1. See the end of chapter 2 in Translation and Taboo, “O Kannada,” and chapter 2 of Translation and Empire.
2. It is ironic, in fact, that Rener’s paean to the building-block theory of language should have as many missing or overturned building blocks as it does (Rener 1989). Given the massive quantity of minutiae he is dealing with, he (or his press) is clearly in need of a professional copy editor. In his bibliography, for example, he also omits the first half of Louis Kelly’s subtitle (“A History of Translation …”), the main title of Gaspard de Tende’s book (De la traduction, ou …), two whole articles (one by Draper, mentioned on p. 53, another by Glyn [not Glynn] Norton, mentioned on p. 271), and the d in Pollard. In the text the Earl of Roscommon is spelled now with one, now with two m’s; Wolfram Wilss’s name is Anglicized systematically as “Wills.” Humphrey is alphabetized between Huet and Horatius Flaccus. Throughout the text anthologized pieces are indicated with the misleading parenthetical notation “qtd in,” so that, for example, without checking the anthologies themselves one cannot tell whether Rener has seen the whole text of Trevisa’s “Dialogue Between a Lord and a Clerk Upon Translation” and Jerome’s letter to Pammachius (to name only two of several dozen cases) or mere quotes from them. (Pollard does give the whole text of Trevisa, but Marti only gives short excerpts of Jerome.) The reader who is unfamiliar with these anthologies is also at a loss to know whether the references to Trevisa’s Lord and Squire (230) and Jerome’s letter to Pacuvius (121) are Rener’s errors or Pollard’s and Marti’s (they are Rener’s). Another result of this practice is that for anthologized texts we are often given no title or original year of appearance/composition/publication, because the only bibliographical reference given is the anthology, not the original author, and textual references are to editor and page number.
All quotations throughout the book are given in the original language, except three quotations from Aristotle, one from Isocrates, one from Martianus Capella, and one from Thomas Sebillet; I assume either that Rener cannot read Greek or that Rodopi cannot typeset it, but there is no apparent reason to give one of the Aristotle quotations in Latin (218) or the Martianus Capella (Latin original; 147) and Sebillet (French original; 54) in English. If he provides an English translation for even one foreign-language original, it is difficult to justify not providing translations for all of them; conversely, if he provides originals for nearly every quotation in the book, it is difficult to justify Aristotle in Latin (from the Poetics) and Martianus and Sebillet in English. At least half of the texts he quotes from in the original language are available in English translation; did he just happen to stumble upon these three translations and decide to use them instead of the originals?
Typographical errors and lexical, syntactical, and stylistic infelicities (of the minor type that are irritating but easily fixed by a copy editor) do not exactly abound, but are not exactly scarce either. A few of these are humorous: in “Other authors belonging to the so-called Saxonists also tried to stem the flood of French borrowings in English” (70), “belonging” is a Saxonism. A spot check turned up two incorrect page references in the first two pages of the index (Boethius 16 should be 17, Draper 238 should be 239).
3. Copeland only cites Ricoeur once (61), but his work is indebted to and congruent with Gadamer’s. The only poststructuralist theorist Copeland mentions is Foucault, and him only in passing, in reference to his concept of the “author-function” (116); but clearly, a good deal of the analytical work she does is poststructuralist in venue.
4. My impatience here is fueled by my own work with six (and ultimately, potentially, an infinite number of) tropes of translation in The Translator’s Turn, which, because our books appeared the same year, Copeland cannot be expected to have read when she was writing her own. Many of her remarks about appropriate commentary, for example, suggest synecdoche far more strongly than either metaphor or metonymy: “The text can be ‘rewritten’ as formally unified because its meaning or cause has been discovered” (78), for example, or “While allegoresis figures itself—even modestly—as disclosure, it in fact operates as a deep recausing of the text as if from within the text” (81). See The Translator’s Turn, esp. pp. 153–57.
5. For further discussion of this emergent approach to translation, see my Translation and Empire: Postcolonial Theories Explained.
