PURIFYING ABUSE
One of the most influential contributions to postromantic translation theory in the past decade or so is that offered by Philip E. Lewis in the article he published in Joseph F. Graham’s (1985) collection Difference in Translation—a piece he originally wrote in French for a 1980 colloquium at Cerisy-la-Salle, France, under the title “Vers la traduction abusive.” In Lewis’s own English translation, “abusive” has disappeared from the title— “The Measure of Translation Effects”—but not from the argument, and his insistence that we consider the abusive nature of translation (or the need to translate certain texts abusively) has increasingly become a watchword of cutting-edge translation theory, most notably, perhaps, in two books by Larry Venuti, Rethinking Translation, where it is cited three times, twice by Venuti himself (12, 224–25), once by Sharon Willis (107), and The Translator’s Invisibility, with four citations (23–24, 182, 291, 296).
Lewis takes the notion directly from Jacques Derrida’s “Le retrait de la métaphore”: “Une ‘bonne’ traduction,” Derrida says parenthetically, “doit toujours abuser,” or, as Lewis translates, “A ‘good’ translation must always commit abuses” or “a good translation must always play tricks” (39–40). From this Lewis proposes to “extrapolate … a kind of abuse principle,” in order specifically “to measure effects wrought by the translation of Derrida’s work,” but also, more generally, to discuss the relational problematics of all translation (especially of “difficult” or “abusive” texts). As a native speaker of English, Lewis is certainly aware that abuse is usually considered a bad thing, a form of violence, physical or emotional, that men inflict on women, adults on children, humans on animals and the environment—that, to put it more generally, abuse is typically the inflicting of physical or psychological damage on another living thing31— but he is at pains throughout the article to recuperate the word for translation theory through linguistic deconstruction. Lewis suggests that “weak, servile translation” results from “a tendency to privilege what Derrida calls, in ‘La mythologie blanche,’ the us-system, that is, the chain of values linking the usual, the useful, and common linguistic usage” (40). This us-system informs the mainstream tradition of translation theory, reductive, assimilative, commonsensical, and as such constitutes the enemy, the internalized and bureaucratized mastery that Derrida and Lewis and other recent postromantic theorists resist through ab-use, a directionality away from use:
To accredit the use-values is inevitably to opt for what domesticates or familiarizes a message at the expense of whatever might upset or force or abuse language and thought, might seek after the unthought or unthinkable in the unsaid or unsayable. On the other hand, the real possibility of translation—the translatability that emerges in the movement of difference as a fundamental property of languages—points to a risk to be assumed: that of the strong, forceful translation that values experimentation, tampers with usage, seeks to match the polyvalencies or plurivocities or expressive stresses of the original by producing its own. (Lewis 1985, 41)
Abusive translation, for Lewis, respects the usages neither of the source-language text nor of the target language—though he is careful to insist that the translator not abuse just anything, but gravitate toward each “key operator” or “decisive textual knot” that arises, those “specific nubs in the original… that stand out as clusters of textual energy” (42–43). He is counseling, in other words, not random abuse but a measured modulation of both the source-language text and the target language so as to bring about significant shifts in meanings, tonalizations, expectations, outcomes:
No doubt the project we are envisaging here is ultimately impossible: the translator’s aim is to rearticulate analogically the abuse that occurs in the original text, thus to take on the force, the resistance, the densification, that this abuse occasions in its own habitat, yet, at the same time, also to displace, remobilize, and extend this abuse in another milieu where, once again, it will have a dual function—on the one hand, that of forcing the linguistic and conceptual system of which it is a dependent, and on the other hand, of directing a critical thrust back toward the text that it translates and in relation to which it becomes a kind of unsettling aftermath (it is as if the translation sought to occupy the original’s already unsettled home, and thereby, far from “domesticating” it, to turn it into a place still more foreign to itself). (43)
For translators who feel constrained by the tyranny of the us-system, “common usage,” the way things are said and done, the only correct way to translate this or that, the way you have to translate if you want to be published, read, understood—and here I emphatically include myself—this is a powerfully attractive formulation. It liberates translators from the dual jail cells of fidelity to the source-language text and communication with the target-language reader. Not that it cuts translators entirely adrift from texts and readers, let alone from addressing both in significant ways; but especially with certain types of texts, difficult texts that themselves “abuse” source-language usage, like lyric poetry and deconstructive theory, it liberates the translator, as Lewis says, to experiment, to tamper, to extend the creative act of writing “difficultly” or “abusively” into the target-language text.
But there are also serious problems with Lewis’s theory. One of these he engages himself: since he is mainly concerned with translations of abusive texts like Derrida’s, wouldn’t an abusive translation of that sort of text, especially one that returned abuse for abuse, actually be conforming to source-language usage rather than deviating from it, and thus be a contradiction in terms, a kind of inverted Cretan liar paradox? “If you can abuse only by respecting and thereby upholding the very usages that are contested,” Lewis asks, “if the aggressive translator merely falls into a classic form of complicity, whereby, for example, deviation serves to ground and sustain the norm, then why all the fuss about abuse?” (43–44). Lewis notes that translation is so much more complex an undertaking than these questions presume that this “complicity” is really far less of a problem than it logically seems; in practice the difficulties, the aporias, the “operators of undecidability” (44), and also the potential for abuse will be mapped differently in the source language and the target language, so that even a determinedly complicitous abusive translation of Derrida will invariably fall short of or exceed Derrida’s own abuse. But Lewis also outlines a hierarchy of sorts, with three rungs:
1.at the bottom the weakest sort of translation, which seeks to restore or naturalize in the target language abusive turns in the source language, so that the target language text conforms to standard target-language usage, and becomes what Venuti (1994) calls “invisible” or “domesticated”;
2.in the middle a stronger sort that seeks to reproduce in the target language the author’s abuses of the source language, producing a strange or foreignized or visible text that manifestly abuses the target language but stands in a problematically complicitous relation to the source language text; and
3.at the top the strongest and most forceful kind of translation, what we might call (with an uneasy glance over our shoulders at Derrida) abusive translation proper, which introduces its own target-language abuses into the abusive source-language text, generating a text that abuses both the source-language text and the target-language linguistic system.
And that seems to solve that problem, especially in a theoretical tradition that has always favored three-step hierarchies: sense-for-sense, word-forword, and free (the hierarchy that Lewis’s formulation most clearly restates, or, as he would prefer to say, remobilizes); grammatical, transformative, mythical (Novalis); prosaic, parodistic, interlinear (Goethe).
The problem that bothers me more in Lewis’s formulation, however, is its implicitly normative glorification of violence. It’s not just that abuse usually means hitting or hurting someone (usually someone weaker) and Lewis wants to “ab-use” or deviate from that usage by defining abuse linguistically, etymologically, as a deviation from usage; it’s also that all the eulogistic terms in Lewis’s essay are aligned with strength and domination, all the dyslogistic terms with weakness and submission. He seems to want to idealize hegemonic violence against the weak out of his essay, but it creeps right back in (or never left in the first place) in the assumption that strong, forceful translation is abusive and weak, servile translation is nonabusive. It doesn’t take much of a paraphrase of the passage that both Venuti and Willis quote, for example to underscore the violence it idealizes:
The abusive parent’s aim is to rearticulate analogically the abuse that occurred in his or her childhood home, thus to take on the force, the resistance, the densification, that this abuse occasions in its own habitat, yet, at the same time, also to displace, remobilize, and extend this abuse in another milieu where, once again, it will have a dual function—on the one hand, that of forcing the familial system of which it is a dependent, and on the other hand, of directing a critical thrust back toward the context that it replicates and in relation to which it becomes a kind of unsettling aftermath (it is as if the abuse sought to occupy the parent’s parents’ already unsettled home, and thereby, far from “domesticating” it, to turn it into a place still more foreign to itself).
Does this project become more attractive, even rhetorically, when the target of the abuse is not a child but a text?
In The Translator’s Invisibility Lawrence Venuti says of an abusive or foreignizing translation of Catullus that he is praising by the seventeenth-century English translator John Nott that “its abusiveness (even if homophobic by late-twentieth-century standards) conveyed Catullus’s Roman assumption that a male who submitted to anal and oral intercourse—whether willingly or not—was humiliated whereas, ‘the penetrator himself was neither demeaned nor disgraced’ …” (Venuti 1994, 88). Am I the only one who finds the collocation “abusiveness (even if homophobic)” bizarre? Maybe it’s only bizarre by late-twentieth-century standards? For Catullus—at least according to one late-twentieth-century commentator—forced or unforced anal or oral sex between two males was humiliating or abusive to the penetrated, not to the penetrator; or, to take only the most extreme part of that cultural norm, anal rape was only considered abusive for the abused, not the abuser. Surprise, surprise. The rapist, the penetrator, is neither demeaned nor disgraced—nor abused. Only the rape victim is.32 The only real surprise comes when Venuti, who is ostensibly on the side of the downtrodden in all this, the oppressed, the victims of sexism and colonialism and so on, insists that the dissident translator resist hegemonic norms by perpetuating that abuse in English translation—though only, of course, in purified (textualized, hence transcendentalized) form.
There are any number of tricky questions here. One is whether (and although Lewis and Venuti never raise the issue, they both tacitly seem to assume that this is in fact the case) abuse is not simply so endemic to patriarchy as to be unavoidable. If so, what (if anything) should we do about it? Try not think about it (the liberal solution)? Hope that if you don’t talk about it, don’t even think about it, it’ll go away? Or simply accept the situation and learn to live with it, for example, by euphemizing it, metaphorizing it, purifying it? I am suggesting that this is at least partly Lewis’s and Venuti’s solution, even if calling it that would almost certainly make both profoundly uneasy. Or—what seems to me the truly dissident solution, given Lewis’s and Venuti’s apparent assumptions about abuse— should we be extremely selective about whom we abuse, choose our victims carefully? For example, should we attempt to turn the abuse back against the abuser? If, for example, we decide that Catullus (backed by his whole society) is abusive toward the penetratees of willing or forced male-male sex, perhaps we should go ahead and translate abusively, but only in order to abuse the abuser(s), to raise contemporary readers’ discomfort levels so as also to raise their awareness about the abuse being perpetrated in (and through) the text—perhaps ultimately to disabuse them of their veneration for an abusive classic?
And this raises another difficult question: in an abusive translation as Lewis and Venuti imagine it, who is the abused? The source-language author, text, culture? The target-language reader, text, culture? Both, or some combination of the various aspects of the two? Lewis says both, but isn’t quite clear on exactly how that works. How is the abuse channeled? How does it hit its mark? What social and psychological effects does it have on its victims and its perpetrators?
If, on the other hand, we believe or hope that abuse may ultimately be avoidable, do we then simply act as if it already were, as if we were already free of the normative abusive ideologies that brutalize us? Or must we enter into a difficult transformative process aimed at uncovering the sources and the channels of our own abusiveness and eradicating them?
In Lewis’s essay, to a large extent in Venuti’s discussions as well, the concept of abuse remains too abstract to do much with. It lacks contextual details, textures, channels, social situations, and human agents. It is an abstract potentiality in language “itself,” language pulled away (abstracted or ab-used) from actual speech situations, which are conceived as enemy territory, the locus of the us-system of ordinary usage. The problem with this demonization of usage, of course, is that it implicitly reduces all usage to ordinariness and thus makes it impossible (and undesirable) to explore abuse too as a form of usage, something people do to each other in real social situations. First usage is idealized as ordinary; then all usage that falls outside that ideally circumscribed category is called something else, “ab-usage,” a significant deviation from usage. Wonderfully enough, this allows the theorist to naturalize abuse philosophically by denaturalizing it socially. Abuse, which is perfectly ordinary in patriarchal usage, both linguistic and behavioral—see, for example, Jean-Jacques Lecercle’s The Violence of Language, not to mention a generation of feminist analyses of physical and emotional abuse in the family and in culture at large—is reconceived as unordinary and therefore deviant from that usage, therefore recuperable as a philosophical operation that is implicitly parasitic on ordinary usage but explicitly superior to it. Ordinary usage is conceptualized restrictively to exclude deviance, abusiveness, precisely in order to flip the hierarchy and privilege the excluded category—in a desocialized realm where abuse has no real victims, only virtual ones, and thus no pain, no trauma, no dynasties of wounding in which the pain inflicted on one generation is passed on to the next.
What I want to do in the rest of this essay is to explore the ordinariness of abuse, the usualness of abuse, in the context of a play I translated several years ago—a play about abuse, about domestic violence, a man who batters and generally terrorizes his wife and children, which I translated in a manner that Lewis and Venuti would almost certainly call abusive. What I hope to be able to achieve by looking fairly closely at this play and its many contexts is a social exfoliation of the desocialized concept of abusive translation—first in terms of my actual process of translation; then in terms of the action dramatized in the play; finally in terms of our chances of escaping or transforming the culture of abuse.
