Collaborative Translation: From the Renaissance to the Digital Age 9781350006027, 9781350006034, 9781350006058

Table of contents :
Cover
Half-title
Title
Copyright
Contents
Notes on Contributors
1. What Is Collaborative Translation?
Part 1: Reconceptualizing the Translator: Renaissance and Enlightenment Perspectives
2. On the Incorrect Way to Translate: The Absence of Collaborative Translation from Leonardo Bruni’s De interpretatione recta
3. ‘Shared’ Translation: The Example of Forty Comedies by Goldoni in France (1993–4)
4. For a Practice-Theory of Translation: On Our Translations of Savonarola, Machiavelli, Guicciardini and Their Effects
Part 2: Collaborating with the Author
5. Author-Translator Collaborations: A Typological Survey
6. Vladimir Nabokov and His Translators: Collaboration or Translation Under Duress?
7. Günter Grass and His Translators: From a Collaborative Dynamic to an Apparatus of Control?
8. Contemporary Poetry and Transatlantic Poetics at the Royaumont Translation Seminars (1983–2000): An Experimental Language Laboratory
Part 3: Environments of Collaboration
9. Online Multilingual Collaboration: Haruki Murakami’s European Translators
10. Translation Crowdsourcing: Research Trends and Perspectives
11. The Role of Institutional Collaborations in Contexts of Official Bilingualism: The Canadian Example
12. A New Ecology for Translation? Collaboration and Resilience
Index

Citation preview

Collaborative Translation

Bloomsbury Advances in Translation Series Series Editor: Jeremy Munday, Centre for Translation Studies, University of Leeds, UK Bloomsbury Advances in Translation Studies publishes cutting-edge research in the fields of translation studies. This field has grown in importance in the modern, globalized world, with international translation between languages a daily occurrence. Research into the practices, processes and theory of translation is essential and this series aims to showcase the best in international academic and professional output. Other titles in the series: Community Translation, Mustapha Taibi and Uldis Ozolins Corpus-Based Translation Studies, edited by Alet Kruger, Kim Wallmach & Jeremy Munday Global Trends in Translator and Interpreter Training, edited by Séverine Hubscher-Davidson & Michał Borodo Music, Text and Translation, edited by Helen Julia Minors Quality In Professional Translation, Joanna Drugan Retranslation, Sharon Deane-Cox The Pragmatic Translator, Massimiliano Morini Translation, Adaptation and Transformation, edited by Laurence Raw Translation and Translation Studies in the Japanese Context, edited by Nana Sato-Rossberg & Judy Wakabayashi Translation as Cognitive Activity, Fabio Alves & Amparo Hurtado Albir Translating For Singing, Mark Herman & Ronnie Apter Translating Holocaust Lives, edited by Jean Boase-Beier, Peter Davies, Andrea Hammel and Marion Winters Translation, Humour and Literature, edited by Delia Chiaro Translation, Humour and the Media, edited by Delia Chiaro Translating the Poetry of the Holocaust, Jean Boase-Beier What Is Cultural Translation?, Sarah Maitland

Collaborative Translation From the Renaissance to the Digital Age Edited by Anthony Cordingley and Céline Frigau Manning

BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2017 Paperback edition first published 2018 Copyright © Anthony Cordingley, Céline Frigau Manning and Contributors, 2017 Anthony Cordingley and Céline Frigau Manning have asserted their right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identifi ed as the Editors of this work. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN: HB: 978-1-3500-0602-7 PB: 978-1-3500-7529-0 ePDF: 978-1-3500-0605-8 ePub: 978-1-3500-0604-1 A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. Series: Bloomsbury Advances in Translation Studies Typeset by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India Printed and bound in Great Britain Research for this publication has been funded by the French Laboratories of Excellence Arts-H2H (Investissements d’avenir program ANR-10-LABX-80-01) and TransferS (Investissements d’avenir program ANR-10-IDEX-0001-02PSL* et ANR-10-LABX-0099), as well as the Institut Universitaire de France. To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

Contents Notes on Contributors

1

What Is Collaborative Translation? Anthony Cordingley and Céline Frigau Manning

vii

1

Part 1 Reconceptualizing the Translator: Renaissance and Enlightenment Perspectives

2

3

4

On the Incorrect Way to Translate: The Absence of Collaborative Translation from Leonardo Bruni’s De interpretatione recta Belén Bistué

33

‘Shared’ Translation: The Example of Forty Comedies by Goldoni in France (1993–4) Françoise Decroisette

49

For a Practice-Theory of Translation: On Our Translations of Savonarola, Machiavelli, Guicciardini and Their Effects Jean-Louis Fournel and Jean-Claude Zancarini

68

Part 2

5

6

7

8

Collaborating with the Author

Author-Translator Collaborations: A Typological Survey Patrick Hersant

91

Vladimir Nabokov and His Translators: Collaboration or Translation Under Duress? Olga Anokhina

111

Günter Grass and His Translators: From a Collaborative Dynamic to an Apparatus of Control? Céline Letawe

130

Contemporary Poetry and Transatlantic Poetics at the Royaumont Translation Seminars (1983–2000): An Experimental Language Laboratory Abigail Lang

145

vi

Contents

Part 3

9

10

11

12

Index

Environments of Collaboration

Online Multilingual Collaboration: Haruki Murakami’s European Translators Anna Zielinska-Elliott and Ika Kaminka

167

Translation Crowdsourcing: Research Trends and Perspectives Miguel A. Jiménez-Crespo

192

The Role of Institutional Collaborations in Contexts of Official Bilingualism: The Canadian Example Gillian Lane-Mercier

212

A New Ecology for Translation? Collaboration and Resilience Michael Cronin

233 247

Notes on Contributors Olga Anokhina, a linguist and a researcher at the Institute for Modern Texts and Manuscripts (CNRS-ENS), works on the genesis of literary works by multilingual writers. She edited the collective volumes Multilinguisme et créativité littéraire (2012) and Écrire en langues: littératures et plurilinguisme (2015). Her interests include the cognitive aspects of the written production, multilingualism and creation. Within ITEM, Olga Anokhina is head of the research team Multilingualism, translation, creation. Belén Bistué is Associate Researcher in Comparative Literature for the Argentine Research Council (CONICET) and Assistant Professor of English at the Universidad Nacional de Cuyo. She specializes in translation history, with a focus on Renaissance collaborative and multilingual  translation practices. Her publications in  this field include ‘The Task(s) of the Translator(s): Multiplicity as Problem in  Renaissance European Thought’ (2011),  winner of the A. Owen Aldridge prize, and the groundbreaking Collaborative Translation and MultiVersion Texts in Early Modern Europe (2013). Anthony Cordingley is Associate Professor of English and Translation Studies at Université Paris 8, presently on secondment to the University of Sydney as ARC Discovery Early Career Research Fellow. He edited Self-translation: Brokering Originality in Hybrid Culture (Bloomsbury 2013) and co-edited the 2015 issue of Linguistica Antverpiensia, ‘Towards a Genetics of Translation’. A literary scholar with a special interest in Samuel Beckett, digital editing and manuscript genetics he has published in journals such as Comparative Literature, Modern Philology and Journal of Modern Literature. He is completing the Comment c’est/How It Is module of the Beckett Digital Manuscript Project. Michael Cronin is Professor of Translation Studies at Dublin City University. He is the author of Translating Ireland: Translation, Languages and Identity (Cork University Press, 1996); Across the Lines: Travel, Language, Translation (Cork University Press, 2000); Translation and Globalization (London, Routledge, 2003); Translation and Identity (Routledge, 2006); Translation Goes to the Movies

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(Routledge, 2009) and Translation in the Digital Age (Routledge, 2013). He is a member of the Royal Irish Academy and of the Academia Europeae. Françoise Decroisette is Emeritus Professor at Université Paris 8. A specialist of Italian theatrical practices from the sixteenth to the twenty-first centuries, she has translated into French Basile’s Le Conte des Contes, de’ Sommi’s Les Quatre dialogues en matière de représentations théâtrales, librettos, comedies written by Goldoni for various publishers and directors (Lassalle, Morin, Cals, Hollund), as well as Gozzi’s L’Oiseau Vert. She also oversaw the collaborative translation of Gozzi’s Mémoires inutiles. Jean-Louis Fournel is Professor of Italian Studies at Université Paris 8, member of the Institut Universitaire de France, of the Laboratoire d’études romanes and the UMR Triangle. With J.-C. Zancarini, he translated works by Machiavelli, Guicciardini and Savonarola. His more recent books are La Grammaire de la république (2009), La cité du soleil et les territoires des hommes (2012) and, as editor, Les mots de la guerre dans l’Europe de la Renaissance (with M.-M. Fontaine, 2015). Céline Frigau Manning is Associate Professor of Italian and Theatre Studies at Université Paris 8, and a member of the Institut Universitaire de France. A specialist of theatre and opera, she was resident scholar at the Villa Medici. Her work has appeared in Opera Quarterly and Nineteenth-Century Music, and she is the author of Chanteurs en scène. L’œil du spectateur au Théâtre-Italien (1815-1848) (Champion, 2014). Founder of the translation collective La Langue du bourricot, which has published translations of plays by Matteo Bacchini, Antonio Moresco, and Emma Dante, she is coediting with Marie Nadia Karsky a volume on theatrical translation. Patrick Hersant teaches English literature and translation at Université Paris 8. His research concerns modern and contemporary poetry. Recent publications include a study of the translations of ‘Kubla Khan’ (S. T. Coleridge: In Xanadu, Presses universitaires de Bordeaux, 2016) and the forthcoming Traduire avec l’auteur, an edited collection devoted to author-translator collaboration. As a translator, he has published French versions of British poets such as Philip Sydney, R. L. Stevenson, Edward Lear and Seamus Heaney. Miguel Ángel Jiménez-Crespo holds a PhD in Translation and Interpreting Studies from the University of Granada, Spain. He is an associate professor in

Notes on Contributors

ix

the Department of Spanish and Portuguese, Rutgers University, where he directs the MA and undergraduate certificate in Spanish-English Translation and Interpreting. He is the author of Translation and Web Localization published by Routledge in 2013, and his papers have appeared in translation studies journals such as Target, Meta, Perspectives, Lingüistica Antverpiensia, TIS: Translation and Interpreting Studies, Jostrans as well as Translation and Interpreting. He is the assistant editor of the upcoming John Benjamins journal JIAL: the Journal of Internationalization and Localization. Ika Kaminka studied art history at the University of Bergen and presently works as translator of Japanese literature into Norwegian. She has translated a number of books by Haruki Murakami in addition to Natsume Sōseki and Jun’ichirō Tanizaki. In 2012 she was awarded the Bastian Prize for her rendering of Murakami’s 1Q84. Kaminka is presently chair of the Norwegian Association of Literary Translators. Abigail Lang is Associate Professor at Université Paris-Diderot (LARCA-UMR 8225). She is the author of a  study on Louis Zukofsky and, with Thalia Field, of A Prank of Georges (Essay Press, 2010). With David Nowell Smith she co-edited Modernist Legacies. Trends and Faultlines in British Poetry Today (Palgrave, 2015). Recent translations into French include books by Rosmarie Waldrop (L’attente, 2011), Lorine Niedecker (Corti, 2013), Ashbery and Schuyler (Presses du Réel, 2015). She is a member of the Double Change collective (www.doublechange.org). Céline Letawe has a PhD in philosophy and literature and a specialized degree in translation studies. She has published her PhD dissertation in German literature (Max Frisch. Uwe Johnson. Eine literarische Wechselbeziehung, 2009), and has begun research on literary translation in the framework of a postdoctoral stay at the archives of the Berliner Akademie der Künste in 2011. She teaches translation studies and translation at the University of Liège. Gillian Lane-Mercier is Associate Professor of French literature at McGill University. Her research interests include literary theory, translation studies, the sociology of translation, the history of literary translation in Canada and twentieth-century French literature. Author of La parole romanesque and co-author of Faulkner: une expérience de retraduction, she has published numerous articles in top European and North American journals. She is currently embarking on a large-scale project on the emergence of traditions of literary translation in Canada since 1980.

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Notes on Contributors

Jean-Claude Zancarini is Emeritus Professor of Italian Studies at the École Normale Supérieure de Lyon (UMR Triangle, Labex COMOD). His research concerns political thought, sixteenth-century theatre and translation. He has translated Machiavelli, Guicciardini, Savonarola (with Jean-Louis Fournel) and literary texts (Fenoglio, Fruttero and Lucentini, Nigro, Vegliani, Sofri, Pasolini). With Séverine Gedzelman, he created HM tool (HyperMachiavel) which allows for the comparison of an original text with its translations. Anna Zielinska-Elliott is a translator of modern Japanese literature into Polish. She has translated Mishima Yukio, Yoshimoto Banana and most of the works of Murakami Haruki. Educated in Poland and Japan, she holds a PhD in Japanese literature from the University of Warsaw. She teaches Japanese language, literature and translation at Boston University, and has published a number of articles on Murakami and translation, in addition to a literary guide to Murakami’s Tokyo. 

1

What Is Collaborative Translation? Anthony Cordingley and Céline Frigau Manning

If I sit down to translate, alone, finish the task and dispatch my text, does the translating end here? Or does it end once the text has been checked by the reviser, editor, the author, other colleagues or by me again? Are the others who work on my text, publish it, sell it, read it, debate it also translating? Are they part of the translation? What if I sit down to translate, with others? What if they are not in the same room, now, in the past, or the future? What if we share the task between us? What if we have to? Are we performing the same activity? What if we have separate roles? Can I do any of this alone? What if I do not know the others? What if I do not agree with them? What if they are a machine? What is collaborating, collaboration? What is translating, translation? The popular image of the lonely translator is strikingly at odds with the reality of his or her work within the profession. In both literary and ‘pragmatic’ contexts, many ‘collaborators’ with different roles will typically shape a translated text before it is published. Even if one defines translation narrowly, limiting it to decoding a source text and writing it in another language, throughout history the practice has not always been assumed to be a solitary affair. From Antiquity to the Renaissance, translation was frequently practised by groups comprised of specialists of different languages and with varied skills. At the centre of translation teams, experts from various cultures came together to find solutions to translation problems, and the acts of reading and rewriting were often separated and multiplied between participants. Yet, during the Renaissance, prefaces and tracts which discussed translation tended to elide these collaborative practices to promote a singular act. Tracing this history in the West, Belen Bistué (2013) has argued that the desire to represent translation as a conflation of different roles derived from a will to accord the translated text poetic unity and singular authority. This aligned it with wider political processes in Europe that were consolidating power around the unification of church, state, family and patriarch. Devolving upon the individual

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the task that was sometimes performed by the many allowed those writing about translation to promote an image of the translator as the text’s surrogate author. It presented the translator with the daunting challenge of equalling the comprehension of the author in the author’s tongue while matching that author’s skill and style in another. The many hands that had frequently contributed to the production of a translation were not replaced by a more expert, singular genius; rather, the discourses around translation sought to suppress them so as to posit the translator as surrogate author. The trope of the solitary translator is thus not simply a post-Romantic construct which mirrors that of the solitary genius. Translators continue to be defined in relation to literary authors in ways that often little resemble the reality of their work. The vast majority of translators, especially those working in pragmatic or audiovisual contexts, must accept their role in the creation of a negotiated, dynamic text over which they have only provisional authority, knowing that their work may be modified significantly by revisers, editors, dubbing adapters and publishers of some form. In recent years, authors have been dethroned by certain literary historians (those, that is, who had not already declared the author dead) and placed among their fellows at court: their collaborators. This chapter will chart this process with reference to the English literary tradition in particular, not to perpetuate a vision of translators filtered through the prism of the literary authorship of a dominant culture, but rather to interrogate the effects of that very equation. Furthermore, the following chapters reclaim the plurality of translating through heterogeneous times and spaces, between individuals and institutions of varying degrees of power, control and respect for translation; they offer a panorama of collaborative translation, from dyadic interactions to networks of actors, modalities and technologies. Indeed, given the overwhelming diversity of skills, knowledge and practices that emerge here, populating a vast landscape of translation, one may legitimately ask: what does ‘collaborative translation’ mean? To address this question, we will retrace the evolution of the most powerful myths of collaboration and explore how current translation practices are influenced by the contemporary rhetoric of the ‘collaborative’ that is pervading social, political, economic and digital life.

Relationality and the perils of definition It is not uncommon to see discussions of collaborative translation highlight the many, often contradictory or conflicting practices included under the

What Is Collaborative Translation?

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term’s umbrella by referencing various dictionary definitions for ‘collaboration’. Inevitably, scholars exploit the ambiguous coexistence of collaboration’s positive and negative connotations in English and other European languages  – the treacherous ‘collaboration with the enemy’ versus its more benevolent or even selfless forms of cooperation – as a way of approaching the multiplicity of situations, motivations and hierarchies that structure collaborative translation practices. Indeed, the approach is often used when scholars try to grasp the complicated notion of ‘translation’ itself. Such definitional problems increase exponentially when one considers these terms in different language contexts and their translation. For instance, in English the more benign adjective ‘collaborative’ was welcomed as the standard term for translations signed by one or more translators, while this term was avoided for a long time in France, where it still echoes uncomfortably with the historical fact of the nominalized, historical Collaboration. Yet most likely under the influence of (global) English spread through the internet and the vocabulary of translation technologies, the term traduction collaborative is becoming more and more accepted in France, where once traduction collective was the norm (though Francophones outside France appear less sensitive to the question). Equally, a move in the opposite direction would be problematic, for in English the adjectival use of ‘collective’ in ‘collective translation’ might for some suggest a notion of mass translation factories or production lines, far from the idealized political harmony permitted in such friendly compounds as ‘theatre collective’ or ‘artists’ collective’. Yet, even more so than for other ambiguous terms, turning to the dictionary for a definition of collaborative translation will never suffice. The field of collaborative translation understood as an enumeration of practices resists nominal definition: the field is non-essential, open and dynamic, and the position of any one collaborative translation event within its unique fabric of relations is constantly shifting. A relational definition of collaborative translation offers, on the other hand, the possibility for multiple definitions of the term to evolve from changes in its elements and the relationships between them at a given moment. A nominal definition defines a term by its characteristics (collaborative translation, CT = a, b, c, d), whereas a relational definition describes one thing through its relationships or absence of relationships with other elements and the forms of those relations themselves. The identity of a translation event is thus not expressed in terms that are monistic (CT = a) or dualistic (CT = not (not CT)), but relational, where the semantic definition of the identity of CT includes its relations to its external world and the relational reflexivity of that world with it. As such, a relational definition allows for a multiplicity of relational elements

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to be defined within a general concept, the capacity to compare different definitions for a concept and the possibility of accommodating a dialectic between the myths that it generates and those that fuel it. As with any definition, a relational definition cannot exist outside of the way we articulate it. When one speaks of collaborative translation, one’s subjective position, as much as one’s collective historical position, necessarily situates one within that network and its definition, altering its relationships. Within a relational paradigm, the translator is no longer a fixed intermediary between traditional binaries of source text/culture and target text/culture, he or she is now an active node in an evolving and dynamic web. But when multiple translators work together, is the translator’s authority and status multiplied? Is it divided, be it in symbolic, semantic, legal or financial terms? If the translator already suffers from a lesser authority, is this weakness increased by a plurality of translators? Discourses around collaborative translation regularly posit its many practices either as a galvanizing force or as a source of division. Might the recognition of the collaborative aspect of translation, however, threaten the hard-won recognition of the translator’s creativity? And while some voices in translation studies aspire for translators to be considered in terms comparable to those used for single authors, this has occurred at a moment when the very model of single authorship is being called into question. Indeed, definitions of the labour of translation currently include many activities that have not been considered to be translation in the traditional sense of the term, to the extent that in current usage, collaborative risks becoming a synonym for notions such as social, transaction, production, or even relation itself. If it is none of these precisely, its usage in the field now relates to them all, with varying degrees of proximity. Indeed, the semantic effervescence bubbling around the term at present is in great need of some historical contextualizing.