6. It is instructive to note that Tarzan learns English by the building-block method Rener propagates; see Cheyfitz’s brilliant deconstruction of this moment in Burroughs’s novel on p. 16.
7. To borrow Fredric Jameson’s terminology from the conclusion to The Political Unconscious (281ff).
8. This is true of some recent linguistic approaches. Hatim and Mason’s Discourse and the Translator, for instance, doesn’t explicitly mention ideology, but the authors’ discussion of intertextuality and semiosis is steeped in an awareness of the impact various socioideological pressures have on translation. I used to shake my head at Noam Chomsky, with his two illustrious but strictly separate careers as a linguist and a political theorist; it is gratifying to see a few linguistic theorists beginning to integrate the two.
9. “Two friends of mine, both artists, wrote me about reading the Twenty-One Love Poems with their male lovers, assuring me how ‘universal’ the poems were. I found myself angered, and when I asked myself why, I realized that it was anger at having my work essentially assimilated and stripped of its meaning, ‘integrated’ into heterosexual romance. That kind of ‘acceptance’ of the book seems to me a refusal of its deepest implications” (quoted in Díaz-Diocaretz 57–58).
10. For one attempt to build bridges similar to the ones Díaz-Diocaretz seems interested in building, coming out of Bakhtin and Lacan’s Schema L, see chapter 2 of my Ring Lardner and the Other. I adapt this conceptualization for the study of translation in chapter 1 of Translation and Taboo.
11. Reading what Zavala has to say about the “omniscient reader” doesn’t help much, either. Unlike Díaz-Diocaretz, she does define the term, but her definitions are as vague as Díaz-Diocaretz’s of the “translator-function”:
The “omniscient reader” as interpreter of avant-texts discloses a particular form of textual cooperation in the process of following the generative phases by which a project of communication (meaning) is transformed into expression. As recipient, s/he becomes a participant of the work and does reconstructive readings by showing the avant-text as a process, as an ongoing production of possibilities of meaning, while describing the interpretative possibilities in the matrix or genesis of the avant-text itself. The omniscient reader interprets the shifts from meaning to significance and translates the text’s deep structure in rendering how the sender re-reads her/his own signs. Within this perspective of verbal discourse as a social phenomenon and social interchange between sender and receiver, both internal and external, the avant-text brings to the forefront the social life of language, “populated, overpopulated with the intentions of others,” in Bakhtin’s neat definition of language (1981, 294).
It should be stressed that both my model ‘omniscient reader’, whose task it is to describe internal poetic language, and the writer, are understood as concrete historical entities. (134)
Really? What does this mean? Would a “concrete historical entity” be the same thing as a person? The two concrete historical entities in this case are a model and a writer; are we to assume that the model and the writer are “concrete,” “historical,” and “entities” in the same or parallel ways? Or are we talking about two different kinds of concrete historical entities? If they are supposed to be the same, are we to see the model “omniscient reader” as something that real readers actually do, a reader-role or reader-function, or as an ideal toward which real readers are expected to strive, or what? In that case, exactly how are we to see a model, role, function, or ideal as “concrete”? These are all abstractions, obviously, and I cannot figure out what Zavala could possibly mean by their concreteness; which makes me think that the “omniscient reader” must somehow be a real person like the writer, except that she does specifically call that reader a model. And omniscience is not a characteristic normally attributed to real people; it sounds much more like an ideal. She writes further: “S/he is a conscious participant in the event of the utterance, and yet occupies an independent position in it, and as such attempts to explain the specific living social comprehension of the literary utterance” (134). This sounds like a person: differentiated for gender, conscious, and able to “attempt” to do things, implying agency and incompleteness (the possibility of failure). In fact, a few lines earlier, Zavala describes the “omniscient reader” as “this specific reader” (134). But the description is simultaneously so obviously idealized that it is difficult to equate it (him? her?) with any specific historical individual, any real reader. My guess is that for Zavala the “omniscient reader” is, like “the ideal reader,” a methodological fiction, specifically a mystified reification of the theorist’s own normative construction of the text. The theorist reads the text carefully, covering what she or he takes to be every possible aspect and angle, and then, instead of reifying the resulting portrait as “the text,” as formalist approaches have traditionally done, s/he reifies it as the image of the text generated in the head of the ideal or omniscient reader—that is, the theorist her- or himself writ large. This enables the theorist to pretend that her or his reading is qualitatively different from that of the individual readers she or he studies, more complete, indeed perfectly complete, and thus an adequate foundation for theoretical pronouncements on both the bias or directedness of specific readings and the universal nature of reading.