In the summer of 1992 Wendy Knox, a Finnish-American theater producer and director at the Frank Theatre in Minneapolis, asked me to translate a Finnish play called Huojuva talo (“Tottering House”)—which was actually a stage adaptation done in 1983 for the Lappeenranta City Theater in Finland by Maaria Koskiluoma, from MariaJotuni’s 1936 novel of the same name. Wendy had seen the play performed at the Oslo Theater Festival in 1984, in Finnish, a language she had heard spoken in childhood by her mother and so could follow somewhat, and was so taken by it that she spent the next several years trying to get funding to commission a translation. I was so intrigued by the text that I agreed to do it for free, for the time being, and possibly to be paid later, if she landed a grant to cover my fee (she did—though considerably less than either of us had hoped). I did the translation quickly, in about a week, working at breakneck speed, rendering Jotuni’s strange Finnish more “foreignly” than I had ever translated before, sticking closely to her flat, prosaic non sequiturs without trying to heighten them or otherwise naturalize them into English, following her word order whenever it seemed possible without turning the English into gibberish, not looking for English equivalents of Finnish idioms but clumping along more or less word by word. For example, I rendered “Rouva se on antiikkikapine jo” (Koskiluoma 1983, 71), literally “Missus it (or she) is antique-contraption already,” as “The missus is already so old-fashioned,” a type of translation I used to warn my students against in Finland: in English we don’t address people in the third person, so “The missus is” should be “You are”; jo, “already,” is merely an intensifier and should not be translated at all in that sentence. A good translation (though not the kind that Derrida says always commits abuses) would run something like “You’re so old-fashioned, ma’am!”
And why did I translate like this, abusively, foreignizing? I didn’t have a carefully articulated rationale, but it seemed to me instinctively that I had to have some way of rendering the translation strange, odd, twisted, not necessarily in precisely the same way that the original was strange and odd and twisted—and in fact I never did manage to put my finger on how Jotuni (and Koskiluoma) had achieved that effect in the first place, so how could I imitate or reproduce it?—but with whatever means I had at my disposal. And hobbling my feet, as Dryden says the literalist or metaphrast invariably does, seemed as good a possibility as any. Jotuni’s novel and Koskiluoma’s stage adaptation of it were both striking in their refusal to moralize against the play’s villain, Eero Markku, a successful journalist who batters and generally terrorizes his wife, Lea; there is no voice of shock, of moral outrage, either in the narrator or in the characters (except, ironically enough, Eero himself—his outrage directed against Lea and all other ordinary mortals who don’t understand geniuses like him). Everything is flat, laconic, deadpan. Also slightly archaic—Jotuni wrote in the 1930s, and the play’s dialogue reflects that—and possibly tinged just slightly with the eastern Finnish dialect of Savo, where Jotuni grew up. And yet the flatness of the dialogue is almost incandescent. If I could hobble my feet by translating as literally as I could, while yet working hard to make every word and every phrase come alive, feel vibrant on the tongue, no matter how awkward or stilted, maybe that would work well enough. And by and large I think it did—a critic for the Minneapolis Journal, Mike Steele, called the translation “stilted and overripe,” not, say, stilted and dry, stilted and dusty, stilted and tedious. Stilted and overripe was exactly the idea: strange, but uneasily alive.
Not that my rendition was all that literal. It felt literal to me as I was doing it, probably because I generally feel more comfortable adapting texts to the target language, and my willingness to foreignize even a little felt odd, alien to me. In fact the translation as I did it at first was already quite assimilative, and when Wendy picked at a few passages that grated on her ears, things that sounded too strange in English, that didn’t make sense or fit the context or character, or perhaps were just rhythmically problematic—rough spots that almost invariably boiled down to literalism—the two of us working together, over her dining room table or over the phone, almost invariably wound up assimilating them to usual English. A longer passage shows this clearly, especially when set alongside a radically literal version:
(Lea kääntyy Aulikseen päin. Auliksen takaa tulee Ukki.)
LEA:Ajoiko Jumala ne pois, ihmiset, paratiisista, ajoiko?
UKKI:Ajoi.
LEA:Miksi Jumala ne pois ajoi? He ottivat vain yhden omenan.
UKKI:He tulivat tietämään hyvän ja pahan.
LEA:Eikö saa tietää hyvää, eikö saa tietää pahaa?
UKKI:Ei saa tehdä pahaa.
(Ukki menee jälleen Auliksen taakse ja sitä tietä näkymättömiin.)
EERO:Missä on raja oikean ja väärän välillä?
AULIS:Sen helposti tietää. Suora viiva on kaunis viiva.
EERO:Mahdoton viiva. Elämän pitäisi opettaa sinua. Minäpä noidun sinut onnettomaan avioliittoon, josta sinä eroat ja rikot pyhat muodot. Tahi että teet tyhmyyksiä, että maasta kohoaa itse demonien ruhtinatar ja sokaisee sinut.
AULIS:Katsokaa, noin han noituu aina. Noidupas minut onnelliseen avioliittoon niin saan kokeilla. (Koskiluoma 43–44)
A radically literal version might have gone something like this:
(Lea turns Aulis-to toward. Aulis’s from-behind comes Grandfather.)
LEA: Drove God they away, people, paradise-from, drove?
GRANDFATHER: Drove.
LEA: Why God they away drove? They took only one apple.
GRANDFATHER: They came to-know good and evil.
LEA: No may know good, no may know evil?
GRANDFATHER: No may do evil.
(Grandfather goes again Aulis’s to-behind and that way invisibles-into.)
EERO:Where is boundary good’s and evil’s between?
AULIS:That easily (one-)knows. Straight line is beautiful line.
EERO:Impossible line. Life should teach you. I bewitch you to-unhappy marriage, from-which you divorce and break holy forms. Or that you do stupidities, that from-earth rises herself demons’ princess and blinds you.
AULIS:Look, thus he bewitches always. Bewitch me to-happy marriage so (I) can try.
Now here’s what I did:
(Lea turns toward Aulis. Grandfather appears behind Aulis.)
LEA:Did God drive them out, people, from paradise, did he?
GRANDFATHER: He did.
LEA:Why did God drive them out? They only took one apple.
GRANDFATHER: They came to know good and evil.
LEA:Is it wrong to know good, is it wrong to know evil?
GRANDFATHER: It is wrong to do evil.
(Grandfather moves behind Aulis and in this way becomes invisible.)
EERO:Where is the line between right and wrong?
AULIS:That’s easy. A straight line is a beautiful line.
EERO:An impossible line. Life should teach you. I curse you, and predict for you an unhappy marriage that will end in divorce and smash the holy forms. Or you will do foolish things, the princess of the demons herself will arise from the earth and blind you.
AULIS:Look at this, this is how he always curses me. Give me a happy marriage so I can try it.
This is stilted, clearly. Certainly overripe. Mike Steele was right. But then the original feels stilted and overripe to me too. Mindful of theater directors’ eternal complaint that academics who translate plays typically have no ear, no sense of what the words they write are going to sound like on stage, or feel like in an actor’s mouth, I worried about this—especially in this, the first drama translation I had ever done especially for an actual production. Surely I shouldn’t deliberately make my translation sound like the translated plays directors always complain about? There was never any question for me of writing what Larry Venuti calls “fluent” or “invisible” dialogue, because Wendy had specifically told me that she planned to stylize the production, that she wasn’t interested in naturalistic theater; but there are lots of ways to stylize dialogue, and I could very well have done something like this:
LEA:So did Adam and Eve get tossed out of the garden?
GRANDFATHER: Yeah.
LEA:What for? They only took a crummy apple.
GRANDFATHER: They came to know good and evil.
LEA:Who knew it was gonna be such a capital offense to know good?
GRANDFATHER: It was a capital offense to do evil.
(Grandfather moves behind Aulis and in this way becomes invisible.)
EERO:So who can tell the difference between right and wrong?
AULIS:Simple: a straight line’s a beautiful line.
EERO:Yeah, well it’s also an impossible line. Loosen up, Jesus Christ man, you gotta roll with the punches. I can just see you marrying some god awful bimbo and duking it out in the society pages with her then going through this painful and utterly public divorce and dragging your prissy-ass name in the mud. Or you’ll do something so fucking stupid some cut-rate goddess straight from Central Casting will fly in on wires and gouge your fucking eyes out.
AULIS:Listen to the shit I’m always taking off him. Just give me one good shot at a happy marriage and I’ll give it a whirl.
All three of these translations are probably abusive in Lewis’s sense, the first (the radical literal one) because it abuses standard English, the second (the one that was eventually staged) because it abuses colloquial idiomatic English—or perhaps only what naturalistic directors take to be colloquial idiomatic English—and the third because it abuses the foreignness of the Finnish text, the feel it has of another time and place. Any one of the three could have been used successfully, probably, in a highly stylized production, the first in an in-your-face avant-garde antitheatrical mode (I hear it done in a deadpan monotone, almost robotically), the third in an exaggerated David Mamet style that said, “Listen to us do this fake modern lingo, we’re actors reciting dialogue and we know it.” The second translation, which I sent to Wendy shortly after receiving the original Finnish text, was only one of a potentially infinite number of “abusive” stylizations of the play.
And Wendy was initially skeptical, though she mentioned her reservations only in passing, in the midst of great excitement at finally seeing the play in English. Over the phone I said I had done the translation very quickly, and roughly, and was willing to work with her to make it feel right in the actors’ mouths; she said yeah, we probably had a lot of work ahead of us to make it work. Because I had never translated for the theater before, and hadn’t acted in plays since elementary school, I felt a little diffident about touting the viability of my translation, which was stilted (precisely what one expects from academic translators, right?) but which I secretly suspected would probably feel just fine in actors’ mouths. But I thought, never mind: I’ll hold back now and wait until Wendy has a read-through; then we’ll see. If she hates it then and wants me to redo it, fine; I translated it in a week, no big deal, I’ll just do it over differently. Or she can rewrite it to fit her actors herself. Whatever. Maybe they’ll even like it.
I flew up to Minneapolis the next April to do some research on Finnish immigrants, and while I was there Wendy got nine actors together for a read-through. It was an exciting moment for me, hearing my words spoken by professional actors for the first time ever; and in her introductory remarks Wendy set me up as a kind of savior, swooping in to do this translation practically for free when nearly a decade of grant applications had produced no results. And the actors started reading—and they loved it! They were moved by it, disturbed by it, it made them shudder and it made them laugh; and at the end of the two-hour read-through they all said how wonderful the translation was, how it felt like an exquisite period piece, and so on. I basked in the glow, of course. Wendy felt it too: the translation really worked. There were a dozen problem spots, of course, individual words and phrases, which we went over in detail later, studying the Finnish original and my translation and considering rhythm and idiomaticity and stylization and everything else; but they were, Wendy said, minor things, easily enough fixed. The translation did not need to be redone, or even substantially revised—only touched up here and there.
The play was performed about a year after that read-through, from March 18 to April 9, 1994, in the Southern Theater in the West Bank theater district in Minneapolis. About halfway through the run, from March 31 to April 3, Wendy flew me up to watch four consecutive performances. Because the play’s topic, domestic violence, was highly pertinent and potentially traumatic for viewers, she also organized postshow panel discussions, with panelists from local women’s shelters, psychotherapists, court advocates, and so on describing their impressions of how the play touched on their personal and professional experiences with domestic violence and eliciting audience response as well. Wendy asked if I’d like to be a panelist too, the nights I was there, and I gladly volunteered— translating the play, I had identified strongly with Poju or Boy, the Markkus’ son, who is beaten by his father and coached in passive-aggressive codependency by his mother, and would be happy to talk about that as well as the process of translation.
The first night I was there, I sat through the show in a good deal of discomfort, so worried about my translation—those are my words they’re saying up there! what if they sound stupid?—that I had a hard time enjoying what was really a stunning production. I was finally swept up by the acting, ended the first act in tears, after Lea suffers a miscarriage brought on by Eero’s violence, then relaxed somewhat and let the second act work on me.
