Local Contingencies: Translation and National Identities

LAWRENCE VENUTI

PRELIMINARY DISTINCTIONS

When you offer a translation to a nation, that nation will almost always look on the translation as an act of violence against itself. Bourgeois taste tends to resist the universal spirit. To translate a foreign writer is to add to your own national poetry; such a widening of the horizon does not please those who profit from it, at least not in the beginning. The first reaction is one of rebellion.

—André Lefevere, Translation/History/Culture

These comments are drawn from Victor Hugo’s 1865 preface to his son François-Victor’s version of Shakespeare’s works. They are worth examining, not simply because Hugo uses translation as the basis for a critique of nationalism, but because his critique at once exposes and is itself riddled with contradictions that have characterized the relations between translation and national identities, regardless of the language and culture in which the translating is performed. Formulating the contradictory implications of Hugo’s comments, then, will be a useful way to introduce my reflections on nationalist agendas in translation.

Translation can be described as an act of violence against a nation only because nationalist thinking tends to be premised on a metaphysical concept of identity as a homogeneous essence, usually given a biological grounding in an ethnicity or race and seen as manifested in a particular language and culture. Since translation works on the linguistic and cultural differences of a foreign text, it can communicate those differences and thereby threaten the assumed integrity of the national language and culture, the essentialist homogeneity of the national identity. As an example Hugo cites Voltaire’s attack on the Shakespearean translator Pierre Letourneur, who is said to “sacrifice every French writer without exception to his idol (Shakespeare)” and “does not deign even to mention Corneille and Racine,” an omission deplored as an “offense that he gives to France” (Hugo 456). Nationalism, Hugo suggests, goes hand in hand with a literary xenophobia, a fear that foreign literatures might contaminate native traditions, an attitude that he tellingly phrases in biological terms: “Who could ever dare think of infusing the substance of another people into its own very life-blood?” (Lefevere 1992, 18).

For Catalan materials and discussions of Catalan translation, I am grateful to Montserrat Bacardí, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona; Pilar Godayol, Universitat de Vic; Marcel Ortín, Universitat Pompeu Fabra; Francesc Parcerisas, Departament de Cultura, Generalitat de Catalunya; and Martha Tennent. Susan Bernofsky of Bard College patiently answered my questions concerning the history of German translation. Susanna Basso and Rossella Bernascone were helpful informants on Italian questions. None of these scholars and translators can be held responsible for what I have made of their generous assistance. Unattributed translations in this essay are mine. Earlier drafts were presented at conferences held by the American Comparative Literature Association and the International Association of Translation and Intercultural Studies. For these opportunities, I thank David Damrosch and Theo Hermans.

This attitude, however, is contradicted by the fact that nations do indeed “profit” from translation. Nationalist movements have frequently enlisted translation in the development of national languages and cultures, especially national literatures. A language, Hugo remarks, “will later be strengthened” by translation, even if “while waiting it is indignant” (Hugo 455). The forms taken by such translation agendas vary with the social situations in which they are deployed, and their varying approaches to foreign texts and cultures may be diametrically opposed, seeking either to preserve or to erase linguistic and cultural differences. Yet in both cases the differences of the foreign texts are exploited to construct a national identity that is assumed to pre-exist the translation process. As Jacques Derrida explains, nationalist thinking rests on a circular logic: the nation, imagined to be a homogeneous essence, must be constructed, but the construction is understood as “a recourse, a re-source, a circular return to the source” (Derrida 1992, 12). Nationalist translation agendas depend on the same circularity: the national status of a language and culture is simultaneously presupposed and created through translation. Insofar as such agendas implicitly reveal the incompleteness of the nation, translation is a scandal to nationalist thinking, providing yet another motive for indignation and offense, for perceiving a translated text as an international act of violence.

The concept of nation, moreover, can be regarded as democratic, at least in principle, subsuming social divisions beneath a collective identity. The term that Hugo uses in his critique is “le peuple” (the people), an undifferentiated population united here in its resistance to a translation. Yet the arbiters of a national culture, even the theorists who articulate the very idea of a nation, may well belong to an elite minority. Hence, Hugo implicitly equates the cultural values of one class, “bourgeois taste,” with the collective culture that resists translation. Nationalist translation agendas have often been initiated by cultural elites who aim to impose their linguistic and literary values on an entire population. The success of these agendas shows, however, that nationalisms cannot be viewed simply as forms of class dominance: translations must be accepted by a mass audience to be effective in constructing national languages, cultures, identities (cf. Easthope 6–8).

Do Hugo’s comments, although critical of nationalism, take a clear stand on nationalist translation agendas? Here too contradictions emerge. On the one hand, he acknowledges that translation traffics in linguistic and cultural differences that threaten nationalisms even while enriching national literatures. On the other hand, he suppresses the constructive hybridizing effects of these differences by positing the existence of a “universal spirit,” an essentialist concept of humanity that transcends the boundaries of class and nation. In a posthumously published commentary on translation, similarly, he asserts that translators “transfuse the human spirit from one people to another,” but when he addresses the languages that mediate this transfusion, his thinking again issues into contradiction: “The human spirit is greater than every idiom. Languages do not all express the same quantity of it” (Hugo 631). Even though translation is seen as the practice that overcomes the boundaries between national languages and cultures to communicate the universal spirit, we must still ask what linguistic and cultural differences shape the translator’s work on another literature and complicate the communicative process. At every turn, Hugo must confront the question of which nation at once gives rise to and is affected by a particular translation practice.

His universalism actually reveals the close relationship between his thinking and nationalism. Derrida points out that “nationalism does not present itself as a retrenchment onto an empirical particularity, but as the assigning to a nation of a universalistic, essentialist representation” (Derrida 1992, 19). Considered from the vantage point of an individual social agent, then, nationalism is not the empirical fact of national citizenship, but an identification with or self-recognition in a particular discourse of nation. Thus, despite the fact that Letourneur was a French citizen, his translation of Shakespeare might still cause offense to Voltaire’s nationalistic investment in French literature, might still be perceived as an insult to France. The English playwright seems a “monster” and “a barbarous actor” to Voltaire because he identifies with an essentialist image of French culture that assumes it is the seat of two universal principles: human nature and civilization (Hugo 456). Hugo, in effect, attributes to humanity what Voltaire attributes to France. Universalism can be useful in criticizing the exclusionary effects of nationalism, but by suppressing linguistic and cultural differences it pre-empts the articulation of theoretical concepts to understand how national identities are formed and what role translation might play in their formation.

To work toward such an understanding, I shall set out from Antony Easthope’s productive synthesis of poststructuralism and psychoanalysis in which human subjectivity is seen as constructed in language, in the subject’s identification with a self-image reflected by an other’s language use (Easthope 3–57). This language-based process of identification at once elicits desire and—since that desire originates in an external object—defers its satisfaction, producing an irremediable lack in the subject. A national identity is constructed when the external object is both a particular discourse of nation and a social group, so that a double process of identification is enacted and housed in social institutions designed to reproduce the national culture and the nation-state. Yet neither culture nor state can guarantee the unity of the nation: not only are they disjunctive, characterized by incommensurate institutions and practices that may be in conflict (such as when a national cultural agency exacerbates political divisions), but they are each in their turn heterogeneous, since citizenship can be granted to foreigners and foreign values can be assimilated into the domestic culture. These incommensurabilities and heterogeneities, in the presence of such other conditions as the modern displacement of traditionally close-knit communities by impersonal social relations and the domination of a colonial or hegemonic power, evoke within individuals the desire for a national collective and sustain the process of national identity formation. As Easthope observes, “the disjunction in nation between state and culture (as well as the heterogeneity of each) is disavowed through fantasy identification with a unified identity, state and culture together” (46).