Author and translator: Myths of singularity The most immediate understanding of collaboration in translation derives from how the term has been applied to authorship: ‘the act of sharing authority over a work or some portion of it’ (Shillingsburg 1996: 173). Yet was the writer ever the work’s sole author, or its authority? The convenient separation of Western literary history into epochs of Antiquity, Medieval, Renaissance, Enlightenment, Neo-Classical, Romantic, Modernist and post-Modern periods has offered blunt categories for debating if and when authorship became or ever was a solitary

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affair. Scholars have highlighted how foundational texts of Western literature, by such canonical authors as ‘Homer’ or ‘Sappho’, in fact evolved over the course of many generations as they moved from oral to print cultures, invalidating any notion of their singular authority. The controversy surrounding the extent of Shakespeare’s authorial activity is representative of how collaborative authorship has been perceived differently since the Renaissance; it is exemplary of the problem of generalizing authorial practices based on generic assumptions of periodization or different theoretical orientations, and serves as a paradigmatic case for interrogating the myth of solitary genius. Indeed, the complex networks that sustained the Elizabethan stage offer a visible microcosm of the kinds of collaborative practices that have been attributed to non-theatrical texts, serving as a productive analogy of the dynamics of textual production and reception that are pertinent to translation. The demands placed upon the act of translation in the Renaissance redoubled those attributed to the author, and the imperative to characterize translation as a singular act should be understood in the context of the ideological imperative to sustain myths of singular authorship. Collaboration has been intensely debated in Renaissance scholarship, especially with respect to the claim that there is a ‘simple, universally accepted truth’ that Shakespeare’s ‘artistic genius … stands alone’ (Ackerman 2003: 2). Expressed in the forward to The Bard on the Brain, a neurological inquiry into Shakespeare’s characters, such uncritical bardolatry abstracts the transcendent Poet from the craftsman of the actor-writer, and shows that even though collaborative dimensions to Shakespeare’s production have been discussed since the nineteenth century, the myth of his unique genius has a tenacious hold on both the popular and scientific imagination (see Knapp 2009: 34–5). Yet scholars are divided as to whether Shakespeare is ‘co-author’ or ‘collaborator’, and often disagree on the definition of these terms. They tend nevertheless to admit that the man wrote plays which others revised or to which they contributed, and that he worked within a corporate theatre where the theatrical text was shaped by negotiations between playwrights, stage managers and directors, the actors on stage, the crew in the wings and the audience in the pit. When this text was set in print, it could not only be subject to revisions by certain collaborators but was also prone to the vagaries of scribes, censors, printers and editors.1 The terminological instability between different definitions of collaboration, not to mention the introduction of the term ‘co-author’, resembles certain ambiguities in present declensions of collaboration with or between translators, to which we will return. In his influential study, Textual Intercourse: Collaboration, Authorship, and Sexualities in Renaissance Drama, J. Masten (1997) asserts that ‘collaboration’

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should no longer be regarded ‘as an aberrant form of textual production in a period and genre in which it in fact predominated’ (7) and that this form of cultural production cannot be accounted for by simply doubling or replicating the single author model: ‘Two heads are different from one’ (19). He counsels scholars to ‘forego anachronistic attempts to divine the singular author of each scene, phrase, and word’. In so doing, Masten takes aim at the sizeable body of scholars who assume the work of detecting and analysing which words belong to whom in the plays of the period; in particular, he critiques the ideological orientation of the small industry of scholars that applies quantitative measures, such as computational stylometrics, to “Shakespeare” texts in order to separate the Bard from his collaborators or ‘co-authors’ (e.g. Vickers 2002; Craig and Kinney 2009). Masten charges the work of attribution scholars as ‘anachronistic’ by applying Foucault’s influential argument of his 1969 text ‘What is an Author?’ Foucault outlined his concept of the ‘author-function’ by arguing that in the West, prior to ‘the seventeenth or eighteenth century’, ‘ “literary” narratives (stories, epics, tragedies, comedies) were accepted, put into circulation, and valorized without any question about the identity of their author’ (1984: 109). With recourse to definitions of authorship provided by copyright law, Foucault states that prior to this period literary texts did not require the ‘attribution to an author’ that emerged ‘once strict rules concerning author’s rights, author-publisher relations, rights of reproduction, and related matters were enacted’ (108). Masten combines this theoretical argument with certain insights from earlier Shakespeare scholarship, notably Bentley’s (1971: 197–234) proofs – disputed by others – that collaborative writing was the rule rather than the exception in the London theatre, not only for Shakespeare, but also for Beaumont and Fletcher, Greene, Marlowe, Peele, Dekker, Webster, Middleton and Heywood. Masten (10, 19) uses Foucault to justify the broader claim that attributing authorship to texts of the period is misguided because it maps onto dominant collaborative practices an ideology of individual authorship. Collaboratively written plays, he argues, precede, elude and resist ‘categories of singular authorship, intellectual property, and the individual that are central to later Anglo-American cultural, literary, and legal history’ (361–2). This thesis has had a powerful effect upon the notion of authorship in Shakespeare scholarship. It has become unavoidable in any serious treatment of collaboration in the period, is reiterated in entries on collaboration in widely read companions to the Renaissance or Shakespeare (e.g. Hoenselaars 2012; McGuire 2002) and is regularly discussed in studies of modern authorship

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(e.g. Bennett 2005). Yet Masten’s contention, and the validity of Foucault’s view of history, have been vigorously rebuked, notably by Brian Vickers in Shakespeare, Co-Author (2002: 506–41) and Jeffrey Knapp in Shakespeare Only (2009). Such scholars do not deny that the Elizabethan theatre functioned through networks of collaboration; rather, they accuse historians who oppose collaboration and singular authorship of ‘distort[ing] the historical picture’ for ideological reasons; they hold that this ‘has prevented theatre scholars from recognizing that paradigms of single authorship not only significantly predated Shakespeare but also dominated his contemporaries’ sense of how plays were written’ (Knapp 2009: 18–19). For Knapp the risk of this interpretation of Foucault is that everything prior to the seventeenth century may be deemed ‘collaborative’, which ‘is to miss the real innovativeness of large-scale coauthorship in the Renaissance theatre’ (2009: 120). In a less polemical fashion, Hirschfeld (2004) demonstrates that collaborative authorship could have models and purposes which surpass Masten’s assumption of a possessive versus non-proprietary authorship. The distinction that such Renaissance scholars draw between ‘collaboration’ and ‘co-authorship’ hinges upon the degree to which one affirms the presence of any individual author in a text. When Vickers writes that ‘anyone who had studied the Renaissance in even a perfunctory manner would have to be suffering from amnesia to imagine that “the author” had not then “emerged” ’ (2004: 528), he believes, in spite of a multitude of printing and editorial vagaries, not only that certain words of Shakespeare’s texts are the Bard’s alone, but also that the living writer felt ownership over them, perceived himself as their author and was known by his peers and audiences as such. This contrasts with the tradition that emphasizes the role of the institution: ‘The company commissioned the play, usually stipulated the subject, often provided the plot, often parceled it out, scene by scene, to several playwrights. The text thus produced was a working model, which the company then revised as seemed appropriate’ (Orgel 1981: 3). This view of decentred authority is dispersed even further by Stallybrass (1992: 601): ‘Instead of a single author, we have a network of collaborative relations, normally between two or more writers, between writers and acting companies, between acting companies and printers, between compositors and proofreaders, between printers and censors.’ The quarrel surrounding collaboration in Renaissance drama reflects the common divides of literary theory. Post-structuralists point to the fact that a reader has no access to an individual author’s subjectivity and that any such attempts only encounter social structures that are themselves subject to

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prevailing (capitalist) discourses of power and knowledge. Their interpretation of ‘collaborative’ processes implies that subjectivity is structured from without and dispersed or fragmented throughout the network in which it is implicated; thus the author’s function cannot be reconciled with the individual. Their detractors hold, on the other hand, that when individuals collaborate within networks they exercise their subjectivity, of which evidence remains in the material text. Furthermore, the use of the term ‘co-author’ by scholars such as Vickers and Knapp highlights their struggle to separate the writing of playwrights who laboured on the genesis of their works – however contingent that ‘text’ may have been – from subsequent interventions by ‘collaborators’ who performed different functions (revising that does not significantly alter the text, performing, transcribing, editing, acting, printing). They admit however that these functions can resemble authorship, and do indeed leave material traces in the texts which are passed on to future readers. They view the question as one of degree: the authority of collaborators lessens as their capacity to alter the text diminishes. Furthermore, they point to the fact that if there were only networks of social and institutional interaction one could never account for the individuality of the works produced. Indeed, some acknowledge the fallacy of ever thinking that a reader has access to the intentions and subjectivity of an author and may object to Harold Bloom’s conservative edification of the Western canon, yet are willing nevertheless to concede that Bloom has grounds for arguing that, in cases of roughly equivalent circumstances, aesthetic differences between authors cannot be ignored: ‘If it is arbitrary that Shakespeare centers the Canon, then they [social constructivists] need to show why the dominant social class selected him, rather than say, Ben Jonson, for that arbitrary role’ (1995: 24). Yet for Knapp, the existence of the individual author and a notion of singular authorship should not exclude the coexistence of a collaborative author and notions of simultaneous co-authorship. He highlights the plurality of roles that one can play within a given structure: Shakespeare the actor-playwright, director, collaborator and author are, in this line of reasoning, each ‘diverse yet inseparable components of his professional identity’ (Knapp 2005: 19). Such critics imply that collaboration is simply a fact of production and that endowing all collaborators with authority is to introduce, from the distance of the critic, a certain pedantry which confuses roles in a way that was foreign to the understanding of those at the time. Renaissance translators and printers remain, on the other hand, interdependent but distinct in A. E. B. Coldiron’s (2015) Printers Without Borders: Translation and Textuality in the Renaissance. While they ‘co-operated closely’,

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translator and printer exercise separate functions, even if they may inhabit ‘the same body, since many early English printers, beginning with Caxton, were themselves also translators’. Coldiron likens each to early-twentieth-century film producers, ‘not faceless middlemen or technicians, but entrepreneurs, experimenters’ (3). Their combined effort to ‘creat[e] not only linguistic readability but also cultural comprehensibility’ during the first two centuries of the printing press in England involved printers ‘ “translating” continental technology and technique as much as the translators were rendering words, styles, genres’ – a symbiosis that helped realize the potentiality of each (3–4). Coldiron’s stereoscopic view of book and translation history contrasts with Dobranski’s (1999) use of bibliographical and literary research when considering a figure whose eminence in the English tradition approaches that of Shakespeare’s. In Milton, Authorship, and the Book Trade he argues that Milton’s self-fashioning as a solitary writer contrasts with the culture of amanuenses, acquaintances, printers, distributors and retailers who could shape the poet’s content and were accountable for it. Dobranski suggests that each collaborator might ‘qualify as the book’s “author”’ in a wide definition of the term, or if not, at least ‘shar[e] responsibility for the finished product’ (37). Paradise Lost is thus born from a ‘collaborative genesis’ and ‘Milton was creating his poem as part of a community’ (37). Dobranski accuses critics of applying a modern notion of unitary authorship that is inappropriate to seventeenth-century publishing when, he argues, they fail to understand that instances of textual incoherence in Milton’s work arise precisely because many hands shaped the work: ‘The construction of the poet John Milton has effaced the book’s various collaborators’ (102). He believes that such instances reveal the missed opportunity for critics to see past their imposition of ‘Milton’ as critical construction to the poet himself. Despite his indebtedness to Foucauldian analysis of the author as function, Dobranski ultimately affirms a measure of singular authority that reinforces the mythical stature of the author founded on the great poet’s infallibility (Bennett 2005: 99–100). This contrasts with Coldiron’s bibliographically informed translation scholarship, which does not revert to such an authorial model to affirm the particularity of the translator in the Renaissance. When it comes to the Enlightenment and beyond, there is far more consensus among literary scholars that the valorizing of unity in style and intention, which emerged throughout the Renaissance, became thoroughly entrenched in the ideology of the individual subject. The writer as artist was idealized as the singular figure inspired with an immaterial, even spiritual genius; and the

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powerful Romantic mythologizing of solitary genius continues to shape the popular conception of literary authorship. Its tenacity very likely derives from the way its apotheosis of the author emulates a prevailing theological model of monotheism and singular salvation. In this context, it is far more difficult to deify a plurality of individuals, whose contributions to the genesis of an oeuvre are unequal, variegated and imbricated. After having contributed to the edification of such paradigmatic figures of English Romanticism as William Wordsworth and John Keats, Jack Stillinger (1991) exposed the multiplicity of actors that shaped the writing of Romantics and other writers since. The thesis was confronting because it targeted not inherently collaborative arts such as theatre, but what is often assumed to be the most solitary of literary endeavours: poetry. His study then extended to the prose of paradigmatic Romantics, praised both for its singular genius and for what it revealed about the spirit of its author (John Stuart Mills’s Autobiography, Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria). Stillinger showed how ‘texts considered to be the work of a single authorship turn out to be the product of several hands’, how this was ‘extremely common’ (v) for the Romantics and for authors today. ‘Multiple authorship’, he argued, was ‘one of the routine ways of producing literature all along’ (201). A literary ‘work’ may in fact ‘be the collaborative product of the nominal author and friend, a spouse, a ghost, an agent, an editor, a translator, a publisher, a censor, a transcriber, a printer, or – what is more often the case – several of these acting together or in succession’ (v). This vision of textual production must account for the temporality of a work’s evolution, thus countering the Romantic vision of textual genesis as defined by Wordsworth in his famous preface to the second edition of Lyrical Ballads: ‘Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings’ (1992: 744, 756). Poetry is here opposed to prose, but also to what Wordsworth calls ‘poetic diction’ (747, 761–5) – an artificial, mechanical style, which denies ‘nature’, like the eighteenth-century lyric poetry criticized in the preface. Authentic, ‘good poetry’ on the contrary is natural, individual, passionate, and distinguishes itself from ordinary language not by a difference in kind but in degree. The tension between the individual and the collective manifests in oppositions between spontaneity and meditation, original expression and habitual language, individual talent and tradition.2 To maintain his position, Wordsworth must of course belie the labour of his own artistry, his shaping and revising, his co-opting or being co-opted by those ‘collaborators’ Stillinger identifies; he offers instead the myth of composition as a solitary, internal activity, of ‘emotion

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recollected in tranquility’ (756). Stillinger points out that the preface is itself the work of close collaboration: Coleridge wrote to Robert Southey on 29 July 1802 that ‘Wordsworth’s Preface is half a child of my own Brain. … [It] arose out of Conversations, so frequent, that with few exceptions we could scarcely either of us perhaps positively say, which first started any particular Thought’ (qtd in Stillinger 1991: 71). If the aesthetics of the two were so closely interwoven and symbiotic at the time, it is problematic to sequester the individual from his myth, as much as his poetry, and idealize his singular genius. The concentration upon singular genius during the nineteenth century galvanized into a critical method, fuelling a tradition of biographical literary criticism and philology deemed reductive and positivist by 1960s structuralists and later post-structuralists. In seeking to overturn this tradition, they excluded the diachronic history of a text’s composition from their analyses, a move which was in turn countered by French genetic critics (de Biasi 2011; Ferrer 2002, 2011; Grésillon 1994; Hay 1993, 1989) interested in the compositional process, from which the figure of the author and his or her collaborators is inextricable (see Van Hulle 2014). The methods of textual genetics have been applied to translation, leading to the emergence of ‘genetic translation studies’ (Cordingley and Montini 2015), which generally accounts for collaboration when it becomes manifest (material) in the genesis of a translation. Stillinger also adds a genetic, diachronic layering to his synchronic dispersal of authority, arguing for a ‘theory of versions’ that embraces a multiplicity of authorial intentions: ‘Thus in a collaboratively authored version, each contributor to the collaboration has … an intrinsic rather than extrinsic place in the text. Removing one or more of the authors … simply produces a different version’ (200). Nonetheless, Stillinger comes up against the same issue that divides literary historians of the Renaissance, finding that any notion of singular authorship becomes untenable because of the implication of authorship in ‘collaboration’. His study begins by detecting instances of what certain Renaissance scholars would term the presence of ‘co-authors’ (contributors to Keats’s poems, Harriet Mill’s substantial revisions of John Stuart Mill’s Autobiography, Wordsworth’s reliance on the work of his sister Dorothy). Yet the dynamics of attribution lead Stillinger to apprehend more and more the social web of collaboration. Given the fact that all writing is bound to socio-economic structures that support publishing and reading, generate meaning and construct a notion of authorship, he asks if ‘pure authorship’ is ever possible, before finally rejecting the idea: ‘To separate “pure” authorship from the circumstances of time and place, one would

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have to lock up not only the manuscripts but the authors themselves (and, in the process, thereby deprive them of, among other necessities, language itself)’ (185). He holds, furthermore, that intertexts as much as readers are collaborators, which implies that translators must also be collaborators with authors, logically having their share in the authorship of what was supposed to be the “original”. It is debatable whether such a definition of ‘collaboration’ is useful, but, before returning to this central issue, let us consider if the sociology of translation will shed any light upon these questions.

Sociologies of collaborative translation In 1999, when Stillinger reflected upon his earlier challenge to the myth of solitary authorship with the evidence of collaboration, he found that ‘the point … seems obvious now that it has been out and reviewed for several years’  (8). His pioneering work did not, however, attempt a full sociological description of the social structures and actors that shape the production of literary texts. His contribution to textual criticism and editorial theory sought to build upon the work of Jerome McGann (1983). McGann had challenged the dominant Greg-Bowers method in the Anglo-American tradition, which advocates the construction of definitive editions of a work through the reconciliation of its multiple variants and versions into an ideal form. Editors of these works promoted them as the most perfect representation of the author’s intentions. Like Don McKenzie (1986) in Bibliography and the Sociology of Texts, McGann countered such editorial constructivism with a notion of ‘social text’, where authority is shared not only between the author and all those who have a hand in the book’s production (publishers, editors, printers, agents, lawyers) but also its communities of reception (booksellers, readers, students, teachers, critics, the media). McGann is attentive to the materiality of the work, yet materiality is itself social: a book, not a text, is ‘fashioned and refashioned repeatedly under different circumstances. … And because all its uses are always invested in real circumstances, the many meanings of any book are socially and physically coded in and by the books themselves. They bear the evidence of the meanings they have helped to make’ (2006). In The Textual Condition (1991), McGann conceives of literary texts as ‘collaborative events’ (60); rather than ‘an autonomous and selfreflexive activity’ textual production is ‘a social and institutional event’ (100). When he insists that a work’s ‘textual authority’ resides in ‘the actual structure

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of agreements’ – he cites the ‘cooperating authorities’ (54) of the writer and the publishing institution – his theory implies that agreements extend to all parties in the social network. The move in literary studies towards a social definition of authorship has expanded significantly since McGann’s writing in the 1980s, as studies continue to be influenced by developments in social theory. They build upon Pierre Bourdieu’s analysis of the literary field as a network of power relations which internally situated agents struggle to maintain or influence through recourse to their different reserves of capital, be they economic (financial) or cultural (one’s education, professional standing), social (networks of contacts) or symbolic (prestige, reputation, honour, fame). Interacting with each other, individuals enact their embodied habitus – ‘systems of durable, transposable dispositions, structured structures, predisposed to function as structuring structures’ (1990:  53) – which emerges from an evolving dialogue with self, family and society, psychology, class, gender and ideology. Habitus is ‘the active presence of the whole past of which it is the product’, incorporated as dispositions it is ‘embodied history, internalized as a second nature and so forgotten as history’ (1990: 56); it is thus a set of competences and capacities that allow the individual to improvise and adapt, especially when coming into contact with new situations or fields. Moreover, habitus as practice constitutes the individual; there is no substantial, pre-existing self, and individual subjectivity is formed in practices situated within networks. This fundamental premise of a non-essentialist ontology is common to ‘relational’ thinking in sociology. It is found in Niklas Luhmann’s social systems theory, Bruno Latour’s actor-network theory, and has become the focus of the field of relational sociology (see Powell and Dépelteau 2013). In The Relational Subject (2015), Donati and Archer critique accounts of relational sociology that reduce social relations to ‘transactions’, circumscribing the capacity of individuals to differentiate themselves from, or emerge out of, a homogenizing ‘flat ontology’. ‘North American Relational Sociology’ they claim ‘has effectively eliminated the subject’ (12); by treating relations as dyadic those sociologists ‘cannot explain the context in which relationships occur despite there being no such thing as context-less action’ (i). Donati and Archer’s ‘relational realism’ advocates a ‘stratified social ontology … with different emergent properties and powers pertaining to different levels of reality, and, in this case, cultural reality’ (164). Indeed, the danger of limiting an understanding of translation to the basic premise of relational sociology – namely that social roles are determined by

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systems – is the implication that the ‘translator’ cannot exist independently of his or her system, and exists only if there is a network of authors, publishers, readers and markets that create the role of the translator. Yet, it is untenable to hold that the translator is only a function of a relational system, for if that were the case anyone so positioned could be a translator. Each translator has, however, a unique personality, different aptitudes, styles of writing and ways of reading, each of which motivates and individuates him or her, making him or her more ready or competent for the task. Given equivalent circumstances, some individuals will translate, some will choose not to (see Bush 1997). Similarly, relatively abrupt shifts in the macro environment can determine whether someone may become a translator or not – the proliferation of access to computers and the internet being perhaps the best example today of a significant environmental change resulting in ‘social morphogenesis’ (Archer 2013) that has influenced how, and how many, individuals can assume roles of translatorship. Furthermore, the immense translating activity that accompanied the Arab Spring uprisings that began in Tunisia in 2010 – of literary as much as political texts (poems, songs, chants, narratives) – is a salient example of how individuals will be compelled to assume roles as translators in reaction to a rupture in the political environment (see Baker 2016) and integrate social change into pedagogical translation projects (e.g. Mehrez 2012).3 From the perspective of relational sociology all translation is collaboration in the sense that it does not have collaboration, but rather is collaboration. One quickly perceives that Stillinger’s realization with respect to the embeddedness of authorship in social structures applies equally to the figure of the translator. The broad questioning of the central figure of literary studies – the author  – and the deconstruction of its myths and ideological underpinnings has been paralleled in translation studies, especially since its ‘sociological turn’.4 Translation scholars have moved away from linguistic paradigms of translation and interminable questions of ‘equivalence’ (Nida 1964), building upon functional (Vermeer 1986) and descriptive (Toury 1995) translation studies to enquire into the conditions of textual production that shape a translation ‘event’, the nexus at which the power and influence of different networks and agents intersect, as well as ‘the social discursive practices which mould the translation process and which decisively affect the strategies of a text to be translated’ (Wolf 2011: 2). The particularity of translation is that its event occurs where the fields of the source culture and the target culture overlap, traversing each translator as agent, whose agency in turn shapes the event. The interaction at this juncture

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is theorized by Chesterman (2007: 13) as the dynamic relationship between translation act and translation event: the cognitive act determined by the translator’s subjectivity occurs within the context of the sociologically defined translation event.