One of the most striking things about the production, in fact, was that it was fairly radically foreignized. Wendy had coached the actors to give roughly Finnish pronunciations to the Finnish names: some managed to roll the “r” in Eero (e:ro), some didn’t (saying “arrow”), but nobody rhymed it with “hero”; Aulis sometimes sounded like Elvis, Evert like Everett, but even through these slips one could hear the actors struggling with foreign pronunciations, retaining a deliberate awkwardness that fit the production perfectly. She kept the references to Finnish marks— though at one point Eero handed Lea a fistful of U.S. dollars, and in the first performance that I saw Nancy Gormley as Lea’s mother slipped and referred to francs instead of marks. The “Finnish” paper in which Eero had Aulis read his article was, oddly enough, Izvestia, and there was a pile of other Izvestias on his desk as well (also a few copies of The Old Times in Gothic script). Wendy had chosen for her background music several Finnish songs sung in English and several non-Finnish songs (Brahms’s “Lullaby,” “Silent Night,” “Fairest Lord Jesus”) sung in Finnish (“Brahmsin kehtolaulu,” “Jouluyö, juhlayö,” and “Maa on niin kaunis”). The latter two were sung in unison by the whole cast; the first, along with a Finnish hymn sung in Finnish (“Joutuu ilta kaunis”), was sung live (but offstage) by Cynthia Hechter, the actress who played Lea’s friend Ester—an American who had had to learn the Finnish words syllabically, so that the songs felt foreign to both the American and the Finnish viewer. As Brahms’s “Lullaby” began, for example, I thought at first that Wendy had found a Finnish singer to make the tape for her, but the sound of the Finnish was just slightly off, eerily off, as if sung by a native speaker in a bad dream: “Levon hetki nyt lyy-o, jo joutuvi yy-o.”33 The two hymns sung in English, “I Turn My Eyes Up to Heav’n Above” (“Mä silmät luon ylös taivaaseen”) and “Praise to Thee Our Gracious Lord” (“Herraa hyvää kiittäkä”) were Finnish hymns that Wendy had found in English translation in a collection of favorite Finnish-American hymns. Several pieces of Finnish dance music were also played without words. As usual, Wendy did everything in her power to block facile assimilation of the play to slick American cultural values; the “foreignism” of the production in this sense was aligned with the stylized, expressionistic acting, the gestural automatisms assigned to each actor, the strange stitches and tucks taken in each actor’s costume—and the “stilted but overripe” translation. Everything was designed to look and feel just slightly off, wrong, twisted.
After the show we panelists, six or seven of us, walked up front to the chairs a stage hand had set up for us, sat down, and were introduced by Wendy, who asked us each to make a brief statement to get the discussion going with those members of the audience who remained to talk.
And sitting there, stage left, waiting for my turn to speak, listening to all the clinicians to my left talk about their experiences with domestic violence, I felt disturbing patterns locking into place.
I was the only man up front. All the other speakers were women, most of them battered women who had devoted their lives to working with other battered women. I was also the only man in the chain of auteurs who had brought the play to the Minneapolis stage. Maria Jotuni, who wrote the original novel (based, her grandson speculates, on her own personal experience with her husband Viljo Tarkiainen, a famous literary critic), was a woman. Maaria Koskiluoma, who adapted the novel for the Finnish stage in 1983, was a woman. Eija-Elina Bergholm, who directed that production (which was a huge sensation in Finland, won numerous prizes in Finland and in Oslo, ran for a full year, and later was adapted for television, where it again won prizes), was a woman. Wendy Knox, whose pet project this American production had been from the start, was a woman. I was a man.
And as the women to my left talked about the play—my English words, based on the work of a succession of women—in terms of survivors and abusers, the female heroes of their stories and the male monsters that the women somehow had to overcome, another realization hit me: I’m the abuser. Symbolically, at least, on this stage, I represented Eero Markku, the abusive husband in the play.
And almost the exact instant I realized this, a handful of the actors emerged from the dressing rooms and joined us, some up front, others in the audience—and who should come sit next to me but Matt Guidry, the actor who played Eero. Now there were two men up front in an expanding company of women (three or four actresses pulled up chairs and sat next to Matt on the other side), two men, the abusive translator and the abusive actor (though we are both, I told myself a little nervously, a little defensively, and without great conviction, sweet, decent men in real life).
When my turn to speak came, I mentioned some of this, my symbolic role as abuser both as panelist and as translator—but I didn’t expand on that latter, the abusive translator, as I figured the crowd (composed that night largely of women from two local shelters) wasn’t particularly interested in this rather fine point of translation theory. Still, Lewis’s notion of abusive fidelity was very much on my mind throughout the discussion.
For one thing, I had first read Lewis’s article around the same time as I did the Jotuni translation, in the early fall of 1992 (I can’t remember which came first, the translation or the article). I had bought the Graham collection when it appeared, in 1985, but for many years, while I was working on The Translator’s Turn, I had focused most of my attention on the Derrida piece in it, “Des tours de Babel.” It wasn’t, in fact, until I read Venuti’s Rethinking Translation and kept seeing references to Lewis’s term that I went back to the Graham book and read the article. My first thought was that it was an interesting spin on what I’d called irony in The Translator’s Turn (172–75), a malicious fidelity to a badly written text, the attempt to make the translation as shoddy as the original (my example was scholarly and technical translation, where the source-language author doesn’t usually think of him/herself as a writer at all, and doesn’t often write very well). In a larger sense, all of the translation models I discussed in part two of the book, with the obvious exception of the normative models discussed under “Metonymy” in chapter 3 and “Introversion and Extroversion” in chapter 4, were abusive, designed to transgress the hegemonic norms of fidelity mandated by traditional theories of translation. Given the overall transgressive and iconoclastic tenor of my book (and my personality), I had found Lewis’s concept of abusive translation quite attractive.
But now, having watched the enactment of Eero Markku’s “abusive fidelity” to his wife, Lea, sitting next to the actor who played him, I was flooded with second thoughts. Lea, played by Annie Piper, opens the play with a highly stylized soliloquy about (and partly to) the man she will someday marry, a speech soaked in the patriarchal myth of happy marriage as the fulfillment of every woman’s dreams. The play is set up to devastate that myth utterly. But from Annie’s first words, the speech had grated on my ears: my words, which I (in a manner of speaking) had put in an abuse victim’s mouth, were all wrong. Why? Whose fault? Mine? Annie’s? Wendy’s? Was it because I had translated too literally? Was my translation too stilted, too overripe, too stylized, too strange-sounding? As the other actors came on and began saying their lines, I began to relax, partly because the stylized lines sounded all right in their mouths; what was going on? Virginia Burke in particular, as Lea’s sister Toini, a flighty, careless young woman who by the end is revealed (at least as I read the play) as the only healthy person in the whole piece, does the weird English perfectly. Not only her mouth but her whole body automatizes her lines, like a wind-up toy, an acting style that Wendy favors and has used to great effect in other plays. Does this mean that the success or failure of specific lines—my words!—is not so much a function of the relative abusiveness of my translation as it is of acting styles, perhaps acting competence? Was it (as I increasingly felt as I watched the play for the second and third and fourth time) Annie Piper’s particular acting style that set my teeth on edge? Or is that just a way of blaming my abuse on the victim, as Eero (played by the guy sitting next to me up front, in the panel discussion on abuse) does so effectively with Lea?
But there was more to the problem than this. In the original Finnish production, all of the actors had stylized their lines, acting expressionistically rather than realistically; there had, for example, been no actual violence in the original production, nothing that even looked as if Eero were striking Lea, but a collection of symbolic gestures meant to signify violence. Wendy, feeling that this approach might suck the life out of the drama, might provide viewers no identificatory inroad into the play, had shifted gears a little and done Lea (and partly Eero as well) naturalistically, as a focus of audience identification, everyone else expressionistically, like a kind of stylized Greek chorus around the lead couple. And so Annie, under direction from Wendy, had deliberately naturalized the “stilted and overripe” dialogue of my translation, trying to make it sound realistic, trying to fit it into a register that she could imagine herself using in ordinary life—the half-hearted naturalism in her voice fighting the stylized foreignism of the dialogue. This was a big part of the problem: Wendy had told me to stylize the translation, but in production she decided to make Lea naturalistic, and I wasn’t there to rewrite her lines in a more naturalistic mode. The surreal automatisms of her lines, especially the broken-record repetitions and the eschatological conversations she has about death and paradise with her parents and grandfather who aren’t physically present—everything that Maaria Koskiluoma wrote into a dramaturgical adaptation that was meant to be utterly stylized—don’t work in Lea’s character, which Wendy wants to make almost Strindbergian or Bergmanesque, so Annie tries to find a tonalization that might justify them in real life:
LEA:Ei sellaista saa ajatella … sellaista saa ajatella … saa ajatella … ajatella.
LEA:You mustn’t think such things … think such things … such things … things.34
Sitting in the audience, I wanted to rewrite her lines, to make them grittier, giving them the realistic rough edges that my more stylized foreignism lacked and Annie’s acting style couldn’t produce. I also wanted to make the other characters’ lines more caricaturish, more grotesquely expressionistic. Maria Asp, for example, plays the maid Hilja brilliantly along the lines of Lea’s exasperated description, “pretentious, enunciating her words as in a poetry recital, with clipped grace”—“teeskentelee … Lausuu sanatkin kuin lausuntakilpailussa. Täsmällisesti, pingotetun sirosti” (56). But there are several spots in her part that I felt didn’t give her enough to work with. She’s such a wonderful actress that she pulled it off, made it work, but it’s hard to stylize “clipped grace” in a line like “He’s afraid the baby will bother him” (“Arvelee, että lapsi häiritsee” [59]). So in the third or fourth performance I watched I imagined myself sitting in rehearsals a month earlier, rewriting dialogue, making that “He is concerned that the infant will disturb his rest.” Would that have been more “abusive” than the line I wrote, the line that Maria Asp spoke? Maybe not. But then, maybe we don’t really know what abusive translation is, yet. Let’s back up and take a different tack.
I suggest that one way of contextualizing abusive translation would be to read it through “Tottering House,” to read the play allegorically as “about” abusive fidelity. In this reading, which I adumbrated a moment ago when Matt Guidry came to sit next to me onstage, the abuser Eero is, represents allegorically, the abusive translator. This may seem like an abusive allegory, an allegory designed to abuse Lewis and Venuti, but bear with me; the issue is considerably more complex than it seems at first blush. Lea, Eero’s wife, is his primary victim; Poju, his son, is his secondary victim. Because Lea is the woman he marries and promises fidelity to, it seems reasonable, if only by way of getting started, to allegorize her as the source culture/author/text. Equally simplistic, but heuristically useful here at the beginning of my allegorizing, would be an equation between Poju and the target culture/reader/text—that other milieu onto which, as Lewis says, the abusive translator displaces his violence.
But as soon as we return to Lewis’s formulation to check that displacement, the complications begin to proliferate: “The translator’s aim,” Lewis wrote, “is to rearticulate analogically the abuse that occurs in the original text, thus to take on the force, the resistance, the densification, that this abuse occasions in its own habitat, yet, at the same time, also to displace, remobilize, and extend this abuse in another milieu” (43). If Lea is the original text, then Eero’s abuse of her and their son must be seen as prompted by her abuse of someone else, “the abuse that occurs in the original text,” which the abusive translator is then “to rearticulate analogically”—and this makes it difficult to allegorize Eero’s battering of Lea. Is Lea to be at once the source and the target of abuse? (That would be a theory that Eero, or any abuser, would feel comfortable with.) Lea is not convincing as an abuser; if Lewis’s theory requires the abusive translator to be remobilizing the source author’s abuse, therefore, Lea will have to be something other than the source author.
It may be preferable, therefore, to unpack the source culture/author/ text cluster that I’m reading through Lea: to take the source culture and the source author and the source text (possibly also the source-text reader) as separate entities, each with its role to play in this allegorical drama. Lea is portrayed in the play as the daughter of dysfunctional parents, a weak, passive, alcoholic father and a passive-aggressive but also physically abusive mother who blames all her ills on her husband: “Jos minulla olisi ollut kunnon mies, niin kyllä minunkin oloni olisivat toiset” (Koskiluoma 1983)—“If I’d had a good man, things would have been different,” and “Jos olisi joku, joka hänet tappaisi, sata markkaa minä hänelle antaisin” (37)—“If I could find someone to murder him I’d pay him a hundred marks.” The mother’s lessons for the daughter are wrapped tightly in double binds:
LEA:Jos minä otan miehen, ja hänet itse valitsen, minäen häntä aina moiti. Pitää tutkia mies, ennen kuin hänet ottaa.
ÄITI:Tutkihan sinä sitten.
LEA:Tutkin.
ÄITI:Ja tyydy tutkittuasi.
LEA:Tyydyn. Jos minä miehen otan, olkoon juoppo, lyököön minuaja vieköön kaiken autuuteni, niin en minä ääntä päästäisi.
ÄITI:Sinä opetat. Toivonpa, että saisit miehen sellaisen, että huonoutesi näkisit.
LEA:If I take a husband, and choose him myself, I won’t nag at him all the time. You have to check a man out before you marry him.
