
Mustat vaunut tulevat. Seudut kukkivat sumuun.
Minuun Jumalat vajoavat. Minuun hiljaisuudet vaikenevat.
The dark waits. The stranger waits.
On an undimensioned sea, a world to reckon with,
I am shipwrecked against worlds.
The black chariots come. The fields push flowers into the fog.
The gods plunge into me. Silences sleep with me.
Looking back at this translation with the critic’s analytical eye, I find much to pick at. Vieras is both “stranger” and “guest.” Kartoittamattomien ulottuvaisuuksien merellä is “on a/the sea of uncharted dimensions,” not “on an undimensioned sea.” Maailmana maailmojen veroisena is “as a world equal to worlds” (I’m a world, and I’m equal to, or a match for, other worlds). Vaunut could be “carts” as well as “chariots.” Seudut kukkivat sumuun is “regions blossom into the fog.” Minuun Jumalat vajoavat is “into me (the) Gods sink”—as into mud, or quicksand. Minuun hiljaisuudet vaikenevat is difficult, because we have no intransitive verb in English like “to silent,” meaning “to be/fall silent,” but a rough translation might go something like “into me (the) silences fall silent.”
But looking back over those analytical landscapes, they feel like my dead leg hovering over the surgical curtain. If anything they feel less alien than my translation, more cautious: a sea of uncharted dimensions could be charted, the egalitarianism of worlds sounds like grade-school citizenship, the regions look to my mind’s eye like colored squares on a map, the kind of map that you have to learn to chart in order to become a good citizen. I don’t like the Gods-capital-G, and although the idea of gods-small-g sinking rather than plunging into me tugs at me, feels good, though different, the necessity of rendering both hiljaisuus and vaikeneminen by “silence” renders that last sentence utterly banal unless I do something drastic, like render vaieta as “sleep.”
In fact, looking back over the translation not through an analytical lens but through the proprioceptive feel of my phantom, sleep or sleepiness begins to dominate it: sleep, an image I slipped or sank into unconsciously at the end, looking for an alternative to vaieta, now feels like the key to the whole poem. It’s a poem, I now suspect, about falling asleep, or about dying as falling asleep, a sailing into an undimensioned sea where the dark and the stranger wait, where black chariots come and gods plunge into me (I’m sinking; they’re plunging—I really do have to insist on that “plunge” now), where my dead or sleeping body pushes up flowers into an undimensioned fog where I am shipwrecked against worlds. The one thing that still bothers me is “a world to reckon with,” because it seems to imply mathematical or other mental calculations, as if the foggy undimensioned world were either a palpable force that I could outwit (“a world to deal with in some deliberate way”) or a calculus to apply to other problems (“a world to calculate with”). But then, working through a phantom rather than an abstract calculus, I don’t feel compelled to understand everything, or to reduce everything to a nice tidy consistency; it doesn’t even bother me if my phantom has a calculus in it.
But is this working from or through a phantom only true of literary translators? Specifically, is it only true of literary translators who choose their own texts to translate, and are at liberty, as I have been with the Finnish poems I’ve been translating for a collection of contemporary Finnish lyric poetry I’m calling “Turnings” (stored on-line at http://www.olemiss.edu/~djr/turn-tc.html), to reject poems that feel wrong, that are too easy to appropriate? I don’t think so. When I did Huojuva talo (“Tottering House”), I could accept or reject the commission as a whole, but I couldn’t very well skip over parts that seemed stupid to me; I had to do something with all of it. As we will see in greater detail in chapter 11, it is an extremely strange play in Finnish, steeped in archaic, unidiomatic, often grotesque expression, and as I started to translate it, without planning or reading ahead, I found myself mimicking that strangeness by sticking closer to the Finnish syntax and idioms than I ever had with a translation—doing what Benjamin and his postromantic followers insist the translator should always do. At the same time, however, I couldn’t do it without appropriating the original’s alterity to my own sense of the grotesque, the weird, in English—which may in fact have been the phantom I needed to do the translation, weird plays and movies I’ve seen in English, Waiting for Godot and Night on Earth, weird books I’ve read and written, weird things I’ve said and had said to me. What would stop me as I translated, typically, wasn’t a weird passage, but a flat one, an “ordinary” one, which felt all the weirder in context, like a sociopath pretending to be a decent citizen. Then I’d have to sit there, uneasy, almost quivering with the need to shift or expand the phantom I’d been working from and the difficulty of doing so, until I’d unconsciously made whatever adjustments in that proprioceptive sense and felt I could go on.28
And isn’t this a fairly typical experience among translators? I think it must be: we all carry around with us a kind of translation automatism, a nervous tic that sets us to translating the texts that come across our desk, a kind of dim phantom that drives us to keep at this work that is so ill paid and unrecognized; and we all work easily on some texts, with difficulty on others, but even in easy ones we will occasionally come across a spot that stops us dead. These moments are traditionally theorized as a mental blockage of some sort, an information deprivation: we need a certain word or phrase and can’t think of it, so we plow through dictionaries and thesauri in search of it. And that’s all true, up to a point; it’s just that I can’t shake the intuitive sense that something else is going on while I’m ransacking my reference library, some kind of front self is flipping through dictionaries while a back self is quietly panicking, “What’ll I do? What’ll I do?” and trying to put itself in character for the trouble spot.