Historicizing the myths of collaborative translation Contemporary interest in relationality and collaborative dynamics encourages us to redefine past practices in a way that risks being anachronistic, while offering a provocative means to historicize translation. Rather than extending the catalogue of practices already mentioned into a more complete genealogy, we would rather draw attention to how the rapid expansion of the semantic field covered by the term ‘collaborative translation’ underscores the way that its meaning is inextricable from its usage within specifically defined contexts. Anthony Pym’s (2011: 77) definition in his ‘Translation Research Terms: A Tentative Glossary for Moments of Perplexity and Dispute’ offers a pertinent example: Collaborative translation: Synonym of ‘crowd-sourcing’ (q.v.), ‘community translation’ (q.v.), part of CT3 (q.v.), etc., used for group translating where the work is largely voluntary (i.e. unpaid in financial terms). ‘Collaboration’ in English always sounds like illicit help given to the enemy, as in the case of the French who helped the Nazi occupation of France. More appropriate terms in English might be ‘participative translation’ or ‘volunteer translation’. Then again, if the idea of collaboration connotes something illicit or underground, those values might not be entirely out of place in many situations. Recommendation: Volunteer translation (q.v.).

This definition, presented as provisory in this context, is crucial precisely for its limitations, and for what these might reveal of our present relationship to history. Pym defines ‘collaborative translation’, first, through the contemporary vector of technology and the internet; secondly, through specific community practices; and thirdly, with reference to a historically contingent connotation of the noun ‘collaboration’. The divergence between Pym’s definition and the way that we have used this term until now, in the present context, cannot be reduced to terminological practices specific to literary and pragmatic translation studies. Prior to the advent of the internet, ‘collaborative translation’ commonly referred to translations made, and usually signed, by more than one person. If the visibility of the translator was rare, instances of declared collaboration were

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even rarer. It was certainly highlighted when the translation benefited from the assumed auctoritas of the author – English versions of Borges’ texts appeared as ‘Translated by Norman Thomas di Giovanni in collaboration with the author’ and certain English texts by Nabokov as ‘Translated by Dmitri Nabokov in collaboration with the author’, while Paul Bowles’s translation of Molloy is a special case in Beckett’s canon of self-translations, for it too is signed ‘in collaboration with the author’. This convention has, in turn, been carried into literary and translation studies, when scholars repeat this phrase in their bibliographies and analyses. There is no doubt, however, that ‘crowdsourcing’ and ‘community translation’ refer to specific translation practices, which are considered forms of ‘collaborative translation’ when the latter is used as an umbrella term. Pym insists on the voluntary aspect which is lacking in the former two categories, yet today both crowdsourcing and community translation (which can mean translation by online communities or translating for specific communities, as in the sense of community interpreting) are frequently remunerated and not necessarily collaborative. This raises the issue of how ‘voluntary’ each party is when working on a shared translation. Yet, Pym forecloses the debate because for him ‘collaboration’, in English at least, ‘always sounds like illicit help given to the enemy’. Affirming that any definition of collaboration ‘always’ holds is somewhat cavalier. The Dictionnaire historique de la langue française and the Oxford English Dictionary list the first usage of ‘collaboration’ in the sense of ‘traitorous cooperation with the enemy’ at 1940 and as a ‘spec’. (specific) form, while the primary definition of the term in English as ‘united labour, co-operation; esp. in literary, artistic, or scientific work’ is dated at 1860, some thirty years after the French began using the term in this way. It derived from the Medieval Latin collaboratio, applied to a marital union, which referred, in a context of alliance relationships, to the profits and goods acquired by common work. In the nineteenth century it retained its legal, economic meaning, but the term’s scope extended outside of marriage to include all participants in the development of a shared project. Today, the adjective remains influenced by the more sinister nominal form, yet even the ‘most delicate of all the problems raised by the fall and divisions of France: collaboration with the German occupant’ (Hoffmann 1968: 375) is itself subject to the different ideological perspectives of historians. The term stood for a political – and legal – programme carried out by Marshal Pétain in the framework of the new French State established after the defeat and the signing of the armistice in 1940. Yet to ‘define’ collaboration requires one to distinguish more accurately between servile and ideological collaboration, as

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well as its voluntary (the attempt to exploit necessity) and involuntary (a reluctant recognition of necessity) modes (Hoffmann 1968: 378). Furthermore, recent historical scholarship has emphasized that ‘it is hard to come up with a serious theoretical reason for excluding from the concept practices of collaboration with non-Axis forces, e.g. of German or Japanese elites with the Allied occupation forces following the Axis defeat in 1945’ (Kalyvas 2008: 109). Indeed, the term is now used by historians for forms of political collaboration that pre-date the Nazi occupation and in non-European contexts. Timothy Brook’s (2005) Collaboration: Japanese Agents and Local Elites in Wartime China does this while also challenging a vertically oriented paradigm of collaboration as imposed on populations by a country’s rulers: ‘Collaboration would not begin at the top as it had in France,’ rather ‘at the local level of a new regime that would gradually be brought into being, minor elites came forward to enter into agreements with agents of the occupying Japanese army’ (2). The slide in Pym’s definition from adjective to noun is significant, for in twenty-first-century English ‘collaborative’ forms part of a set of positive values founded on transparency, the circulation of data, the flattening of hierarchies and participation in democracy. The resonances of the ‘collaboration’ as treason are competing with a powerful repositioning of the concept in public discourse, legitimized through official usage, such as in US president Barack Obama’s 2009 Memorandum for the Heads of Executive Departments and Agencies on ‘Transparency and Open Government’: ‘My Administration is committed to creating an unprecedented level of openness in Government. We will work together to ensure the public trust and establish a system of transparency, public participation, and collaboration. Openness will strengthen our democracy and promote efficiency and effectiveness in Government.’ Obama’s ‘system of … collaboration’ inhabits a semantic field that overlaps with those of openness, transparency, public participation, democracy, efficacy and effectiveness (see Lathrop and Ruma 2010). This suite of concepts neatly surmises the utopian trajectory in the contemporary rhetoric of collaboration. Technology is key to the hopes of delivering this braver new world. Government should be collaborative. Collaboration actively engages Americans in the work of their Government. Executive departments and agencies should use innovative tools, methods, and systems to cooperate among themselves, across all levels of Government, and with nonprofit organizations, businesses, and individuals in the private sector. Executive departments and agencies should solicit public feedback to assess and improve their level of collaboration and to identify new opportunities for cooperation. (Obama 2009)

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Citizen participation in government through the use of networking technologies, applications, open-source platforms and the internet has been termed Gov 2.0. It promises a digital future where a frighteningly impersonal technocracy fades behind a utopian vision of the ‘grassroots’ connecting organically with the structures that govern it. Yet political collaboration is now feeding off the rhetoric of the collaborative, appropriating the adjective as a trope to legitimize government’s traditional responsibilities, mobilizing the term’s rhetoric of cooperation, its claims to dissolve hierarchical barriers, especially through digital meditation. Obama issued his Memo very soon after entering the White House as President, on the back of an electoral campaign whose success owed much to its command of social and electronic media (Twitter, Facebook, email), crucial also for mobilizing its grassroots activists. Yet when it comes to the day-to-day policy making of the executive branch, there appears to be very little meaningful collaboration in policy making on subjects such as tax, drugs, Syria and drone strikes. The idealism that pervades the rhetorical repositioning of the ‘collaborative’ has encouraged an adjectival rebranding of a host of existing situations and practices, at the expense of other terms that are at least as legitimate. Qualifying a translation process as ‘collaborative’ today makes a claim for its legitimacy and improved quality. This improvement is declined in many ways: from a logic of ethics – individuals working together for a common good while renouncing part of their interests and authorship; to a logic of productive capacity and expertise – the ability to harness more and diverse skills to create ‘better’ what would have been produced differently, even sometimes facilitating translation that would be impossible without cooperation (in the case of many online projects); a logic of risk control – multiplying parties to a translation increases the potential surveillance over quality; and the intimately connected logic of efficiency – the rhythm and accuracy of the process can, ideally, be engineered faster through the use of crowdsourcing, volunteer translating, machine translation, translation memories and networked computer assisted translation (CAT) tools. Yet all is not domination from above: in other cases, translators claim that translating together allows the development of a shared epistemological and affective project or mission, offering them with a means with which to approach the ideal and practice of community. The issue here is less, ‘How do I benefit from the collaborative process?’ than ‘What do I give to the community?’ leading to the much debated question of ‘What is community?’ Collaborative translation as a tekhnê is, of course, not something bad or good in itself, and the uses of technology are innumerable. Yet in some

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instances, the logic of ‘exchange’ that segments translation for recycling through Translation Memory eXchange (TMX) files or which motivates professionals who crowdsource translation – both of which can be used by some to justify not paying first-world professional rates or to by-pass the (prototypically collaborative) quality assurance processes used by translation professionals  – contrasts with the dimmer reality of collaboration. Similar limitations are emerging in the new economic model dubbed ‘collaborative consumption’ (Botsman and Rogers 2011). Surfing the wave of collaboration’s positive vibes, this buoyant economy, which is packaged as ‘sharing’, structured around peopleto-people exchange and pumped up in TED talks, capitalizes upon a masterly understanding of contemporary sociability, aesthetics and media. It offers those with disposable income such illicit thrills as a previously out of reach cab ride or a romantic weekend in a luxury treehouse, but it has the far more powerful effect of sustaining global corporate giants who operate out of minimal tax regimes, undercutting local jobs and industry (Slee 2016). In the context of underregulated capitalism, the aggressiveness with which these companies conquer new markets is entirely conventional: they have the resources to sustain losses over a number of years in order to drive out competition and take control of the market (Rushkoff 2016). The comparison between such behaviour and certain collaborative translation processes is less extravagant if one considers how a capitalistic division of labour, with its symbolic integration of the translator into a collaborative ‘assembly-line’, can multiply both the workers’ tasks and the surveillance devices employed to oversee them. One need only remember the attempt by LinkedIn to try to crowdsource the ‘volunteer’ translation of its platform but limit the work to professionals only (McDonough Dolmaya 2011) to understand that, in the absence of regulation or community backlash, the positive rhetoric of collaborative translation can be used as a smokescreen to induce and hide the exploitation of the vulnerable.

Singular or plural: Competing or complementary ontologies? Such exploitation is all the more possible when the very status and existence of the translating subject itself appears fragmented or dispersed. In the genre of ‘collaborative autobiography’, a diaological text posits a monological voice. Such instances may be covert, as in the case of the diary of ‘Michael Field’, pseudonym

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of the Victorian lovers Katharine Harris Bradley and Edith Emma Cooper, or overt, as in the case of Italian writer Piergiorgio Paterlini rendering the voice of the philosopher Gianni Vattimo (2009) in Not Being God: A Collaborative Autobiography. In Vulnerable Subjects: Ethics and Life Writing Thomas Couser writes that ‘co-authoring another’s life can be a creative or a destructive act, a service or a disservice, an homage or an appropriation’ (36), a fact recognized by ethnographers when they gather together first-person narratives or testimonials into an editorial construction of shared identity, or when social anthropologists use collaborative autobiography in the context of collective memory work in qualitative research (Lapadat 2009; Lapadat et al. 2010). A group of ten prominent American Language poets produced The Grand Piano (Armantrout et al. 2006–10), a ten-volume ‘collaborative’ or ‘collective’ (they use both terms) ‘autobiography’ focused on the birth of Language poetry in San Francisco in the second half of the 1970s. Each volume is a non-linear mosaic of self-interrogating personal micro-narratives. In the fifth volume, Ron Silliman reflects on a line multi-authored by members of the early ‘Brat Guts Group’: ‘Does this sentence look more like Bob, Steve or Kit? My guess is all of the above. Or, perhaps more accurately, none. It has qualities I can think about in relationship to each’ (ibid 5: 25). Silliman suggests that the experimental text’s relational subjectivity denies an individual versus aggregate equation. Yet is this necessarily the case for the multi-authored collaborative autobiography within which he makes the observation? As previously discussed, relational sociology encourages one to posit the emergent ontology of the translator within the network. Yet is it possible to think of an emergent ontology of the group? Will this be expressed in the singular, or the plural? Will it come equipped with collective subjectivity? To do so, must one revert to a naive definition of collaboration as an idealistic vision of co-authoring, like the complementarity of lyricist and composer at a piano? For, according to editorial theorist John Bryant (2002: 7), this ‘almost never’ happens: Most collaboration derives from … the conflicting sensibilities of collaborators, both friendly and adversarial. Collaborators act primarily as ‘second readers’, the first reader being the writer writing. That is, these second readers take a writer’s work and provide new perspectives by suggesting changes, in some cases, they demand changes. … In virtually all these cases, the ‘collaborators’ do not work together from the inception of the project; rather, the collaboration begins with one person acting as an editor to shape what a principal writer has written.

Bryant admits that he is ‘nervous about bestowing upon such editorial figures the status of authorial collaborator, since authorship implies a kind of unified,

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originary role not played by most collaborators’ (7). He is wise to do so, and not only for reasons of literary theory. The presently unresolved dispute over the authorship of The Diary of Anne Frank is a case in point. Frank wrote the diary as an adolescent, hiding from the Nazis in Holland. Though she died at fifteen years of age at the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in 1945, her father Otto Frank recovered the diary, edited it and added a prologue verifying its authenticity. He died in 1980. Rights to the book, which has been a phenomenal publishing success, are held by the Swissbased Anne Frank Fonds, who after seeking legal advice has requested that the work not enter the public domain in 2016 (seventy years after Anne’s death); they hold that ‘Otto “created a new work” because of his role of editing, merging and trimming entries from her diary and notebooks and reshaping them into “kind of a collage” meriting its own copyright’ (Carvajal 2015). Apparently unconcerned with discrediting Otto’s own thirty-year battle, in court and out, to defend Anne’s authorship of the diary from Holocaust deniers and others, and which also involved fending off charges that it was in fact he who wrote it, in 2015 the Swiss foundation reclaimed Otto as ‘co-author’. If successful, they will significantly extend the copyright in many countries, perpetuating a constant stream of royalties.5 European law, for instance, maintains that for collaborative works, the seventy-year post-mortem auctoris period is dated from the death of the last collaborator or author.6 Belgian lawyer Alain Berenboom (2016) objects: why should The Diary of Anne Frank be treated differently to any other work? The case is not unusual, for literary estates and corporations have commonly used such techniques to guarantee their control over intellectual property, a trend supported by political and legal systems across the world, which have tended to steadily increase the length of the copyright period. What if translation scholars devoted less attention, however, to the blurring of traditional definitions of authorial and editorial functions in collaborative writing and focused rather on how collaboration or co-translating affects the subjectivity, identity and agency of the text? Quantitative methods may be able to separate out different contributors to a work, but the text’s voice is never a simple aggregate of its components. Much work remains to be done in detailing the qualitative differences in a collaboratively authored text, in determining how co-translators affect the text and each other. How do translators modulate their output through anticipation or reaction to others when translating simultaneously or sequentially, and in deferent spatial arrangements? How do they self-censor, adapt themselves, compromise or other the self? Homogenizing strategies may be internalized by translators – smoothing out stylistic differences, normalizing

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and levelling various translation choices – and applied systematically while editing or rewriting. Yet, what if a translation produced by several voices allowed the voice of the text to be heard as well as its many contributing voices?7 The musical metaphor remains apt to describe the polyphony of such a translated text, suggesting a comparison with the phenomenon studied by musicologist Bernard Lortat-Jacob (1995) when, during the Holy Week in Castelsardo, Sardinia, male singers form quartets and perform traditional sacred music. Once the four deep voices of the choir are in perfect harmony the quintina (literally the ‘little fifth’) appears in the upper register. Producing this voice is the singers’ goal, the effort to do so often leaving them overwhelmed (Lortat-Jacob 1995: 94). Rather than a simple mixing or blending of four voices, a new voice emerges in its own right, with its own unique texture and range. It is born from the union of the other voices, but exists in itself, with the others, each of which remains audible, though concentrated on the maintenance and endurance of the fifth voice. Listeners themselves are conscious of the coexistence of the four deep voices and of the dominant new voice. Lortat-Jacob presents this song as an ‘acoustical wonder’, framing it in a mystical trajectory towards a transcendent unifier: ‘The song is no longer choral but a lied’ (94). This interpretation draws attention to the historically situated subjectivity of the scientific gaze, and how participants in collaborative processes may understand their roles differently from those who observe them. The fact that this Sardinian folk tradition remains marginal, relative to the centres of European power, reminds us that notions of collaboration are context-bound, provoking a wider question – one that could, and should, fill another volume on collaborative translation – of how collaborative translation processes are perceived differently in non-Western traditions. Nevertheless, the idea of the quintina as music, as much as translation, affects the imagination powerfully: ‘Because it testifies to and at the same time reveals the perfection of the singing, the quintina is of a spiritual essence: like the masked faces of the Passion, it is hidden behind appearance and, significantly, presents itself as the acoustic attribute of the ineffable’ (94). It appeals thus to our mythologizing instincts, conjuring notions of ideal communities in spiritual harmony, surpassing the limitations of finite human words. Some translators within collectives may hold similar aspirations and on occasion report feeling something akin to the emergence of the quintina, if only fleetingly. This common grain in the voice suggests a comparison with Jean-Luc Nancy’s (2000) notion of shared ontology – ‘Being is singularly plural, and plurally singular’ (28) – which does not pre-exist anything and exists as ‘coessence’ (30). One might also argue, in similar terms, that translating is singularly plural and plurally singular, for the

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reason that we are never alone when translating, while conversing – virtually or otherwise – with an always hypothetical author and a necessarily imagined reader, while making translation decisions based on cultural worlds which possess us and are possessed by us. We are ourselves vectors of actions, discourses, influences, which pervade us, and which themselves intersect at ambivalent and moving junctures within the many discourses of the self. Nancy’s ‘with’ offers an alternative to the ontology of the necessary relation that binds the relational sociologist’s network: ‘If Being is being-with, then it is, in its being-with, the “with” that constitutes Being; the with is not simply an addition’ (2000: 30). It is neither supplement to, nor an element of, the connectedness of individuals. Being’s fundamental coessence precludes the possibility of its delimitation in an individual, whose being exists only ‘with’ others. Nonetheless, if the practice of translating is always translating with, not as a collection of essences but rather as a fundamental coessence, then collaborative translation cannot preclude solitude. In many cases, on the contrary, the translator’s feelings of loneliness might precisely be increased by his or her presence within a group – where he or she might, moreover, be alone in defending a position shared by no one else.

Conclusion If all translation is collaborative, not all collaborators are translators. A translation reviser, an editor, a dialogue adapter, a dubbing director understands his or her role to be different to that of the translator, even though each may be required to translate (in the usual sense of the term) while performing his or her primary function. Equally, translators habitually revise their own texts, though their revising and its role is necessarily different to that of the designated translation reviser. The point may seem somewhat obvious, yet the distinction needs to be made so that the term ‘collaborative translation’ is not used indiscriminately, sliding between authorial and social models. When Günter Grass gathered his translators together to discuss the work that lay ahead of them, and when those translators then worked individually, was this collaborative translation? Might a ‘regular’ translation have a lesser mode, phase or moment of collaboration? Discussing author-translator collaboration, Vanderschelden (1998: 23) notes that ‘authorial help may take various forms, such as clarification on specific problems of comprehension or reference, consultations on translation strategies, and the transfer of formal properties of the source text’. She concludes, however,

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that ‘this in itself does not necessarily imply translation collaboration’; to qualify as collaborative, such interaction should be ‘regular or systematic’. The notion of collaborative translation depends here on the proximity of parties to the initial creation of the translation and how integral each is to the translation process. The debates about collaboration in Renaissance authorship alert us to the issues involved in making precisely these judgements. Following the distinction made by certain Shakespeareans, it is possible to speak of the difference between co-translation and collaborative translation. Co-translation already has the specificity of designating the act whereby self-identifying translators work together on the creation of a translation, simultaneously or otherwise. This activity also falls under the umbrella term collaborative translation, though it would be inaccurate to describe an editor as a co-translator – that person is unlikely to understand his or her work to be that of a translator, and is unlikely to insist on being a collaborator, as the term is used in some legal contexts, to imply co-authorship. The editor is, nonetheless, far more likely to accept that s/he is a collaborator in the translation process, helping the work come into being. Indeed, there are evidently different degrees of collaboration between different agents in the continuum of the collaborative processes that accompany the publication and reception of a translation, some justifying claims to co-translatorship, others not. Yet the real potential for collaborative translation as a critical concept and tool lies not in its drawing attention to the different roles played by actors in a process, but in its capacity to complicate our assumptions about translation. Understood as a poetics, it surpasses the epistemology of the individual, offering instead various dialectics of imbrication and fusion that subtend and produce collective work. A poetics of collaboration will draw attention to the motivations and social forces that animate collaborative projects and the cultural and political statements they embody. It will elucidate stylistic, rhetorical and technical dimensions to translating that are imperceptible or excluded from a single-translator focus. And it will, finally, expose new materialities of the text.

Notes 1 The literature on Shakespeare, collaboration and his contemporaries is vast. See Hoenselaars (2012a), Holland (2014), Hirschfeld (2004, 2009, 2015), Knapp (2009), Masten (1997), Muir (1960), Orgel (1981, 2003), Taylor (1995a, 1995b) and Vickers (2002).