MOTHER: Well do it then.
LEA:I will.
MOTHER: And once you’ve checked him out, be satisfied.
LEA:I will. If I take a husband, he can be a drunk and beat me and blight my life and still I won’t make a sound.
MOTHER: [Literally:] You teach. I wish you’d get a man such that your badness you would see.
Emulating her father’s passive acquiescence to her mother’s abuse, Lea throws her willingness to suffer silently in her abusively suffering mother’s face, who advises her in return to “be satisfied” with the man she chooses: to do precisely what she herself could never do, precisely what Lea is most inclined to do anyway, to thematize silent suffering as “satisfaction.” That last line of the mother, which I rendered literally so as not to unpack its ambiguity too soon, is especially rich in double binds: sinä opetat, “you (will) teach,” implies a direct object, which doesn’t need to be spelled out in Finnish; in this case the implicit direct object is either minua, “me,” or häntä, “him.” If it’s the former, the implication seems to be that the mother resents the unmarried Lea trying to teach her all about marriage, thus “Thanks for teaching me” (a line Lea will actually say to Eero later, in response to emotional battering), or “Listen to the little teacher,” or something equally sarcastic about Lea’s presuming to teach something she knows so little about. If it’s the latter, the implication would be that Lea will teach her husband; but here the possibilities really begin to multiply. Does the mother really think Lea will teach him, train him, school him, civilize him, as wives are expected to do in bourgeois patriarchy? That would be in direct contradiction to the instruction “be satisfied,” but contradiction is what double binds are made of. The irony becomes even richer if we assume Lea’s mother believes that her daughter will never be successful in teaching a man through silent suffering, thus:
LEA:I won’t make a sound.
MOTHER: That’ll teach him.
The rest of that line, “Toivonpa, että saisit miehen sellaisen, että huonoutesi näkisit,” I misread for the production: my eye skipped that last t in näkisit, making it mean not “you would see” but “he would see”; the translation used in the production was “I just wish you’d find a man who’d see how bad you are.” The reason for my mistake isn’t hard to find, because the sentence makes better grammatical sense the way I read it: the kind of man who will see your flaws, your inadequacies. With the second-person t, the sentence turns the man Lea will someday marry into a kind of mirror in which she sees her own flaws, which is fine except that the syntax is then awkward (nothing new in this play): I wish that you would get the kind of man that you would see your badness. So in this case (probably others as well) I unconsciously domesticated the Finnish text, assimilated it to my target-language sense of what it had to mean to make sense in English, and translated accordingly, abusing the original by mistaking its meaning (not the sense of abusive translation Lewis and Venuti mean).
Most important for an allegory of abusive translation, however, is the fact that both renderings, with and without the t, reflect the mother’s abuse of her daughter, which seems to be predicated on something like the following web of assumptions: (a) other people (as opposed to the perfected speaking self) are severely flawed, and (b) should be wracked by a debilitating sense of their imperfections; (c) any attempt another person makes (especially someone perceived as an inferior) to deny or displace that debilitating sense is pride, a dangerous attitude that must be eradicated instantly; (d) the best weapon against pride is abuse, which is designed to debilitate and thus to restore the proper state of affairs; (e) the proper context for abusive debilitation is the family, (f) especially when channeled from positions of dominance to positions of subordination (parents to children, husbands to wives, but also, in Lea’s mother’s case, strong women to weak, passive men). In presuming to teach her mother (or possibly even her husband), Lea is acting pridefully and must be abused; her mother has done her best to smash that pride all through Lea’s childhood, but now Lea is on the verge of adulthood and nearly beyond her mother’s reach, so the mother hopes her daughter will find a husband who will continue the all-important process of smashing pride through abuse. And, of course, Lea does: Eero abuses her and cuts her off from her mother, whose blaming and double-binding comment on all this is: “Sinä totutat hänet huonoille tavoille tuolla tavalla liiaksi kieltäy-tymällä” (48) —“You’re letting him develop bad habits by denying yourself so much.” Lea can’t win. But then, no one can, not even Eero, whose largely successful attempts to spread his misery around never successfully alleviate that misery, and who ends in suicide.
So let us say that in an allegory of translation the abusive culture based on the universalization and naturalization of the abusive assumptions I listed above stands for the source culture, which produces the source author, represented symbolically in this play by Lea’s parents. And Lea would then be the source text? Possibly. Then “the abuse that occurs in the original text” that Lewis wants the abusive translator to rearticulate analogically would not be any specific abusiveness that Lea perpetrates but rather the traces of her abusive upbringing in her passive-aggressive codependency, in her willingness to suffer abuse at her husband’s hands. The source author channels the abusiveness of her or his society into and through the source text, a “child” onto whom she or he transfers all the doubly bound anger and fear with which she or he has been saturated by the source culture, a simulacrum of her or his own abusiveness which she or he unleashes onto the source culture as living proof of the success of her or his abusive training.
Then the “transfer(ence)” involved in abusive translation would entail a reinscription or remobilization of those traces in the target text, creating a new text—which I am associating allegorically with Poju, the battered son—that is “raised” or “reared” or created in an analogous or transferential atmosphere of abuse and so carries into the target culture the traces of the original abuse.
But this still ignores the agency of the abuser, the abusive translator who transfers or remobilizes the abuse in (to) the target culture not merely because it’s a living but also because it’s the only way she or he knows how to live:
EERO:Minulla, minulla ei ollut jouluja, ei joulukuusia eikäpä äitiäkään. Äiti minut jätti—nojajättäköön. Lahjaksi olen saanut hänelta kymmenen markkaa ja senkin pyytämällä. Niinpä minäen myös anna mitään. En kenellekään, se on sanottu. Kyllä ne rakkaudet tiedetään, keinotekoista juttua.
LEA:Mikä on keinotekoista?
EERO:Rakkaudet. Ei sinun tarvitse vetistellä siksi.
LEA:Enhän—toki. (Kääntää selkänsä. Eero tarttuu häntä olkapäähänsä, kääntää häntä ja ojentaa pientä pakettia.)
LEA:Mitä sinä nyt tyhjää. Kiitos sinulle, armas poika.
EERO:Avaa nyt lahjapakettisi.
LEA:Kultasepän tavaraa?
EERO:Avaa.
LEA:Rakas, kultainen olento, minulla ei ole mitään, ja sinä, sinä …
(Kääreestä paljastuu pieni rasia. Lea avaa sen. Tyhjiä visiittikortteja.)
EERO:Hahahaaaa.
LEA:Hyviä nämäkin. Hyvin tarpeellisia.
EERO:Hahaa. Äläkä usko, että ne ovat sinulle. Minä ostin ne itselleni, aina niitä tarvitsen.
LEA:Olisin ollut pahoillani, jos sinä olisit tuhlannut rahaa. Paljon menee muutenkin. (Kävelee pois ja palaa mukanaan kaksi keitettyä kananmunaa lautasella.) Otahan.
EERO:Kaksi? Hemmetti miten sinä tuhlaat. (Heittää munat lattialle.) Ei meillä ole varaa kaikkien munia syödä. (Katsoo hetken munia lattialla, linnoittautuu sitten kirjoituspöytänsä taakse. Joulumusiikki nousee. Äiti tulee näkyväksi.)
ÄITI:Sinä totutat hänet huonoille tavoille tuolla tavalla liiaksi kieltäytymällä. (47–48)
EERO:I, I never had Christmases, no Christmas trees, not even a mother. Mother left me—and who needs her. Her gift to me was ten marks, and that only when I asked her for it. So I never give anything either. Not to anyone, period. We all know what love is, sheer illusion.
LEA:What’s illusion?
EERO:Love. No need to cry over it.
LEA:I—guess not. (Turns her back. Eero takes her by the shoulders, turns her to face him and holds out a tiny package.)
LEA:You didn’t need to. Thank you, sweetheart.
EERO:Open your present.
LEA:From the jeweler’s?
EERO:Open it.
LEA:You dear sweet thing, I have nothing for you, and you, you …
(Lea removes the paper and finds a small box, opens it. Blank calling cards.)
EERO:Ha ha haaaa.
LEA:No, these are good, we need these.
EERO:Ha haa. I didn’t buy them for you. I bought them for myself, I always need them.
LEA:I would have been disappointed if you’d wasted your money. We spend enough as it is. (Walks offstage and returns with two boiled eggs on a plate.) Here.
EERO:Two? You’re so damned wasteful. (Throws the eggs on the floor.) We can’t all afford to eat eggs. (Looks at the eggs on the floor for a moment, then entrenches himself behind his desk. The Christmas music swells. Mother becomes visible.)
MOTHER: You’re letting him develop bad habits by denying yourself so much.
Eero has decreed that they will not celebrate Christmas, supposedly on ideological grounds—“Turha, pakanallinen tapa kokojoulu,” “Vapaa, valistunut henki ei sellaiseen alennu” (47) —“Christmas is just a useless pagan custom,” “A free, enlightened spirit never stoops to such,” but actually, as we discover at the beginning of the long passage I quoted, because he never had anything nice or enjoyable as a boy, no Christmases, no Christmas trees, no love. And it is characteristic of the doubly bound abusive culture in which he was raised that the dark, murky enslavement that that culture considers normal and seeks to reproduce in every one of its members is idealized as freedom and enlightenment. Love is illusion, giving presents is a “useless pagan custom” (besides, he never gives anyone anything). But when Lea buys a little tree and a slice of ham for him—he claims they only have enough money for one of them, guess who, to eat well (“We can’t all afford to eat eggs”), so she lives off bread and drippings—and cries at his insistence that love is illusion, he gives her a present after all. In accordance with his instructions she has bought him nothing and is trying to force her spirit into the emotional strait-jacket he requires, but then he surprises her with a gift, which looks as if he had bought it at the jeweler’s—and she melts, hoping that he really does love her after all, that the abusive ascesis he has forced on her will gradually dissipate, that everything is going to be all right. But she opens the package to find the blank calling cards, he laughs nastily at her disappointment, and when she tries to put a good face on it he gloats that he didn’t buy them for her, he bought them for himself.
And this is only their first Christmas, six months into their marriage. Things go downhill from there. Soon after this incident Eero apologizes for losing his temper, reassures her that he loves her, offers to take her downtown to look at the big Christmas tree there; but it is not long before he stops apologizing, stops trying to reassure her about his character:
LEA:Eero, sinä olet juonut.
EERO:Minun juonnistani ei kannata puhua.
LEA:Sinähän olet raittiusmies.
EERO:Entä sitten?
LEA:Sinä olet alkanut viipyä iltaisin.
EERO:Epäiletko jotakin?
LEA:En epäile.
EERO:Minä sanon, jos epäilet minua, minäen kunnioita sinua. Minun tapani on se. Minua loukkaa se kun saan huomautuksia.
LEA:Ei tarvitse huutaa.
EERO:Jos sinä et moralisoisi, sinun luonasi olisi hyvä olla. Sinä viet minulta tukesi sillä tavoin. Sinun pitää luottaa minuun, sillä tavalla sinä autat minua eteenpäin.
LEA:Minä luotan.
EERO:Minun persoonallisuuteni rajat eivat kai ole tavalliset. Minä tahtoisin tehdä pahaa. Minäpä kerron sinulle kaiken. Minä teen pahaajoskus tahallani. Noin virassakin. Kun pitäisi kiittää, minäpä äkkiä muutankin sävyäja moitin. Joskus taas päätan lyödä rehellisesti asian maahan ja äkkiä sotkenkin ja etsin olemattomat hyvät puolet. Mitäs siitä sanot?
LEA:Se on vaarallista.
EERO:Mutta katsopas, enhän minä olekaan mikään totuuksienjulistaja. Minä tahtoisin tehdä pahaa. Sinä et sitä ymmärrä. Minä pakotan toiset katsomaan omalla tavallani. Helvetin piina. Jos minä tahdon, minä ammun itseni. Olen sitä useasti ajatellut, koska olen niin paha. Sinustakin. Sinä et pidä minusta enää.
LEA:Onko tämä hetki sopiva rakkaudentunnustukselle?
EERO:Minä olen tavallani epämukava. mitä? Minä luulen, että moni nero on samanlainen. (53)
LEA:Eero, you’ve been drinking.
EERO:There’s nothing to say about my drinking.
LEA:You’re a temperance activist.
EERO:So what?
LEA:You’ve begun staying out late.
EERO:Do you suspect something?
LEA:No.
EERO:I’m telling you, if you suspect me, I won’t respect you. That’s the way I am. Reprimands offend me.
LEA:No need to shout.
EERO:If you wouldn’t moralize, I’d feel better around you. That’s how you withhold your support from me. You must trust me, that’s the best way to help me get ahead.