It’s like those panicky moments everyone has upon waking in a strange bed, or even in the same old bed, or any place or time of the day, even when teaching a class or giving a talk at a prestigious conference—that you don’t know who you are, where you are, what you’re doing there, what you just said. Who is that person in bed with me? Oh yeah, my spouse. Who are those people looking up at me? Oh yeah, my students. You suddenly lose your proprioceptive sense and experience total disorientation—fortunately, for most of us, only momentarily. Then you’re back “in body.” Then you can go on. And the same happens when I translate—probably when you translate as well—except that there the disorientation is often stimulated by the original text. It shuts down my target-language phantom, hits the off switch on my proprioceptive sense of the target-language text’s body, casts me physiologically adrift.
And it happens with all kinds of texts, not just literary ones. I won’t go into detail with nonliterary examples; there are, in any case, plenty of them in The Translator’s Turn. We have to have textual phantoms when we translate weather reports, business letters, technical documentation, scholarly articles, advertising copy, and the like; and every text we translate, no matter how mundane, has the power to throw us off track, to make us stop and shift or expand phantoms. If this weren’t true, machine translation would be a huge unqualified success. The only way machine translation works today is when computers are fed texts carefully preedited by humans to facilitate the mechanical replication of stable, abstract calculi—when computers are protected against the kinds of proprioceptive breakdowns to which human beings are susceptible, and for which most of us have developed coping strategies. (But see the conclusion for complications.)
And, finally, what about the target-language reader who appropriates the translation, makes it her or his “own”? How does this work? Where does the phantom come from then? Think of the King James Bible, which has an almost overpowering proprioceptive sense for English literature. In fact, without the King James Bible, modern English literature wouldn’t have a leg to stand on. George Steiner has explored this phenomenon at length in After Babel, the process by which a translation is so thoroughly assimilated into a culture that it seems that it was always there, that it was originary for the culture—that, say, God was an Elizabethan Englishman. What he didn’t explore was the ideological construction of the readerly phantom that keeps the King James Bible alive in and for Anglophone culture: the hegemonic myelination of the proprioceptive fibers in millions of Bible readers’ and churchgoers’ nervous systems through the sheer force of coerced and normative repetition. You have to go to church, you have to read the Bible, you have to believe what you hear in church and read in the Bible, and what you hear and read is all formulated by the translators for King James, so that what feels right in Anglophone Christianity, what feels like the body of your religious belief, is an ideological program that runs inside your skull with numbing reliability—“The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want,” “and forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us”—even when you reject Christianity intellectually, even when you haven’t read the Bible for years, even when you dilute the King James with Today’s English Version or The New International Bible or Clarence Jordan’s Cotton Patch Version.
But then, what does happen when you retranslate the Bible into English? Do the new translations become prosthetics, which only begin to feel real—only become good for walking on—once the King James phantom has been incorporated into them? This is certainly true of the Revised Standard Version and its successors. Can another phantom be incorporated into them instead (or in addition)—a contemporary colloquial English phantom, say? This would be Eugene Nida’s explicit ideal for Today’s English Version—but how does that work? And what does all this have to do with the deadening and revivifying of linguistic sensation, which I discussed at length in the subversion section of The Translator’s Turn (223–31)? Is it like the patient Sacks describes, who has to “‘wake up’ his phantom in the mornings: first he flexes the thigh-stump towards him, and then he slaps it sharply—‘like a baby’s bottom’—several times. On the fifth or sixth slap, the phantom suddenly shoots forth, rekindled, fulgurated, by the peripheral stimulus. Only then can he put on his prosthesis and walk” (67)?