Translation can support the formation of national identities through both the selection of foreign texts and the development of discursive strategies to translate them. A foreign text may be chosen because the social situation in which it was produced is seen as analogous to that of the translating culture and thus as illuminating of the problems that a nation must confront in its emergence. A foreign text may also be chosen because its form and theme contribute to the creation of a specific discourse of nation in the translating culture. Similarly, a foreign text may be translated with a discursive strategy that has come to be regarded as a distinguishing characteristic of the nation because that strategy has long dominated translation traditions and practices in the translating culture. A translation strategy may also be affiliated with a national discourse because it employs a dialect that has gained acceptance as the standard dialect or the national language. Such translation practices form national identities through a specular process in which the subject identifies with cultural materials that are defined as national and thereby enable a self-recognition in a national collective. The fact that the materials at issue may include forms and themes, texts and cultures that are irreducibly foreign is repressed in a fantastic identification with an apparently homogeneous national identity. The irreducible foreignness of these materials may actually result in an intensification of national desire: in this instance, whatever linguistic and cultural differences may be communicated by a translation elicit a desire for a unified nation that the translation cannot fulfill by virtue of those very differences.

INTENTIONALITY AND THE TRANSLATOR’S UNCONSCIOUS

Although translation nationalisms are usually deliberate, driven by specific cultural and political goals, neither translators nor their audiences need be aware of the social effects produced by translated texts. The formation of national identities can remain unconscious because it occurs in language that originates elsewhere, in the subject’s relations to others, but that the subject perceives as his or her own self-expression. In Easthope’s words, nation is “an identity that can speak us even when we may think we are speaking for ourselves” (5). A translation, then, might serve a nationalist agenda without the translator’s conscious intention. Hugo remarks that “Letourneur did not translate Shakespeare; he parodied him, ingenuously, without wishing it, unknowingly obedient to the hostile taste of his epoch” (Hugo 457). Letourneur’s decision to translate Shakespeare deviated from contemporary French literary canons, but his discursive strategy unconsciously conformed to them. This conformity could only highlight Shakespeare’s deviation, simultaneously intensifying and offending Voltaire’s nationalistic investment in French literature.

The translator’s unconscious formation of national identities can be developed further if we examine a specific case more closely. Consider the American translator William Weaver’s 1968 version of Italo Calvino’s scientific fantasies, Cosmicomics. On a few occasions, Calvino uses “ricotta” as an analogy to describe imaginary features of the moon and interstellar matter. The word refers to a soft, mild Italian cheese made from the whey of cow’s or sheep’s milk. Weaver repeatedly replaces it with English words that do not maintain a semantic equivalence with the Italian:

Il latte lunare era molto denso, come una specie di ricotta.
[Moon-milk was very thick, like a kind of cream cheese.]

La ricotta volava
[The cheese flew]

adesso s’erano trovati prigionieri d’una specie di ricotta spugnosa
[now they were imprisoned in a kind of spongy cream]
(Calvino 6, 7, 27; Weaver 5, 6, 24)

In each instance, Weaver suppresses the cultural specificity of “ricotta” by using words that are more familiar to English-language readers. His choices include “cheese,” which generalizes the Italian word; “cream,” which diverges from the very notion of cheese; and “cream cheese,” which for many readers would refer to a distinctively American cheese made from cream and milk, sometimes associated with a brand name, Philadelphia Cream Cheese, but in any case very different from Italian ricotta. These renderings constitute lexical shifts that assimilate the Italian text to English-language cultural terms, a tendency that recurs in the translation:

La Galassia si voltata come una frittata nella sua padella infuocata, essa stessa padella friggente e dorato pesceduovo
[The Galaxy turned like an omelet in its heated pan, itself both frying pan and golden egg]

cosa volete che ce ne facessimo, del tempo, stando lì pigiati come acciughe?
[what use did we have for time, packed in there like sardines?]

Attraversai una metropoli nuragica tutta torri di pietra
[I crossed a piled-up metropolis of stones]

—Ragazzi, avessi un po’ di spazio, come mi piacerebbe farvi le tagliatelle!—
[“Oh, if I only had some room, how I’d like to make some noodles for you boys!”]
(Calvino 41, 45, 49, 57; Weaver 38, 43, 46, 56)

In each case, the translation adheres closely to the Italian passages until a culturally specific term appears, at which point a lexical choice reveals a discursive strategy that can be called Anglocentric. The word pesceduovo, or “fish [made] of egg,” refers to an omlette that has been folded to form an elongated, fish-shaped roll. Weaver not only simplifies the word for English-language readers, but strips it of its peculiarly Italian significance. With the Italian phrase pigiati come acciughe, or “pressed like anchovies,” he removes “anchovies,” a staple of Italian rather than British or American cuisine, and reverts to an analogy that has long been a cliché in English: “packed like sardines.” The Italian word nuragica, a technical term that refers to the prehistoric conical monuments found in Sardinia, is similarly replaced by a simpler yet somewhat unclear rendering, “piledup.” And the Italian word tagliatelle, referring to a long, ribbon-like pasta, gives way to the generic “noodles.”

These Anglocentric renderings belong to an overall strategy in which the translator’s choices are evidently made to enhance intelligibility for a broad English-language readership. The translation is primarily written in the current standard dialect of English, devoid of any typically British or American markings. It also draws on fairly common colloquialisms. Thus, Ignoranti … Ignorantoni (Ignoramuses … The big ignoramuses) is translated as “Bunch of ignorant louts … Know-nothings”; la forte miscela (the strong mixture) becomes “the heady blend”; la partita è nulla (the game is invalid) becomes “the game’s null and void”; poteva avere torto marcio (he could be totally wrong) becomes “he could be dead wrong”; l’avreste capita (you would have understood) becomes “to catch on”; non mi sarei cambiato (I would not have changed) becomes “I wouldn’t have traded places”; sbranarla (tear her to pieces) becomes “tear her from limb to limb” (Calvino 30, 58, 67, 74, 83, 99; Weaver 27, 57, 66, 73, 82, 98). These examples show that Weaver consistently favors the colloquial word or phrase, the cliché-like idiom, the informal contraction, even where Calvino uses standard Italian. As a result, the translation is extremely fluent, immediately recognizable to English-language readers and therefore easily readable.

This discursive strategy allows the translation to produce several potentially nationalistic effects. The easy readability fosters an illusion of transparency whereby the second-order status of the translation is effaced and the reader comes to feel as if he or she were reading, not a translation, but the original, Calvino’s Italian text. Through this illusionism, the translation validates the most widely used forms of English by seemingly demonstrating their power to express the truth of Calvino’s writing. Here the experience of reading Weaver’s translation coincides with the formation of a national identity. Whether the nationality is British or American (or linked to some other English-speaking country) depends on the reader to a significant extent because Weaver’s English is not regional, not geographically marked. Yet the identity should be considered national because it is grounded in a validation of a national language, the standard dialect and the most familiar colloquialisms, and reinforced through Anglocentric cultural terms. The very illusion of transparency, furthermore, is characteristic of Anglo-American cultural traditions: not only has it dominated English-language translation at least since the seventeenth century, but in implying that language use can give unmediated access to truth or reality, it is closely linked to the empiricist epistemologies that have long distinguished British and American philosophies (Venuti 1995; Easthope). The transparency of Weaver’s translation invites a British or American reader to identify with a particular discourse of nation, a British or American national culture, defined as empirical, common-sensical, and pragmatic insofar as the translator’s work was governed by an Anglocentric norm of acceptability. The fact that Weaver’s version of Cosmicomics might effectively form a national identity was confirmed in 1969, a year after publication, when it won the National Book Award for translation, a prize given by a consortium of American publishers who judged it, not according to standards of accuracy or adequacy to the foreign text, but according to literary standards that they also applied to contemporary American writing.