12. “This does not mean that all translation should become ‘literal,’ because this type of translation only makes sense for a certain type of works, whose relation to their languages is such that it requires this differential coupling of literal translation” (Berman 1984, 173). But what would that “is such” be, exactly? He says we shouldn’t do an anglicizing (or a gallicizing) translation of Henry James; a “different type of approach” is needed, but what?
13. And in fact the book would have been very different had Berman listened more intently to Bakhtin, and to compatriots of his such as Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, and less intently to Lacan and (especially) Heidegger, who coach him to impose rigid authoritarian controls on the engagement with the other.
I take my images of cuts and flows, earlier in the paragraph, from Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipe, and Deleuze and Guattari’s discussion of the standard language and dialect, of majoritarian and minoritarian discourse, in Milles plateaux, makes a good deal of Berman sound naive.
14. See also the essays by Richard Jacquemond (139–58) and Sherry Simon (159–76) in Venuti’s Rethinking Translation (1992).
15. Compare Heyvaert’s disclaimer in his preface: “Berman wrote this book ten years ago, in France, where there was (and still is) much less of an awareness about gender-biased language than in the USA today. Consequently, the reader will sometimes find he, him, and man used to refer to people (translators, writers, readers) in general. I apologize to all those who might be offended by my failure to substitute s/he, him/her, and person in the appropriate cases. I believe Berman’s unrelenting emphasis on the necessity of an experience [épreuve] with the foreign suffices to clear him of any exclusionary prejudice” (viii). It’s always nice to have a translator who buys your idealizations. Women in Berman’s French society (his masculine-generic terms proclaim) are foreigners who do not translate, do not write, and do not read, and who therefore do not need to be “experienced.” Women, like other capitalist functionaries in the West and “primitive” peoples abroad, do not represent a significant alterity worthy of dialogue. We are somewhere in the vicinity of Heidegger’s pronouncements on dialogue with the Other (a powerful influence for Berman), which somehow always managed to exclude the Jew as significant Other.
16. See Benjamin (1928) for a discussion of fascism as an attempt to restore an “aura” destroyed by capitalism; see also Eagleton’s Marxist reading of this problematic in Benjamin (chap. 2).
17. Berman’s we is intensely problematic throughout the book. He uses it to mean I, mostly, and Heyvaert respects his “alterity” by not shifting in English to the I; but he also moves constantly outward from the pluralized I, much as Whitman did, cosmically, in singing of “myself.” For example: “That is the reason why we have been led to attempt to write— even if partially—a chapter in the history of European translation and a chapter in German cultural history—a chapter particularly heavy in meaning, since we recognize in it choices that have been our own, even though our cultural field has changed” (20). What is the extension of the we here? Does Berman mean that he made choices (which were “his own”) that he later, in reading German romantics, discovered were made by people of a different age and country? That’s what the first we sounds like, but by the second and third we’s it begins to sound as if he is expanding his we to include the reader as well, indeed “all of us,” all right-thinking Westerners who make the same choices the German romantics once made.
18. Sometimes strangely, as when Heyvaert tells us in English that both Hölderlin (158) and Heidegger (160) refer to the “experience [épreuve] of the foreign”—here the foreignizing impact of the bracketed French word is to make it seem as if Hölderlin and Heidegger were in the habit of referring to the experience not as die Erfahrung but as l’épreuve.
19. “Mais cela ne veut absolument pas dire que le poète délaisserait les Grecs” (Berman 1984, 258).
20. I got quite accustomed to it while living in Finland; my students all used it, due to interference from Finnish, which also uses the conditional in this way. For a discussion of this reshaping of a “native” feel for a language through constant exposure to “foreigner” speech, see my Translator’s Turn (26–27).