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2 Roland Barthes identifies a similar appeal to individual sensibility in French poetry of the second half of the nineteenth century in Le Degré zéro de l’écriture (Mazzoni 2005: 132–3). 3 As was also the case with ‘Pedagogies of Revolt: Translating Egypt in Flux’, the international conference organized by the Collaborative Translation project at the Université Paris 8, 26 March 2015. http://www.collaborativetranslation.labex-artsh2h.fr. 4 For an overview see Wolf (2011). Representative works include those by Angelelli (2011), Buzelin (2005, 2007), Chesterman (2006), Hermans (1999), Pym, Shlesinger and Jettmarová (2006), Simeoni (1998), Wolf and Fukari (2007). 5 The Fonds has introduced a second line of argument that evokes the European law concerning the publication of ‘posthumous works’, arguing that the date of publication of the first complete edition of the Dutch original in 1986 be applied, even though the diary has been in circulation in one form or another since 1947 (Savigneau 2016). French activist and researcher in information science and communications Olivier Ertzscheid, who once published a French translation of Frank’s Diary on line and then the full Dutch version, writes about this case at http:// affordance.typepad.com//mon_weblog/anne-frank/. 6 The English text of the act uses the terms ‘joint authorship’ and retains ‘author’, the French collaborateurs d’une œuvre and collaborateurs (Directive 2006/116/EC of the European Parliament and of the Council OJ L 372/12). 7 Valuable analyses of collaborative translation that respond to such questions can be found in Jansen and Wegener’s (2013) two-volume Authorial and Editorial Voices in Translation. Their introduction offers a thorough contextualizing of these questions within translation studies and suggests that collaborative translation processes be distinguished according to the categories Harold Love proposes in the context of attribution studies: executive (composer), declarative (identified author) and revisionary (agents in publishing) authorship.

Works cited Ackerman, D. (2003). ‘Forward’. In The Bard on the Brain: Understanding the Mind Through the Art of Shakespeare and the Science of Brain Imaging, edited by P. Matthews and J. McQuain, 1–12. New York and Washington: Dana Press. Angelelli, C., ed. (2012). The Sociological Turn in Translation and Interpreting Studies, Special issue of Translation and Interpreting Studies 7.2. Archer, M. S. ed. (2013). Social Morphogenesis. Dordrecht: Springer. Armantrout, R., Harryman, C., Hejinian, L., Mandel, T., Pearson, T., Perelman, B., Robinson, K., Silliman, R. and Watten, B. (2006–10). The Grand Piano: An Experiment in Collective Autobiography, San Francisco 1975-1980, 10 Vols. Detroit: Mode A.

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Baker, M., ed. (2016). Translating Dissent: Voices From and With the Egyptian Revolution. Oxon and New York: Routledge. Bennett, A. (2005). The Author. Oxon and New York: Routledge. Bentley G. (1971). The Profession of Dramatist in Shakespeare’s Time, 1590-1642. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Berenboom, A. (2016). ‘D’Hitler à Anne Frank’. La Tribune 85. 7 January 2016. www.avocats.be (accessed 16 April 2016). Bistué, B. (2013). Collaborative Translation and Multi-Version Texts in Early Modern Europe. Farnham: Ashgate. Bloom, H. (1994). The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages. New York: Harcourt Brace. Botsman, R. and Rogers, R. (2011). What’s Mine Is Yours: How Collaborative Consumption is Changing the Way We Live. London: Haper Collins. Bourdieu, P. (1990). The Logic of Practice. Cambridge: Polity Press. Brook, T. (2005) Collaboration: Japanese Agents and Local Elites in Wartime China. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Bryant, J. (2002). The Fluid Text: A Theory of Revision and Editing for Book and Screen. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Bush, P. (1997). ‘The Translator as Arbiter’. In The Translator’s Dialogue: Giovanni Pontiero, edited by P. Orero and J. Sager, 115–126. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Buzelin, H. (2005). ‘Unexpected Allies: How Latour’s Network Theory Could Complement Bourdieusian Analyses in Translation Studies’. The Translator 11: 193–218. Buzelin, H. (2007). ‘Translations “in the Making”’. In Constructing a Sociology of Translation, edited by M. Wolf and A. Fukari, 135–69. Amsterdam: Benjamins. Chesterman, A. (2006). ‘Questions in the Sociology of Translation’. In Translation Studies at the Interface of Disciplines, edited by J. Ferreira Duarte, A. Assis Rosa and T. Seruya, 9–27. Amsterdam: Benjamins. Chesterman, A. (2007). ‘Bridge Concepts in Translation Sociology’. In Constructing a Sociology of Translation, edited by M. Wolf and A. Fukari, 171–83. AmsterdamPhiladelphia: John Benjamins. Cordingley, A. and Montini, C. (2015). ‘Genetic Translation Studies: An Emerging Discipline’. Linguistica Antverpiensia 14: 1–18. Craig, H. and Kinney, A. F., eds. (2009). Shakespeare, Computers, and the Mystery of Authorship. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. De Biasi, P.-M. (2011). Génétique des textes. Paris: CNRS. Directive 2006/116/EC of the European Parliament and of the Council, of 12 December 2006 on the term of protection of copyright and certain related rights (OJ L 372/12). European Parliament, Council of the European Union. http://eur-lex.europa.eu. Accessed 10 March 2016. Dobranski, S. B. (1999). Milton, Authorship, and the Book Trade. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Donati, P. and Archer, H. (2015b). The Relational Subject. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ferrer, D. (2002). ‘Production, Invention and Reproduction: Genetic vs. Textual Criticism’. In Reimagining Textuality: Textual Studies in the Late Age of Print, edited by E. Bergmann Loizeaux and N. Fraistat, 48–59. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press. Ferrer, D. (2011). Logiques du brouillon: modèles pour une critique génétique. Paris: Seuil. Foucault, M. (1988). ‘What Is an Author?’ In Textual Strategies: Perspectives in PostStructuralist Criticism, edited and translated by J. V. Harari, 141–60. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. ‘Qu’est-ce qu’un auteur?’ (1969). Bulletin de la Société française de Philosophie 63 (3): 73–104. Grésillon, A. (1994). Eléments de critique génétique. Paris: PUF. Hay, L. (1989). La Naissance du texte. Paris: José Corti. Hay, L. (1993). Les Manuscrits des écrivains. Paris: Hachette, CNRS. Hermans, T. (1999). Translation in Systems: Descriptive and System-oriented Approaches Explained. Manchester: St. Jerome Publishing. Hirschfeld, H. A. (2004). Joint Enterprises: Collaborative Drama and the Institutionalization of English Renaissance Theatre. Boston: University of Massachusetts Press. Hirschfeld, H. A. (2009). ‘ “For the Author’s Credit”: Issues of Authorship in English Renaissance Drama’. In The Oxford Handbook of Early Modern Theatre, edited by R. Dutton, 441–55. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hirschfeld, H. A. (2015). ‘Playwriting in Shakespeare’s Time: Authorship, Collaboration and Attribution’. In Shakespeare and Textual Studies, edited by M. J. Kidnie and S. Massai, 13–26. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hoenselaars, T., ed. (2012). The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare and Contemporary Dramatists. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hoenselaars, T., ed. (2012a). ‘Shakespeare: Colleagues, Collaborators, Co-authors’. In The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare and Contemporary Dramatists, edited by T. Hoenselaars, 97–119. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hoffmann, S. (1968). ‘Collaborationism in France during World War II’. The Journal of Modern History 40 (3): 375–95. Holland, P. ed. (2014). ‘Shakespeare’s Collaborative Work’. Special issue: Shakespeare Survey 67. Jansen, H. and Wegener, A., eds. (2013). Authorial and Editorial Voices in Translation. Vol 1: Collaborative Relationships between Authors, Translators and Performers. Vita traductiva 2. Montréal: Éditions québécoises de l’œuvre. Johnston, D. (2004). ‘Securing the Performability of the Play in Translation’. In Drama Translation and Theatre Practice, edited by S. Coelsch-Foisner and H. Klein, 25–38. Bern: Peter Lang. Kalyvas, S. N. (2008). ‘Collaboration in Comparative Perspective’. European Review of History-Revue européenne d’histoire 15 (2): 109–11.

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Knapp, J. (2005). ‘What Is a Co-Author?’ Representations 89: 1–29. Knapp, J. (2009). Shakespeare Alone. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. Lapadat, J. C. (2009). ‘Writing Our Way into Shared Understanding: Collaborative Autobiographical Writing in the Qualitative Methods Class’. Qualitative Inquiry 15: 955–79. Lapadat, Judith C., Black, N. E., Clark, P. G., Gremm, R. M., Karanja, L. W., Mieke, M. and Quinlan, L. (2010). ‘Life Challenge Memory Work: Using Collaborative Autobiography to Understand Ourselves’. International Journal of Qualitative Methods 9 (1): 77–104. Lathrop, D. and Ruma, L., eds. (2010). Open Government: Collaboration, Transparency and Participation in Practice. Sebastopol, CA: O’Reilly Media. Lortat-Jacob, B. (1995). Sardinian Chronicles. Translated by T. Lavender Fagan. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. (1990) Chroniques sardes. Paris: Julliard. Masten, J. (1997). Textual Intercourse: Collaboration, Authorship, and Sexualities in Renaissance Drama. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Mazzoni, G. (2005). Sulla poesia moderna. Bologna: Il Mulino. McDonough Dolmaya, J. (2011). ‘The Ethics of Crowdsourcing’. Linguistica Antverpiensia 10: 97–111. McGann, J. (1983). Critique of Modern Textual Criticism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. McGann, J. (1991). The Textual Condition. Princeton: Princeton University Press. McGann, J. (2006). ‘From Text to Work: Digital Tools and the Emergence of the Social Text’. Romanticism on the Net 41–42. doi: 10.7202/013153a. McGuire P. (2002). ‘Collaboration’. In A Companion to Renaissance Drama (Blackwell Companions to Literature and Culture), edited by A. F. Kinney, 540–52. Oxford: Blackwell. McKenzie, D. (1986). Bibliography and the Sociology of the Text: The Panizzi Lectures 1985. London: The British Library. Mehrez, S. ed. (2012). Translating Egypt’s Revolution: The Language of Tahrir. Cairo and New York: The American University in Cairo Press. Muir, K. (1960). Shakespeare as Collaborator. London: Methuen. Nancy, J.-L. (2000). ‘Of Being Singular Plural’. In Being Singular Plural, translated by R. D. Richardson and A. E. O’Byrne, 1–99. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Nida, E. (1964). Towards a Science of Translating, with Special Reference to Principles and Procedures Involved in Bible Translating. Leiden: Brill. Obama, B. (2009). Memorandum for the Heads of Executive Departments and Agencies on ‘Transparency and Open Government’. 24 February 2009. Executive Office of the President of the United States. https://www.whitehouse.gov/the_press_office/ TransparencyandOpenGovernment (accessed 30 March 2016). Orgel, S. (1981). ‘What Is a Text?’ Research Opportunities in Renaissance Drama 24: 3–6. Reprinted in S. Orgel (2002). The Authentic Shakespeare: And Other Problems of the Early Modern Stage. New York: Routledge. 1–6.

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Orgel, S. (2003). Imagining Shakespeare. New York: Palgrave. Powell, C. and Dépelteau, F., eds. (2013). Relational Sociology: Ontological and Theoretical Issues. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Pym, A. (2011). ‘Translation Research Terms: A Tentative Glossary for Moments of Perplexity and Dispute’. In Translation Research Projects 3, edited by A. Pym, 75–110. Tarragona: Intercultural Studies Group. http://isg.urv.es/publicity/isg/publications/ trp_3_2011/pym.pdf (accessed 20 March 2016). Pym, A., Shlesinger, M. and Jettmarová, Z., eds. (2006). Sociocultural Aspects of Translating and Interpreting. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Rushkoff, D. (2016). Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus: How Growth Became the Enemy of Prosperity. New York: Penguin. Savigneau, J. (2016). ‘Le casse-tête Anne Frank’. Le Monde des idées. Le Monde 7 April 2016.  Shillingsburg, P. L. (1996). Scholarly Editing in the Computer Age: Theory and Practice, 3rd ed. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Shillingsburg, P. L. (1997). Resisting Texts. Authority and Submission in Constructions of Meaning. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Simeoni, D. (1998). ‘The Pivotal Status of the Translator’s Habitus’. Target 10 (1): 1–39. Slee, R. (2016). What’s Yours Is Mine: Against the Sharing Economy. New York: OR Books. Stallybrass, P. (1992). ‘Shakespeare, the Individual, and the Text’. In Cultural Studies, edited by L. Grossberg, C. Nelson and P. A. Treichler, 593–612. New York: Routledge. Stillinger, J. (1991). Multiple Authorship and the Myth of Solitary Genius. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Stillinger, J. (1999). Reading The Eve of St. Agnes: The Multiples of Complex Literary Transaction. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. Taylor, G. (1995a). ‘Shakespeare and Others: The Authorship of Henry the Sixth, Part I.’ Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England 7: 145–205. Taylor, G. (1995b). ‘What Is an Author (Not)?’ Critical Survey 7: 241–55. Toury, G. (1995). Descriptive Translation Studies and Beyond. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Vanderschelden, I. (1998). ‘Authority in Literary Translation: Collaborating with the Author’. Translation Review 56 (1): 22–31. Van Hulle, D. (2014). Modern Manuscripts: The Extended Mind and Creative Undoing from Darwin to Beckett and Beyond. London: Bloomsbury. Vattimo, G. and Paterlini, P. (2009). Not Being God: A Collaborative Autobiography. Translated by William McCuaig. New York: Columbia University Press. Vermeer, Hans J. (1986). ‘Übersetzen als kultureller Transfer’. In Übersetzungswissenschaft. Eine Neuorientierung, edited by M. Snell-Hornby, 30–53. Tübingen and Basel: Francke. Vermeer, Hans J. (2006). Luhmann’s ‘Social Systems’ Theory: Preliminary Fragments of a Theory of Translation. Berlin: Frank & Timme.

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Vickers, B. (2002). Shakespeare, Co-Author. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Wolf, M. (2010). ‘Translation “Going Social? Challenges to the (Ivory) Tower of Babel,” ’ MonTI 2: 29–46. Wolf, M. (2011). ‘Mapping the Field: Sociological Perspectives on Translation’. International Journal of the Sociology of Language 207: 1–28. Wolf, M. and Fukari, A., eds. (2007). Constructing a Sociology of Translation. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Wordsworth, W. (1992). Lyrical Ballads, and Other Poems, 1797-1800. Edited by J. Butler and K. Green. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

Part One

Reconceptualizing the Translator: Renaissance and Enlightenment Perspectives

2

On the Incorrect Way to Translate: The Absence of Collaborative Translation from Leonardo Bruni’s De interpretatione recta Belén Bistué

Leonardo Bruni’s Latin treatise De interpretatione recta (On Correct Translation), written in Florence sometime between 1420 and 1426, is today considered to be the first modern reflection on translation. Nevertheless, scholars seem to disagree on the value of this early work. Its advocates include James Hankins (2003: 176), who considers Bruni ‘the most self-conscious of the Quattrocento humanist translators from the Greek’, and Paul Botley (2004: 6), who admires the coherence of Bruni’s reflection upon eloquence. Even more enthusiastically, Gianfranco Folena (1994: 65–9) assigned him a ‘privileged position’ in the history of translation in Europe, admiring Bruni’s lexical innovation (the use of the verb traducere to refer to translation) as the signal of a new way of thinking about this practice.1 There are also, however, far less positive judgements of Bruni’s work. Frederick Rener (1989: 264), for instance, finds no theoretical value in De interpretatione recta beyond ‘an incidental definition of translation’. And even in the specific field of humanist translation theory, Glyn Norton (1981: 175) has described it as a minor work in comparison with the theorizations of Giannozo Manetti. Norton (185–6) regards Bruni’s definition as only ‘deceptively simple’, and he draws attention to the ‘portative force’ and ‘dynamism’ that it assigns to the translation process. Nevertheless, he also considers that thanks to Charles Trinkaus’s rescue of Manetti’s treatise ‘the literature of Humanist translation theory has been expanded far beyond the lesser contributions of Colucio Salutatti and Leonardo Bruni’ (175). In addition, while passages from De interpretatione recta are included in some important historical anthologies of translation theory – such

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as those by André Lefevere (2002), Dámaso López García (1996) and Douglas Robinson (2014) – the treatise is absent from the influential The Translation Studies Reader, edited by Lawrence Venuti (2012). I side with those who assign Bruni a significant place in the history of translation theory, because I believe his treatise formalizes a substantial change in the way in which this practice was understood. I propose, however, that in order to appreciate the full importance of this change one needs to understand how it negotiates an exclusive space for the individual-translator model and for the single-version text – and how it does so against the background of contemporary and historical practices of collaborative translation. In addition to the principles and strategies Bruni openly defends, we thus need to consider those he implicitly  – but unconditionally – rules out. I have made this claim elsewhere (Bistué 2013: chap. 1), and will offer here a more thorough exploration of the competing notions of translation that Bruni’s treatise precludes as it inaugurates a modern understanding of this practice. As Folena (1994: 6–10) explains, Bruni’s most visible contribution is his movement towards terminological unification. When he began using the term traducere in his writings, Bruni placed it next to, and often instead of the dominant interpretare – and instead of the many other ancient and medieval terms that could also refer to translation practices, such as vertere, convertere, explicare, exprimere, reddere, mutare and transferre. Folena identifies semantic differences among these various terms. He traces the use of interpretare to the Roman economic and judicial spheres, where it acquired the meaning of ‘mediation’ (a sense highlighted in the enduring use of this term to indicate oral interpretation as opposed to written translation). Vertere and convertere appear to have designated poetic or literary forms of translation, closer to the notions of literary aemulatio and imitatio and with an emphasis on the rhetorically ornate. And while the use of exprimere and reddere implied a marked attention to formal correspondences, the term explicare emphasized the transmission of content, as did mutare, transferre and the latter’s successful derivative translatare, widely used during the Middle Ages. In Bruni’s innovative use of traducere (based on the verb duco: ‘to lead’ or ‘to guide’), Folena sees a new emphasis on the translator’s agency, personal contribution and, ultimately, his individuality. Moreover, against this variety of earlier coexisting terms, Bruni’s innovation signals a change that would also take place in most European vernaculars in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries: the many alternative, overlapping names that could designate translation came to be replaced by a single term.2 For Folena, the fact that in most of the Romance languages the respective unifying terms (It. tradurre; Fr. traduire;

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Sp. traducir; Port. traduzir) can be directly correlated to the Latin traducere clearly indicates that Bruni was at the vanguard of this change. Above all, this terminological ‘reductio ad unum’ heralded by Bruni constitutes the mark of a new, unified conceptualization of translation practices (Folena 1994: 67–8). Building on these claims, I want to draw attention to an implicit consequence of this unification, which is nothing less than the exclusion of the many other names for translation that had been previously used. What is more, when one analyses Bruni’s definition of correct translation, one can see that it actually excludes other ways of translating. I will focus in particular on the exclusion of collaborative translation, a practice that was in use during the Middle Ages and the early Renaissance, but which did not comply with Bruni’s most basic requirements – and that has, by and large, remained outside the scope of translation theory since that time.