Nonetheless, the translator was—and remains—entirely unaware of the potential cultural and political effects of his translation. In a 1980 interview, Weaver’s response to the question, “Should translations sound foreign?,” contradicted the Anglocentric strategy he employed with Calvino’s Cosmicomics:

“Yes, I think sometimes they should. I don’t think they should sound American. I don’t think Italian characters should say ‘gee whiz’ to each other or ‘gosh’ or whatever, and I don’t think if they’re eating pizza you should translate it into peanut butter sandwiches or anything like that. And I think occasionally you can leave a word in Italian … because it can’t otherwise be translated. Or sometimes I leave it in Italian and add a very tiny apposition, explaining what it is.” (Venuti 1982, 19)

Calvino’s text is fantasy, of course, and the characters are not presented as specifically Italian, but rather as personifications of scientific concepts and phenomena. Still, Calvino was undoubtedly writing in Italian for an Italian audience, and the retention of such words as ricotta and tagliatelle would help to signal the Italian origin of the text to English-language readers. Yet they are replaced by words such as “cream cheese” and “noodles,” which do indeed “sound American.” In a more recent interview, when asked why he avoided the word “ricotta,” Weaver explained that it fit the context of a cheese-coated moon: “I used ‘cheese’ because we used to say, ‘the moon is made of green cheese.’ But also thirty years ago nobody in the US knew what ricotta was” (phone conversation: November 10, 2001). This comment reveals the translator’s Anglocentric strategy, his effort to bring English-language cultural traditions to bear on his translating (the comparison between the moon and green cheese actually dates back to the sixteenth century) and to avoid communicating any sense of foreignness to the English-language reader by, for instance, retaining the foreign word and adding an explanatory phrase in apposition. In fact, when asked why he rendered tagliatelle as “noodles,” Weaver responded, “Well, they are noodles,” demonstrating that his investment in transparent translating continues to be so deep as to suppress the linguistic and cultural differences of the foreign text. A translator too can identify unconsciously with a national cultural discourse, here with the empiricist privileging of transparency that has long prevailed in British and American thinking about language.

A translation intended to serve a nationalist agenda might similarly have unanticipated effects that conflict with the translator’s intention, whether in serving the interests of one social group instead of a national collective or even in undermining those group interests. Consider Sir Thomas Hoby’s 1561 translation of Baldassare Castiglione’s courtesy book, The Courtyer. Hoby, like other Elizabethan translators, presents his work as a contribution to an English national culture (see Ebel). “Englishemen,” he argues in his dedicatory preface, “are muche inferiour to well most all other Nations” in their unwillingness to translate foreign literary, philosophical and scientific texts, and so they fail to render “a commune benefite to profite others as well as themselves” (Hoby 8). Hoby wishes to reverse this tendency, not only because Castiglione’s work possesses such moral value that it ought “to be in estimation with all degrees of men” in England, but also because the practice of translation can develop the English language:

As I therefore have to my smal skil bestowed some labour about this piece of woorke, even so coulde I wishe with al my hart, profounde learned men in the Greeke and Latin shoulde make the lyke proofe, and everye manne store the tunge accordinge to hys knowledge and delite above other men, in some piece of learnynge, that we alone of the worlde maye not bee styll counted barbarous in oure tunge, as in time out of minde we have bene in our manners. (9)

Yet despite Hoby’s repeated insistence that his work aims to benefit the nation, his very decision to translate a courtly text makes clear that his primary concern is the aristocracy. Thus, in dedicating the translation to Lord Henry Hastings, Hoby asserts that “none, but a noble yonge Gentleman, and trayned up all his life time in Court, and of worthie qualities, is meete to receive and enterteine so worthy a Courtier” as Castiglione describes in his book; and when Hoby turns to list the “degrees” or social classes that he imagines as his readership, he includes only “Princes and Greate men,” “yonge Gentlemen,” and “Ladyes and Gentlewomen” (6–7). Such remarks assume an ideological representation of absolute monarchy wherein the royal court governs the nation, not merely through its political authority, but through its exemplary morality. Within absolutist ideology, Hoby’s address to the aristocracy is consistent with his nationalist agenda, so that his nationalism takes the form of a class dominance. The wide circulation of his translation suggests that it was instrumental in forming courtly identities, regardless of the social position occupied by his readers. During the Elizabethan period alone, it was reprinted three times, in 1577, 1588, and 1603.

Hoby’s discursive strategy, even though it can be considered Anglocentric in sixteenth-century terms, further complicates his nationalist agenda. He follows the example set by the humanist Sir John Cheke, who in a prefatory letter to the translation urges English writers to avoid foreign borrowings and use primarily Anglo-Saxon words:

our own tung shold be written cleane and pure, unmixt and unmangeled with borowing of other tunges, wherin if we take not heed by tijm, ever borowing and never payeng, she shall be fain to keep her house as bankrupt. For then doth our tung naturallie and praisablie utter her meaning, when she bouroweth no counterfeitness of other tunges to attire her self withall, but useth plainlie her own, with such shift, as nature, craft, experiens and folowing of other excellent doth lead her unto … (Hoby 12)

Cheke’s purist recommendation constitutes a vernacular nationalism in which words derived from Anglo-Saxon are assumed to express an essential Englishness, the truth of an English “self” that would be obscured by the “counterfeitness” of foreign borrowings. In Hoby’s translation, this Anglo-Saxonism leads to a remarkable rendering of the key Italian term “sprezzatura”:

vendo io già più volte pensato meco onde nasca questa grazia, lasciando quelli che dalle stelle l’hanno, trovo una regula universalissima, la qual mi par valer circa questo in tutte le cose umane che si facciano o dicano più che alcuna altra, e ciò è fuggir quanto più si po, e come un asperissimo e pericoloso scoglio, la affettazione; e, per dir forse una nova parola, usar in ogni cosa una certa sprezzatura, che nasconda l’arte e dimostri ciò che si fa e dice venir fatto senza fatica e quasi senza pensarvi. (Castiglione 61–62)

[I, imagynyng with my self oftentymes how this grace commeth, leaving a part such as have it from above, fynd one rule that is most general whych in thys part (me thynk) taketh place in al thynges belongyng to man in worde and deede above all other. And that is to eschew as much as a man may, and as a sharp and daungerous rock, Affectation or curiosity and (to speak a new word) to use in every thyng a certain Recklesness, to cover art withall, and seeme whatsoever he doth and sayeth to do it wythout pain, and (as it were) not myndyng it.] (Hoby 59)

The Italian “sprezzatura” is a neologism that Castiglione devises to signify the effortless grace that distinguishes the ideal courtier’s actions. Hoby, who knew French, might have used a French loan word, namely “nonchalance,” but in his adherence to Cheke’s vernacular nationalism he instead chose “Recklesness,” a word derived from the Anglo-Saxon recceléas. Hoby clearly intended the word to communicate a sense of natural, spontaneous action, seemingly without thought or deliberation, without “reck” or care. Yet in the sixteenth century, as today, “Recklesness” denoted neglect, carelessness, irresponsibility, meanings that worry Hoby’s etymological rendering and transform it into a moral criticism of courtly behavior that subverts the nationalist agenda he imagined for his translation. A similar effect occurs in his rendering of Castiglione’s assertion that the courtier can acquire his skills from ottimi maestri or bon maestri (excellent teachers, good teachers): In both instances, Hoby uses “cunning men,” another Anglo-Saxonism that carries negative connotations in Elizabethan English, since “cunning” might signify not only skillful, expert, learned, but also crafty, guileful, sly (Castiglione 60–61; Hoby 57–58). At such points, the different national discourses that inform Hoby’s translation, absolutist as well as humanist, issue into contradictions of which he was obviously unaware.