21. Other constructions that sound like beginning American writing students essaying the foreign waters of academic discourse would include: “… in Novalis, F. Schlegel, and Schleiermacher. The latter was …” (Heyvaert 1992, 47), “To be sure, neither Novalis nor F. Schlegel are translators” (103), “he includes them in the sphere of ‘the philological’ in general, for the same reason as ‘notes’ and ‘commentaries,’ for example, as ‘critical genres’” (124), “Because ‘representing what is foreign in one’s mother tongue,’ that is what runs the risk of threatening …” (149), “would be difficultly understood” (168), and “capable to ‘figure’ the world” (181).
22. Here are two punctuation examples as well, these involving the omission of the first comma marking a sentence modifier: “And this is exactly as we have indicated, F. Schlegel’s intuition” (Heyvaert 1992, 161) and “the definition of which for that matter, remains indeterminate” (190). Is this foreign? If so, is it Berman or Heyvaert—and does it matter which it is?
23. In a session at the American Literary Translators Association meeting in Albuquerque, New Mexico, November 3–6, 1994, Peter Bush brought up another disturbing wrinkle in foreignism: it is often interculturally condescending, pandering to preexisting stereotypes of source-language speakers within target-language culture. For example, a phrase like “the world is a handkerchief” in a translation from Spanish—a literal rendition of the idiom that Spanish speakers use where English speakers would say “small world”—is understandable but cute and quaint in English, and serves to confirm Anglo stereotypes of the “picturesque simplicity” of Hispanics.
24. For a discussion of this excluded middle in Goethe’s movement from the 1813 claim that there are only two maxims of translation, taking the reader to the author and taking the author to the reader, to the 1819 claim that there are three, see The Translator’s Turn (82–83). I argued there that Goethe realized what Venuti has now realized, that translation without assimilation is impossible, and in his 1819 remarks on the Divan had to come up with a new opposition to “taking the author to the reader.” As Venuti begins to insist in The Translator’s Invisibility, even the strangest, most alien or foreign-sounding translation brings the source-language author to the target-language reader.
25. Significantly enough, in the passage from Rethinking Translation quoted above, Venuti too reifies “words as words,” as material things, and calls for translators to respect “their opacity, their resistance to empathic response and interpretive mastery”(4). In a generous reading, this would point to an awareness of the role played by the autonomic system in processing language, the felt materiality of language, language as tone, pitch, color, gesture, which we express and receive with our whole bodies; and would direct translators’ attention to the many hitches in the somatic processing of language, the blockages to empathic response, the somatic defenses we raise against others’ attempts to read us correctly and incorrectly. In a less generous reading it fleshes forth a dead world, a world of reified utterers emitting reified verbal signs that remain opaque to empathic response and, in protecting against interpretive mastery, become themselves the effective tools of interpretive mastery. The former reading would incline us toward the empathic sensitivity of Sacks himself; the latter toward the dehumanizing “total institution” of the traditional mental hospital.
26. I’m punning here, of course, on Derrida’s title “Des tours de Babel,” which means not only “(On) the Towers of Babel” but “(On) Some Turns of Babel.”
27. And from the author’s point of view, even before translation, how does this textual proprioception work? You write a book, it feels real to you, but for it to be published, then received well, it has to feel real to others as well—and how do you accomplish that? You can’t make someone experience your words proprioceptively—you can’t make someone “appropriate” your words, make them theirs, incorporate them into their own body image. In academic publishing in particular it seems common for books to be published that have never been experienced proprioceptively by anyone—not even the author. An editor reads a book, is impressed by it, sends it out to readers, who are impressed by it, it gets published, reviewers are impressed by it, libraries buy it, it gets borrowed and read by readers who are impressed by it, it comes out in paperback and gets bought by scholars who are impressed by it—and no one ever feels it, no one ever appropriates it, makes it their own. I think that’s what happened to my earlier book American Apocalypses, which was received very well but just sort of died on the vine. It didn’t excite people enough for them to appropriate it. It never felt like their own leg to walk on, their own hand to write with. The Translator’s Turn, on the other hand, is getting appropriated that way, by translators who find it voicing their own thoughts about translation, their own experiences of translating. And it’s getting translated—by people who experience a textual phantom for it in French.