LEA:I do trust you.
EERO:I suppose my personality doesn’t fall within the usual bounds. I want to do bad things. I’ll tell you everything. Sometimes I do bad things on purpose. At work, too. When I should be thanking someone, I change my tone of voice and blame him. Sometimes I decide to be honest and chuck a thing in the dirt, but then I suddenly get mixed up and start finding all kinds of nonexistent good sides to it. What do you say about that?
LEA:It’s dangerous.
EERO:But see, I’m no prophet of truth. I want to do bad things. You don’t understand it. I force others to see things my way. Hellish torment. If I decide to, I’ll shoot myself. I’ve thought about it often, because I’m so evil. You think so, too. You don’t like me any more.
LEA:Is this a good time for declarations of love?
EERO:I’m difficult, aren’t I, in my own way. I think probably many geniuses are that way.
Yes, he’s difficult. Also insecure, needy, emotionally dependent on Lea—and terrified of his own neediness, his dependence, which prompts him to defend against it through abuse, physical and emotional abuse of the one woman who sees his fears and suffers the brunt of his violence, his wife. He also flees her into the arms of other women, as he began to hint in that passage I quoted above (“Do you suspect something?”). He begins their marriage (of course) with melodramatic declarations of eternal fidelity—
EERO:Tämä mies, huomaa, on kömpelö talonpoika. Monta virhettä teen. Mutta uskollinen sinulle olen. En petä sinua, sen vannon. (43)
EERO:For remember that I am but an awkward peasant. I will make many mistakes. But I will be faithful to you. I’ll never cheat, that I swear to you.
—but it is not long before he is sleeping with their maids, probably with other women as well (the maids are all Lea finds out about). For the most part, he lies, claiming innocence and insisting defensively that Lea’s suspicions are her problem, not his; but at one point, speaking hypothetically but still rather revealingly, he sets up an incredibly double-binding justification for infidelity:
EERO:Pelkäätkö että petän sinua?
LEA:Minä luotan sinuun.
ERRO:Jos minä pettäisin sinua, merkitsisi se vain sitä, että minä arvioin sinut niin korkealle, etten tahdo sinun tuomiotasi kuulla, otapas se huomioon. Jos minäen vaivautuisi pettämään, niin minä väheksyisin sinua, otapas se huomioon. Minun ei olisi pitänyt koskaan tunnustaa sinulle mitään.
LEA:Ethän sinä ole mitään tunnustanut.
EERO:Kun minä puhun avomielisesti, niin se vie minulta itseluottamuksen. Minä elän kuin alennustilassa edessäsi.
LEA:Enhän minä ole vaarallinen.
EERO:Minä annan elämyksilleni sen arvon, minkä tahdon. Ne eivät sinuun kuulu. Kun olen luullut, että ne kuuluvat, olen tehnyt pahimman virheen.
LEA:Etpä sitä virhettä ole tehnyt. (64)
EERO:Are you afraid I’ll cheat on you?
LEA:I trust you.
EERO:If I cheated on you, it would only mean that I have so much respect for you that I couldn’t bear to be judged by you, remember that. If I didn’t bother cheating on you, I would be undervaluing you, remember that. I never should have confessed anything to you.
LEA:You never did.
EERO:When I speak openly, it robs me of my self-confidence. I am humiliated before you.
LEA:I’m not dangerous.
EERO:I give my experiences whatever value I wish. They’re none of your business. If I’ve ever thought they did I made the worst mistake of my life.
LEA:That’s a mistake you’ve never made.
In an allegorical reading, this exchange clearly points to the translator’s abusive fidelity as theorized by Lewis and Venuti: “If I cheated on you, if I rendered you abusively, it would only mean that I have so much respect for you that I couldn’t bear to be judged by you,” which is to say that abuse is the highest form of respect. Infidelity is the highest form of fidelity. “If I didn’t bother cheating on you, I would be undervaluing you, remember that”: precisely the argument that Lewis makes about abusive translation. Fidelity is a “weak, servile” (Lewis 1985) approach to a text or a partner, a “slave morality” (Nietzsche) clung to by the unwashed masses, by boring common uncultured people who privilege, as Lewis says, “what Derrida calls, in ‘La mythologie blanche,’ the us-system, that is, the chain of values linking the usual, the useful, and common linguistic usage” (40). The “strong, forceful” translator, to paraphrase Eero, “gives his experiences whatever value he wishes. They’re none of the source author’s business.” Or as Eero explains to Lea:
EERO:Minä vihaan ihmistä koko sydämestäni.
LEA:Sinä puhut julkisuudessa toisin.
EERO:Puhun heidän kieltänsä. Se on epätoivoista valhetta. Ihmiset, mitä sinä tiedät ihmisestä. Ihmisellä on haluja, joista sinun tapaisellasi ei ole aavistustakaan. Hänen sisimpäänsä kätkeytyy halu murhata. Peto on ihminen, peto. Siksi ihmistä pitää käsitellä kataluudella ja viekkaudella. Ja jos ei auta, on ase, ase.
LEA:Sinähän olet rauhan mies.
EERO:Estääkö se minua olemasta ihmistutkija? Minä olen kansanvaellusajan ja kaaoksen mies. Minussa asuu suuri muodostamaton henki. Tulisipa sota ja sekasorron ajat, minä huudattaisin itseni keisariksi.
LEA:Miksi puhut noin?
EERO:Miehen pitäisi olla orja, kotiorja, tämän lauman elättäjä, mutta se ei riitä, vaaditaan vielä, että mies ei saisi ollenkaan elää enää, sen pitäisi olla kone, elatuskone vain, ja yksin kotia varten.
LEA:Mitä sinulta vielä puuttuu? Vapautta?
EERO:Idiootti. Minä sanon, että oli suuri erehdys koko avioliitto. (63–64)
EERO:I hate humanity with all my heart.
LEA:That’s not what you say in public.
EERO:I speak their language. It’s a desperate lie. Humanity, what do you know about it? A human being has wants that your type can’t even imagine. Deep down he wants to murder. Humans are beasts, I mean it, beasts. That’s why they have to be handled with cunning and deceit. And if that doesn’t work, with a gun.
LEA:You’re a pacifist.
EERO:Does that mean I can’t be a student of human nature? I’m a man of the great migrations, a man of chaos. I harbor within me a spirit of formlessness. If a time of anarchy and war would only come, I’d have myself hailed Caesar.
LEA:Why do you talk that way?
EERO:They expect a man to be a slave, a house slave, supporter of the herd, but that’s not enough, now they expect him to stop living, to be a machine, a support-machine, dedicated to the home.
LEA:What do you still lack? Freedom?
EERO:Idiot. I’m saying the whole marriage was a mistake.35
This is typical grandiose self-dramatization, of course—“a man of the great migrations, a man of chaos” who harbors “a spirit of formlessness”— but it is not mere rhetoric. Eero may only vent his violent impulses on his wife, not on all humanity; but Lea has no reason to doubt the reality of those impulses. (And in any case he makes it crystal clear to her that his genocidal ranting about “all humanity” is just a slightly exaggerated way of saying that “the whole marriage was a mistake.”) He pounds her with his fists, strangles her, holds her head under water till she begins to run out of air, and, at the end of act 1, turns a hug into a viselike squeeze that breaks her ribs and causes her to miscarry.
And in each case he portrays his abuse as her fault; she drives him to it by suspecting him, by not trusting him, by reprimanding him, by looking at him fearfully. In Freudian terms one would say that he is making a transference onto her of both his mother’s abusiveness (the mother’s attempts to smash his refusals to be smashed by her abuse) and his own badness, the evil little boy that his parents created through their attempts to destroy it. By her very existence, and especially the fact that she’s a woman and a mother, Lea reminds him of his mother, and that awakens all his anxieties, so he reacts as his parents did when he awakened their anxieties, by striking out at the trigger. Beating Lea, Eero is beating both his mother and himself. His abuse is aimed simultaneously at defending his beleaguered sense of self against a mother who threatens to engulf him and at smashing the little-boy self that caused his mother (and father, presumably, though we never hear about him in the play) so much anxiety.36
However, in the allegorical reading I’m setting up the source author is not the originary source of the abuse, and thus not to blame for it. This is, in other words, not a case of blaming the victim, blaming a woman for a man’s violence. Like Lea’s parents, Eero’s parents are mere vehicles of abuse, not its inventors, its authors, its originators. The source author channels the source culture’s abuse. The target author or translator channels the target culture’s abuse. There is no reason for an author or parent to create an abusive text or child unless that author was himself or herself first abused. Abuse is systemic and dynastic, passed on from generation to generation in a complex economy of self-defense and displaced revenge, protecting the self from abuse and simultaneously transferring the abuse to a surrogate victim, who becomes the next generation’s abuser.
What this gives us allegorically, then, is a pair of distinct but intimately intertwined streams or dynasties of abuse, associated in the vehicle of my allegory with Lea and Eero, the wife and husband, the woman and man, and in its tenor with the source and target cultures. Abuse, in this perspective, is not (merely) individualistic violence visited by one person on another, but a systemic violence that is compulsively passed on from one person to another—a “gift,” to put it cynically in terms of Eero’s Christmas gift to Lea, that keeps on giving (and taking away).
This suggests at least three complications for my allegorical correspondences: (a) Following Eero, that the abusive translator too must be understood as a carrier or channeler of abuse; (b) following Lea, that the various forms of fidelity, no matter how submissive, must be understood systemically not as an alternative to abuse but as a dynamic link in the chain of abuse (a codependency); and (c) following Poju, that target texts/ readers/cultures are not mere victims of abuse but themselves future or potential abusers as well.
(a) Abused by his parents—whom we never see in the play, and hear very little about—Eero abuses his wife and his son. This suggests allegorically that the abusive translator displaces the source text’s abuse onto the target text, as Lewis said: “the translator’s aim is to rearticulate analogically the abuse that occurs in the original text, thus to take on the force, the resistance, the densification, that this abuse occasions in its own habitat, yet, at the same time, also to displace, remobilize, and extend this abuse in another milieu” (43). It also suggests that the translator is conditioned by the target culture to desire this displacement, remobilization, and extension, and conditioned not only to desire it and to do it but to naturalize it as well, to treat it as so natural, so obvious, so mundane a part of “the translator’s aim” as not to be worthy of notice, let alone comment. That’s just what the translator does.
For this to be possible, of course, the abusive translator must have been conditioned to abuse by the target culture—or, in the vehicle of the allegory, Eero must have been conditioned to abuse by his parents (they by theirs, etc.)—and must thus be perceived (andjudged, if at all) not alone, but against this systemic cultural backdrop. This is a mistake I made in The Translator’s Turn, treating various forms of abusive translation (which I didn’t call by that name; there it was synecdoche, irony, metalepsis, subversion, aversion, perversion, etc.) as life-style decisions, as it were, things individual translators just sort of decided to try on their own, to make a point, or because they felt like it. The dynastic model of abusanalysis, if you’ll permit the coinage, insists that abuse has no individual origin: it flows through individuals like a virus or a parasite, using them as the medium of its dissemination.
One conclusion that we might want to draw from this is that interlingual abuse is preceded and conditioned by intralingual abuse: the abusive translator is shaped for his or her task by target-cultural abuse. True, this may not invariably be so; in a bilingual and bicultural family, for example, interlingual and intralingual abuse would presumably be channeled concurrently. But because small children are normatively constructed as speakers/ abusers of a given language in that language, through that language, it seems fair to say that intralingual abuse is at least logically prior to interlingual abuse.
(In this sense we should expect the three points I’m enumerating here, a-b-c, batterer-enabler-child, to come full circle, the batterer learning to batter by being abused as a child. More of this in a moment, under c.)
My initial response to Huojuva talo, for example, was conditioned by my exposure to “strange” (abusive?) texts in English, such as Waiting for Godot, Flannery O’Connor’s Wise Blood, and so on. I probably wouldn’t even have accepted the translation job Wendy offered, with only the vaguest promise of pay, if she hadn’t described the play as weird, warped, grotesque, and her planned production as equally weird and warped—and if I hadn’t been predisposed to prefer that sort of text over more submissive or faithful (nonabusive) ones. I hadn’t even seen the script at that point, but I projected onto it my past (largely positive) experiences of strange writing in English (intralingual abuse), and decided that I wanted to do the translation (interlingual abuse) whether I got paid for it or not.
And how far back did my positive experiences of strange writing in English go? Probably as far back as literacy. I remember loving a book of puzzles and riddles and nonsense rhymes when I was about six or seven, loving it so intensely, in fact, that I can still recite from memory today many of the things I read in it as a small child:
One bright day in the middle of the night
Two dead boys stood up to fight.