Certainly the translation’s “invisibility” as translation in the target culture is controlled by a well-established ideological phantom of this sort, a group fantasy disseminated and inculcated by hegemonic forces in society that want you to believe you’re reading Homer, not Lattimore or Fitzgerald—or, a fortiori, the Bible, God’s Word, not some fallible translation committee’s interpretation of the Bible. This is the phantom that governs the reviewing of translations as if they were originally written in the target language, or as if the reviewer and her or his reader were reading the work in the source language—as if translation didn’t exist and didn’t need to exist. It is the phantom that governs courses in comparative literature that proceed as if the translation were the original work. This is the phantom that the postromantic foreignizers attack, of course, and it is indeed a behemoth of startling proportions; but as I see it, it does no good to blame the perpetuation of this phantom on assimilative translators, who in many cases have to have access to that phantom to translate at all. The question, I’m suggesting, is not whether you translate by recourse to a proprioceptive phantom; the question is whose phantom you’re going to use, and how you’re going to use it. The target-language text has to feel real, feel alive, for the translator to write it; but the proprioceptive reality and life imparted by hegemonic forces in society are quite different from those arising out of rebellious, deviant, idiosyncratic phantoms of the translator’s counterhegemonic experience.29
But I’m digressing to the question of the translator’s phantom limb. What of the target-language reader’s idiosyncratic phantoms? What, for example—just to have somewhere to start—of my love when I was about eighteen for Hermann Hesse’s novels in English, despite a German teacher’s insistence that the translations were better than the originals— which in his opinion were crap? What of my Finnish students’ love for John Steinbeck’s novels in Finnish, despite my insistence that the originals were crap? Parents, ministers, teachers, advertisers, hundreds of other hegemonic forces in society attempt to drum normative phantoms into our heads—Homer, Virgil, Dante, Shakespeare, Goethe are great, Literature-capital-L is timeless, television and trash lit will make you stupid, and so on—but it doesn’t always take. Our experience always overflows the institutional channels constructed for its proper use. Even the best role robots, the perfectly repressed little obedient boys and girls who obey all authorities in everything they do, cannot contain and sustain the normative phantoms without residue, partly because authorities conflict, generating disruptive cognitive dissonance, partly just because we are neurologically, and thus humanly, far more complex than any system ever invented to simplify us.
This suggests, for one thing, that assimilative interpretive practices are not necessarily the worst thing a student can bring to a foreign literary text. Shaped by an entire civilization’s theocratic pressures to worship an objectified Bible, literary critics transfer those pressures to their students in the secularized form of the demand that they worship an objectified literary classic: that they see it purely through the eyes of the foreign culture in the period it was written, and above all through the normative channel of authorial intention, and not assimilate it to their own experience, not construct it as relevant to their own lives. As I mentioned in passing in chapter 8, the romantic insistence on taking the reader over to the foreign author is part of an authoritarian pedagogical regime designed to block students’ (or generally readers’) attempts to develop their own proprioceptive responses to the texts they read. The foreign-language teacher becomes the authority in whom the foreign definitively resides, and whom the educational institution hires to channel that foreignness to students—ostensibly because hegemonic forces in society believe that exposure to foreign cultures is good for you. Larry Venuti’s research flatly denies this possibility, exposes it as a hypocritical sham: hegemonic forces in nationalist society are emphatically not interested in expanding students’ minds through exposure to peripheral or centrifugal impulses from outside the immediate sphere of national hegemony. More probably foreign-language teachers are charged with this task because, as V. N. Voloshinov suggests, the alien word is a powerful tool of authoritarian silencing, the imposition of a highly charged piece of alienation on any rebellious attempt to experience things idiosyncratically. A student who is forcibly taken over to the foreign author is not in fact taken over to a foreign author but to a fake-foreign authority, a pedagogical priest robed in pretend foreignism, because pretend foreignism awakens mind-numbing awe and respect—and the institution wants minds numbed and respectful.
If you agree with Friedrich Schleiermacher that readers should be taken over to the foreign author and should not haul the author over to them, you will have been rather appalled at my assimilation of Benjamin to Wayne’s World (as by much else in this chapter), even though, and this is the delicious irony about that example, I assimilated Benjamin specifically by following his syntax in an un-English way. The thing is, I don’t see how we can see, except through our own eyes; how else we ever confront the world, except through our own bodies. No matter how much we would like to be other people, no matter what spiritual, mystical, histrionic, or translatorial disciplines we develop to enable us to project ourselves into the minds and the bodies of other people, the bodymind through which we experience those other people remains our own.