28. The best recent book I know on this process is The Subversive Scribe, by Jill Levine, and her self-depictions have been feeding me a kind of quasi-scholarly phantom for writing about myself as a translator over the past few pages.
29. This may be the place to say a few words about the “biologism” of my talk of somatics in The Translator’s Turn, what I call proprioception here. I’ve been astonished at how eager academic theorists have been to thematize my somatics as biologism, and thus as a kind of reactionary scientistic mysticism, a belief, say, that biology is destiny. I made it painfully clear in The Translator’s Turn that ideosomatics is a far more materialist exploration of ideology than anything I’ve seen written by Marx or Marxists, who tend to assume, uncritically, that ideology works on us mentally, like God, without neural channeling. The sociopolitical layers of our neurologies go so deep it is impossible to say just where ideological programming ends and our innate proclivities begin. That the neurology of proprioception is equally social should be clear from the fact that statistically, women in patriarchal society are far more aware of their proprioceptive and vestibular senses than men—and that women who train themselves for entry into the corporate world typically dull awareness of those senses (protective coloring for work in an institution that denies the body), whereas men who survive disintegrative or other traumatic experiences, or struggle through to gender liberation, are typically exhilarated by their enhanced sense of their own body. Women are socialized to proprioceptive sensitivity, men to insensitivity—which is why we speak of women’s intuition and of men being blind to the emotional climates around them. There is such a thing as preideological biology—we find it in a more or less pure state in fetuses, especially very early on in pregnancy, and it survives deep in the hindbrain even in adulthood—and there is such a thing as unbiologized ideology. But most human biology, physiology, neurology is saturated with ideology, and almost all ideology operates through biological channels. How else could it operate—barring some chess-playing god that could move us around on the chessboard? The distinction between biology and ideology is another (and pernicious) non distributio medii.
30. This was not, by the way, a claim I made in that book, but enough people have read it that way to make me suspect I’m partly responsible for the non distributio medii (either all translation is intellectual or all translation is intuitive). In my desire to underscore the importance of intuition, I probably overemphasized the somatics of translation, neglecting to stress forcefully enough that whatever intellectual, analytical checks and balances you bring to bear on your intuitive sense of the right translation of a given word or phrase, the resulting mind-body coalition that makes the final decision is still intuitive, still somatic. This is true even in the simplest sense: I don’t know a single translator, no matter how cerebral, who would use a given target-language word or phrase purely on analytical grounds. It always has to feel right as well. Even in technical translations, I would guess most translators feel as I do—uneasy, even anxious—when unable to check an unfamiliar term with an expert and forced to trust a dictionary, because the dictionary’s analytical assurance is never enough to compensate for a missing intuitive feel of rightness. More complexly, too, competent translators rapidly somatize analytical approaches to texts, so that what might seem to a nontranslator like a purely intuitive approach—the translator picks up the text and after a cursory glance through it, starts translating, without diagraming sentences or looking up words or doing detailed literary analyses of symbols and images—is often highly (but subconsciously, or somatically) analytical. What experienced driver analyzes traffic situations as consciously as the driver trainee? What tennis pro has to keep saying subvocally, “Keep your eye on the ball until it leaves the racket, lean onto your forward foot as you stroke into the ball,” and so on? As I noted earlier in this chapter, I find that I often deal even with the difficult problems that arise in a translation without conscious thought, my mind seemingly blank, but some other me back behind my conscious awareness running through words, images, syntactic structures until I solve my problem and can go on. I was astonished to find one reviewer assuming that I considered the translator’s intuition more important than craft, or craftsmanship; in my view the translator’s craft is intuitive, at least after the novice has taken her or his first baby steps in the field.