‘The correct way to translate’ Let us begin by looking briefly at how and in what context Bruni defines what he considered to be the correct way to translate. By the time he wrote De interpretatione recta he was already a seasoned translator.3 He was proficient in Greek, which he had studied with Manuel Chrysoloras, a Byzantine scholar and diplomat who taught in Florence between 1397 and 1400 and who was a key agent in the revival of Greek studies in Renaissance Italy. Bruni also had an expert command of Latin. Under the patronage of Coluccio Salutati, he had perfected his skills in Latin composition, which he then deployed not only as a translator but also when writing history, oratory, diplomatic and administrative correspondence.4 It is important to note that, with respect to Latin, Bruni espoused the new ideas advocated by the humanists, who believed that the best way to write in this language was by imitating the vocabulary, syntactical patterns and style of the classical authors. In fact, as the opening paragraphs of De interpretatione recta make clear, Bruni’s most urgent goal was to justify the strong criticisms he had previously made of the medieval Latin translation of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics and to justify the lexical and stylistic choices he had made in his own Latin version of this work.5 Bruni’s complaints against the previous translator were challenging enough to prompt a response from the Spanish scholar Alfonso of Cartagena, first in a short riposte to Bruni’s attack, known as the Liber Alphonsi episcopi Burgensis contra Leonardum invehentem contra libros Ethicorum Aristotelis (c. 1430),

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and later in his correspondence with Bruni and other Italian humanists.6 In general terms, we could say that while Bruni emphasized the failure of the prior translator to preserve Aristotle’s eloquent style, Cartagena (1922: 166) defended this translator’s clear communication of Aristotle’s teachings. In his piece against Bruni, Cartagena claimed that the question should not be ‘about how the work was written in Greek but about how the translator explained it’, and whether his explanation ‘was allowed by the Latin language and properly written, and if it agreed with the subject matter’.7 A little earlier, Cartagena had even stated that he did not have enough expertise in Greek to tell whether or not the Latin version followed Aristotle’s style, yet he considered himself perfectly capable of judging the Latin translator’s work. This is perhaps understandable when one considers that many of the early humanists, including Salutati, approached Greek authors exclusively through Latin translations. However, here lies an important point of contrast with Bruni’s position, since he considered expertise in both languages to be fundamental. Indeed, when in De interpretatione recta he establishes the standards of correct translation, Bruni’s first step is to offer a definition in which the knowledge of both languages is a key requirement: I say, therefore, that all the essence of translation [interpretatio] consists in this: that something written in one language be correctly carried across [recte traducatur] into another. However, nobody can do this correctly who does not have much and great expertise in both languages. And not even this is enough. For there are many who are capable of understanding something but not capable of explaining it.8

The requirement that the translator be an expert in both languages and be able both to understand the source and to explain it in a new version would today appear self-evident. At first sight then, it may seem easy to agree with Rener’s claim that this definition does not offer a radical theoretical contribution. Nevertheless, there is more to Bruni’s words than meets the eye. In fact, part of the difficulty of assessing his contribution lies precisely in its currency today – in how close and obvious this definition still feels to us. Bruni’s contemporaries, however, would not have felt this way, given that translation had not always been performed by a translator who was an expert in both languages. There is evidence, for instance, that at least since the twelfth century translations could be produced by the joint work of two translators, each of them an expert in a different language. It is believed that in these cases one of the translators rendered the words from the source text into an intermediate

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vernacular version and the other one rendered them into Latin (or sometimes into a more polished version of the vernacular). As Marie Thérèse D’Alverny (1947–8: 70–7) highlights, most often the intermediate version seems to have been delivered orally but it could also be written down or dictated to a scribe. She has found several mentions of instances (from twelfth-century Toledo to sixteenth-century Venice) in which this technique was employed to translate texts from Arabic into Latin. For example, when Peter the Venerable, Abbot of Cluny, describes a translation project he had sponsored in Spain around 1142, he notes that one of the texts translated (the Apology of al-Kindī) was rendered by Peter of Toledo, an expert in Arabic, with the help of the notary Peter of Poitiers, who knew how to write in polished Latin. Luckily, the prefatory note to a Latin version of Avicenna’s De anima, made in Toledo between 1152 and 1166, contains a similarly short but more detailed description of a collaborative technique: the work is said to have been translated from the Arabic, with one translator by the name of Avendauth ‘delivering each word in the vulgar [singula verba vulgariter proferente]’ and another translator, Archdeacon Dominicus, ‘converting each of them into Latin [singula in latinum convertente]’ (qtd. in D’Alverny 1989: 195). References to instances of collaboration also appear in the following century. For instance, D’Alverny mentions a 1263 Latin version of an astronomy treatise made through collaboration between the Jewish translator Profacius and the Latinist John of Brescia. Among later cases, there is a detailed description of the production of a trilingual translation of the Quran (in Arabic, Castilian and Latin parallel columns) organized in 1455 by the former theologian and professor at Salamanca John of Segovia, by then retired in Savoy. The text of the trilingual Quran is now lost, but fortunately the description of the translation process survives in a separate copy of John’s preface. In this text, John explains that he had a translator, Iça of Jabir, travel from Spain to make a careful copy of the Arabic version and prepare a word-for-word Castilian version, which a scribe then copied in a column next to the Arabic. John and Iça revised this work together by reading the two versions – Iça the Arabic and John the Castilian – and then, after Iça left, John rendered the Castilian into Latin and had the Latin version copied in-between the lines of the Castilian (D’Alverny 1989: 201–3). Arabic was not the only possible source language in instances of collaboration, nor Latin the only possible destination language. In a study of medieval translations of scientific texts, Lys Ann Shore (1989: 303) cites a thirteenthcentury case that resembles collaborative translation, this time from Hebrew into French. The text, an astrological treatise, was translated in Malines by Hagin the Jew and Obert de Montdidier, under the patronage of Lord Henry Bate, who

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later appears to have made a Latin version. In the same century, there is also the example of a collaborative translation made at the scriptorium of Alfonso X of Castile: a Spanish version of the catalogue of stars in Ptolemy’s Almagest, prepared by Judah ben Cohen and Guillén Arremón Daspa. The prologue of this translation states that the translation was made from both ‘Chaldean and Arabic’, which probably indicates that the translators worked from both Syriac and Arabic versions. Furthermore, as I have suggested in my analysis of this translation, it is likely that they consulted Greek and Latin versions as well (Bistué 2009; Bistué 2013: 65–79). Linguistic multiplicity is also an integral part of the new version, since almost every time the name of each constellation is given, the translation offers the Spanish name together with its Latin, Arabic and Greek equivalents: We will begin by talking about the northern stars. And we begin with [the constellation of] ossa menor, which in Latin is called ursa minor, and in Castilian ossa menor, and in Arabic dub-al azgar, which is the first constellation among all in this part of the sky. And after this one we will tell of the other constellation, which in Latin is called ursa maior, and in Castilian ossa mayor, and in Arabic alacbar. And then we will speak of another, which in Latin is called serpens, and in Castilian serpiente, and in Arabic tannin. And after that, we will tell of another figure, which in Latin is called inflamatus, and in Castilian inflamado, and in Greek caypheos and in Arabic almutahib.9

In some ways, this version is not only the result of the joint work of the two Alfonsine translators, but also of several earlier stages of writing and translation, including Ptolemy’s composition of the treatise in Greek in second-century Alexandria, a ninth-century Arabic version by al-Hajjaj, a tenth-century Arabic version by the Persian astronomer as-Sufi, and a Latin version made in twelfth-century Toledo by the Italian translator Gerard of Cremona, with the help of a Mozarab interpreter. Each time the treatise gives the name of a star in Greek, Arabic, Latin and Castilian, it is bringing together pieces of these earlier versions.10 There is also evidence, discovered by Charles Haskins (1960: 191–3), of an earlier instance of collaborative translation of the Almagest (in twelfth-century Sicily) in which the work was rendered into Latin from a Greek source. In the preface, the Latin translator explains that he had learnt some Greek but, not being proficient enough to understand the work fully, he had made the Latin version [latine dedi orationi] with the help of another translator [expositor] by the name of Eugenius, whom he describes as learned in Greek, Arabic and Latin. This

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last example is particularly interesting, not only because of the more complex distribution of linguistic expertise, but also because a copy of this translation survives in a fourteenth-century manuscript that once belonged to Bruni’s mentor Coluccio Salutati (ibid.: 157). An even closer example to Bruni is the translation of Plato’s Republic, made between 1400 and 1402, by Bruni’s Greek teacher Manuel Chrysoloras and Uberto Decembrio (one of Chrysoloras’s Milanese pupils, a friend of Salutati and the father of Pier Candido Decembrio). Little is known about their specific collaborative method, but Gerard Boter (1989: 264) speculates that Chrysoloras made a word-for-word Latin version which Decembrio then corrected and polished, more freely at the beginning, then with less additions and changes as the work progressed. In Hankins’s (1990: 108) words, it is believed that ‘the philological part of the translation was almost certainly done by Chrysoloras, and the style improved by Uberto, since the former’s command of the niceties of Latin style was limited, and the latter’s knowledge of Greek very limited indeed’. Thus, even if we cannot tell whether their method shared specific similarities with earlier descriptions of collaboration, this is still the case of a translation that was not performed by a single translator with ‘much and great expertise in both languages’, as Bruni (2004: 78) would require. Because of its historical proximity, this is a valuable example of the collaborative practice that Bruni’s definition of translation suppresses.11 Within this historical context, it becomes easier to see an important consequence of Bruni’s definition: the requirement that the translator know both languages implies that the work must be performed by a single translator. Similarly, Bruni’s clarification that the translator should be able to both understand the original and deliver the new version becomes less incidental when we consider that, in collaborative instances, each of these tasks could actually be performed by a different translator (by Peter of Toledo and Peter of Poitiers, by Avendauth and Archdeacon Dominicus, by Eugenius and the anonymous Latin translator, by Hagin and Obert, by Iça and John). I believe that these restrictive implications are an important part of the standards De interpretatione recta is establishing. This is not to say, of course, that collaborative translation was previously the dominant model, or that the single translator model was something new at the time Bruni was writing. Neither is it to deny that his requirements were, first of all, part of a humanist valorization of Greek and Latin, and that it is important to understand them as such. My claim is simply that these humanist requirements implied the rejection of collaborative forms of translation – and that this is equally important to understand.

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Dealing with translation’s multiplicity What is more, as one continues to analyse Bruni’s treatise, one even finds more or less explicit traces of this rejection. Immediately following the definition of correct translation is a section that further elaborates on the requirements for the best translator. This section also highlights the urgency of the need for dual linguistic proficiency, and it is organized around the type of knowledge required in each of the two languages. First, Bruni (2004: 78) describes the expertise needed for the source language [lingua de qua transfert] – in this case, Greek. Here, the necessary knowledge is certainly ‘much and great’: it includes having carefully read the works of ‘all types of writers in this language’ and being able to understand idiomatic phrases, as well as literary allusions and common figures of speech and thought. Then, he establishes that the translator must also have complete command over the language into which he translates [lingua ad quam traducere vult], so that he can be precise, make subtle distinctions in meaning, preserve ornamentation and rhythm and, especially, so that he does not need to borrow words from the Greek (78–82). After these considerations, the rest of the treatise offers specific examples of correct translation of passages from Plato and Aristotle, along with some examples of bad translation taken from medieval versions of Aristotle. Neither in the general requirements nor in the examples is there any explicit mention of collaborative translation, but the collaborative model does come to the surface in Bruni’s figurative language, in particular, in a violent image he employs when trying to justify the idea that only the original author’s style should be present in the translation text. As an expert in the source language, the translator should be able to imitate the author’s style to the point of excluding any traces of his own. Bruni formulates this as the need for the translator to be ‘seized and carried off by the force of the style of the writing from which he translates’ (86) – one could even say ‘abducted’ by this force, since the Latin term he uses is ‘rapitur’.12 I believe that this forceful removal of the translator can be connected to the forced omission of the collaborative model. A certain urgency and anxiety about the implicit requirement that there be only one translator (when in practice there could be more than one) surfaces here, at the metaphorical level, in the translator’s forceful abduction.13 One would expect the member of the translation team who is in direct contact with the original version (he who is translating from Greek) to be the one metaphorically abducted. Because, in spite of Bruni’s emphasis on the importance of a sound knowledge of Greek language and letters, Greek is practically absent

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from his text. This is already noticeable when Bruni first discusses the linguistic expertise needed in this language. Here, he refers to Aristotle and Plato and to their frequent use of Greek figures of thought and diction, yet his examples come not from Greek but from Latin: First you must have knowledge of the language from which you translate … acquired from the reading of the philosophers, orators, poets, and all other types of writers in this language. No one who has not read, unfolded, examined from many sides, and fully grasped them can understand the essence and meaning of words, since Aristotle and Plato were, as one may say, supreme masters of literature … and they frequently used figures of thought and speech which mean one thing according to the words and another according to what common usage dictates. Such as, among us, ‘gero tibi morem’ [I comply with your wishes] and ‘desiderati milites’ [missing soldiers] and ‘boni consules’ [you will take it in good part] and ‘opere pretium fuerit’ [it would be worthwhile] and ‘negotium facesso’ [I cause trouble] and a thousand others alike. (78)14

Again, when later in the text Bruni offers more extensive examples, he gives the Latin versions only even when he announces that he will quote Plato’s own words: ‘The philosopher Plato, in the book known as Phaedrus, discusses the topic with much elegance and rhythm. I have written his words here … which are the following: “O puer, unicum bene consulere volentibus principium est…” [Dear boy, there is only one way to begin for those who are willing to understand well …]’ (88). We see the same pattern in his quotations of Aristotle: ‘In the tenth book of the Ethics, when [Aristotle] speaks of the happiness of the contemplative man, he begins thus: “Esse vero perfectam felicitatem contemplativam quandam operationem vel ex eo patebit…” [That perfect happiness is a certain speculative operation will be evident from the following…]’ (96). In the rest of the text, Bruni repeatedly refers to passages from Greek texts only to give their Latin versions. He may describe the words as ‘examples of Aristotle’s ornate discourse’, but all he shows us are the ornate Latin versions. Something similar happens when Bruni presents negative examples from the medieval translator’s work. In line with his recommendation that the translator must both understand and explain, he advises that failure occurs ‘partly because the translator understands the Greek badly and partly because he renders the Latin badly, as when [the translator] says “prolocutionis gratia” [by way of preamble] instead of “sub pretextu aliquo et simulatione” [under some pretence and simulation]’ (106). But Bruni does not quote the Greek phrase. He does not let the reader see how the Greek was badly understood. He only shows us how it was badly rendered. This happens in many other places, such as when he

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states that the phrase ‘circa congregationem’ [a grouping] is ‘most absurd, since the Greek word actually means “contionem” [an assembly]’ (108).15 Not even here does he give the Greek word – as a matter of fact, in his edition, Paolo Viti has seen the need to supply the Greek ‘ἐκκλησία’ between brackets (109). In sum, except for occasional transliterations, such as ‘dicastis’ and ‘dicastirion’ (for δικαστήϚ, ‘judge’ and δικαστήριον ‘court of justice’), there is practically no Greek in Bruni’s treatise. This merits attention because it is common to find the Greek version quoted in similar discussions of translation. Such is the case, for instance, in a contemporary letter from Milanese humanist Pier Candido Decembrio (son of Uberto) to Alfonso of Cartagena (who, after the initial controversy over Bruni’s ideas, had established a friendly relationship with Decembrio). In this letter, Decembrio discusses how to translate certain terms and states that he will show Plato’s words. However, unlike Bruni, he supplies the Greek: ‘Here are Plato’s words … ὃsoi politeίwn trόpoi, pέnte dέ, tosoῦtoi kaὶ yucῆ [There are as many types of state constitutions, which are five, as there are types of souls]’, and then presents his Latin version: ‘Politiarum, inquit, modi quinque totidem et anime sunt [Of state constitutions, it is said, there are five types, and there are as many types of souls]’ (qtd in Saquero Suárez Somonte and González Rolán 1991: 215). This practice can be observed in earlier discussions as well. A notable case is St Jerome’s well-known ‘Letter to Pammachius’. Written towards the end of the fourth century, this text contains the famous discussion of the ad verbum and ad sensum methods that would become a locus communis in medieval and Renaissance discussions of translation, and it sets the tone for later reflections on translation. To give only one example among the many found in this letter, when Jerome responds to serious criticisms of his translation of a letter from Bishop Epiphanius, he gives both the Greek original and his Latin version: To show you [Pammachius] of what kind are the falsehoods they reproach in my translation of [Epiphanius’s] letter, I will give you the beginning of the letter, so that from one crime you can presume the rest: ἒδει ἡμᾶϚ, ἀγαπητέ, μὴ τῇ οἰήσει τῶν χλήρων φέρεσθαι [It is necessary for us, my dear, not to be driven by the estimation of the clerics], which I remember having rendered: ‘oportebat nos, dilectissime, clericatus honore non abuti in superbiam [It is necessary for us, my dearest, not to abuse the honor of the clerical status for pride].’ (1953: 71–2)

This practice continues in many reflections on translation written after Bruni’s. In Juan Luis Vives’s (1782: 233) discussion of when it is acceptable to render one word with two or more, it is stated that ‘Theodorus Gaza, supreme interpreter, in

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the first volume of Aristotle’s De Animalibus rendered λύσωμα [dissolution] as “aequamentum, et discrimen” [equal distribution, and separation], and στρυφνόν [astringent] as “austerum, et acerbum” [harsh and bitter], one word into two … and then in another book, τά καλούμενα ὀλοθούρια [the so-called olothouria] he translated as “et quae tota simplici mitioreque testa operta vertibula appellantur, et calli, aut tubera” [and which in general are called verticula covered with a single soft shell, and calluses, or swellings]’. Likewise, to give only one example among the many found in Erasmus’s work, in the Introduction to his Adagia, he too provides both the Greek and Latin versions when discussing allusions in proverbs: ‘Cicero uses in his letter to Atticus, σύν τε δύ’ ἐρχομένω that is, “Simul duobus euntibus” [the two go together]; and in Lucian Ἰατρῶν παῖδεϚ, that is, “Medicorum filii” [the sons of Medicine] is used for the medical doctor’ (68). The frequent presence of the two versions in the reflections of other theoreticians highlights the absence of the Greek from Bruni’s text. As I have begun to suggest, this absence is significant because it points to a blind spot in his treatise: he demands the translator’s expertise in two languages, and describes translation as an activity that involves two tasks (understanding the source and explaining it in the new version), yet Bruni’s own examples concentrate on only one language and only one task. In this disconnection between his programmatic tenets and his examples, I see the sign of a conceptual difficulty with which Bruni is struggling. The pull towards conceptual unification discussed above, and which Folena (1994: 67–8) identifies at the lexical level, would appear to exert pressure upon Bruni’s text: it is necessary not only to presuppose a single translator, but also to conceive of translation itself as a single task. Indeed, in light of this discussion, Bruni’s initial definition of translation now seems to bear the traces of this difficult conceptual negotiation. Bruni appears to oscillate between two different models. Translation is supposed to involve different tasks (understanding and explaining). However, in the previous lines, translation had been presented as a single process, as the correct passage [recta traductio] of a text from one language into another. Noticeably, this is the part of the definition where Bruni uses the innovative traducere, in order, it would appear, to place particular emphasis on this more unified understanding of translation. Still, Bruni juxtaposes the two models as such: I say, therefore, that all the essence of translation consists in this: that something written in one language be correctly carried across into another. However, nobody can do this correctly who does not have much and great expertise in both languages. And not even this is enough. For there are many who are capable

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Bruni first presents translation as a single passage from one language into another, performed by a single translator who understands both languages. He then acknowledges, however, that in fact this is ‘not enough’ [Nec id quidem satis] – or even, ‘not adequate’, which is also the meaning of the word ‘satis’ – and he introduces the double-task model. In other words, as much as Bruni wants to define translation as a single task performed by a single translator, he still feels there is something missing in this definition. It is precisely here, in the strained differentiation of two tasks, that traces of the collaborative model persist. For, as discussed above, instances of collaborative translation most visibly separate the two tasks, each being performed by a different translator. Here, too, lie the ambition and difficulty of correct translation, which I believe refers as much to the need for double linguistic expertise as to the attempt to define translation as a single task. To conceptualize translation in a unified fashion is difficult, because, even if one is to negate the validity of collaborative translation, there is still a multiplicity inherent in the practice of translation that cannot be overlooked: translating always involves more than one language, more than one version, and more than one writing position. Even in the individual model, one cannot escape the fact that the new version of the translator is based on the first author’s writing. In addition, as made patent by the Alfonsine translation of the star catalogue, the process often entails consulting other available versions of the work, carried out by previous translators, as well as the many possible versions of certain words and phrases offered by dictionaries, grammars and translating aids. Translation thus most often involves more than one task. Bringing collaborative translation into the picture, from an historical and theoretical point of view, renders translation’s multiplicity patent. Above all, the realization that Bruni’s definition implicitly rejects the possibility that two translators with different languages of expertise work together to produce a translation, allows one to observe a more specifically political manoeuvre. For this entails that collaboration among scholars coming from different territories, professing different religions, speaking different languages and belonging to different interpretative traditions is – by definition  – the wrong way to translate. This is understandable in the context of early modern European processes of unification, since translating Greek

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and Arabic manuscripts in order to build the prestige of one’s language and one’s people was not the same as having a Greek or a Mozarab interpreter be a partner in this process. Today, scholars may want to re-evaluate the worth of such collaborations, and they will be able to do so when they incorporate the forgotten practice of collaborative translation into their histories, their definitions and their theories of translation.

Notes 1 In Latin this verb had normally designated the transfer of objects or persons from one place to another, or from one status to another, or even a passage through time. As Folena (1994: 65–8) shows, Bruni began using it consistently in the sense of linguistic translation as early as 1400. 2 To offer examples of this unification in a vulgar language, in Italian, tradurre came to replace such terms as translatare, trasmutare, volgarizzare and trarre/ritrarre/ mettere/recare/ridurre/porre/sporre in volgare (Folena 1994: 30–5, 77). 3 The works Bruni had translated before he wrote De interpretatione recta include St Basil’s De studiis secularibus (also known as Epistula ad adulescentes), Xenophon’s Hiero and Apologia Socratis, Plato’s Phaedo, Apology, Crito and Gorgias, Plutarch’s Lives of Antony, Cato the Younger, Aemilius Paulus, Sertorius, Tiberius, Caius Gracchus, Pyrrhus and Demosthenes, Demosthenes’s Pro Diopithe and De corona, as well as Aeschines’s speech for the prosecution. As we get closer to De interpretatione recta, the list also includes Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics (1416) and the pseudoAristotelian Economics (1420), and perhaps, at the time he was working on the treatise, Bruni may already have been working on his translation of the Phaedrus, which scholars believe dates from 1424 (Botley 2004: 5–41; Hankins 2003: 11–12). 4 Bruni employed Latin for diplomatic and administrative purposes in the different positions he occupied, including that of papal secretary and, later, chancellor of Florence. He also produced works in different fields of letters, which circulated widely. Among them are his Dialogi ad Petrum Paulum Histrum [Dialogues for Pier Paolo Vergerio] (c. 1401–1405), usually considered the inauguration of humanism, his Laudatio Florentinae urbis [an oration in Praise of the City of Florence] (c. 1403–1404) and his famous Historiae Florentini populi [History of the Florentine People], on which he worked from 1415 until his death, in 1444. In particular, his political thought has been the subject of many important studies (e.g. Baron 1955; for an overview of the work done on this topic see Hankins 1995). 5 Scholars have identified the translation Bruni criticizes as the thirteenth-century version attributed to William of Moerbeke, which is believed to be a revision of the translation made, earlier in the same century, by Robert Grosseteste.