Although ethnocentric discursive strategies may endow a translation with a nationalistic effect, they can never entirely remove the foreignness of a foreign text. Cultural differences will still be communicated on other textual levels, both formal and thematic, insofar as they deviate noticeably from cultural works and traditions in the receiving language. Any such differences, in conjunction with the translator’s strongly assimilative work on the language of the foreign text, can acquire a nationalistic value in reception. More precisely, they can intensify a reader’s sense of belonging to a national collective and may even elicit an unconscious desire for a unified nation distinct from the foreign nation that the text is taken to represent. These possibilities are suggested by D. J. Enright’s admiring response to Weaver’s version of Calvino’s Cosmicomics in the New York Review of Books: “The opening story, which makes the film 2001 look about as imaginative as a spilled bucket of distemper, tells of the time when the moon was so close to the earth that Qfwfq and his companions could row out in a boat and scramble up on it to collect Moon-milk, which was ‘very thick, like a kind of cream cheese’ ” (Enright 23). Here not only is Calvino’s story treated as uniquely “imaginative,” but it serves to remind this British reviewer of an Anglo-American work that he had found disappointing, Stanley Kubrick’s recently released film 2001: A Space Odyssey. The contrast in aesthetic value tacitly rests on a national distinction that involves Enright’s own culture, the Italian writer versus the American director resident in England. And Calvino’s narrative premise of a moon coated with “cream cheese” is cited to illustrate the imagination that determines the cultural difference of his story. Nonetheless, Weaver’s Anglocentric rendering, “cream cheese,” is evidently as transparent to Enright as the Britishism “distemper” (where an American writer might use “whitewash”), demonstrating that his own identity as a reader is inextricably bound to a national language, the British dialect of English—which he assumes will be immediately intelligible to the predominantly American audience of a New York-based periodical. When confronted with an Italian work of fiction, Enright seems to feel all the more strongly his investment in English linguistic and cultural forms, notwithstanding—or because of—the hybridity of the language and the imaginative weakness he perceives in the film.

TRANSLATION AND NATIONALIST CULTURAL POLITICS

Nationalist translation agendas have been devised to intervene into specific social situations, but they do possess a number of common features. While taking into account significant historical differences, I want now to present a critical taxonomy of these features, considering how translation theories and practices have been used to shape a concept of nation and what cultural and social effects have resulted from this use. I will focus on two especially revealing cases: Prussia during the Napoleonic Wars and China under the late Qing dynasty.

In both of these cases, translation was enlisted in a defensive nationalist movement that was designed to build a national culture so as to counter foreign aggression. During the eighteenth century, the Prussian aristocracy had fallen under French cultural domination so that, as the theologian and philosopher Friedrich Schleiermacher complained, even King Frederick II “was incapable of producing in German the literature and philosophy he produced in French” (Lefevere 1977, 83). After 1806, when Napoleon defeated Prussia, Schleiermacher’s sermons not only called on congregations to resist the French occupation, but articulated a concept of the German nation. With a victory, he told them, “we shall be able to preserve for ourselves our own distinctive character, our laws, our constitution and our culture” (Schleiermacher 73). A key factor in this nationalist agenda was the German language, which Schleiermacher felt might be best improved through translation: “Our language,” he argued in a lecture delivered in 1813, “can thrive in all its freshness and completely develop its own power only by means of the most many-sided contacts with what is foreign” (Lefevere 1977, 88).

Later in the nineteenth century China faced a somewhat different adversarial situation, characterized by foreign commercial and military invasion. Defeated in the war against Britain over the opium trade (1839–42), China was forced to grant economic and political concessions to several Western nations who established colonies in various ports and, after the Chinese lost the first Sino-Japanese War (1894–95), divided the country into spheres of interest. Just as the Boxer uprising against the foreign presence was repressed by an international force (1898–1900), translators such as Lin Shu and Yan Fu began introducing Western ideas to reform the Chinese nation and enable it to struggle against the invaders. Lin Shu’s preface to his version of Rider Haggard’s novel The Spirit of Bambatse suggests that such Western literary texts are valuable because “they encourage the white man’s spirit of exploration” and can instill a similar “spirit” in his Chinese readers: “The blueprint has already been drawn by Columbus and Robinson Crusoe. In order to seek almost unobtainable material interests in the barbarian regions, white men are willing to brave a hundred deaths. But our nation, on the contrary, disregards its own interests and yields them to foreigners” (Lee 54). Similarly Yan Fu, who had studied in England during the 1870s, chose to render works on evolutionary theory by T. H. Huxley and Herbert Spencer precisely because he believed them to be useful to the “self-strengthening and the preservation of the race” (Schwartz 100).

As the translators’ comments indicate, they intended their translations to form national identities by soliciting their readers’ identification with a particular national discourse that was articulated in relation to the hegemonic foreign nations. This relational identity, always fundamentally differential, shaped through a distinction from the other on which the identity is nonethless based, might be either exclusionary or receptive. German translators defined the German nation as incorporating a respect for the foreign that led them to reject French cultural practices that did not show this respect. They valued a foreignizing method of translation, described by Schleiermacher as one in which “the translator leaves the author in peace, as much as possible, and moves the reader towards him,” a literalism imprinted with the foreignness of the foreign text, whereas the French were seen as advocating a domesticating method, in which the translator “leaves the reader in peace, as much as possible, and moves the author towards him,” a much freer rewriting of the foreign text according to the intelligibilities and interests of the receiving culture (Lefevere 1977, 74). French translation, from the German point of view, even went to the extremes of paraphrase and adaptation, both of which were to be lamented. In a satiric dialogue from 1798, August Wilhelm Schlegel, whose own versions of Shakespeare’s plays exemplified the foreignizing method, demonstrated how different translation practices might be taken as representative of opposed national identities:

 

FRENCHMAN: The Germans translate every literary Tom, Dick, and Harry. We either do not translate at all, or else we translate according to our own taste.

GERMAN: Which is to say, you paraphrase and you disguise.

FRENCHMAN: We look on a foreign author as a stranger in our company, who has to dress and behave according to our customs, if he desires to please.

GERMAN: How narrow-minded of you to be pleased only by what is native.

FRENCHMAN: Such is our nature and our education. Did the Greeks not hellenize everything?

GERMAN: In your case it goes back to a narrow-minded nature and a conventional education. In ours education is our nature.

(Lefevere 1977, 50)

Chinese translators, in contrast, sought to form a national identity by accepting Western values. They particularly prized the individualism and aggressiveness that seemed to them so important in motivating Western imperialism in China. For Lin Shu, the emulation of these values required that they be assimilated to Chinese cultural traditions that were consequently revised or in certain instances abandoned. Hence, his criticism of the Confucian virtue of “yielding” or deference:

The Westerners’ consciousness of shame and advocacy of force do not stem entirely from their own nature but are also an accumulated custom…. In China, this is not so. Suffering humiliation is regarded as yielding; saving one’s own life is called wisdom. Thus after thousands of years of encroachments by foreign races, we still do not feel ashamed. Could it also be called our national character? (Lee 54)

Chinese notions of deference and self-preservation ran counter to the collective “consciousness of shame” that might accompany the recognition of one’s self as belonging to a nation under seige. Lin Shu’s reference to a Chinese “national character” was itself a cultural import from the West.