31. We also, of course, abuse a trust or a privilege, which might be thought closer in spirit to the kind of linguistic or philosophical abuse Lewis theorizes; but the abuse of a trust or a privilege remains explicitly interpersonal, and by definition has the effect of changing the interpersonal dynamic. The abuser of a trust or a privilege is typically an inferior partner in a relationship (a child, for example, or an employee) who has been entrusted with an important task or function and is expected to carry out that task or function in a way that satisfies the entrustor, or who has been extended a special privilege and is expected to remain properly grateful and appreciative. Abuse in these circumstances entails transgressive behavior, overstepping the bounds established for the abuser’s actions: to abuse a trust or a privilege is to (mis) take the trust or the privilege for an improvement in status, indeed for an equalization of status, when in fact it was only intended as a special case, an exception, a momentary and transient and nonbinding exemption from the full stricture of the hierarchical relationship. The result of this abuse is characteristically the threatened or actual withdrawing of the trust or the privilege in future—the threatened or actual restoration of the original hierarchical dynamic, which was never in fact rescinded, only temporarily and tentatively (indeed, probatively) waived.
This type of abuse does seem to fit the hegemonic conception of translation, in fact, in which the source author is thought of as the hierarchical authority who extends to the translator the privilege of rendering his (not her) text into the target language, or who entrusts his text to the translator’s care. The “good” translator is traditionally—that is, not in Derrida’s iconoclastic sense—one who renders the text in the submissive spirit of this trust, one who studiously avoids abusing the trust. In this sense the abusive translator that Lewis theorizes might be thought of as primarily abusing the source author’s trust—secondarily, perhaps, the target reader’s trust? That remains to be seen.
Would we also say that a cheating husband has abused his wife’s trust, or that a cheating wife has abused her husband’s trust? This seems to me slightly peripheral to the notion of trust-abuse; but it is also more central to the physical and emotional abuse that I’ll be considering throughout the chapter.
32. I realize, of course, that there is more going on here than rape; according to Wiseman, in ancient Rome consensual sex between males is considered equally abusive for the man who accepts another man’s penis into his mouth or anus. I don’t mean to simplify Venuti’s argument, only to highlight the portion of it that strikes me as most bizarre.
33. Finnish y is pronounced like the German ü or the French u; Finnish ö like the German ö or the French eu; the sound in lyö (“[clock] strikes, [bell] sounds”) and yö, “night,” is a soft diphthong that is difficult for non-Finns to pronounce. Cynthia got the vowel quality of the y right but held it a beat too long before turning the ö into an English o.
34. There is also a scene in act 1 with the infant Poju/Boy, where Lea is talking baby talk to her son, who at this point is a plaster doll, his voice trills on a synthesizer. Lea interprets his speech like this: “Ahaa. Aatataa. Se on: vellin ainakin Poju hyväksyv” (Koskiluoma 1983, 62). I rendered that with stylized foreignism: “Aha. Atatataa. That means: Boy does like porridge.” Annie apparently found that “Atatataa” difficult to say, strange, un-English, because in two of the four performances that I saw she left it out or turned it into her own laugh.
35. A fascinating line of speculation in this context is Wilhelm Reich’s in The Mass Psychology of Fascism, where he traces Eero’s type of brutal abusiveness to patriarchy’s demonization and suppression of natural sexuality:
With the institution of chastity, women, under the pressure of their sexual needs, become unchaste. The natural orgastic sensuality of the men is replaced by sexual brutality which in turn gives the women the feeling that the sexual act debases them. Extramaital sexual intercourse is by no means effaced from the earth. But, as a result of its different evaluation and of the abolition of the matriarchal institutions for its protection, it comes into conflict with official morality and comes to lead a backstairs existence. With the changed social position of extramarital intercourse the manner of experiencing sexuality changes also. The conflict which now exists between nature and a “higher” morality disturbs the capacity for gratification. Sexual guilt feelings disturb the natural course of the orgastic process. This results in sexual stasis, and the dammed-up sexual energies seek an outlet through all kinds of pathological channels. Neuroses, perversions and antisocial sexuality become permanent sexual phenomena. Infantile and adolescent sexuality, which in the original work democracy of matriarchy was affirmed and socially underwritten, comes to be systematically suppressed. This distorted, disturbed, brutalized and debased sexuality in turn supports the very ideology to which it owes its existence. The denial of sexuality can now, rightly, be justified by the dogma that sexuality is something inhuman and filthy. What is overlooked, however, is the fact that this filthy sexuality is not natural sexuality but the specific sexuality of patriarchy. Sexology of the patriarchy of the past few hundred years has never made this distinction. (74–75)
It is easy enough to dismiss Reich’s utopian conception of matriarchy as sheer speculation; we have no evidence that matriarchy ever even existed, let alone that it had the paradisal attributes Reich imagines for it. It is harder, however, to dismiss his trenchant ideological analysis of sick patriarchal sexuality and its roots in authoritarian social structures. If Reich is right about the intrinsic interrelatedness of authoritarianism, violence, mysticism, and the suppression of natural sexuality, it will make no sense to call, say, “infidelity” abusive and “fidelity” nonabusive; both fidelity and infidelity will be wrapped up in the same abusive social dynamic. More on this below.