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6 The writings in which Bruni and Cartagena carried out their discussion have been published in Birkenmajer (1922). An edition of the correspondence between Cartagena and Pier Candido Decembrio on this topic is available in Saquero Suárez Somonte and González Rolán (1991). 7 This and all other translations into English are mine, unless otherwise noted. Due to the nature of my argument, I have attempted to make translations as literal as possible. 8 ‘Dico igitur omnem interpretationis vim in eo consistere, ut, quod in altera lingua scriptum sit, id in alteram recte traducatur. Recte autem id facere nemo potest, qui non multam ac magnam habeat utriusque lingue peritiam. Nec id quidem satis. Multi enim ad intelligendum idonei, ad explicandum tamen non idonei sunt’ (Bruni 2004: 78). 9 ‘Queremos comenzar primero á fablar en estas [estrellas] del septentrion. Et començamos primero de la ossa menor á que llaman en latin ursa minor. et en castellano ossa menor. et en aráuigo dub al-azgar. que es la primera figura de todas las otras que son en esta parte. Et en pos esta diremos de la otra figura que dizen el latin ursa maior. et en castellano ossa mayor. et en aráuigo alacbar. Et desí fablaremos de otra que dizen en latin serpens. et en castellano serpiente. et en aráuigo tannin. Et otrossí diremos dotra figura que llaman en latin inflamatus. et en castellano inflamado. et en griego caypheos. et en aráuigo al-mutahib’ (Alfonso X 2002: 12–13). 10 For a concrete example of how specific names can be traced to each of the previous versions, see Bistué (2013: 121–3). 11 I owe the suggestion of this example to a generous anonymous reader for Bloomsbury. 12 ‘Rapitur enim interpres vi ipsa in genus dicendi illius de quo transfert’ (Bruni 2004: 86). 13 I do not want to deny that the most immediate meaning of the metaphor has to do with the self-erasure of the translator that Bruni recommends (a problem with which many early modern translators dealt in figurative terms). What I mean is that this metaphor is pointing – as metaphors usually do – to other levels of meaning at the same time. After all, both problems – the self-erasure of the translator vis-à-vis the first author and the omission of the collaborative translation model – have to do in the end with the multiplicity of writing and reading positions that are an intrinsic part of the translation process, a multiplicity that, as I have shown elsewhere, was deeply problematic for early modern translation theoreticians (Bistué 2013: chap. 1). 14 As Bruni notes in the quoted passage, the literal meaning of these Latin phrases is different from their idiomatic meaning. For instance, the literal meaning of ‘desiderati milites’ would be ‘soldiers who are wished for’, but the customary meaning of this phrase is that the soldiers ‘are missing’ or, as Bruni puts it, that

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they ‘have perished’ (2004: 78). I have kept the examples in Latin to highlight the fact that they are in Latin in Bruni’s Latin text. Unlike this strategy, Bruni’s gives the impression of a certain ‘monolingualism’. 15 Bruni (2004: 108) adds that the word ‘congregatio’ is a particularly bad choice because of its proximity to the word ‘gregem’ ( grego), which refers to a ‘gathering of beasts’. 16 The following passage completes the citation in note 1: ‘Quemadmodum de pictura multi recte iudicant, qui ipsi pingere non valent, et musicam artem multi intelligunt, qui ipsi sunt ad canendum inepti. Magna res igitur ac difficilis est interpretatio recta’ (Bruni 2004: 78).

Works cited Alfonso, X. (2002). Libros del saber de astronomía del rey D. Alfonso X de Castilla [Reprint of the 1863–1867 ed.], vol. 1. Frankfurt am Main: Institute for the History of Arabic-Islamic Science at the Johann Wolfgang Goethe University. Bacon, R. (1962). The Opus Maius of Roger Bacon. Translated by R. Belle Burke, vol. 1. New York: Russell & Russell. Baron, H. (1955). The Crisis of the Early Italian Renaissance: Civic Humanism and Republican Liberty in an Age of Classicism and Tyranny. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Bistué, B. (2009). ‘Multilingual Translation and Multiple Knowledge(s) in Alfonso X’s Libro de la ochava esfera (1276)’. Comitatus: A Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies 40: 99–122. Bistué, B. (2013). Collaborative Translation and Multi-Version Texts in Early Modern Europe. Farnham: Ashgate. Boter, G. (1989). The Textual Tradition of Plato’s Republic. Leiden: J. Brill. Botley, P. (2004). Latin Translation in the Renaissance: The Theory and Practice of Leonardo Bruni, Giannozzo Manetti, and Desiderius Erasmus. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bruni, L. (2004). Sulla perfetta traduzzione [De interpretatione recta]. Edited by P. Viti. Napoli: Liguori. Cartagena, A. de (1922). ‘Liber Alphonsi episcopi Burgensis contra Leonardum invehentem contra libros Ethicorum Aristotelis’. In Vermischte Untersuchungen zur Geschichte der mittelalterlichen Philosophie, edited by A. Birkenmajer, 162–86. Münster i. W.: Aschendorff. D’Alverny, M. T. (1947–1948). ‘Deux traductions latines du Coran au Moyen-Age’. Archives d’Histoire Doctrinale et Littéraire du Moyen Âge 16: 69–131. D’Alverny, M. T. (1989). ‘Les traductions à deux interprètes: d’arabe en langue vernaculaire et de la langue vernaculaire en latin’. In Traduction et traducteurs au Moyen Âge: actes du colloque internationale du Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, edited by G. Contamine, 193–206. Paris: CNRS.

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Dryden, J. (1680). ‘Preface’. Ovid’s Epistles Translated by Several Hands. London. Folena, G. (1994). Volgarizzare e tradurre [1991]. Torino: Einaudi. Hankins, J. (1990). Plato in the Italian Renaissance, vol. 2. Leiden: J. Brill. Hankins, J. (1995). ‘The “Baron Thesis” after Forty Years and Some Recent Studies of Leonardo Bruni’. Journal of the History of Ideas 56 (2): 309–38. Hankins, J. (2003). Humanism and Platonism in the Italian Renaissance, vol. 1: Humanism. Rome: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura. Haskins, C. H. (1960). Studies in the History of Mediaeval Science. Reprint. New York: Frederick Ungar. Jerome, St. (1953). ‘Ad Pammanchium de optimo genere interpretandi’. Lettres, vol. 3. Paris: Les Belles Lettres. Lefevere, A., ed. (2002). Translation, History, Culture: A Sourcebook [1992]. London: Routledge. López García, D., ed. (1996). Teorías de la traducción: antología de textos. Cuenca: Universidad de Castilla-La Mancha. Norton, G. P. (1981). ‘Humanist Foundations of Translation Theory (1400–1450): A Study in the Dynamics of Word’. Canadian Review of Comparative Literature/Revue Canadienne de Littérature Comparée 8 (2): 173–203. Rener, F. M. (1989). Interpretatio: Language and Translation from Cicero to Tytler. Amsterdam: Rodopi. Robinson, D., ed. (2014). Western Translation Theory: From Herodotus to Nietzsche. [first published in 1997 by St. Jerome Publishing.] London: Routledge. Russell, P. (1985). Traducciones y traductores en la Península Ibérica (1400–1550). Barcelona: Bellaterra. Saquero Suárez Somonte, P. and González Rolán, T. (1991). ‘Actitudes renacentistas en Castilla durante el siglo XV: la correspondencia entre Alfonso de Cartagena y Pier Cándido Decembrio’. Cuadernos de Filología Clásica. Estudios latinos 1: 195–232. Shore, L. A. (1989). ‘A Case Study in Medieval Nonliterary Translation: Scientific Texts from Latin to French’. In Medieval Translators and their Craft, edited by J. Beer, 297–327. Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications. Venuti, L., ed. (2012). The Translation Studies Reader. [2000] 3rd ed. London: Routledge. Vives, J. L. (1782). ‘Versiones seu interpretations’. In Opera omnia, vol. 2, 232–7. Valencia: Benedicto Monfort.

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‘Shared’ Translation: The Example of Forty Comedies by Goldoni in France (1993–4) Françoise Decroisette

Among the diverse fields of investigation linked to translation, theatrical translation immediately appears as one of the most pertinent for analysing the notions of collective and/or collaborative practice. Without going into detail regarding the specificity of this important mode, we may nevertheless recall that the text we call ‘theatrical’ is, in essence, created primarily to be emitted by voices and bodies on stage.1 Because of this, authors of dramatic texts, even if they claim personal authorship through writing and publication, are in fact only ‘scripters’ among other intermediaries and creators of performance, and thus necessarily co-authors (Ubersfeld 1982: 226–43). The theatrical text is a pretext, and its translator is confronted with a dual textual object. On the one hand, the dramatic text – whose writing is highly gestural, oral and visual – is not always clearly identifiable, and may have several successive versions (especially with texts from the past, variations of which are themselves often the result of experimentation on stage). On the other hand, the scenic text, contained potentially in the first, is subordinated to the demands of spectators’ reception and the present temporality of the stage. In reality, in the translating process, in the passage from one language – or to be more precise, from one language-gesture-culture2 to another languagegesture-culture – translators are never alone, even if they happen to translate alone. They share the process of translation with the series of scripters/ co-authors who – if we admit, like Anne Ubersfeld, that the process of staging is a type of translation (1982: 15) – can themselves claim the status of go-betweens: of co-translators. ‘Shared’ translation thus appears, in this precise case, to be a more appropriate term than ‘collective’ or ‘collaborative’. Unlike ‘collective’, it does not suggest the production of a translated object for which the identity and

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sensibility of each participant disappears in favour of the group (which can run the risk of ending up with a translation itself deprived of a singular identity); and in contrast to ‘collaborative’, it avoids the confusion between the term’s two possible etymologies, one negative – collabor, collapsus, to slip, to fall – and the other positive – collaboro, collaboratum, to work in concert.

On ‘shared’ translation: Elements of a debate This sharing is, however, only ideally consensual. It may be a source of conflict in authority, and often results in the translator’s exclusion from the practice of staging, what with the stage director (for a variety of reasons, commercial or artistic) often playing the role that we may expect of the translator.3 In fact, since it is primarily the translator’s point of view which interests us here, one primary question arises: where and how does the translator fit into the chain of intermediaries? Must he or she be considered as one of the co-authors of the dual materialization of the dramatic and scenic text (Pavis 2000: 243 passim)?4 Can we apply to this context the metaphor of the translator as ‘a servant with two masters’? Coined by Rosenzweig, and mimicking the title of a comedy by Goldoni (Rosenzweig qtd in Berman 1983: 61), this metaphor describes a case of subordination. Here, however, the translator is integrated into a configuration in which he or she is no longer in the service of only two masters – author and reader – but rather three, or even four (when we include the spectator). Would not the theatrical translator, moreover, play a less servile role, closer to that of the dramaturg who elucidates the text and orients its reading, thus joining the stage director and actors in their authorial functions; indeed even abandoning the traditional, ideally impartial, role of a go-between, or an arbiter whose identity must be effaced in order to guarantee the author’s own? The debate is age-old: some respond in the affirmative and argue that, for the theatre, we no longer speak of translation but rather of adaptation.5 Others (mostly translators) contend that they feel ‘autonomous’, that they remain the ‘neutral’ intermediaries who ‘do not comment on a staging’, do not ‘anticipate it, do not predict it’ (Sallenave qtd in Pavis 1990: 144), but ‘enable the performance’, ‘prepare’ it, by simply making ‘possible’ multiple stagings (Déprats 1982: 48; 1985), and guaranteeing for the author and the text, by the translation’s systematic publication, an existence beyond the stage. Is the autonomy they claim, however, really a synonym for neutrality – assuming that neutrality exists in the absolute? For if we must, in order to translate the dramatic text, necessarily ‘hear voices

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which say, [and] see by anticipation bodies which act’ (Sallenave qtd in Pavis 1990: 144), if we must by consequence activate the text and embody it in the translation process, does it not become difficult, or even paradoxical, to speak of neutrality, whether with regard to the stage director or the actors? Unless we admit, that is, that there are indeed ‘universals’ in this language/body/gesture which are not linked to a specific voice, body, gesture or reception – which are temporally and culturally circumscribed in the process of representation, but which also exist in the absolute. To speak of universals, however, is to take part in a process of negation, with regard to the text’s referent as well as its cultural anchoring: a negation already attempted in articulated language, and which leads to a dead end. Finally, as Patrice Pavis (1990: 163–4) also suggests, is not the actor, even more so than the director, the person who has the last say concerning a text, translated or original, on the ephemeral site of the stage?

An experience of shared translation: Between academic research, publishing and staging To pretend to settle the debate here would be presumptuous. I remain convinced that our response can only, as is so often the case in translation, be contextual and pragmatic, linked to an author, and even to a specific work. It is not a question of opposing, for convenience, theory and practice, nor of refusing all theoretical reflection, but rather of considering, in the words of David Johnston (2011: 13), that ‘at the heart of translation, of every act or event that is generated by a translator, there is a double consciousness … a simultaneity of thinking and doing. It is here that theatre translation establishes its claim to be considered a paradigm of reflective practice par excellence, because it is at this point that critical reflection and cultural praxis coincide most clearly.’ On this basis, I have reactivated the memory of an experience of theatrical translation with which I was associated, between 1992 and 1994, which offers a concrete illustration of what I mean by ‘shared’ translation. The experience in question was a veritable collaborative enterprise, since it was aimed at the translation of forty comedies by Carlo Goldoni which had never been translated into French,6 bringing together around twenty translators.7 The initiative was promoted by the European Goldoni Association, founded by Ginette Herry, and presided over by Robert Abirached.8 It fell within the precise framework of the celebrations of the tricentenary of Carlo Goldoni’s death – who, we may recall, died in Paris in 1793 and was the author of 120 comic,

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tragic, and tragicomical plays, and around fifty opera libretti in three languages (Italian, Venetian or French). If ever there was an author at the intersection of cultures, it was Goldoni. Appreciating the commemorative, multinational nature of what I would term an ‘assembly’ of translators, is crucial for understanding the choices we made. The presence of Ginette Herry was also important: a major specialist of eighteenth-century French and Italian theatre, both Goldoni’s and that of his rivals, Carlo Gozzi and Pietro Chiari, she was also at the ‘crossroads’ of various roles and responsibilities. A comparativist by training, she combined her role as an academic specialist and translator of Italian theatre (Alfieri, Goldoni, Pirandello, Svevo) with that of dramaturge at the Théâtre national de Strasbourg. Yet the translation project was only one of the facets of the French events organized for the tricentenary celebrations. It occurred in conjunction with a series of Franco-Italian, and more widely European conferences – German, Spanish, Swedish, etc. – and of related publications, including the five volumes of conference proceedings published by the host universities and at least two special journal issues dedicated to Goldoni’s work.9 The conferences and events united academics, critics and practitioners, stage directors and actors,10 all of whom had theoretical and practical knowledge of Goldoni, which was at once textual and related to the stage. Translating thus had other purposes besides the simple fact of making available a text hitherto unknown to a reader who did not know the source language. These purposes, initially, were more academic than theatrical: the translators were not ‘professionals’ (in the sense of being professionally registered or regular translators), but were primarily solicited for their theoretical knowledge of Goldoni’s work. Some went into the experience of translation as theorists of the theatre and/or of translation itself, whereas others had already translated for the stage in collaboration with stage directors (like Myriam Tanant, who had worked with Jean-Claude Penchenat, or Ginette Herry, who had worked with Jacques Lassalle and Jean-Claude Berutti), others were actors (Nadine Alari, for instance) who had already acted in plays by Goldoni or who had both translated and acted in the same production (like Huguette Hatem). Far from being an impediment to concertation in the collective enterprise, this diversity of translation approaches encouraged mutual enrichment and debate by preserving the necessary adequation of each translation to the dramaturgic and linguistic specificity of each work. The common thread was that all of the translators were included in the programme of meetings, conferences and debates. Scanning through the names of the panels of the last conference held in Strasbourg in 1994 – which, bringing together all the participants in

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the debates and acting workshops, was intended as a review of past work and a projection of the entire enterprise into the future – is perfectly representative of their theoretical and practical orientations: ‘Goldoni in the text’; ‘in research’; ‘on stage’; ‘related writings’.11 In this way, the work of translation was conceived as an activity associating academic reflection with scenic practice, the book with the stage. Going beyond the recent model proposed by Manuela Perteghella (2004: 6), such an approach empirically transcended her overly radical opposition between ‘two traditions of translating drama, a stage-oriented tradition … concerned above all with audience reception during a relatively short time span in a specific place, and a reader-oriented one, concerned with philological exactness and literary values: the tradition in which the translator’s work shapes the social function(s)’ (6). Indeed, our translations were to be published with an introduction and analytical commentary, along with historical and lexical notes: a sine qua non condition set by Ginette Herry and duly negotiated with publishers (L’Arche, Actes SudPapiers, Circé, L’Imprimerie Nationale, ENS Éditions). The Association also foresaw that the translations should be able to result in a staging. It was moreover on this basis that the publishers committed to publishing the translations once they were complete, and the majority of the translated plays were indeed staged across France between 1993 and 1996, continuing on until at least 1999 (see Théâtre/Public 1993). For Ginette Herry and the Association, it was not simply a question of revealing the richness of Goldoni’s dramaturgy by bringing previously unknown plays to the attention of a wider audience, it was rather an attempt, by diving deep into the depths of the Goldonian ocean (and reaching the too frequently neglected opera libretti), to upset the many interpretative stereotypes that had accumulated, in France in particular, throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, among stage directors, actors and spectators alike – chief among which was the idea that Goldoni’s was a lightweight theatre: the smiling and hopping drollery of a farcical author. Even more so than for the anniversary celebrations, this complex construction followed in the dual wake of, on the one hand, theoretical studies on translation and the act of translating for the stage, which were flourishing at the time,12 and on the other an important readjustment in the interpretation of Goldonian dramaturgy, which occurred after an academic conference in 1957 on the occasion of the 250th anniversary of Goldoni’s birth.13 This conference had highlighted the need for academic research to take into account the stage reinterpretations of Goldoni by Italian stage directors, notably those by Luchino Visconti (La locandiera, 1952) and Giorgio Strehler (Trilogia della villeggiatura, 1954–5),

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which presented a total rupture with the prior actorial and scenic interpretation. This rupture, backed up by academic research begun in France with Mario Baratto’s teaching at the École Normale Supérieure in the 1970s, Giorgio Strehler’s stagings of Goldoni at the Théâtre de l’Europe-Odéon (including an adaptation in French, La Trilogie de la villégiature, in 1978) and Luca Ronconi (La serva amorosa performed in Italian at the Théâtre des Amandiers de Nanterre in 1987). It led to darker stage reinterpretations like those directed by Jacques Lassalle at the Studio-Théâtre de Vitry, and at the Comédie-Française (Barouf à Chioggia; La Bonne mère; La Locandiera; La Serva amorosa), by Jean-Claude Penchenat at the Théâtre du Campagnol (L’Opéra de Smyrne; Une des dernières soirées de Carnaval; Le Joueur; L’Homme exemplaire) and by Jean-Claude Berutti at the  Théâtre du Peuple de Bussang, then at the Comédie de Saint-Étienne (L’Honnête Fille/La Bonne Épouse (Bettina); Il Campiello; Le Théâtre comique; La Trilogie de Zélinde et Lindor), to name only those who were associated with the enterprise of translation itself. This decisive re-evaluation, carried out on stage, highlighted three essential elements needed in order to address the critique and staging of Goldoni, and which form the theoretical foundation of the whole enterprise of translation launched by the European Goldoni Association: 1. Goldoni writes for specific companies, spaces, actors and actresses, who are at the heart both of his dramaturgy and his reform of the theatre. The texts we have available, in the editions which Goldoni himself oversaw, always derive from representation and performance. They emerge out of a complex and progressive process of revision, rewriting, linguistic annotation and even translations made by Goldoni of certain dialectal plays that he wanted to make more accessible to an Italian-speaking audience. 2. Goldoni’s dramatic writing is above all rhythmical and musical, particularly the choral and dialectal plays. Indeed, the Italian stage director Gianfranco De Bosio (quoted in Alberti 1996: 139) has stated that he had to treat these texts like musical scores, ‘musically arranging the poetic lines, decomposing syllable after syllable, word after word, then progressively recomposing them’. 3. Goldoni’s texts have emerged from the author’s work in collaboration with his actors, we can find in the subjects, the situations, the character of the protagonists and the very interstices of the text (stage directions, lexical and syntactical choices, rhythms, the expressivity of the dialogues, etc.) the traces of temperament – and even the vocal, corporal and gestural dispositions – proper to the primi attori and prime attrici of the Venetian companies

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for whom Goldoni worked. These traces are so evident that almost all of Goldoni’s theatre may be considered a metatheatrical discourse on the actor’s art.14 His dramaturgy is truly at the crossroads between a dramaturgy of actors (proper to the commedia dell’arte) and a dramaturgy of the author (which plans to create a written text which actors must subsequently learn). Goldoni’s texts are, in their process of creation, more actorial than authorial, and what is now available to us is the textual trace, set down by publishing, of a complex negotiation between dramatic and scenic writing. It was thus more than necessary to tackle Goldoni in a new way in order to put the text into play – ‘en jeu’ in all senses of the French term: at once ‘game’, ‘play’ and spatial ‘gap’ – to consider, as Jacques Nichet (1992: 26–7) writes, that ‘words have play (les mots ont du jeu), they can rub together and be adjusted’, and that this process must occur in the company of the actors, in the interest of ‘balancing the text’s exactitude with scenic efficacy’.15 It was also more than necessary, however, to ensure that one did not lose the ‘cold memory’ of the text,16 that one did not break with its history – a memory and history that Goldoni, especially, made sure to pass on to future readers and spectators with an uncommon ardour and constancy in his peritexts and memoirs. Goldoni’s ‘polyphonic and choral’ dramaturgy, as Bernard Dort (1994: 15) has defined it, imposes a translation practice founded on a constant back-and-forth, from the page to the stage, and vice versa. This idea of a back-and-forth or pendulum motion illustrates what shared work, or work ‘in concert’ – which is necessarily of the type the theatrical translator engages in – can be. Ideally, it is a type of work from which all ideas of subordination, in one direction as in the other, are banished. Both inequalities are inadmissible: the translator who imposes his vision of the play, and short-circuits the staging and the performance of the actors, is as unacceptable as the stage director who imposes his or her staging, thus making the translator work according to prior scenic images, from an actorial and scenic choice which would guide the rhythm, vocality and gestures,17 without taking into account the text and its prior history. In this perspective, the translators were involved rather in a process of accompaniment, of what is called in French a compagnonnage, in the sense that the stage director Jacques Nichet also gives to this term when he says that he feels he is first the translator’s ‘assistant’. The back-and-forth allowed them to situate themselves more easily in a search for equilibrium between ‘proximity’ and ‘distance’, or again between archaisation and modernization, similar to that defended, for example, by Jean-Michel Déprats (1990, 2002) on the basis of his personal