Back to back they faced each other,
Drew their swords and shot each other.
A deaf policeman heard the noise,
Came and shot the two dead boys.
If you don’t believe this lie is true,
Ask the blind man, he saw it too.
And before that: my father’s bad puns, my mother’s love of made-up words such as “nackapoochy” for napkin, all the silly word and tone games my brothers and I played when we were small. This is the aspect of language that Jean-Jacques Lecercle calls the “remainder” repressed by linguists; one of the reasons I’ve never felt comfortable around linguists is that for me this is the most interesting part of language. Jill Levine’s book The Subversive Scribe, discussed in chapter 6, is among other things a celebration of this “abusive” language as well—of how her childish love for linguistic silliness helped create her as the translator of various strange Latin American writers like Severo Sarduy and G. Cabrera Infante. Conclusion: abusive translators are made, not born; they are shaped first by an abusive target culture, later perhaps (sometimes simultaneously) by an abusive source culture. They are vehicles of a culture of abuse, even when, in a given family dynamic, they seem to be the originary source of abuse.
(b) Lea’s long-suffering fidelity to Eero suggests some disturbing perspectives on translational fidelity as well. The established view in translation studies is that submissive fidelity to the source text is normal and normative, and abusive (in)fidelity is quite simply not translation; in this view my claim in (a) above, that the translator is conditioned to desire, carry out, and naturalize the remobilization of source-text abuse in the target language, is flat-out untrue. The translator is conditioned to desire, carry out, and naturalize not abuse but the stable transfer of source-language meaning to the target language. But Lea’s case, allegorized, suggests that the stable transfer of source-language meaning to the target language is a remobilization of abuse—just an idealized or euphemized one.
Part of this shift is built into the very dramatic and rhetorical structure of the play. Like Lea in the play, the play itself as a dramatic adaptation of Jotuni’s novel enacts a movement from silence to articulation (many of the novel’s interior monologues are spoken aloud in the play, Lea’s “dangerous” thoughts are increasingly voiced to her abuser’s face) that encodes fidelity as control: the play “speaks” the novel faithfully in very much the same mode as Lea “speaks” Eero, vocalizing the repressed or the hidden, but always in the repressor’s or hider’s best interests. Note, for example, in this next passage how Lea articulates Eero’s own submerged healthy or good (nonabusive, perhaps even submissive—he does give in to Lea here) impulses, convincing him not to kill her not because her life is so valuable but because it’s dangerous for him:
(Lea kerää lapset syliin, pyörähtelee niiden kanssa, asellelee sitten nukkekaappiasetelmaan. Eeron työpöydälle on syttynyt valo. Eero on tullul. Eero on kumartuneena valon yli, kirjoittaa jotakin siinä. Lea menee Eeron luo.)
LEA:Mitä sinä kirjoitit äsken, näytä minulle.
EERO:Mitä se sinulle kuuluu.
LEA:(tunnistaa vekselin) Täytyvkö meidän tehdä vekseleitä?
EERO:Niin kuin ei olisi ennen tehty.
LEA:Miksi sinä valoa vasten kirjoitit? Kenen nimeä sinä kirjoitit?
EERO:Jos et ole vaiti, minä lyön sinua.
LEA:Lyö, minä tahdon tietää sen.
EERO:No, miksi en sanoisi. Se oli Auliksen nimi. Minulla on siihen lupa.
LEA:Se ei ole totta. Sinä et saa. Sinä väärennät hänen nimensä.
EERO:Ole nyt vaiti. Minä olen tehnyt sen ennenkin.
LEA:Onko Aulis tiennyt?
EERO:Mitenkä ei olisi tiennyt? On hän maksanutkin. Mitä hänelle merkitsee jokin viisi tai kymmenen tuhatta?
LEA:Eero, minä kiellän sinua.
EERO:Ja minä kiellän sinua sotkeutumasta asioihini.
(Eero riuhlaisee Leaa käsivarsista niin, että Lea lennählää nukkehaappia vasten. Syntyy ääni kuin vaijeri kiristyisi liikaa. Eero riuhtaisee Lean pystyyn, vääntää häntä käsistä ja kuristaa sitten kurkusta. Nukkekaappiin on syttynyt valo, se huojuu edestakaisin. Ehkä sitä nyt voisi kohdata paikallinen sadekuuro.)
LEA:Älä kurista, tule järkiisi. (Eero helliltää ja tuijottaa Leaa niin kuin unesta herännyt, katsoo kuin miettisi.) Ei niin, Eero, ei enää. Ei tällä tavoin. Itsesi tähden. Tämä on vaarallista.
EERO:Tiedän sen.
LEA:Sinulta irtosi takista nappi. Minä ompelen sen kiinni.
EERO:Kaikki sinä näet. (Riisuu takkinsa.)
LEA:Tämä ei käy päinsä. Anna pois se vekseli.
EERO:En anna.
LEA:Minä soitan Aulikselle. Lyö minua, mutta älä harjoita väärennystä.
EERO:Kuule, älä puhuttele minua tuossa äänilajissa, se on vaarallista. Minä varoitan sinua, pysy minun asioistani erilläsi.
LEA:Ymmärrän. Mutta on asioita, joissa minun mahdolliset etuni eivät saa olla esteenä. Tässä on kysymys sinusta ja asioista, jotka ovat meidän yläpuolellamme.
EERO:Helvetti. (Ottaa vekselinja repii sen.) Tuossa on. (70–71)
(Lea takes the children into her arms, spins around with them, arranges them in the doll closet. A light has appeared at Eero’s desk. Eero is back. Eero is bent over the light, writing something. Lea goes to Eero.)
LEA:What were you just writing, show me.
EERO:None of your business.
LEA:(recognizes the promissory note) Do we have to borrow money?
EERO:As if we hadn’t before.
LEA:What were you writing under the light? Whose name was that?
EERO:Shut up or I’ll hit you.
LEA:Hit me then. I want to know.
EERO:Why shouldn’t I tell you? It’s Aulis’s name. I have his permission.
LEA:I don’t believe it, you mustn’t. You’re forging his name.
EERO:Stop it. I’ve done it before.
LEA:Does Aulis know?
EERO:How could he not know? He’s paid, too. What does five or ten thousand mean to him?
LEA:Eero, I won’t let you do it.
EERO:I won’t let you interfere in my business.
(Eero yanks on Lea’s arm so that she goes careening into the doll closet. There is a noise like a cable being pulled too taut. Eero pulls her to her feet, twists her arms and then chokes her. A light has come on in the doll closet, it sways back and forth. Maybe a local rain shower could hit it now.)
LEA:Don’t strangle me, come to your senses. (Eero loosens his grip and stares at Lea as if waking from sleep, looks at her thoughtfully.) That’s right, Eero, no more. Not like this. For your own sake. This is dangerous.
EERO:I know it.
LEA:A button came off your coat. I’ll sew it back on.
EERO:You notice everything. (Takes off his coat.)
LEA:This won’t do. Give the promissory note away.
EERO:I won’t.
LEA:I’ll call Aulis. Hit me, but don’t forge other people’s signatures.
EERO:Listen, don’t take that tone with me, it’s dangerous. I’m warning you, stay out of my affairs.
LEA:I understand. But there are things that shouldn’t be affected by what’s in my best interest. This is about you and matters that are above us both.
EERO:Oh hell. (Takes the note and tears it up.) There.
Like many battered spouses, Lea knows that her abuser is most tractable after he has battered her, and so encourages him to get right to it— not only to get it over with, but to skip straight to the phase in which he is most susceptible to her control. By voicing faithfully not her own needs and desires but his, his best interests, she finds a surreptitious channel for the satisfying of those very needs and desires that she seems to deny. In fact, by urging him first to abuse her, she sets the stage for his post-abuse obedience, because to abuse a victim who encourages abuse is to obey her. Obey me in what you want and you will find it harder to disobey me in what I want. An abuse codependent’s dependency or addiction is not, in other words, to abuse, but to the minimal control that submission to abuse yields. Everyone needs to feel at least partially in control of her or his life; total control-deprivation leads rapidly to madness. And so an abuse victim survives the abuse both physically and emotionally by developing surreptitious channels of control that are not always very effective and involve enormous amounts of humiliation and pain and suffering, but that do nevertheless make it possible (and even, ultimately, perversely attractive, even necessary) to stay with the abuser.
The obvious allegorical corollary to this is that the translator, too, has traditionally been relegated to positions of minimal control, idealized not as a fully competent and creative human being capable of making intelligent and independent choices but as a transfer-machine, a dead thing, an object, an instrument (like a window). In a striking parallel Eero uses Lea to edit his articles but (especially in the novel) grows angry with her and stops asking for her help when she begins to show signs of being good at the work, when she begins suggesting ways of improving his writing. Because many humans, especially as Western thought comes increasingly to emphasize the uniqueness of each individual (soul), experience this instrumentalization as abusive, as an assault on their full humanity, translators who have consented to the “abuse” of being a source-language author’s “faithful interpreter” have typically managed to find ways of converting fidelity into a manipulative codependency, a subtle channel of control disguised as neutral instrumentality:
He couldn’t possibly mean this; I’ll correct his error silently and go on …
Surely he meant this part to be consistent with the rest of the piece, and would want me to fix it up for him …
He always says that I understand him better than he understands himself anyway …
Note, though, what I’ve done: I’ve switched the allegorical identifications between Eero and Lea, associating the translator with the faithful wife and the source text/author with the abusive husband. This brings to mind Lori Chamberlain’s remarks on the ideological engenderment of Western thought about translation, in which the translation is only imaged as a woman if it is beautiful but faithless and the translator is imaged as a woman only if subservient. In the abusive interpersonal dynamic between the batterer and the codependent victim, the former is normatively male and the latter female; in the abusive intertextual dynamic between the author and the translator, the latter is normatively male only when abusive (“strong” and “forceful,” in Lewis’s terms) and normatively female only when submissively faithful (“weak” and “servile”).
The interchangeability implicit in the codependency suggests also, of course, that each harbors a bit of the other: the abusive translator a terror of his own neediness and vulnerability, against which he defends with abuse; the submissively faithful translator a need to retain some control in a dehumanizing situation, which she finds through “correcting” the author’s inconsistencies. Each develops strategies for not becoming the other: the abusive translator projects his repressed vulnerability onto the source text and resolves to rise above it through sovereign strength and force (my translation will be so explosively brilliant that nobody will even understand it, let alone be able to condemn it as a failure); the submissively faithful translator projects her repressed need for stability and consistency and control onto the source text and resolves to find it there even when it is lacking (in my translation the author will become better than he ever was in the original, become in fact more fully himself, less undermined by passing lapses and human failures).
The conclusion toward which these observations inexorably lead, of course, is that all translation is abusive—or at least caught up in a web of abuse. Actual physical or emotional abuse in the world of relationships, the sort of “strong, forceful” translation that Lewis theorizes as abusive in his article, is in this sense only one expression of abusiveness, one way in which the violence inherent in the system is channeled. “Weak, servile” translation, fidelity as it has been idealized by sixteen hundred years of hegemonic translation theory, is conditioned by abuse—for how else would it become weak and servile except by being conditioned to servility, and how else would it become slavish except by being enslaved?—and reflects that abusive history in its repressive attempts to avoid the appearance of perpetrating it, passing it on.
(c) Who is the victim of abusive translation? Cui malo? Who suffers? This question is almost invariably begged by theorists of abusive translation, probably because it’s a hard one to pin down. Does the source-language author suffer? This is the usual answer, especially in warnings against mistranslation, bad translation, other traditional abuses: the source-language author deserves the very best translation she or he can get, it would be unfair to inflict your idiosyncratic interpretation on the author, who has no way of fighting back, and so on. But it is hard to imagine scenarios in which the source-language author does actually suffer. Perhaps at a conference, where the source-language author reads a target-language version of her or his paper—and the translation is so abusive that the author is humiliated? People jeer, laugh, or just sit there in stony silence: is the source-language author then a victim of translation abuse?
What people usually mean when they say that the source-language author suffers from bad translations is that his or her reputation suffers— what Michel Foucault calls the author-function suffers, the “author” not as person but as social construct. And sometimes a living author identifies so strongly with that author-function that any blow to it is felt as a blow to the person. A student of mine in Finland once did a study of the American translation of Väinö Linna’s Tuntematon sotilas (“The Unknown Soldier”) and found that about a third of the book had been omitted, paragraphs had been moved around, new characters had been invented, old characters were made to say things that were not in the Finnish original, and so forth. After he wrote up his findings for me, he sent Linna a copy of his paper, and Linna immediately initiated legal proceedings to sue the translator and to block further publication of the translation. Surely in this case one might say that the source-language author was a victim of translation abuse as well?