In using translation to form national identities, the translators expose the contradictory conditions of their nationalist agendas. Terms such as “nature” and “race” point to a concept of nation as an unchanging biological essence that preexists the translation process and so reveals the circular logic of nationalism: the translating can only return to the identity that it is said to create. Yet terms such as “education” and “custom,” along with the very use of a cultural practice like translation, implies that identity is constructed in a discursive formation and therefore can be changed and developed, precisely to intervene against the embattled social situations where the German and Chinese translators were working. The essentialistic strain in their thinking, furthermore, coincides with a universalism. The national identity that translation is summoned to form in each case embodies universalistic traits. For Schleiermacher, what distinguishes the German nation is its capacity to mediate all other national cultures, making it the historical culmination of “translation in general”:

Our nation may be destined, because of its respect for what is foreign and its mediating nature, to carry all the treasures of foreign arts and scholarship, together with its own, in its language, to unite them into a great historical whole, so to speak, which would be preserved in the centre and heart of Europe, so that with the help of our language, whatever beauty the most different times have brought forth can be enjoyed by all people, as purely and perfectly as is possible for a foreigner. This appears indeed to be the real historical aim of translation in general, as we are used to it now. (Lefevere 1977, 88)

Here German culture, created through translation, achieves global domination, and the “respect for what is foreign” that is characteristic of the German “nature” ultimately suppresses the cultural differences of other nations by forcing the “foreigner” to appreciate the canon of world literature in German. A. W. Schlegel similarly argued that the practice of translation is synonymous with German culture: Because “poetic translation is a difficult art,” he asserted, “its invention was reserved for German fidelity and perseverance” (Lefevere 1992, 78–79). In Lin Shu’s thinking, the universalism took the form of assuming the global validity of Chinese cultural traditions, notably Confucianism. Thus, he read the most diverse British novels as exempla of the Confucian reverence for filial piety, an interpretation that he made explicit in his habit of retitling the English texts. His version of Dickens’s The Old Curiosity Shop became The Story of the Filial Daughter Nell (Lee 47).

Nationalist agendas in translation involve the conceptual violence that occurs whenever the unity of a nation is proclaimed, whether at its founding moment or subsequently in its cultural and political institutions. An assertion of national unity fictively creates that unity in the very process of asserting it by repressing the differences among the heterogeneous groupings and interests that comprise any social collective. As Derrida remarks, “the properly performative act must produce (proclaim) what in the form of a constative act it merely claims, declares, assures it is describing” (Derrida 1987, 18). Translation nationalisms are based on performative acts of this sort because they assert a homogeneous language, culture, or identity where none is shared by the diverse population that constitutes the nation. Such agendas in translation necessarily entail various exclusions, not only in drawing distinctions between the nation and its foreign others, but in privileging certain cultural forms, practices, and constituencies within the supposedly unified nation. Foreign texts are chosen because they fall into particular genres and address particular themes while excluding other genres and themes that are seen as unimportant for the formation of a national identity; translation strategies draw on particular dialects, registers, and styles while excluding others that are also in use; and translators target particular audiences with their work, excluding other constituencies.

Thus, the German translators at the turn of the nineteenth century aimed to build a national language and culture, but they actually belonged to an elite bourgeois minority whose taste dictated both the selection of foreign texts for translation and the development of discursive strategies to translate them. The translators focused on canonical works of European literature and philosophy. Johann Heinrich Voss rendered Homer, Schleiermacher Plato, and A. W. Schlegel Shakespeare, to cite a few representative examples, whereas the great majority of German-language readers preferred translations of French and English novels by such authors as Choderlos de Laclos and Samuel Richardson (see Ward). The foreignizing method of translation, although relying on the standard dialect (High German), avoided familiar, conversational forms: “The indispensable requirement of this method,” in Schleiermacher’s words, “is a feeling for language that is not only not colloquial but also causes us to suspect that it has not grown in total freedom but rather has been bent towards a foreign likeness” (Lefevere 1977, 78–79). And although the German translators wished their translations to be read by every member of the German nation, the foreignizing method was guided by an appeal to an elite segment of the national audience; “any reader,” states Schleirmacher, “educated in such a way that we call him, in the better sense of the word, the lover and the expert” (76). The identity formed by the resulting translations was less national than learned and bourgeois.

The Chinese translators, in rendering Western literary, philosophical, and scientific texts, unavoidably displaced native cultural traditions, but they also tended to neglect foreign texts that in their view were not conducive to the creation of a resistant national identity. Because their political goal was reformist, intended to strengthen an imperial culture that had lost authority amid foreign invasion, they adopted a domesticating method of translation that resulted in diverse forms of cultural and social exclusion. Thus, Lin Shu and Yan Fu not only translated into the classical literary language (wenyan) to appeal to an academic and official elite, but in some cases they revised Western texts so as to assimilate them to Chinese values and make their nationalist agenda more acceptable to their readers. Lin Shu’s 1899 version of Alexandre Dumas fils’s La Dame aux camélias renders the French ange (angel) with the Chinese xian (fairy maiden), which evokes ancient Chinese mythology in place of the Judeo-Christian tradition (Wong 213). Similarly, when in the novel a man greets a woman by kissing her hand, Lin Shu inserted an explanatory note to anticipate the Chinese reader’s surprise at this Western practice. The identity formed by such translations could only be hybrid, not simply national, but imperial, not simply classical Chinese, but also modern and Western to some extent.

To produce significant cultural and political effects, however, nationalist movements must win the spontaneous support of a broad cross-section of the population, even if this very breadth simultaneously puts into question the notion of a unified nation. Translation nationalisms likewise cannot be restricted to the cultural elite who is most likely to devise and execute them; the translations that are designed to form a national identity must circulate widely among the diverse constituencies that comprise the nation so as to produce a nationalistic effect that might result in social change. From this point of view, the German translators’ impact was inevitably limited. Although they initiated a translation tradition that stretched into the twentieth century, inspiring such theorists as Nietzsche and Walter Benjamin, in their own historical moment their foreignizing translations of canonical texts were most powerful in forming a national identity among readers who, like them, were not just scholarly in their interests, but acquainted with previous German translations as well as German literary developments. Thus, in 1814, Goethe argued for the usefulness of a prose translation of Homer “in the first stages of education,” observing that “If you want to influence the masses a simple translation is always best. Critical translations vying with the original really are of use only for conversations the learned conduct among themselves” (Lefevere 1992, 75). Wilhelm von Humboldt’s preface to his 1816 version of Aeschylus’ Agamemnon took an opposing view, although the nationalistic tenor of his remarks shows that he was engaging in precisely the sort of learned conversation that Goethe had in mind:

What strides has the German language not made, to give but one example, since it began to imitate the meters of Greek, and what developments have not taken place in the nation, not just among the learned, but also among the masses, even down to women and children since the Greeks really did become the nation’s reading matter in their true and unadulterated shape? Words fail to express how much the German nation owes to Klopstock with his first successful treatment of antique meters, and how much more it owes to Voss, who may be said to have introduced classical antiquity into the German language. A more powerful and beneficial influence on a national culture can hardly be imagined in an already highly sophisticated time, and that influence is his alone. (137)

Given the fact that in successive editions Voss brought the German of his Homeric translations closer to the Greek and so increased the difficulty of reading them, one must doubt Humboldt’s enthusiastic assessment of their mass readership. Schleiermacher, in fact, seems to have felt that Voss’s foreignizing version was too extreme to be pleasurably readable (see Bernofsky). In Humboldt’s case, the linguistic differences of the Greek poems intensified his own national identity even as they deepened his appreciation for Voss’s translation, as well as the dramatist Friedrich Klopstock’s imitation of classical prosody.

The social impact of the Chinese translators’ work was much more consequential because it was extremely popular, extending beyond the academic and official elite that was their immediate audience to encompass independent intellectuals and both secondary-school and university students. Among this wide readership, to be sure, Lin Shu’s version of Dumas fils’s sentimental novel did not consistently elicit the same patriotic response that he voiced in drawing an analogy between the courtesan Marguerite and two Chinese ministers renowned for their devotion to the emperor. Here the cultural differences of La Dame aux camélias strengthened his nationalistic identification with imperial culture: “Strong are the women of this world, more so than our scholar-officials, among whom only the extremely devoted ones such as Long Jiang and Bi Gan could compare with Marguerite, those who would die a hundred deaths rather than deviate from their devotion. Because the way Marguerite served Armand is the same way Long and Bi served their emperors Jie and Zhou” (Hu Ying 1995: 71). Nonetheless, the nationalist agenda of the late Qing translators established a model for a later, more radical generation. Lu Xun, the modernist innovator in Chinese fiction, read their versions of Haggard and Huxley and decided to translate science fiction because he believed that Western popularizations of science might “move the Chinese masses forward” (Semanov 14). By 1909, however, he had rejected the strongly Sinicizing approach of his predecessors while retaining their project of building a national identity so as to alter China’s subordinate position in geopolitical relations. He wrote foreignizing translations of fiction from Russia and Eastern European countries that occupied a similar position, but whose literatures subsequently gained international recognition (for a detailed account, see Venuti 1998, 183–86). Yan Fu’s translations, especially his version of Huxley’s Evolution and Ethics, had a much more direct influence on Chinese identity. A contemporary observer noted that “after China’s frequent military reversals, particularly after the humiliation of the Boxer years, the slogan ‘Survival of the Fittest’ (lit., ‘superior victorious, inferior defeated, the fit survive’) became a kind of clarion call” (Schwartz 259, n.14).