36. It is interesting to note that, like many psychoanalytical theories, Jotuni’s novel and Koskiluoma’s stage adaptation seem to blame the mother for abuse: both Lea’s and Eero’s mothers were abusive, Lea’s mother physically abusive, Eero’s (at least) emotionally abusive. Lea learns her passive-aggressive codependency from her father, lets Eero beat her as her father had once let her mother beat him; we don’t know who beat whom in Eero’s childhood home, but the only parent he mentions at all is his mother. A significant corollary: if Eero allegorically represents the abusive translator and the abusive parent the source author, I too as abusive translator render (abuse) the work of a female source author, indeed two female source authors, two symbolic mothers, Maria Jotuni the novelist and Maaria Koskiluoma the dramaturge.
37. Poju is an affectionate diminutive for poika, “boy”; other children’s names in the play include Tytti, from tyttö, “girl,” and Veikko, a boy’s name that means “guy.” The only child’s name that is not generalized in this way is Pia, Latin for “pious.” Since Tytti, Pia, and Veikko (and their sibling who dies in a miscarriage caused by Eero’s abuse) are all represented by plaster dolls on stage, it made sense to translate all the children’s names into English, making the children sound generic, Boy, Girl, Pious, Guy. Ironically enough from Venuti’s standpoint, a radical domestication here felt more alien, more foreignized, than the Finnish originals would have.
38. This is what I called “aversion” in The Translator’s Turn (239–49).
39. For further discussion of the classics as abusers (though not in those terms), see my articles “Trivial and Esoteric Pursuits” (1987) and “The Trivialization of American Literature” (1988).
40. It is, of course, hard to make a living if you’re this choosy about what you translate; some readers of The Translator’s Turn took me to task for ignoring the economic realities of the field, the dire consequences in some cases of translating in ideologically deviant ways. But of course I didn’t ignore those realities; I just insisted that sometimes emotional health is more important than an individual job, and it may be preferable to quit or get fired rather than having your soul slowly destroyed by an abusive situation. If there is nowhere else to go, if you look and look and can find nothing else, then you have to go on adapting to abuse, seeing it as clearly as possible and taking a stand, symbolic or otherwise, against it whenever you can without endangering your job, but nevertheless perpetrating it in line with your employer’s or clients’ requirements. But even then you’ll be better off aware of abuse, including your own, and willing to make ethical decisions based on your perception of abuse, than you would be idealizing every translation task as a set of technical problems (terminology, syntax, register, etc.).
41. For further discussion of these methods, see chapter 11 of Colin Rose, Accelerated Learning.
42. See also Michael Leff’s persuasive exploration of “Burke’s Ciceronianism.”
43. Cf. D’Alton: “But, apart from the question of translation, it was recognised as possible for a Roman writer to range from mere servile imitation, which was little better than plagiarism, to the most vital form of it, which is made familiar to us under the image of the bees that flit from flower to flower, and thence draw material which they transmute into a new creation” (430). Seneca uses the image of the bee in Letter 84.