The translator invisibility

x Preface and acknowledgements Maule, Sally Mitchell, Daniel OHara, Toby Olson, Douglas Robinson, Stephen Sartarelli, Richard Sieburth, Alan Singer, Nigel Smith, Susan Stewart, Robert Storey, Evelyn Tribble, William Van Wert, Justin Vitiello, William Weaver, Sue Wells, and John Zilcosky. Others assisted me by providing useful and sometimes essential information: Raymond Bentman, Sara Goldin Blackburn, Robert E.Brown, Emile Capouya, Cid Corman, Rob Fitterman, Peter Glassgold, Robert Kelly, Alfred MacAdam, Julie Scott Meisami, M.L.Rosenthal, Susanne Stark, Suzanna Tamminen, Peter Tasch, Maurice Valency, and Eliot Weinberger. Of course none of these people can be held responsible for what I finally made of their contributions. For opportunities to share this work with various audiences in the United States and abroad, I thank Carrie Asman, Joanna Bankier, Susan Bassnett, Cedric Brown, Craig Eisendrath, Ed Foster, Richard Alan Francis, Seth Frechie and Andrew Mossin, Theo Hermans, Paul Hernadi, Robert Holub, Sydney Lộvy, Gregory Lucente, Carol Maier, Marie-josộ Minassian, Anu Needham, Yopie Prins, Marilyn Gaddis Rose, Sherry Simon, William Tropia, and Immanuel Wallerstein. I am grateful to the staffs of the libraries where much of the research was carried out: the British Library; the Archive for New Poetry, Mandeville Department of Special Collections, University of California, San Diego; Rare Books and Manuscripts, Butler Library, Columbia University; the Library Company, Philadelphia; the Nottingham City Archive; the Inter-Library Loan Department, Paley Library, Temple University; and the Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University. I am especially thankful to Bett Miller of the Archive for New Poetry, who did a special job of helping me secure copies of many documents in the Paul Blackburn Collection, and to Adrian Henstock of the Nottingham City Archive, who enabled me to consult Lucy Hutchinsons commonplace book. Philip Cronenwett, Chief of Special Collections at Dartmouth College Library, kindly answered my questions about the Ramon Guthrie papers. Various individuals and institutions have granted permission to quote from the following copyrighted materials: Excerpts from Mary Barnard, Sappho: A New Translation, copyright â 1958 by The Regents of the University of California, â renewed 1984 by Mary Barnard; and from Assault on Mount Helicon: A Literary Memoir, copyright â 1984 by Mary Barnard. Excerpts from Paul Blackburns correspondence, translations, and nonfiction, copyright â 1995 by Joan Miller-Cohn. Excerpts from The General editors preface xi Collected Poems of Paul Blackburn, copyright â 1985 by Joan Blackburn. Reprinted by permission of Persea Books, Inc. Excerpts from the writings of Macmillan employees: editor Emile Capouyas letter to John Ciardi, Capouyas letter to Ramon Guthrie, Guthries report on Paul Blackburns Anthology of Troubadour Poetry. Reprinted by permission of Macmillan College Publishing Company, New York: 1958. All rights reserved. Excerpts from End of the Game and Other Stories by Julio Cortỏzar, translated by Paul Blackburn, copyright â 1967 by Random House, Inc. Reprinted by permission of Pantheon Books, a division of Random House, Inc. Excerpts from Translators Preface by Robert Fagles, from Homer: The Iliad, translated by Robert Fagles, translation copyright â 1990 by Robert Fagles. Introduction and notes copyright â 1990 by Bernard Knox. Used by permission of Viking Penguin, a division of Penguin Books USA, Inc. Excerpts from Poems from the Greek Anthology, translated by Dudley Fitts, copyright â 1938, 1941, 1956, by New Directions Publishing Corporation. Excerpts from Dudley Fittss essay, The Poetic Nuance, reprinted by permission from On Translation edited by Reuben A.Brower, Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, copyright â 1959 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College. Excerpts from Ramon Guthries poetry and translations, used by permission of Dartmouth College. Eugenio Montales poem, Mottetti VI, is reprinted by permission from Tutte le poesie edited by Giorgio Zampa, copyright â 1984 by Arnoldo Mondadori