TRANSLATION NATIONALISMS IN TIME: CATALUNYA

Although translation nationalisms turn to essentialistic concepts to articulate a discourse of nation, such agendas are fundamentally determined by the local contingencies into which they intervene. The communicative effectiveness of any translation in fact depends on its capacity to engage with the intelligibilities and interests that define the social situation where the translator is working. Nationalist agendas that seek not just to communicate the meanings of foreign texts, but to use those texts in constructing national identities, must tactically take into account the linguistic forms, cultural values, and social groups that are arrayed, always hierarchically, in their historical moment. And this accounting inevitably shapes the translating as well as the kind of national identity that the translator aims to establish, challenging any essentialism. I want to develop these points further by considering translation nationalisms within the same culture at two different moments. My site is Catalunya during the twentieth century; my cases are two influential Catalan translators, Josep Carner (1884–1970) and Joan Sales (1912–83).

Catalan nationalism emerged during the nineteenth century with the recovery of Catalan as a literary language in opposition to Castilian, the language of the hegemonic Spanish state. By the turn of the century, the formation of a language-based Catalan identity stimulated the pursuit of political autonomy from Madrid, resulting in the establishment of a regional commonwealth or Mancommunitat in 1914 (Balcells 25–27, 67–72). Enric Prat de la Riba, the elected president, had previously addressed the issue of Catalan “nationality” in a work that relied heavily on Johann Gottfried Herder’s notion of Volksgeist or the spirit of a people, revealing the contradictions typical of nationalist thinking:

La societat que dóna als homes tots aquests elements de cultura, que els lliga, i forma de tots una unitat superior, un ésser col.lectiu informat per un mateix esperit, aquesta societat natural és la nacionalitat. Resultat de tot aixó és que la nacionalitat és una unitat de cultura o de civilització; tots els elements d’aquesta mena, l’art, la ciència, els costums, el Dret … tenen llurs arrels en la nacionalitat. (Prat de la Riba 1906: 66)

[The society that gives to men all these elements of culture, that binds them together, and forms from them all a higher unity, a collective being informed by a selfsame spirit, this natural society is nationality. The result of all this is that nationality is a unity of culture or of civilization; all the elements of this kind, art, science, customs, Law … have their roots in nationality.]

On the one hand, nationality is a socially determined form of “collective being” that is manifested in diverse cultural practices; on the other hand, it is the “natural” form of a homogeneous “spirit” that transcends social determinations (cf. Llobera 345–46). The passage shifts seamlessly between these contradictory concepts, the first materialist, the second idealist, finally treating national identity as a biological essence indistinguishable from the soil in which the national culture is said to take root.

The questionable logic of Prat de la Riba’s thinking did not discredit it as an intellectual force in the defensive nationalism that drove the Catalan bid for self-government. On the contrary, the very contradictions were more likely to have stimulated the desire for a unified nation by putting into question its possibility. And in fact his work was extremely effective in rationalizing the cultural and social projects that were initiated during the Mancommunitat, including the standardization of the Catalan language. “La llengua,” he wrote, “és la manifestació més perfecta de l’esperit nacional i l’instrument més poderós de la nacionalitizació i, per tant, de la conservació i la vida de la nactionalitat” (84). [Language is the most perfect manifestation of the national spirit and the most powerful instrument of nationalization and therefore of the preservation and life of nationality.] Although in 1923 the Spanish state intervened to impose an anti-Catalan dictatorship on Catalunya, the elections of 1931 resulted in the establishment of a Catalan republic or Generalitat that broadened the range of cultural and social initiatives. Under the Generalitat, Catalan joined Castilian in becoming an official language in political institutions, the educational system was reorganized to prepare for the introduction of Catalan, and both the Catalan periodical press and book industry underwent a significant expansion (96–100).

These historical developments motivated Josep Carner’s work as a translator even as he contributed to them. A prolific prose writer as well as a poet, he belonged to the modernist literary movement known as Noucentisme, which collaborated closely with the Manicommunitat in promoting a standardized language. In his 1913 article “La dignitat literària,” he echoed Prat de la Riba in asserting that “la paraula és la pàtria. La seva dignitat és una dignitat nacional” (the word is the fatherland. Its dignity is a national dignity [Carner 1986, 132]). Carner, like other Noucentist writers, considered the translation of canonical literary works as a means of developing the Catalan language and literature so as to construct a national identity. In 1907, at the start of his career as a translator, he sketched this project in an article that celebrates the translation of Shakespeare’s plays into Catalan:

Perquè el català esdevingui abundós, complexe, elàstic, elegant, és necessari que els mestres de totes les èpoques i tots els països siguin honorats amb versions a la nostra llengua i, agraïts, la dotin de totes les qualitats d’expressió i diferenciació que li calen. Perqué la literatura catalana es faci completa, essencial, illustre, cal que el nostre esperit s’enriqueixi amb totes les creacions fonamentals. Com podria ésser sumptuós un palau, sense els hostes! (56)

[In order for Catalan to become abundant, complex, flexible, elegant, it is necessary that the masters of every period and every country be honored with versions in our language and, in gratitude, endow it with every quality of expression and differentiation that it needs. In order to make Catalan literature complete, essential, illustrious, our spirit must be enriched with every fundamental creation. How could a palace be sumptuous without guests (hostes)!]

Here too Carner adopted Prat de la Riba’s essentialistic lexicon in referring to the Catalan “spirit.” Yet unlike the Catalanist ideologue, Carner took a more materialist approach. Neither the language nor its literature is adequate or self-sufficient in its expressive power, and neither can be developed solely on the basis of the Catalan “spirit,” which itself “must be enriched” through literary translation. For Prat de la Riba, Catalan identity, the “Iberian ethnos,” transcends its linguistic and cultural conditions, predating and persisting through the Roman conquest of the peninsula:

Aqueix fet, aqueixa transformació de la civilització llatina en civilització catalana, és un fet que per ell sol, sense necessitat de cap altre, demostra l’existència de l’esperit nacional català. Encara que després d’engendrar la llengua catalana no hagués produït res més, l’ànima del nostre poble ens hauria ja revelat les ratlles fonamentals de la seva fesomia, estampades en la fesomia de la seva llengua. (Prat de la Riba 89)

[This fact, this transformation of Latin civilization into Catalan civilization, is a fact that by itself, without any need for others, demonstrates the existence of the Catalan national spirit. Even if after the Catalan language was begotten it had not produced anything more, the soul of our people would have already revealed to us the basic lines of its physiognomy, engraved in the physiognomy of its language.]

Whereas in Prat de la Riba’s thinking Catalan identity pre-exists the language that constitutes its transparent expression, in Carner’s this identity is largely a linguistic construction that requires translation to be viable, the importation of foreign cultural materials that complicate any such notion of transparency. Indeed, because the Catalan word hostes is ambiguous, capable of signifying both “guests” and “hosts,” Carner’s metaphor of the palace suggests that Catalan literature lacks not only the productive influence of foreign writing, but more sophisticated Catalan writers. The palace of Catalan literature can be sumptuous only if it is inhabited by hosts who are imaginatively enriched by translation.