Then again, in what sense is it meaningful to say that Homer suffers from an abusive translation of the Iliad or the Odyssey? How does Shakespeare suffer when his plays (translated intra- or interlingually) are modernized or made to serve topical political interests? We like to say, walking out of a particularly abusive production, that Shakespeare is rolling in his grave; is there any sense in which that is true?
It seems to me that the primary (perhaps only) sufferer in these cases is not the source-language author but some target-language reader or viewer who feels compelled to identify with that author—someone, perhaps, who has read the work in the original and cherishes it so deeply as to find all translations of it abusive; someone who takes the author to be a kind of spiritual forebear, a mentor, a model, an internalized simulacrum of the self, which feels diminished whenever the author is demeaned. Matthew Arnold defending Homer against an abusive translation by Francis Newman is perhaps actually defending not Homer (who is not only nearly three millennia in his grave but possibly a legendary or generic figure, no real person at all) but an idealized self-image, a “plain but noble” Matthew Arnold projected back into the mists of antiquity.
And the allegorical reading I’ve been setting up of Tottering House suggests that abusive translation is definitively directed not at abusers but at surrogate victims, target-language readers rather than source-language authors—that abuse is most characteristically not avenged on its perpetrator but passed on to a new generation, a group innocent of violence but conditioned to it, created as potential future abusers, by the abuse. This is most clearly evident in Eero’s battering of his son Poju (or Boy):37
EERO:Seisotko sinä siinä äitiäsi vartioimassa? Sinustahan oikea naisten sankari tuleekin. Sinä viettelet vielä tyttöjä. Muista silloin isääsi.
POJU:En muistele. Minusta ei tule sinun tapaistasi.
LEA:Poju!
(Eero lyö Pojua.)
POJU:Lyö vielä, niin äiti pääsee vähemmällä. (Eero lyö uudestaan.) Kiusaaja.
LEA:Jätä.
POJU:Anna sen lyödä. Näinhän isä tekee, oikea isä.
EERO:Ulos, ulos, pois heti.
POJU:Ihmispeto.
LEA:Eero, tule järkiisi.
POJU:Anna hänen tapella, eihän hän muuta kunnolleen osaakaan.
LEA:Minun sydämeni revitte.
(Hakkaaminen jatkuu, Pojukin alkaa vastata, mutta hän häviää: hänennenästään alkaa valua verta. Se riittää Eerolle. Toisaalta näkyy, ettei Eero enää kauan voi käydä turvallisesti Pojun kimppuun; ensi kerraüa hän häviäisi.)
EERO:Sinun kasvattisi. En ikinä anna anteeksi.
(Eero menee työpöytänsä luo, hävittää jonkin paperin.) (82–83)
EERO:Are you standing there guarding your mother? What a ladies’ hero you’ll be. You’ll be out seducing girls soon. When you do, remember your father.
BOY:I won’t. I’m not going to be like you.
LEA:Boy!
BOY:Hit me again, make it easier on mother. (Eero hits him again.) Tormentor.
LEA:Leave it alone.
BOY:Let him hit me. That’s what a father does, a real father.
EERO:Out, out, get out this instant.
BOY:Monster.
LEA:Eero, get ahold of yourself.
BOY:Let him fight, he’s no good at anything else.
LEA:You’re tearing up my heart.
(The fighting continues, Boy starts giving as good as he gets, but he loses, his nose starts bleeding, and that’s enough for Eero. On the other hand it’s clear that Eero won’t be able to beat up on Boy safely much longer; next time he will lose.)
EERO:You made him like this. I’ll never forgive you.
(Eero goes to his desk, loses a paper.)
“I’m not going to be like you,” Poju tells his father, but when the fighting starts—deliberately provoked by Poju—he fights back and almost wins. Poju is already like his father. In the very act of calling his father a “tormentor,” Poju becomes himself a tormentor.
But how can we apply this to translation? Philip Lewis tacitly portrays abusive translation as a victimless crime: the translator simply perpetrates abuse by deviating from normal usage. Or if there is a victim, it is an abstract one: language, or a text. And maybe he’s right. Maybe there is no human victim; maybe the reason he is so casual with the term “abuse” is that no one suffers, no one is victimized. Maybe this whole abusanalysis of translation I’ve been developing is predicated on a false analogy between translation abuse, which is abstract, linguistic, philosophical, and therefore victimless, and physical and emotional abuse, whose physical and emotional ravages we see all around us. Maybe, to put it bluntly, I’m blowing this all out of proportion.
Then again, what about the ethical imperative that runs like a scarlet thread all through the foreignist literature from Schleiermacher to the present: that target-language readers are indolent, comfort-loving creatures who must be forcefully dragged out of their narrow lives into the broader world of foreign cultures? Weak, servile translations only reinforce the weakness and servility already systematically instilled in these readers by an assimilative, ethnocentric culture that panders to their slothful, infantile needs; what they need is a rude wake-up call from the outside, a healthy dose of foreignized translations, abusive translations that will slap them around a little. There is almost a Spartan asceticism lurking behind these ethical imperatives, a military sense that target-language readers’ flabby cultural bodies need to be firmed up in a boot camp of the mind, where a foreignized source-language author as drill sergeant will tone up their muscles, discipline their wants and needs, organize their lives.
And like Eero’s conflicted feelings about his “mamma’s boy” son Poju, there seems to be in these theorists a sense that the mass of target-language readers are at once slackers who are beneath their contempt and potential followers, imitators, finally peers. To put that differently, foreignists seem to want both to drive target-language readers away and to bring them closer—to use their abuse both as dismissals and as encouragements, both to block and to inspire emulation.38 A target-language reader who feels sufficiently insulted, even (though this is harder to imagine) traumatized or destroyed, by an abusive translation (or translation theory) may discover that the only ray of light in a dark world is the abuser, the source of contempt that is also, by extension, the source of new possibilities, higher aims, nobler pursuits. The abuser abuses me not because he is a frightened little person who can’t deal with his fear, but because he knows my potential, knows what all I could be if only I would surrender to his disciplinary regimen, and learn to become more like him. Maybe I too can learn to like difficult foreign texts! Maybe I too can open myself up to the foreign, the different, the alien, the difficult—and in so doing become a better person, more perceptive, more sensitive to subtle nuances, more willing to enter into an unfamiliar situation.
Lest it seem as though I am simply heaping abuse on abusists like Lewis and Venuti, however, let us not forget the ways in which submissive codependency too, traditional fidelity, is grounded in abuse. Lea too, the play’s “faithful interpreter,” abuses her son Poju in and by the very process of attempting to defend and protect him against Eero’s abuse. In this passage Eero has just beaten Poju with a crowbar and the boy has had a seizure:
POJU:Äiti.
LEA:No, lapsi, nuku nyt, äiti istuu tässä koko ajan, koko ajan, koko ajan. Ei mitään hätää. (Jatkaa potilaan hoivaamista. Poju kohottautuu istumaan.) No, Poju. Täytyy oppia vaikenemaan, eikö niin? Ajatella voi, mutta täytyy vaieta.
POJU:Niin, äiti.
LEA:Tuleeko sinun kylmä?
POJU:Ei.
LEA:Ja katsos, Poju, me emme muistele tätä pahalla, emmehän?
POJU:Niin.
LEA:Me opimme anteeksi antamaan.
POJU:Ei. Kun hänen kätensä sattuu minun käteeni, niin minua puistattaa, ja minä ajattelen käärmettä ja sisiliskoa.
LEA:Olet paha.
POJU:Minä taidan olla paha. Minä halveksin häntä.
LEA:Etkö osaa edes vaieta?
POJU:Ja valehdella? Te tahdolte, että minun pitää oppia valehtelemaan. En rupea.
LEA:Se ei ole valhetta.
POJU:On se.
LEA:Katsos, minim isä sen, että pikku siskot, Pia ja Tytti tarvitsevat äitiä.
POJU:Tarvitsevat. Ja minäkin tarvitsen.
LEA:Niin, Poju siis ymmärtää. Sinä olet pieni vielä, eikä sinun tarvitse näitä kokonaan ymmärtää. Mutta sinä teet palvelusta jo sillä, ettet hyökkää mielessäsikään.
POJU:Niin.
LEA:Että sinä pidätyt, et sotkeudu meidän isojen asioihin, sillä se vahingoittaisi minua. Nyt isä luulee, että minä yllytän sinua, ja se on paha. Isä tuntee, että ympärillä on vihollislauma, ja niinhän ei ole. Me rakastamme häntä. Hän on meidän. Me odotamme, että hän ymmärtää sen. Tulee aika, jolloin me kuulumme yhteen niin kuin oikea perhe.
POJU:Tuleeko varmasti se aika?
LEA:Iso poikani, mitä varten puhua niin paljon.
POJU:Äiti, minulle voit puhua. Kenellekä sinä sitten puhuisit. Ja minä ymmärrän. Kaikki mitä te isän kanssa puhelette, minä ymmärrän.
LEA:Mitäpä niissä on ymmärtäm¡stä.
POJU:Sinä luulet, että lapsi ei ymmärrä. Sinä olet varmaan unohtanut, mitä itse lapsena ajattelit.
LEA:Kultaseni. (72–73)
BOY:Mommy.
LEA:There, child, sleep now, mommy will stay right here, right here, right here. Everything will be all right. (Keeps caring for her patient. Boy sits up.) There, Boy. You have to learn to hold your tongue, don’t you? You can think, but you must hold your tongue.
BOY:Yes, mommy.
LEA:Are you cold?
BOY:No.
LEA:And remember, Boy, we won’t bear a grudge over this, will we?
BOY:No.
LEA:We have to learn to forgive.
BOY:No. When his hand touches my hand, I shudder, and think of snakes and lizards.
LEA:You’re evil.
BOY:I must be evil. I despise him.
LEA:Can’t you even hold your tongue?
BOY:And lie? You want me to learn to lie. I won’t.
LEA:It’s not a lie.
BOY:Yes it is.
LEA:Listen, my father said to me, “patience.” You do understand that your little sisters, Pious and Girl, need their mother?
BOY:They do. And I do too.
LEA:Yes, you do understand. You’re still small and don’t need to understand everything yet. But you’d help me a lot by not even thinking bad thoughts about him.
BOY:Yes.
LEA:By holding back, by staying out of grownups’ affairs, that way you won’t hurt me. Now daddy thinks I put you up to it, and that’s bad. Daddy feels surrounded by enemies, and that’s not true, is it. We love him. He is ours. We’ll wait for him to realize that. There will come a time when we’ll belong together like a real family.
BOY:Do you promise?
LEA:My big boy, why talk so much?
BOY:Mommy, you can talk to me. Who else can you talk to? And I understand. Everything you and daddy talk about, I understand.
LEA:What is there to understand.
BOY:You think a child can’t understand. You’ve probably forgotten what you thought when you were little.
LEA:Sweetheart.
“You have to learn to hold your tongue, don’t you?” Lea says at first. “You can think, but you must hold your tongue.” Even that is problematic enough, as Poju himself points out—holding his tongue means lying— but Lea soon realizes that even this isn’t enough: “But you’d help me a lot by not even thinking bad thoughts about him.” The important thing is to “position yourself correctly” (“asettua oikein” [43]), as Lea promises Eero she will do early in their marriage: this is the lesson Lea knows that she must learn, and it is the lesson she strives to teach her son. And for Lea the correct position is one from which it is possible to idealize the abuser and his abuse, with as much sincerity, or at least the feel of sincerity, or at the very least the appearance of sincerity, as one can muster. “We won’t bear a grudge over this, will we?” We—you and I, the mother who has already learned to position herself correctly and the son who is still shy of that goal—will not feel the anger that surges inside of us, for that anger is dangerous, literally life-threatening. It must be squelched. “Daddy feels surrounded by enemies, and that’s not true, is it. We love him. He is ours. We’ll wait for him to realize that.” That’s why he treats us like this: not because he is evil, nor because we are, but because he hasn’t learned to trust yet. He’s sick, and must get better—and we must not only wait for him to get better but help create a healthy atmosphere conducive to his cure, one in which he doesn’t feel surrounded by enemies. The double bind here is obvious: we didn’t make him the way he is, but he stays the way he is because we aren’t more understanding, more loving, more tolerant of his actions, which is to say we did help make him the way he is, and go on contributing to his sickness by not surrendering utterly to his abuse. We are at once the cause, the target, and the only possible cure for his sickness. If we could only stop resisting him, stop looking accusingly or fearfully at him, he would see that we love him and stop abusing us.