Editore SpA, Milano. Excerpts from the works of Ezra Pound: The ABC of Reading, all rights reserved; Literary Essays, copyright â 1918, 1920, 1935 by Ezra Pound; The Letters of Ezra Pound 19071941, copyright â 1950 by Ezra Pound; Selected Poems, copyright â 1920, 1934, 1937 by Ezra Pound; The Spirit of Romance, copyright â 1968 by Ezra Pound; Translations, copyright â 1954, 1963 by Ezra Pound. Used by permission of New Directions Publishing Corporation and Faber & Faber Ltd. Previously unpublished material by Ezra Pound, copyright â 1983 and 1995 by the Trustees of the Ezra Pound Literary Property Trust; used by permission of New Directions Publishing Corporation and Faber & Faber Ltd, agents. The tables, U.S. Book Exports, 1990, U.S. Book Exports to Major Countries, 19891990, and World Translation Publications: From Selected Languages, 19821984. Reprinted (as Tables 1 and 2) from the xii Preface and acknowledgements 5 July 1991 issue of Publishers Weekly, published by Cahners Publishing Company, a division of Reed Publishing USA. Copyright â 1991 by Reed Publishing USA. The Best Seller List for Fiction from The New York Times Book Review, 9 July 1967, copyright â 1967 by The New York Times Company. Reprinted by permission. Excerpts from the agreement between myself and Farrar, Straus & Giroux for the translation of Delirium by Barbara Alberti, used by permission of Farrar, Straus & Giroux, Inc. Grateful acknowledgement is made to the following journals, where some of this material appeared in earlier versions: Criticism, Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies, SubStance, Talisman: A Journal of Contemporary Poetry and Poetics, Textual Practice, To: A Journal of Poetry, Prose, and the Visual Arts, and TTR Traduction, Terminologie, Rộdaction: Etudes sur le texte et ses transformations. An earlier version of chapter 4 appeared in my anthology, Rethinking Translation: Discourse, Subjectivity, Ideology (Routledge, 1992). My work was supported in part by a Research and Study Leave, a Summer Research Fellowship, and a Grant in Aid from Temple University. My thanks to Nadia Kravchenko, for expertly preparing the typescript and computer disks, and to Don Hartman, for assisting in the production process. The graphs displaying patterns in translation publishing (Figures 1 and 2) were prepared by Chris Behnam of Key Computer Services, New York City. All unattributed translations in the following pages are mine. Come la sposa di ogni uomo non si sottrae a una teoria del tradurre (Milo De Angelis), I am reduced to an inadequate expression of my gratitude to Lindsay Davies, who has taught me much about English, and much about the foreign in translation. L.V. New York City January 1994 Chapter 1 Invisibility I see translation as the attempt to produce a text so transparent that it does not seem to be translated. A good translation is like a pane of glass. You only notice that its there when there are little imperfections scratches, bubbles. Ideally, there shouldnt be any. It should never call attention to itself. Norman Shapiro I Invisibility is the term I will use to describe the translators situation and activity in contemporary Anglo-American culture. It refers to two mutually determining phenomena: one is an illusionistic effect of discourse, of the translators own manipulation of English; the other is the practice of reading and evaluating translations that has long prevailed in the United Kingdom and the United States, among other cultures, both English and foreignlanguage. A translated text, whether prose or poetry, fiction or nonfiction, is judged acceptable by most publishers, reviewers, and readers when it reads fluently, when the absence of any linguistic or stylistic peculiarities makes it seem transparent, giving the appearance that it reflects the foreign writers personality or intention or the essential meaning of the foreign textthe appearance, in other words, that the translation is not in fact a translation, but the original. The illusion of transparency is an effect of fluent discourse, of the translators effort to insure easy readability by adhering to current usage, maintaining continuous syntax, fixing a precise