Carner’s cultural politics was not simply nationalist, but implicitly critical of Catalan traditions and practices that did not seem consistent with his agenda. Hence, his nationalism involved an explicit utopian projection grounded on an estimation of Catalan deficiencies. In his 1908 article “De l’acció dels poetes a Catalunya,” where the word acció signifies not so much action as military or political engagement, he again resorted to a telling architectural metaphor to describe the work that Catalan poets must perform on their language and literature:

Nosaltres els poetes som els constructors dels pobles, i avui que tenim encara tanta feina a fer en el casal projectat de la civilització catalana, no sentim, en amidar tot ço que encara ens manca, en veure aqueixos forats per on entra el sol, una impressió de descoratjament i de pessimisme, sinó una ànsia de creació que és benaventurada perquè ha de ser fecunda. (Carner 1986, 95)

[We poets are constructors of peoples, and now that we still have so much work to do in the house planned for Catalan civilization, we do not feel, in surveying all that we still lack, in seeing those holes through which the sunlight enters, any sense of discouragement and pessimism, but a yearning for creation that is fortunate because it must be fertile.]

Carner seems to have been aware that the “yearning” or desire for a national literature was based on lack that, however, could never be eradicated because it was supplied through the translation of foreign literatures, through the introduction of linguistic and cultural differences that sustained creativity.

His translating aimed to form a national identity that was based on two exclusions: hegemonic Spanish culture, or in his words “el monopoli castellà dels destins d’Espanya” (the Castilian monopoly on the destinies of Spain [Carner 1986, 77]), and limited Catalan literary traditions. This relational identity is evident, first, in his selection of foreign texts for translation. Although typical of twentieth-century Catalan writers he possessed a native proficiency in both Spanish and Catalan, he avoided Spanish literature and placed the greatest emphasis on French and English traditions. Moreover, he chose to translate texts that were distinguished by fantasy and ironic humor and therefore ran counter to the realism that dominated nineteenth-century Catalan fiction, what Marcel Ortín has described as “the naturalists’ limitation to the documentable real” (Ortín 1996, 112). Between 1908 and 1934, Carner published 33 translations, including one or more texts by such writers as Shakespeare and Molière, La Fontaine and Hans Christian Andersen, Dickens and Lewis Carroll, Twain and Robert Louis Stevenson, Erckmann-Chatrian and Villiers de l’Isle-Adam (105–07). Carner was particularly interested in the identity-forming power of children’s literature because, as he prefaced his 1918 version of Andersen’s tales, “el gradual reviscolament de la imaginació catalana és el primer fonament per a fer pròsperes i invencibles les empreses de l’art i la política, de la cultura i el diner” (the gradual revival of the Catalan imagination is the first foundation for insuring that the enterprises of art and politics, culture and money prosper and become invincible, 43).

To advance his nationalist agenda, Carner wrote translations that were enjoyably readable, but that contained noticeable departures from current usage. Although at the beginning of his translating career the process of linguistic standardization had not yet begun and Catalan usage displayed variations at every level, it is still possible to see that he devised innovative strategies that resulted in a richly heterogeneous Catalan. His lexicon deliberately mixed archaisms, learned diction, dialectalisms, and neologisms, at times deviating from the registers and styles of the foreign texts, at others resorting to literalisms or calques of foreign words and phrases (Busquets; Sellent Arús 25; Pericay and Toutain 266–67; cf. Ortín 2001). Thus, in his preface to his 1908 version of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, he noted his decision to assign “neologismes i arcaismes a personatges qui són en l’espai i el temps tan allunyats de nosaltres” (neologisms and archaisms to characters who are so remote from us in time and space [Carner 1986, 102]). Carner’s agenda might also lead to more aggressive translation moves, such as the insertion of allusions to the Catalan cultural and political situation. In his version of Alice in Wonderland, published in 1927 during the Madrid-imposed dictatorship, the Cheshire cat became el gat castellà (the Castilian cat), and the King and Queen of Hearts became el Rei i la Reina d’Espases (the King and Queen of Swords), referring not just to the Spanish deck of playing cards, but to the military repression enacted by the Spanish state, a monarchy (Carner 1927, 93, 88).

The identity formed by such translations could only be hybrid, cast in the Catalan language yet an amalgam of linguistic and cultural differences that did not conform to the homogeneous essence imagined by Prat de la Riba. Nonetheless, Carner’s translations undoubtedly enabled his readers to recognize themselves as Catalans. This becomes clear in a 1921 review in which the Barcelona-based poet and translator Carles Riba admired how Carner handled La Fontaine’s fables in a very different cultural situation. The French writer’s irony, Riba argued, combines

una malícia xampanyesa i una restricció mundana, sovint amb llurs formularis mateixos. Les condicions socials de Catalunya, del català per tant, havien forçosament d’afeblir la mundanitat i engruixudir la plasticitat camperola. Però la meravella de la traducció de Josep Carner consisteix a fondre l’una i l’altra en una bonhomia burgesa, tota barcelonina, amb la seva fraseologia feta i tot. (Riba 170–71)

[a wickedness characteristic of Champagne and a worldly restraint, often with the same forms. The social conditions of Catalunya, and therefore of Catalan, inevitably had to weaken the worldliness and thicken the rural plasticity. Yet the wonder of Josep Carner’s translation consists in joining both in a bourgeois bonhomie that is entirely Barcelonian, complete with its own phraseology.]

For Riba, Carner’s translation communicates the distinctiveness of the French text in a compelling way that reinvents a familiar Catalan identity—although obviously that identity was strongly inflected by bourgeois values.

The Spanish Civil War abruptly suspended the nationalistic effects produced by the work of Noucentist translators like Carner. During the war the authority of the Generalitat was increasingly weakened both by internal political divisions and by the beleaguered Spanish state, and after 1939 many Catalan politicians and intellectuals went into exile. Franco’s regime enforced a harsh repression of Catalan identity that lasted for more than two decades (Balcells 127, 143–44). Public use of the Catalan language was prohibited, as was publication of Catalan books and periodicals; teachers suspected of being Catalanist sympathizers were dismissed or transferred to other Spanish regions; and Catalan culture and history were excluded from curricula. Near the end of the 1950s, however, the Francoist repression began to ease. Catalan publishing, which had continued outside of Catalunya, witnessed an increase despite the continuing threat of censorship, and the ban that had been specifically placed on translations into Catalan was lifted (147–48). Whereas in 1960 Catalan publishers issued 193 books, 10 of which were translations, 1966 saw the publication of 655 books including 207 translations, figures that represent a return to book output levels during the 1920s and 1930s (Vallverdú 102–3).

Joan Sales’s work as a publisher, novelist, and translator constituted an important intervention into this cultural and political situation. During the 1940s he joined a group of Catalan writers in Mexico, where he published the journal Quaderns de l’Exili (Notebooks from Exile). Their nationalism was based on Prat de la Riba’s essentialist notion of an “Iberian ethnos,” which they joined to Catholicism and to the patriotic romanticism of the nineteenth-century Catalan movement known as the Renaixença, producing an ensemble of ideological concepts that were militant in opposing Franco’s repressive dictatorship, populist in promoting the egalitarianian view that La Nació és el Poble (the nation is the people), and anti-intellectual in rejecting Noucentisme (Casacuberta 1989). The first issue in 1943 ran a policy statement that made clear the editors’ approach to culture:

Defensem la cultura basada en els caràcters nacionals i posada al servei de l’home. Rebutgem l’intellectualisme, la deshumanitizació i la supèrbia de tota manifestació que s’anomeni cultural a si mateixa, però que pretengui sobrepassar o menystenir l’Home. Rebutgem una cultura sense contingut i que es nodria infinitament dels seu propis residus. Entenem que l’home val més que el seu rostre, el contingut més que la continent, el pensament més que la forma. Ambicionem un estil directe, senzill i digne, subordinat a l’obra. (quoted in ibid., 99–100)

[We uphold culture grounded in national characters and put in the service of man. We reject intellectualism, dehumanization and the arrogance of every expression that calls itself cultural, but that seeks to go beyond or undervalue Man. We reject a culture without content which is infinitely nourished by its own residue. We take man to be worth more than his face, the content more than the container, the thought more than the form. We aspire to a style that is direct, natural and appropriate, subordinated to the work.]