And barring that, of course, we will at least have learned not to feel abused. What Lea thus teaches Poju to do, of course—or tries to teach him to do, without much success—is to idealize abuse as no abuse at all. If you position yourself correctly, if you learn not to react to abuse with anger, you can learn to see abuse as love, as well-deserved discipline, as anything but the violent assault on your humanity that it is. In the same way translators too have been taught to idealize their subservient instrumentality with respect to the source-language author as a nonabusive situation, to enable the abuse by respecting or glorifying it—and what they teach their children, target-language readers, is the same codependent respect for source-language classics. In this sense a traditional faithful (sense-for-sense, domesticating, nonabusive) translation is the translator’s enabling pipeline through to target-language readers, the channel of her or his codependency: It is the pedagogical channel through which she or he teaches them to idealize their abusers, not only the classics but the target-language cultural authorities (especially teachers) who promote them.39
But are things really as bad as I’ve been suggesting? The portrait I’ve painted here is pretty bleak: Philip Lewis takes a passing remark of Derrida’s and turns it into a useful heuristic for the translation of difficult texts; I blow that up into an indictment not only of all translation but of all social interaction, all of it steeped in the dynamics of abuse. Every translator has been conditioned to abuse by an abusive society and, depending upon the specific convergence of abusive forces in the past and present not only of the translator but of the source-language author and target-language culture as well, expresses that conditioning through either abusive (in)fidelity or submissive fidelity; in either case abusiveness is passed on to another generation of readers. Is this a realistic, or even in any way useful, picture of translation in society today?
It is and it isn’t. I suggest that the abusiveness I’ve been exploring is not so much endemic to translation, an intrinsic property of translation proper, as it is what Wilhelm Reich would have called a group fantasy, a mass psychosis, programmed into all or most of us by a society that does idealize abuse, in the sense both of glorifying and of naturalizing and repressing it. If this is true, the dynastic web of abusive translation or translation-as-abuse is only real insofar as we all go on believing in it; but as Reich insists, that makes it very real indeed, because we do so patently believe in it and act it out in our daily personal and professional lives. There is an intensity to discussions of translation, a needy and anxious edge, that speaks worlds about the impulses that lie repressed just under the surface. Just what those impulses are, of course, it is difficult to say— and my attempts to flesh them out have been largely speculative, and partly divergent in their speculative directions as well. In The Translator’s Turn I imaged those impulses as theological, as driven by medieval Christian doctrine; in Translation and Taboo I traced them back to ancient taboos on touching sacred texts; here I have been identifying them with a dynastic web of abusive double binds. All of these models seem to work, tentatively, as explanations for specific areas of the theory and practice of translation; all of them have forced me to bring to consciousness specific practices that need explanation. But all of them remain heuristics—not objective representations of the truth.
The question that exercises me most, however—and that seems hardest to answer—is whether there is any escape from these impulses. I see only two escapes; but then maybe I just don’t see far enough—far enough past dualistic solutions. Either this whole dynastic web of abuse is an illusion, a mere allegorical construct that I didn’t exactly invent but have here blown all out of proportion, through my allegorization of Tottering House, and it will vanish like smoke once we stop thinking translation through the play; or, if it is real, expanding groups of authors, translators, and readers will (have to) begin to liberate themselves and the social contexts and acts of translation from that web of abuse.
That first alternative could probably be fairly characterized as the liberal solution: don’t think about it and it will go away. It is in fact a solution that I find myself powerfully drawn to. Who is hurt when I translate? It seems almost absurd to speak of translation as abuse, especially widespread and all-pervasive abuse, abuse that damages everyone it touches. I play around with a poem, like the Haavikko I discussed in chapter 10, shift “fall silent” to “fall asleep”—and now all of a sudden I’m an abuser? Hah!
This is almost certainly the mind-set against which Lewis and his foreignist followers are reacting in their insistence on discussing translation in terms of abuse: mainstream thinkers about translation may cling to their euphemisms, may be addicted to their idealizations of a fundamentally violent process in the repressive terms of equivalence, fidelity, and so on, but we call a spade a spade. If this is in fact so, of course, my insistence on expanding their discussion of abuse through the Finnish play will have made these thinkers a little uneasy, because my argument is patently an attempt to extend the scope of their attack on euphemism so as to apply to their own discussions: they talk about abuse, but they are determined to portray abuse as a linguistic event that either has no victims or else victimizes abstract things like texts and languages for which we need feel (or need we?) no sympathy. The abusists will have heartily welcomed my suggestion that domestication or translational fidelity is just as grounded in abuse, in a codependent defense against abuse, as is foreignism or infidelity; they will have been much less happy with my insistence that the abusive fidelity that they celebrate is analogous to, indeed is part of the culture of, physical, emotional, and sexual abuse. And it may be necessary for them to “draw the line somewhere,” to protest that it is possible to advocate translational abuse without becoming complicitous in a larger abusive culture—without, for example, condoning (let alone celebrating) wife-battering or child abuse. But it is hard to imagine a convincing argument for this line that does not merely fall back into the prevailing euphemism. “Translation is nonabusive abuse. Translation is violence without violence.” Uh-huh, sure.
If we are going to talk about abusive translation at all, it seems to me, we are going to have to consider the full implications of the subject. We are going to have to admit that translation too is steeped in a culture of violence, that translation perpetuates and in some cases even glorifies that violence. It will do no good to protest that you didn’t mean abuse that way. The mere mention of abuse (or conquest, or invasion, or captivity, an uneasy trope for translation since Jerome) lets the cat out of the bag. We can repress the violence perpetrated by translation, we can idealize it as fidelity, until someone cries out, “But the emperor’s wearing no clothes!” Then the repressions come crashing down. Then the violence becomes apparent, and it becomes (almost) impossible to return to the lost state of repression. Then it requires a determined self-delusion to go back to believing in the purity or innocence of translation, the purity not only of the translator but of the source-language author and the target-language reader as well.
Which leaves us with the possibility of liberation: individual and collective liberation from the culture of abuse, the healing of abusive dynasties in our individual bodies and in the body politic as well. This utopian alternative seems impossible, even unimaginable; but as Fredric Jameson argues at the end of The Political Unconscious, without a utopian or positive hermeneutic to guide our moral approach to the unpleasantness we find (and analyze) all around us, negative hermeneutics (like this chapter so far) conduce to fatalism, quietism, despair. And while that may be all right with some people, I’m enough of a utopian thinker to want to fix the problem rather than just understanding it—even though I have no illusions about the realism of that desire, about my ability even to imagine, let alone successfully engineer, mass liberation from the culture of translation-as-abuse.
Still, one tries. And I think that one possible avenue of exploration might be through the concept of the three seals that I developed in The Translator’s Turn (34–35), a concept that may enable us to map the argument so far in such a way as to point forward toward a still amorphous liberatory future.
In the first seal, there is no abuse; or if there is, it’s not translation, has nothing to do with translation, is something else altogether. Maybe some people abuse texts, authors, readers, “translate” abusively, add things or subtract things or put some vicious personal slant on the text, but no decent, ethical translator would ever do such a thing, so there is no reason for serious translators or translation theorists to give such practices another thought—not even to deny it (which is not denial) (or repression).
Philip Lewis broke through that seal by making a persuasive case for the importance of abuse within translation; but he remained blocked by the second seal, which says that if you translate abusively, it’s just you, just your idiosomatic reaction to a difficult text that implicitly or explicitly presents itself as abusive. Maybe it’s a personal challenge for you, rising above the sea of mediocrity around you that keeps most translators enslaved to ordinary usage, flexing your muscles, identifying and operating on those “specific nubs in the original … that stand out as clusters of textual energy” (42–43), and thereby finding your own individual path to strength and force in your work.
Unconsciously, however, Lewis’s rhetoric points him past the second seal to the third, according to which all such responses to texts are ideosomatic, collectively regulated acts that are only superficially subject to individual choice. Where, after all, does Lewis’s association of abuse with strength and force come from, except from a hegemonic ideology that idealizes and naturalizes violence and domination? In my deconstruction of Lewis’s rhetoric, in my allegorization of “Tottering House,” I have essentially been mapping out the ideological or ideosomatic space blocked by the third seal, the area in which we are all controlled by our social environments, all programmed to be, and not to see that we are, and least of all to see that we have been programmed to be, the sick, repressed, self-regulated monsters that social hegemony needs us to be.
The question that lies before us, then, is: what lies beyond the third seal? From our position within the culture of abuse, this is almost unimaginable, like a person blind from birth trying to imagine what the world looks like. Chances are, however, liberation would proceed through the phases undergone by abuse survivors who work through their traumas to emotional health:
1.Discovery of the abuse, often through the surfacing of repressed memories;
2.rage at the abuser and his or her enablers (the mother who refused to see what was going on, for example);
3.various forms of symbolic revenge (imagined or dramatized murders, beatings, humiliations, imagined or real lawsuits aimed at bringing the abuser to that symbolic retribution called “justice”) directed at the abuser(s) rather than at a succession of surrogate victims;
4.various kinds of therapeutic body-work provoked and guided by this rage and these symbolic enactments;
5.the discovery that your own fearful vulnerable child self is lovable precisely because it is so pathetic, so hurt, that the abuser’s hatred of that child self doesn’t need to be translated and eternally retranslated into self-hatred;
6.the shocking discovery that the abuser himself or herself was (and if not dead, still is) fearful and vulnerable as well, that you are joined to your abuser by a commonality of fear and pain;
7.the ability to forgive the abuser, even to love the scared little child inside him or her;
8.and finally, the breaking down of the protective walls that keep you isolated from a hostile world, an opening up to trust and love for other people, a willingness to enter into relationships without fear or mistrust or the withholding of self, because you know that you can no longer be destroyed emotionally as you were as a child.
How these phases “translate” into translation, I’m not sure. By analogy with the therapeutic process outlined above it’s fairly easy to guess at the transformation that individual translators might undergo in their approach to a text, much harder to envision the larger social transformation that is needed to break the dynasties of abuse that will go on conditioning source-language authors to write abusively and target-language readers to read abusively long after individual translators have escaped the abusive web. The individual process might go something like this:
1.the discovery of abuse, by reading theories of abusive translation like Lewis’s or this one, by reading intelligent and honest accounts of that process of self-discovery like Jill Levine’s Subversive Scribe or through the sudden self-realization that seems to explode out of nowhere when trapped in a bad situation and desiring an out;
2.the exploration of that abuse, and of your own complicity in it, again through reading—in feminist and postcolonial studies of translation, for example, like those by Lori Chamberlain, Miriam Díaz-Diocaretz, Eric Cheyfitz, and Tejaswini Niranjana—or through an attentive engagement with the full disheartening complexity of your own practice (and the attitudes that underlie it) as a translator;
3.working through the conflicted emotions that vie for ascendancy in this process: the desire to get back at your abusers (for example, through abusive translations, which may in fact be useful steps along the way); the desire to be fair and not publicly denounce your abusers (which may relegate revenge to various forms of symbolic actions, for example, bad or vengeful or abusive translations that are not published, not sent out, etc.); and the increasing ability and willingness to forgive and even love your abusers, even if you go on hating the abuse; and finally,
4.the ability to pick and choose among translation jobs, and translation methods, only taking on those jobs that enable you to translate with love and trust, even if (and this is the interesting possibility that needs considerably more exploration) your love and trust for the source-language text requires that you expose its abusiveness and thus disabuse and empower target-language readers. 40
This is the thing: it may be possible (and this is sheer speculation, offered in the hope that someone can pick up the argument where I’m leaving off) that there are forms of what Lewis calls “abusive” translation that are actually “disabusive,” translations that reveal abusive strategies in texts without wholesale dogmatic condemnations or dismissals, and thus engage target-language readers too in the process of working through their abusive conditioning through their reading of an abusive text. This might be envisioned as a kind of homeopathic abuse, the translator’s willingness to give readers the source-language text’s abuse in controlled doses, with full awareness of what is being done, in order that they might learn to recognize and combat abuse in their own and other people’s interpretive and expressive activities.
But again, I’m not sure about this. The temptation is great to say “abuse is abuse, period,” and condemn this homeopathic approach too as just more of the same. And maybe it is. As I say, I have no full-fledged utopian alternatives to the abusive regime I’ve been exploring, only some tentative and speculative suggestions for further work—work, possibly, by you. In fact this chapter might even be described as itself a form of homeopathic abuse, abusing the notion of abusive translation not in order to condemn or dismiss Lewis and Venuti, even less to condemn or dismiss translation tout court, but to instill in my readers—you—a desire to go on working to make things better. If there is ever to be even a small-scale liberation from the culture of abuse, it will not, cannot, come from a single person; it has to come from ever-expanding groups, working together to improve our shared conditions for living.