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experience of theatrical translation. To have chosen texts which had never before been translated, and thus never before staged in France (nor sometimes even in Italy!) allowed for knowledge of Goldoni’s corpus to expand in France. For despite the numerous eighteenth- and nineteenth-century18 translations, and a steady stream of French versions appearing throughout the twentieth century, his corpus had been reduced to a very small bouquet of titles: starting with La locandiera, followed by I rusteghi and Le baruffe chiozzotte (choral dialetical plays particularly appreciated by amateur theatre companies), the three plays making up La trilogia della villeggiatura, and naturally Il servo di due padroni. But this allowed, above all, for the sedimentation of stage interpretations to be done away with, not to mention other preconceptions regarding the text held by actors or stage directors, which so quickly transform into stereotypes deprived of real meaning. The most difficult of these to combat was that of the levity, vivacity and cheerfulness that the Venetian’s comedies were supposed to represent. Translations were assigned to various translators in the following way: Ginette Herry drew up a list of titles, which was discussed by the translators, who, after an individual reading, chose their text according to their specific sensibility, knowledge – or even lack of knowledge – of the work. This gave them a certain autonomy. We also determined a translation protocol shared by all: not to use a French patois in order to translate the Venetian language; to preserve the rhythm as much as possible, without trying to translate in set poetic lines; to ensure the fundamental punctuation for the rhythm of the acting and actors’ gestures; not to add easy interjections (such as Ah!, Oh!, Hum etc.); not to veer into an imitation of Marivaux or Molière, which required forgetting our experiences as French school students, university students and spectators; not to systematically elucidate the ambiguities and ellipses of the text (which were up to the actor to interpret); not to erase, nor to transform the cultural references to Venetian or Italian life – proper nouns and place names, types of currency or parlour games were, for example, to be kept in the source language, be it Italian or Venetian, in order to conserve a touch of Venetianness and Italianness. We also sought to avoid the levity usually associated with Italianness in France by reinterpreting, in our own way, the secrets of commedia dell’arte.19

The integration of the spectator in the translation process This shared protocol did not prevent each translator from applying the guidelines differently according to the specific text chosen and its history. To take a personal

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example, that of La scuola di ballo, which I translated and which was published by Circé (Goldoni 1994a): I chose this comedy because I did not know it, like the majority of Goldoni specialists for that matter. It is a cursed play, written by Goldoni in 1759, in hendecasyllables with chain rhymes in the complex schema of Dante’s terza rima: an absurdly ambitious exercise in style, that the playwright set for himself upon his return from Rome in order to form, with eight other plays in all genres – comedies, tragedies, tragicomedies – a theatrical ‘garland’ dedicated to the nine Muses (Le nove muse). The comedy having had, upon its creation, no success whatsoever, the author subsequently disowned it and condemned it to oblivion.20 It was thus question of a choice which deliberately went against the author, in order to give the play a chance to be able to defend itself and exist on its own. This is why, in this precise case, it seemed to me that a better way to erase this initial oblivion and lack of success – caused principally, if we are to believe the author,21 by the choice of an archaic Tuscan tongue – was to rewrite this Tuscan language, without taking anything away from the succession of the scenes, characters and dialogue, but rather by inventing an imaginary version in prose. Indeed, Goldoni could have written such a prose version himself, as he had previously done for two comedies in the same series, initially planned in verse, Gli innamorati (of which there exists only the prose version) and L’Impresario delle Smirne (of which Goldoni wrote two versions, one in verse, the other in prose). This prose translation, which one could hastily judge as disrespectful or unfaithful, but which was nonetheless founded on a practice of rewriting which the author himself had recognized as being valid, certainly allowed the play to escape the purgatory to which its author had condemned it. It thus attracted the attention of Jacques Lassalle, who was seduced by the idea of the translation rewriting as much as by the theme (an old lascivious dancing instructor runs a shabby school where his students do as they please, and gradually abandon him), which echoed Lassalle’s own difficult experience as director of the Comédie-Française and teacher at the Conservatoire. He saw in this black comedy about the world of dance a self-reflexive play (which it also certainly was for Goldoni, like many of the Venetian’s metatheatrical comedies) and he produced it with his students as an end-of-year performance, taking over the entire space of the Conservatoire d’art dramatique, further emphasizing the text’s metatheatrical charge. The transposition into prose thus effaced the stylistic virtuosity which had been liable for the initial failure, allowing the play to find, even modestly, a second life, albeit in a revised and adapted form.22 One recent mise en espace, or semi-staged event, produced by Agathe Alexis and a group of young actors as part of the festival Traduire/Transmettre at the Atalante

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theatre (May 2014), allowed me to verify that the prose transposition of the play still resonates in the bodies and voices of the present. The result perhaps stems from the fact that, in the translation’s first phase of elaboration, we attempted to echo Goldoni’s practice of elaborating the text. We first translated al tavolino alone, as the author himself did (which he affirms on several occasions in his prefaces and Mémoires). Then, just as Goldoni gave snatches of dialogue to the actors (their separate roles, ‘la parte’), we delivered our translations, even when they were incomplete, to the stage directors involved in the experiment, who began the process of reading them aloud and rehearsing. These readings – sometimes mises en espace – were an opportunity for debate among translators, actors, stage directors and even spectators, after which we would return to our work in order to provide a version to be published. This experience reveals the shortcomings of the model proposed by Manuela Perteghella (2004: 17), which opposes two types of collaboration: one between the translator and the stage director, the other between the translator and the actor, thus excluding the relationship with the spectator. In our case, the interest lay not only in the sonic and gestural effects on the stage, or the initial feelings of actors and stage directors who spoke after a reading, but also with the reactions of spectators, or the lack of their reactions. The expression of their emotions, like the hesitations of actors, brought out the text’s problematic nodes, those where the translation stumbled in its vocal and gestural delivery and in its reception; it was these nodes which were discussed. Moreover, throughout the experience, the translators also found themselves, at a certain moment during their work, in the position of spectators. They were certainly translating as guarantors of the author’s memory, but they also had to remain attentive to the spectator of today, surrounded by actors and stage directors who were spectators themselves.

Limits and perspectives As we can see, this first collective context primarily served the idea that the translated and published texts should open up potential later stagings, thus the idea of long-term transmission ensured by publication. For those stagings, however, which were indeed performed – when it was no longer, for actors, about reading or saying the texts aloud, but about investing and incarnating them with their bodies – the process was again put into question (and in my opinion, it necessarily must be). This gave rise to a new shared interaction between the translator, stage director and actors, one whose aims differed from

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the first. At this later stage, the shared work can no longer be conceived of in a theoretical way, but is rather concentrated around a contextual practice: on the particular experience of a translator with a stage director and actors who are going to perform in a specific theatre, for specific spectators. With respect to this point, which was most likely central to how the project was initially envisioned, because we did not systematically make recordings of the performances of each play, nor of the successive stages of the discussion and the process of establishing the text to be performed, we are cruelly lacking in concrete elements that would facilitate theoretical reflection. For my part, experience has shown me that stage directors – and actors – do not situate themselves in the same way before a translated text as before a text in its original language. Though it varies according to personality and the degree of knowledge of the original language, the passage through translation, arouses a more or less demanding and detailed request for explanation of the translator’s lexical and stylistic choices (why this word, what does the original say, what coherence does it have with the advancement of the plot, etc.). This questioning is all the more demanding for the reason that such individuals, through their practice, already have a vision of the author, his universe, his style. It is most likely at this stage that the issue of ‘faithfulness’ to the text – a problematic question if ever there was one, given the vagueness surrounding the notion and its lack of relevance in the absolute – was recurrently posed, automatically engendering questions/responses on the possible interpretations to which the translation had subjected the original text. The experience showed me that the position of neutrality, while still defendable in establishing the text to be published, was more difficult to maintain; the (self-)analysis of the translation which had to be undertaken, moreover, was without a doubt a type of dramaturgic explanation, causing a shift from the position of translator to one of dramaturg. These discussions prior to a staging sometimes highlighted problems of translation which had not been envisaged when setting down the protocol, as they did not directly effect the publication. This was the case for the translation of the title of some comedies, whose passage from publication to performance made delicate the application of the principles usually used for Goldoni’s titles; namely literal translation, the majority of the time – keeping the Italian titles imposed by the most recent French stagings (La Locandiera, Il Campiello, La Serva amorosa) in order to avoid the sometimes out-dated titles proposed by Goldoni in his Mémoires, or other unsatisfying and overly ambiguous solutions. The problem arose for La villeggiatura, which I translated for the

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publishing house L’Arche (Goldoni 1992a), and the stage director Claudia Morin23 immediately raised this question when it came time to give the text to the actors. La villeggiatura is a comedy written in 1756 – very little known, even in Italy, and almost never performed – it preceded by five years the famous Trilogie de la villégiature (Marini 2006). It deserves attention first because it explores further a theme that was dear to Goldoni since the beginnings of his career – the economic and sentimental upheavals caused by the fashion of the villeggiatura (a stay in the country, away from the urban centres, during the warmer months of the year) – and constitutes a draft of the second part of La Trilogie of 1761 (Le avventure della villeggiatura/Les aventures de la villégiature). Yet, the play also gives a very personal vision of the villeggiatura, far from that presented in the Avventure, for the reason that it is in many ways a theatrical transposition of Goldoni’s own experiences of rustic pleasures and torments at the country house of one of his aristocratic friends. This would explain why the characters of this comedy are all noble, why it is transposed to Naples, and why the vision that it gives of a day in the villeggiatura is more impressive and nostalgic than critical or satirical, as in other comedies on the same theme. Goldoni’s title is itself evasive: it constitutes a hapax in the titles of the comedies (Fido 1988) as it designates, in an exceptional way, a space-time unique to a social practice. Now, while the French title La villégiature could be kept in the publication, and accompanied by explanatory notes and commentaries on the history of the play, Claudia Morin expressed doubts about keeping it for the performances. The risk of confusion for the audience (and for critics) with the Trilogie de la villégiature was an even greater handicap to the work’s reception, she believed, for the reason that the French had first discovered the Trilogie in Strehler’s mythic staging at the Comédie-Française. Strehler’s staging thus constituted their immediate point of reference and a possible source of confusion. In order to overcome this problem, we adopted, after much discussion, the title Fin d’été à la campagne (Late Summer in the Country) which conserved the idea of space-time suggested by the Italian title, while playing on the precise moment of the year when that particular villeggiatura took place – autumn.24 In its syntactic structure, it is not a Goldonian title (the majority being constructed around the couple article/noun, or article/ noun/adjective). Moreover, it orients the interpretation of the play in an obvious way, as it underlines the nostalgia which permeates a part of the plot, something the title original does not do. More documentarian than dramatic, more neutral as well if we compare it to the scansion of the titles of the Trilogy (Le smanie della villeggiatura/La Manie de la villégiature, Le avventure – already

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quoted –, and Il ritorno della villeggiatura/Le Retour de la villégiature), which mark the distinct temporal sequences of the three canonical moments of the Goldonian theatrical villeggiatura. This opportunistic choice was also an interpretation, and it underlined the ambiguity inherent in this comedy and its characters. This aspect disconcerted critics, and audiences as well, for whom Goldoni remains above all synonymous more with joy and laughter than with melancholy. They did not fail to express their surprise in finding the staging a touch too ‘Chekhovian’ (which it was not really), an adjective which may have been inferred from the modified title alone. Given that the play was not performed again, we may wonder if, on the contrary, the conservation of the original title in the publication did not in fact reduce the play’s readership and disturb future stage directors. The rather mixed results of those Goldonian stagings which made use of translations published in the immediately following period implies that, if the enterprise provided stage directors with new texts which had been commented and tested on stage, it hardly changed the way that Goldoni was received by audiences, nor did it cause stage directors to take risks in their programming, at least with respect to professional theatre.25 This obviously does not call into question the validity of the principles which presided over the enterprise in 1993, nor its value as a motor for the later initiatives of shared translation. This is the case with the experiment, organized by one of the ‘historical’ translators of the Goldoni experience, Lucie Comparini (2013), who, within an academic theatrical workshop, brings together students of all disciplines. It is within this framework, perhaps because it is liberated from any economic interest, that the sharing of competences (linguistic, literary, dramaturgic, scenic) necessary to the establishing of a text to be performed is legitimated and acquires new sense. Translated by Nicholas Manning

Notes 1 Theatre made exclusively to be read certainly exists, but there are texts which, for various reasons, resist theatre’s essential element: performance, the fleeting interaction between two groups of people, actors and spectators, who are confronted in praesentia within a defined space. 2 Patrice Pavis (1990: 135–65), in a chapter entitled ‘Vers une spécificité de la traduction théâtrale: la traduction intergestuelle et interculturelle’ speaks of verbocorps or verbe-au-corps. The theory of verbo-corps holds that there is a gestural and

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Collaborative Translation vocal rhythm to a text, specific to a language and a culture, which necessitates a particular adjustment on the part of the intermediaries (151, 166). These reasons were discussed in the field of Italian studies during the 2013 conference entitled ‘ Traduire et mettre en scène le théâtre italien en langue française aujourd’ hui’ (cf. Cederna and Proust 2013). On the various roles that directors, dramaturges and actors assume during collaborative translation, and the financial constraints upon such collaborations, see Bennett (1997: 125), Aaltonen (2000: 88–9), Aaltonen (2007) and Baines et al. (2010). Pavis (1990: 165) defines theatrical translation as ‘translation for the stage, carried out with future staging in mind, whether ordered by a stage director or published while waiting for a future staging to take place’. All translations are by the translator of this chapter. On the relationships between dramaturgs and translation, see for instance Trencsényi (2015); on the question of theatrical translation as a dramaturgic endeavour, see Bonnaud et al (2010). On the question of translation and adaptation, see for example B. Faivre d’Arcier in Thiériot (1990: 15–16) and Sirkku Aaltonen (2000: 45, 64, 75, 80, notably). For a list of the translated plays see Herry (1995: 402). One exception is the translation of Il vero amico, a comedy of 1751 published in 1753, which had already been the object of a French translation during Goldoni’s lifetime, in 1758, three years before his arrival in Paris. The play was ‘controversial’, as it was embroiled in the anti-Encyclopedists’ attacks against Diderot, the former having accused the philosopher of imitating Il vero amico in Le Fils naturel, as well as Il padre di famiglia (1751) in Le Père de famille. In a second edition (Pasquali 1761), Goldoni (1996) modified the preface to the Vero amico, by diplomatically excluding all plagiarim from Diderot. Nadine Alari, Lucie Comparini, Françoise Decroisette, Sylvie Favalier, Huguette Hatem, Ginette Herry, Anne Manceron, Geneviève Rey-Penchenat, Marie-France Sidet, Myriam Tanant, Valeria Tasca, Karin Wackers. To this list one must add the eight translators brought together by Jean-Claude Zancarini at the École Normale Supérieure de Saint-Cloud for ‘Le petit théâtre de société’ (Goldoni 1994b), which produced the three plays written by Goldoni for his friend, the Count Albergati Capacelli, thus for a private theatre: L’Avare; L’Auberge de la poste; Le tour payé de retour. Two or three translators worked on each of them together. The Association was disbanded at the General Assembly of November 2014. The Association Goldoni en France, founded in November 2015, took over its mission (http://goldoni-en-france.org/goldoni/ [accessed 8 January 2016]). Conference proceedings: Decroisette (1995); Goldoni. Le livre, la scène, l’image (1994); Luciani (1995); Herry (1995); Ulysse (1998). Special journal issues: Théâtre/Public (Ertel 1993) and Revue des Études Italiennes (Sur Goldoni 1994).

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10 Patrick Berthier, Jean-Claude Berutti, Yves Chenevoix, Matthieu Dion, Jacques Lassalle, Claudia Morin, Jean-Claude Penchenat. 11 Jacques Lassalle began the workshop ‘Goldoni On Stage’ by giving the following definition to the work that they were to accomplish: ‘It is the true convergence, against a background of friendship, of real dialogue, without arrogance on the part of the theatre, without condescension on the part of the university, of those who search, of those who translate, of those who analyse, of those who bring to the stage, of those who act, Goldoni’ (Herry 1995: 206). 12 In her doctoral dissertation devoted to the ‘relationship between Text and Performance in the Translation of Il servitore di due padroni’, Cristina Marinetti (2007: 34–40) traces the important theoretical studies devoted to the question in the 1980s–90s: alongside Patrice Pavis, David Johnston and Susan Bassnett figure prominently. See notably Pavis (1990, 1992), Bassnett (1980, 1990, 1991, 1998) and Johnston (1993). 13 The conference took place at the Fondazione Giorgio Cini. It was published in its entirety in Branca and Mangini (1960). 14 The most famous case is that of Mirandolina in La locandiera, whose challenge – to make a misogynist knight fall in love through her mastery of feminine wiles – can be read as a metaphorical exaltation of the actorial art of the servetta Maddalena Marliani, who fascinated Goldoni, and whom he raises with this role to the rank of prima donna. He was to do the same thing a little later with the actress Caterina Bresciani, whose fiery, passionate temperament inspired the protagonists of comedies in prose and verse, called Theatre of San Luca, between 1754 and 1762: Ircana, Eugenia, Giacinta, famous heroines of La trilogia persiana, Gli innamorati, La trilogia della villeggiatura, but also those less famous ones of La donna stravagante, I rusteghi, Le baruffe chiozzotte. 15 Jacques Nichet (1992: 26–7) states that he ‘wants to reaffirm the place and role of the translator in theatrical movement’, then observing: ‘As soon as we begin to translate, we begin to produce gaps (du jeu). The words rub against each other, they do not fit correctly, they have gaps (ils ont du jeu).’ 16 Banu (1993: 69) applies to the memory of the theatre the distinction which LéviStrauss establishes between hot societies and cold societies. Hot memory ‘aims to update the very old. To transmute it into the present’ (the case of Peter Brook and Grotowski). Cold memory ‘affirms distance, remoteness, strangeness’ (the case of Peter Stein). 17 One may recall a remark by the stage director Alain Sachs regarding the staging of La Locandiera in 2005, at the Théâtre Antoine (translation Paolo Dussoubs, unpublished), which defines Mirandolina in a peremptory way as a ‘beautiful young brunette’ (Turquois 2005). Goldoni’s text never specifies however the colour of Mirandolina’s hair, and she says herself that she is neither young nor beautiful.

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Collaborative Translation Quite clearly, the choice of the actress (Cristiana Reali) here dominates the reading of the text, and her acting orients the translation. For the translations of the eighteenth century, see Goldoni (2007). In the nineteenth century, at least two anthologies of translations of Goldoni appeared, see Goldoni (1803, 1822). The beginning of the nineteenth century was also characterised by numerous, often operatic adaptations of comedies, and the stagings of little known comedies such as La guerra (La Guerre et la paix), performed at the Théâtre des Variétés étrangères in July 1807, or I mercatanti, performed the same year in the same theatre under the title Les Négocians. All the minutes of the preparatory meetings prior to the translations, which detail the establishing of the shared protocol, may be found in the archives of the Association Goldoni Européen, currently conserved at the Comédie de SaintÉtienne. At the initiative of its director, Jean-Claude Berutti, also president of the new Association Goldoni in France, these archives will soon be transferred to the Bibliothèque Nationale de France. He quotes it only once at the end of the preface of Tome I of the Pasquali edition (1763–1779). It was only published, like several plays of the Nove muse, in 1792, in the Zatta edition, with neither preface nor dedication. In the Pasquali preface, Goldoni explains that he wants, in his editions, to purge from his comedies their defects of language, without falling however into archaism. He then quotes the two plays where he endeavoured to use the Tuscan ‘of the times of Boccacio and Berni’, once ‘seriously dans La scuola di ballo; another time parodically in Torquato Tasso’ (Goldoni 1999: 39–40). L’École de danse, in the published translation, was performed under the same title at La Rochelle in 2001 by Laurence Andreini (the company Amazone), in the framework of the Université de La Rochelle. It also served as foundation in 2011 for an end-of-year performance at the Centre des arts de la scène du 15e arrondissement (stage director Jacques Mornas, song by François Borand), under the title École d’art, with a dancing instructor who becomes a woman, like all the male dancers, and the suppression of a part of the plot. Director at the time of the Morin-Timmerman company. Performed in Limoges, then in Paris at the Théâtre 14, the play was also performed in Naples, in French, though it was not performed in Italian in Italy. Let us note that Claudia Morin also staged the Amants timides, translated by Lucie Comparini (cf. Goldoni 1993), in the courtyard of the Hôtel Donon. In the Venetian practice of the eighteenth century, the villeggiatura took place at two periods of the year, in spring and in autumn, at harvest time and during the hunting season. Cf. Decroisette (2008). The last programming of Goldoni at the Comédie-Française (2015–16) – moreover highly appreciated by audiences and critics – did not go

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beyond tried and tested values, since it proposed one of Goldoni’s most well-known dialectal comedies, Les Rustres. The translation chosen by the stage director, JeanLouis Benoît, was by Gilbert Moget, completed in 1957 for the celebration of the 250th anniversary of Goldoni’s birth (Goldoni 1957: 8–174) in order to ‘encourage, in the world of theatre, the desire to include this author more frequently in the repertoire’ (ibid., 40). Already, in 2002, in order to stage the Trilogie de la villégiature au Festival d’Avignon, Benoît had had recourse to a pre-existing ‘translation’, in this case the ‘French text’ established by Félicien Marceau for Giorgio Strehler (Comédie-Française 1978), which again poses differently the question of the link between the translator and the staging director. The current resounding successs of Rustres also challenges the idea of translations’ ‘aging’.