In their frank humanism, in their idealist assumption that “Man” exists apart from and is transparently expressed in language, these values are opposed to the materialist position of a writer like Carner for whom stylistic innovation was necessary to construct human identity. It was in fact these values that informed Sales’s editorial activities upon his return to Catalunya in 1947: Despite the prohibitions of Franco’s regime, Sales sought to popularize canonical works of Catalan literature in adaptations that were cast in current usage and designed especially for young readers (Bacardí 27–28).

Sales’s most consequential work as a publisher and translator began after 1959, when he assumed the directorship of the Catalan press El Club dels Novel.listes. His editorial policy was decidedly nationalist, but also populist. He focused on one literary genre, the novel, as he later said, “perquè precisament els franquistes ho volien impedir i perquè era l’unica manera de fer una literatura contemporània nacional” (because precisely the Franquistas wished to stop it and because the novel was the only way to create a contemporary national literature [Ibarz 15]). Since he aimed to expand the Catalan readership, he published only accessible realistic narratives, rejecting those that were difficult to read because they lacked a coherent plot or required a specialized knowledge of literature. Thus, he published Catalan versions of such novels as Giuseppe Tomasi de Lampedusa’s The Leopard (1962), Alan Paton’s Cry the Beloved Country (1964) and J. D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye (1965). Sales himself translated three novels for the press, including Kazantzakis’s The Last Temptation of Christ (1959) and Dostoevesky’s The Brothers Karamazov (1961). To insure that the translations effectively produced the realist illusion, Sales insisted that the language closely follow current usage with an emphasis on oral forms, what he called the llenguatge vivent (living language) in the preface to his own novel, Incerta glòria (1956). This discursive strategy enhanced verisimilitude, but it also effaced the translated status of the texts. As Sales explained in introducing his version of Dostoevsky’s novel:

El Club dels Novel.listes cregué que el que importava per damunt de tot era que el traductor s’identifiqués amb l’esperit i l’estil de l’obra, que se la fes seva, que sabés posar en boca dels seus personatges un català tan viu com ho és el rus de l’original, fins al punt que el lector, llegint-la, arribés a oblidar que llegia una traducció. (Sales 1961, 8–9)

[El Club dels Novel.listes believed that above all it was important that the translator identify with the spirit and style of the work, that he make it his, that he know how to put in his characters’ mouths a Catalan as alive as the Russian of the original, to such an extent that the reader, while reading it, might come to forget that he is reading a translation.]

In the sheer invisibility of Sales’s translating, Catalan readers might also overlook the deep contradictions in his nationalist agenda. He wished to create a national identity based on two exclusions: on the one hand, a resistance against the Franquista pressure that Catalans abandon their language and speak Castilian and, on the other, a refusal of the standardized Catalan supported by Noucentist intellectuals, the exercicis de grammàtica (grammatical exercise) that he saw opposed to the “living language” (Sales 1956, 10). Yet not only did he translate Flaubert’s Madame Bovary and Salammbô into Castilian, but his reliance on current usage in his Catalan translations as well as his novel resulted in a style filled with Castilianisms (Bacardí 30–31; Vallverdù 142–46). Sales questioned the Noucentist emphasis on French literary texts and rather chose to work with foreign literatures that were associated with relatively minor cultures whose subordinate position resembled that of Catalunya: Lampedusa’s Sicily, Paton’s South Africa, or the Provence of Loís Delluc whose Provençal novel El garrell he translated into Catalan in 1963 (Bacardí 32–33, 36–37). Yet in advocating a discursive strategy that produced the illusion of transparency, Sales was soliciting his reader’s identification with the religious values that he himself perceived in foreign texts, even The Brothers Karamazov, which he described as “l’obra màxima de la novel.la cristiana universal” (the greatest work of the universal Christian novel [Sales 1961, 7–8]). There is, finally, the question of the foreign “spirit and style” with which he and his readers identified in his translations of Kazantzakis and Dostoevsky: since he knew no Greek or Russian, he queried specialists and based his Catalan text on several other versions of the novels, including Castilian and French (Sales 1961, 9). The linguistic and cultural differences that constituted Sales’s translations might do no more than create a hybrid Catalan identity, stimulating the reader’s desire for a unified nation that they simultaneously withheld.

Carner and Sales represent two nationalist agendas in translation driven by different theories and practices and reflecting different historical moments. In both cases, their defensive nationalisms sought to construct collective identities based on Catalan, and their translations can be seen as a linguistic ecology, a means of protecting and developing a language that was not simply marginal in relation to the dominant Spanish culture, but threatened with suppression. Yet important distinctions can be drawn between their work. Carner cultivated an experimentalism that took advantage of the variations in Catalan before standardization. His translations registered the foreignness of the foreign texts even as they formed a recognizably Catalan identity. Thus, they can be described as foreignizing, employing a strategy that, as Schleiermacher observed, “cannot thrive equally well in all languages, but only in those which are not the captives of too strict a bond of classical expression outside of which all is reprehensible” (Lefevere 1977, 79–80). Sales’s translating, in contrast, was much more conservative, at once consolidating current usage and validating its expressive possibilities during a period when the very viability of Catalan had been weakened by Franco’s regime, when “diglossia had established a foothold even in the educated classes and the quality of the spoken language was steadily deteriorating” (Balcells 144). Sales’s translations were thus domesticating, written in the most familiar forms of Catalan, creating an image in which the reader could experience a self-recognition as a Catalan, however much hybridized by the diversity of the language and the foreign texts.

Carner and Sales also wrote translations that mystified—in their respective ways—the contradictions in their nationalist agendas. Both announced their intentions to translate for a national collective, but both belonged to elite literary groups who comprised their primary readerships. Carles Riba’s review is a reminder that Carner’s cosmopolitanism was closely linked to the taste of the Barcelona bourgeoisie. And despite Sales’s adherence to popular taste his directorship of El Club dels Novel.listes made it truly a literary “club” or circle, as Montserrat Bacardí has indicated, by creating “an authentic forum that would permit Catalan writers to comment on and discuss their works, given the absence of communicative media that addressed Catalan literature” (Bacardí 31).

Perhaps the most instructive distinction between these two translators is the place of essentialism in their nationalistic thinking. Although both were influenced by Prat de la Riba’s notion of a transcendental Catalan identity, Carner’s openness to linguistic and cultural differences, partly because of his modernist inclination toward stylistic innovation and partly because of the variations in Catalan usage, led him to adopt a materialist approach to translation that assumed human identity was constructed in discursive formations. The sheer repressiveness of Sales’s later period, however, encouraged the adoption of various conceptual defenses, all essentialistic, whether the universalist humanism of Quaderns de l’Exili or the egalitarian populism of the “living language.”

These cases show that it would be reductive to attempt any ethical or political evaluation of translation nationalisms without considering the historical moments in which they emerged. Translation can be motivated by an essentialism that conceals the constitutive differences of the cultural identity it is deployed to form. But such an essentialism may be strategic, as Gayatri Spivak has noted, used “in a scrupulously visible political interest” (Spivak 214), with the self-critical awareness that in different historical circumstances it might harden into a conceptual repression just as strong as the political force it is intended to combat. Neither Carner nor Sales could develop this awareness in their defensive cultural situations. But in studying their examples later Catalan translators might, admitting variations in current usage that deviate from standardized forms so as to signal the foreignness of foreign texts—and make a productive difference in Catalan identities.

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