So does this condemn us to solipsism? Only if we’re determined to exclude from consideration the middles in which we all live. No one can become another person, but neither can anyone remain purely himself or herself. We are all partly made up of other people, other voices, other visceral responses to the situations in our lives; we take other people into our own bodies constantly. We feel (something of) what they feel; their emotions and opinions become our own, even, sometimes, when we wish we could protect ourselves against them, as when we laugh at ethnic or sexist humor of which we disapprove, or when we cry with a person who we believe is faking his or her distress.
The question is not, therefore, whether a translation I do is to be infused with my phantom limb or the author’s—or, when it is read, the target-language reader’s. How can it not be all three? The question is rather how the three phantoms are going to get along, squeezed into the same prosthesis—and, like the outcome of a three-legged race, how fleetly the shared leg will allow the runner to run, how abjectly to limp, and so on.
A translation theorist friend of mine, telling me about her reservations with The Translator’s Turn, told me recently that she just couldn’t go along with my claim that translators translate on intuition alone.30 Students’ intuitions are all too often flat-out wrong, she said; and certainly a First World translator’s intuitions will usually be wrong with a Third World writer.
But for me the key issue there is whether there is such a thing as a “right” intuition; and if there is, who is to say what it is (the question of the social power to control interpretation); and if there isn’t, how translators are to proceed responsibly. If you believe, as my friend obviously does, that there are right and wrong intuitions, you will probably adopt a conventional teaching style that places all authority for determining intuitive rightness in the teacher; that’s straightforward enough. It is somewhat more problematic to assign interpretive authority in the engagement between a First World translator and a Third World writer. Even if you posit an actual personal dialogue between translator and writer (face to face, over the phone, by snail-mail or e-mail), and further posit a Third World writer whose command of the target language is as good as the translator’s, you still have to go on and assume that the Third World writer knows exactly what he or she was attempting to do in the work as a whole and in specific passages in particular, that there are no aspects of the source-language work that are inaccessible to the author’s articulable intuition, that the writer will never have to throw up her or his hands and say, “Boy, I have no idea what I was getting at there!” Because even source-language writers can never be sure their intuitions are “right” about their own work, the translator’s task is less one of submission to another’s right intuitions, more one of working to create a dialogical phantom limb that is both inside and outside her or his own body, both her or his own limb and powerfully shaped in dialogue with someone else.
What I am calling for here, then, is no great blooming mysticism of blind intuitive translation, cut off from all skeptical or other analytical thought, but a willingness to start wherever you start—as a student who doesn’t always understand the source-language text or the processes of translation all that well, as a person who didn’t grow up in the source-language culture and might well make mistakes about it—and keep working on it. Your phantom understanding of what I’m trying to say may be radically different from mine, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that I’m right and you’re wrong and you had better get yourself under control and start conforming your phantom to mine. It only means that there is a discrepancy between our phantoms, and that we are going to need to do some work together if we are ever going to be even marginally satisfied with the outcome of our dialogue. Students don’t make random mistakes; their mistakes arise out of who they are, what experiences they have had, and starting with that, starting with a student’s experience, is going to be much more productive for the student’s growth as a translator than the teacher’s authoritarian solution of a problem by pronouncing the student’s intuition “right” or “wrong.” How are student translators to develop the intuitive ability to discover the problems and pitfalls in their own intuitions—say, when translating a Third World text, or any text—if their teachers train them to expect all correction to come from an authority figure outside themselves? Clients, editors, and critics will provide them plenty of that, of course; but one only grows into the translator’s profession by learning to trust the intuitive process of finding and shaping interpretive phantoms within oneself—even if always in dialogue with others.
And why is this so hard for us to embrace? Why is translation theory so ravaged by fruitless battles over the best kind of neutral instrumentality— total submission to the source-language author’s transcendental designs on the target-language reader, or total submission to the textures and flows of the author’s verbalizations—that we find it almost impossible to theorize what’s right in front of (let alone behind) our noses? What are the deep-seated phantoms that drive theorists in one camp to vilify any translation that isn’t flat and ordinary and perfectly accessible to the General Reader with a fourth-grade education and theorists in another camp to vilify any translation that isn’t difficult and cumbersome and unpleasant to read?
And above all, what can we do about these phantoms that continue to dominate our debates? How can we poke fun at them, parody them, say NOT! to them, thumb our noses (and whatever’s in front of our noses) at them—and begin, gradually, to work past them?