meaning. What is so remarkable here is that this illusory effect conceals the numerous conditions under which the translation is made, starting with the translators crucial intervention in the foreign text The more fluent the translation, the 2 The Translators Invisibility more invisible the translator, and, presumably, the more visible the writer or meaning of the foreign text. The dominance of fluency in English-language translation becomes apparent in a sampling of reviews from newspapers and periodicals. On those rare occasions when reviewers address the translation at all, their brief comments usually focus on its style, neglecting such other possible questions as its accuracy, its intended audience, its economic value in the current book market, its relation to literary trends in English, its place in the translators career. And over the past fifty years the comments are amazingly consistent in praising fluent discourse while damning deviations from it, even when the most diverse range of foreign texts is considered. Take fiction, for instance, the most translated genre worldwide. Limit the choices to European and Latin American writers, the most translated into English, and pick examples with different kinds of narrativesnovels and short stories, realistic and fantastic, lyrical and philosophical, psychological and political. Here is one possible list: Albert Camuss The Stranger (1946), Franỗoise Sagans Bonjour Tristesse (1955), Heinrich Bửlls Absent Without Leave (1965), Italo Calvinos Cosmicomics (1968), Gabriel Garcớa Mỏrquezs One Hundred Years of Solitude (1970), Milan Kunderass The Book of Laughter and Forgetting (1980), Mario Vargas Llosas In Praise of the Stepmother (1990), Julia Kristevas The Samurai (1991), Gianni Celatis Appearances (1992), Adolfo Bioy Casaress A Russian Doll (1992). Some of these translations enjoyed considerable critical and commercial success in English; others made an initial splash, then sank into oblivion; still others passed with little or no notice. Yet in the reviews they were all judged by the same criterionfluency. The following selection of excerpts comes from various British and American periodicals, both literary and mass-audience; some were written by noted critics, novelists, and reviewers: Stuart Gilberts translation seems an absolutely splendid job. It is not easy, in translating French, to render qualities of sharpness or vividness, but the prose of Mr. Gilbert is always natural, brilliant, and crisp. (Wilson 1946:100) The style is elegant, the prose lovely, and the translation excellent. (New Republic 1955:46) Invisibility 3 In Absent Without Leave, a novella gracefully if not always flawlessly translated by Leila Vennewitz, Bửll continues his stern and sometimes merciless probing of the conscience, values, and imperfections of his countrymen. (Potoker 1965:42) The translation is a pleasantly fluent one: two chapters of it have already appeared in Playboy magazine. (Times Literary Supplement 1969:180) Rabassas translation is a triumph of fluent, gravid momentum, all stylishness and commonsensical virtuosity. (West 1970:4) His first four books published in English did not speak with the stunning lyrical precision of this one (the invisible translator is Michael Henry Heim). (Michener 1980:108) Helen Lanes translation of the title of this book is faithful to Mario Vargas LlosasElogio de la Madrastrabut not quite idiomatic. (Burgess 1990:11) The Samurai, a transparent roman clef, fluently translated by Barbara Bray, chronicles Ms. Kristevasand Parissintellectual glory days. (Steiner 1992:9) In Stuart Hoods translation, which flows crisply despite its occasionally disconcerting British accent, Mr. Celatis keen sense of language is rendered with precision. (Dickstein 1992:18) Often wooden, occasionally careless or inaccurate, it shows all the signs of hurried work and inadequate revision. [] The Spanish original here is 10 words shorter and incomparably more elegant. (Balderston 1992:15) The critical lexicon of post-World War II literary journalism is filled with so many terms to indicate the presence or absence of a fluent translation discourse: crisp, elegant, flows, gracefully,