Works cited Aaltonen, S. (2000). Time-Sharing on Stage: Drama Translation in Theatre and Society. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters. Aaltonen, S. (2007). ‘Space and Place in Theatrical Contact Zones. How to Find Audiences for Untapped Reservoirs of Contemporary Drama from Small Cultures’. In ACT 15. Teatro e Tradução: Palcos de Encontro, edited by M. J. Brilhante and M. Carvalho, 53–75. Porto: Campo das Letras. Alberti, C. (1996). ‘La realizzazione delle Massere: Venezia 1993’. In Carlo Goldoni tra libro e scena, edited by C. Alberti and G. Herry, 137–40. Venezia: Il Cardo. Baines, R., Marinetti, C. and Perteghella, M. (2011). Staging and Performing Translation: Text and Theatre Practice. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. Banu, G. (1993). Théâtre ou l’instant habité, Paris: L’Herne. Bassnett, S. (1980). ‘An Introduction to Theatre Semiotics’. Theatre Quarterly 10 (38): 46–55. Bassnett, S. (1990). ‘Translating for the Theatre: Textual Complexities’. Essays in Poetics 15 (1): 71–83. Bassnett, S. (1991). ‘Translating for the Theatre: The Case against Performability’. TTR 4 (1): 99–111. Bassnett, S. (1998). ‘Still Trapped in the Labyrinth: Further Reflections on Translation and Theatre’. In Constructing Cultures, edited by S. Bassnett and A. Lefevere, 90–108. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters. Bennett, S. (1997). Theatre Audiences. A Theory of Production and Reception, 2nd ed. London: Routledge. Berman, A. (1983). L’Épreuve de l’étranger. Paris: Gallimard. Bonnaud, I., Jansen, S., Manganaro, J.-P. and Pisani, G. (2010). ‘Dramaturgie et traduction’, table ronde animée par A. Carré dans le cadre du Festival ‘Les Européennes’ au Théâtre des Ateliers à Lyon, 29 mai 2010, Agôn. Revue des arts de la scène, http://agon.ens-lyon.fr/index.php?id=2163 (accessed 12 February 2016).

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Branca, V. and Mangini, N., eds (1960). Studi goldoniani. Atti del Convegno internazionale di studi goldoniani (Venezia, 28 settembre-1 ottobre 1957), vol. 1, Venezia-Roma: Istituto per la collaborazione culturale. Cederna, C. and Proust, S., eds (2013). Traduire et mettre en scène le théâtre italien en langue française aujourd’hui, journée d’études, Université de Lille, 28 November 2013 http://live3.univ-lille3.fr/collections/traduite-et-mettre-en-scene-le-theatre-italienen-langue-francaise-aujourdhui (accessed 17 January 2016). Comparini, L. (2013). ‘Goldoni aujourd’hui en France. Expériences de traduction et d’atelier théâtral universitaire’. Cahiers d’études italiennes 17: 167–88, http://cei. revues.org/1420 (accessed 17 January 2016). Decroisette, F., ed. (1995). Musiques goldoniennes. Hommage à Jacques Joly. Strasbourg: Circé. Decroisette, F. (2008). ‘www.lalocandiera.com. La réception française des comédies goldoniennes à travers internet (1995-2007)’. In France-Italie: un dialogue théâtral depuis 1950, edited by M.-J. Tramuta and Y. Butel, 175–95. Bern-Berlin: Peter Lang, 2008. Déprats, J.-M. (1982). ‘Traduire Shakespeare pour le théâtre’. Théâtre/Public 44 (March to April): 48. Déprats, J.-M. (1985). ‘Le verbe, un instrument du jeu shakespearien’. Théâtre en Europe 7: 70–2. Déprats, J.-M. (1990). ‘La traduction au carrefour des durées’. In Opéra théâtre, une mémoire imaginaire, edited by G. Banu, 219–39. Paris: L’Herne. Déprats, J.-M. (2002). In ‘W. Shakespeare, Tragedies, edited by J.-M. Déprats and G. Venet, vol. 1, lxxxix–xcvii. Paris: Gallimard, La Pléiade. Dort, B. (1994). ‘Ce que Goldoni peut apporter au théâtre aujourd’hui’. Goldoni. Le livre, la scène, l’image, Chroniques italiennes 38 (2): 13–20, http://chroniquesitaliennes. univ-paris3.fr/PDF/38/Dort.pdf (accessed 17 January 2016). Ertel, E. (ed.), with Ferrone, S., and Voisin, T. (1993). Carlo Goldoni sur les scènes italienne et française contemporaines, Théâtre/Public 112–13, July–October. Fido, F. (1988). ‘I titoli delle commedie goldoniane’. Studi goldoniani 8: 185–93. Goldoni, C. (1803). Les Chefs d’œuvre dramatiques de Charles Goldoni, bilingual version. Translated by J. A. Amar du Rivier. Lyon-Paris: Reymann-Molini. Goldoni, C. (1822). Chefs-d’œuvre du théâtre italien, Goldoni. Translated by E. Aignan. Paris: Ladvocat. Goldoni, C. (1957). La Belle Hôtesse, Les Rustres, La Nouvelle Maison. Edited by A. Monjo. Paris: Edit. Goldoni, C. (1992a). La Villégiature. Translated and introduction and notes F. Decroisette. Paris: L’Arche. Goldoni, C. (1992b). Les Cuisinières. Translated by M. Tanant. Arles: Actes Sud. Goldoni, C. (1993). Les Amants timides ou la Confusion des deux portraits. Translated and introduction L. Comparini, in C. Goldoni, Les années françaises, vol. III, 7–103. Paris: Imprimerie Nationale.

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Goldoni, C. (1994a). L’École de danse. Translated by F. Decroisette. Saulxures: Circé. Goldoni, C. (1994b). Le petit théâtre de société. (L’Avare; L’Auberge de la poste; Le Tour payé de retour) Translated by the Atelier de traduction des italianistes de l’École normale supérieure de Fontenay St-Cloud. Fontenay-aux-Roses: ENS éd. Fontenay St-Cloud. Goldoni, C. (1996). Le Véritable Ami (with Les Femmes curieuses, translated by A. Manceron). Translated, introduction and notes by F. Decroisette. Arles: Actes Sud. Goldoni, C. (1999). Mémoires italiens. Edited by G. Herry. Strasbourg: Circé. Goldoni, C. (2007). Comédies choisies. Edited by D. Fachard. Paris: Le Livre de Poche. Herry, G., ed. (1995). Goldoni en Europe aujourd’hui, et demain? Utopie théâtrale en quatre journées dédiée à Bernard Dort. Strasbourg: Circé. Johnston, D., ed. (1996). Stages of Translation: Essays and Interviews on Translating for the Stage. Bath: Absolute Classics. Johnston, D. (2011). ‘Metaphor and Metonymy: The Translator-Practitioner’s Visibility’. In Staging and Performing Translation: Text and Theatre Practice, edited by R. Baines, C. Marinetti and M. Perteghella, 11–30. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Jonard, N. (1962). ‘La Fortune de Goldoni en France’. Revue de littérature comparée 36 (2): 210–34. Jonard, N., ed. (1994). Sur Goldoni, Revue des Études Italiennes 1–4, July–December. Marini, Q. (2006). ‘Nota sulla fortuna’. In La villeggiatura, edited by C. Goldoni and Q. Marini, 289–319. Venezia: Marsilio. Nichet, J. (1992). ‘La Maison A. Vitez: à la découverte d’un autre théâtre’. Translittérature 4 (Winter): 21–30, http://www.translitterature.fr/media/article_41.pdf (accessed 17 January 2016). Pavis, P. (1990). Le théâtre au croisement des cultures. Paris: José Corti. Theatre at the Crossroads (1992). Translated by L. Kruger. New York: Routledge. Pavis, P. (2000). Vers une théorie de la pratique théâtrale. Lille: Septentrion. Perteghella, M. (2004). ‘A Descriptive-Anthropological Model of Theatre Translation’. In Drama Translation and Theatre Practice, edited by S. Coelsch-Foisner and H. Klein, 1–23. Bern: Peter Lang. Thiériot, J. (1990). ‘Traduire, adapter, écrire’. In Sixièmes assises de la traduction littéraire: Traduire le théâtre, round table discussion with F. Delay, P. Ivernel, J. Jourdheuil, B. Lortholary, 15–40. Arles: Actes Sud. Trencsényi, K. (2015). ‘A View from the Bridge: The Dramaturg’s Role when Working on a Play in Translation’. In The Routledge Companion to Dramaturgy, edited by M. Romanska, 275–81. London and New York: Routledge. Turquois (2005). ‘ Théâtre: La locandiera, de Goldoni’. Agoravox le média citoyen 4 November. http://www.agoravox.fr/culture-loisirs/culture/article/theatre-lalocandiera-de-goldoni-4324 (accessed 24 February 2016). Ubersfeld, A. (1982). Lire le théâtre. Paris: Éditions sociales. Ulysse, G., ed. (1998). La Venise de Goldoni. Aix-en-Provence: PUP.

4

For a Practice-Theory of Translation: On Our Translations of Savonarola, Machiavelli, Guicciardini and Their Effects Jean-Louis Fournel and Jean-Claude Zancarini1

From 1987 to 2000, we translated texts by Francesco Guicciardini, Savonarola and Machiavelli. Most of these texts were translated together: the Avertissements politiques (Guicciardini 1988) and the Écrits politiques (Guicciardini 1997), an anthology of Savonarola’s texts (sermons on Aggée, Lettre à un ami, Traité sur la façon de régir Florence, court documents, 1993) and Machiavelli’s Prince (2000). Guicciardini’s Histoire d’Italie (1996) was translated by the translation workshop of our research group at the time, the Centre de recherche sur la pensée politique italienne at the ENS de Fontenay-Saint-Cloud.2 In the seminar, we collectively elaborated a number of translation principles, after which each of the members of the team translated one or several of the twenty books. Jean-Louis Fournel and myself then went through all of the books together in order to unify the style and ensure its coherency, particularly concerning the lexical choices. Our last work of translation (2013–14) concerned the second edition – fully revised both in its critical apparatus and the translation itself – of Machiavelli’s Prince (2014), which now features in the collection ‘Quadrige’ from the Presses Universitaires de France. Furthermore, this translation work, with the decisive help of computer engineer Séverine Gedzelman, led to the conception and creation of HyperMachiavel. This tool allows one to interrogate the concrete modalities of the translation process by viewing an original text (in this case Machiavelli’s Il Principe, 1532) in parallel with its translations (here, Il Principe’s four French translations from the sixteenth century), and by visualizing translational equivalences. It is this dual experience which we would like to outline in broad strokes, as a fully contextualized history of the process is beyond the scope of this chapter.

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An empirical path To observe that reflection on this experience would necessarily have to go through a process of historicization indicates the extent to which, when we started translating our first text in 1987 (the C version of Francesco Guicciardini’s Ricordi), we did not have a fully defined idea of our own translation methods. The title of this chapter – which is primarily a wink towards Henri Meschonnic (1999), whose Poétique du traduire contains the chapter headings ‘I. Practice is Theory’ and ‘II. Theory Is Practice’ – also intends to express the fact that we are defending here a materialist and empiricist conception of translation, where what counts is the back-and-forth pendulum swing between the act of translating and the rules that one draws from it. In other words, it is question of a dialectic between the different forms of knowledge that arise from translating and the comprehension of the text – a comprehension which modifies in turn the modalities of the translating process itself. In the end, this practice-theory of translation is a living process, which risks becoming fixed whenever we attempt to formalize it (but which we must never stop attempting to formalize nevertheless). We must note at the outset that this applies to the process of translation, but also to critical reflection on ‘our’ texts which fall within a concrete historical reality, in this case Florence at the time of the Italian Wars. It is this conception of the work of translation itself as being rooted in specific historical research (which for us means being interested in the texts of political players and authors of this historical moment: Savonarola, Guicciardini, Machiavelli) that I would like first to emphasize. I will thus evoke our approach to history – our focalization on the ‘conjuncture’ which, borrowing the expression from ‘our’ authors, we call ‘the quality of the times’, in other words the way historical actors think in order to act – and will focus on the method, defined in order to address the history of political thought, which we call ‘political philology’.

The quality of the times To speak of the ‘quality of the times’ constitutes an initial way of getting to the heart of how language is used. This is indeed the literal translation of a frequent expression in Machiavelli, la qualità de’ tempi. The expression is also used by Francesco Guicciardini, though the latter, to refer to the same reality, generally prefers the syntagm condizione de’ tempi, which is moreover quite frequent in the language of the Chancery of the preceding century.

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The ‘quality of the times’ refers to what we may call the ‘conjuncture’3: to the stakes and power relationships that define a precise historical moment, and which must be taken into account if and when one intends to act. Machiavelli already uses the phrase in the public letters which he writes as secretary for the Second Florentine Chancery. Machiavelli’s usage tends to give to the tempi more determined meanings than those of the Latin tradition, which already distinguished between a time of war and a time of peace. Of course, this distinction – necessary, but somewhat generic or even elementary – can be found in both the letters and subsequent texts, as well as in those letters from the Chancery which are not in Machiavelli’s hand. Behind this general formulation however (questi tempi, e’ tempi presenti, e’ tempi che corrono), we already feel implicit analyses of the situation, marked by the effects that may result from it or the actions that must be carried out. Indeed, it is the action to be carried out, or on the contrary to be avoided, which determines what is or are la/le qualità de tempi; the conjuncture requires (e’ tempi richieggono) a certain type of action, which is moreover indissociably political and military, and a certain ‘way of proceeding’ (il modo del procedere). The decisions to be made by the players derive from what we might call an implicit analysis of the qualità de’ tempi: there is here an anticipation of one of the central theses of the Prince and the Discourses, expressed in a synthetic way in Book III, Chapter 8 of the Discourses: gli uomini nell’operare debbono considerare le qualità de’ tempi e procedere secondo quegli (‘Men, in acting, should consider the qualities of the times and conduct themselves in accordance with them.’). In this sense, the attention paid to the qualità dei tempi is not a question of simple contextualization: our choice of method is not only about highlighting the conditions of a discourse, of its historical background, but intends to underline the stakes and political logics of each of the terms studied, considered as acts and interventions in the life of the Republic.

Political philology We combine a properly historical reading with a particular attention to language – its construction, its effects of meaning, its evolutions – which allows us to verify in detail various practices of writing and the verisimilitude of our historical reconstructions. Indeed, in our perspective, the question of the language our authors use, and the way they use it, is central; the terms chosen must be interpreted according to the conjuncture and stakes determined by

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the political players, which means that a term’s meaning may be different from the one it had before, or the one it would later assume. The way these terms are used – with a certain syntax, particular modes of argumentation, tonalities, borrowings, quotations, allusions – is also important: terminological usage cannot be dissociated from a historical and political analysis which gives this writing sense. We call this approach to texts ‘political philology’. ‘Philology’ because we begin with a slow, careful reading (and often translation: a particularly rigorous type of reading), attempting to re-establish the link, echoes and gaps within one particular work, or between one work and another. ‘Political’, not only because we chose to study a corpus of texts linked to a precise political and military conjuncture but also because, for us, approaching texts critically and reflecting on the meaning of the words has an eminently political value, whatever the historical period under analysis.

Il Modo del Tradurre: ‘General rule’ and ‘partial rules’ We have already explained on other occasions the way in which we translate and our conception of the translator’s task (Fournel and Zancarini 2002; Zancarini 2002): on this subject it is no doubt useful to say a few words. It was regarding one of ‘our’ authors that we retrospectively defined the only ‘general rule’ which guides our work. In a passage from Dialogo del reggimento di Firenze – the first draft of which Francesco Guicciardini wrote in 1521, then revised in 1525 (but which was published only in the nineteenth century) – one of the speakers, Bernardo del Nero, a man of experience who by his own admission ‘is not lettered’, responds to Piero Guicciardini’s questions. Guicciardini is surprised at the ‘knowledge [that del Nero has] demonstrated of the affairs of the Romans and the Greeks’, to which del Nero replies that he has ‘read with pleasure all the books translated into the vernacular tongue’, but downplays the importance of his readings by specifying that he does not believe ‘that all these translated books have as much richness as the Latin works’ [né credo che questi libri tradotti abbino quello sugo che hanno e’ latini]. Now, this is precisely what we wish to attain in our French editions: that the translated works have as much richness (in Italian sugo: literally ‘juice’) as the Italian works. Apart from this formula, which defines the destination towards which we are travelling, without necessarily always being able to reach it, we put in place a system of ‘partial rules’: obligations which seem to us dictated by the necessity created by our critical concern. These rules were never a priori, but rather arose

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during the process of elaboration of our method. They essentially concern the maintaining of coherent semantic fields and the respect of syntactical complexity, though we must add that we of course do this, as Schleiermacher (1999: 85) encourages, ‘as much as possible’.4 Like Bernard Simeone (2014: 12), we believe that ‘translation merely refers back to the radical nature of writing’. A fact which is not without consequences: for translation thus poses the essential question of coherency, it imposes itself by its coherency, and not by its ‘fidelity/infidelity’, or by its ‘beauty/ugliness’ (which, in frequent critical language on translation, is often expressed by the opposition ‘finesse/clumsiness’). This coherency is the set of rules – partial, limited, sometimes even purely arbitrary  – which we established for ourselves in order to recreate, in the target language, the history and the depth of a language as they are incarnated and reveal themselves in a given text.

The choice to translate together Before now, we had never specifically asked ourselves the question, ‘Why translate together?’ Or, ‘Is there anything particular to translating together, in a pair or with several people?’ The first element of response is at once simple and eminently political: intellectual friendship is political, as is the aspiration to cooperation in collective work. We could also turn the question on its head by asking: ‘Why not translate together?’ And by declining it: ‘Why not write articles, books, dissertations, in pairs, or with several other people?’ There is a second element of response, which applies at least to the very beginning of this experiment. There was a slight difference in experience and expertise between us when we first decided to translate the Ricordi: Jean-Louis already knew these sixteenth-century Florentine political texts very well, whereas I had studied only sixteenth-century Venetian theatre. On the other hand, I had some experience of literary translation (since, in 1987, I had already translated Beppe Fenoglio’s Una questione privata and two novels by Fruttero and Lucentini). It was thus a similar situation to those forms of translation ‘with two interpreters’, in which a difference in competency was at the basis of the need to work as a team. Thérèse d’Alverny (1989: 193–206) attracted attention to these situations as early as 19895 and they are discussed by Belén Bistué (2011) in her recent work: one of the interpreters knew Arabic (but not Latin) and translated into the vernacular; the second interpreter (who knew vernacular and Latin, but not Arabic) translated from the vernacular into Latin. This said, in our case, this reason for our initial

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association began to dissipate from the second translation on, since the work in common had led, among other things, to a rather clear, reciprocal transfer of competences from one to the other.

Orality 1: The Septuagint as ancestors of the translation workshop? The answer to the second question seems to us more complicated, not least in the absence of a contrary experience regarding Florentine texts of the time of the Italian Wars: we have never translated them separately (which is not true for other texts). Moreover, this answer is perhaps easier to provide for translation workshops (the Storia d’Italia workshop, for instance, or the ENS de Fontenay-Saint-Cloud’s). The workshop was based on the idea of assuming an artisanal trade, where the exchanges took place on the basis of experience and its transmission by practice, and where we considered ourselves as ‘translator master-craftsmen’, as workshop leaders. This underlines the extent to which the collective work and the confrontation of points of view were, from the very outset, at the centre of the elaboration of this translation. It does not take account though of the specificity which the fact of translating in pairs may (or may not) lead to: we translated all these texts sitting side by side, one of us with the Italian text before him, reading it out loud and suggesting a translation, the other typing the translation at the computer. From the outside, this process resembles that described by Jerome in his letter to Vincent, concerning the sending of Origen’s translation of fourteen homelies on Jeremiah: Jerome (1838) presents himself as someone who ‘dictates’ to a ‘scribe’ (he asks, moreover, that the scribes in question be provided for him: ‘I am so poor now that I cannot hire scribes to write down what I would dictate to them.’). There was, however, one substantial difference in our way of working, namely that there was not, on the one hand, one person who made Savonarola, Guicciardini or Machiavelli ‘speak French’ (as Jerome ‘made Origen speak Latin’), and on the other hand the person who copied the text down, since we exchanged roles at regular intervals, and above all had set for ourselves a fairly strict operating rule which stated that ‘as long as one of us remains unconvinced by a formulation, we will continue to look for a better one’. Our ‘partial rules’, moreover, elaborated as we went along, reminded us of their existence at every moment, and of the coherence we had promised ourselves to respect (if we began to question one of our rules at a specific point

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in the text, this forced us to go back over everything which had been done up until that point). Orality is thus at the centre of this translation process: there is no prior stage of individual translation, the Italian text like the French text are spoken aloud, and the translation is discussed, word for word, expression by expression, until we reach a point of mutual satisfaction. A good translation, we believed, must be able to be declaimed out loud, and sometimes Flaubert’s gueuloir (or shouting room) came to mind: the obligatory rite of passage for his texts after they were written. This importance of orality in the act of translating in pairs or more may be placed into relation with several major traditions of thinking about translation; though these are not aspects which we had integrated into our prior reflection, it seems to us they may help to elaborate alternative models of thinking the act of translation itself. The first tradition I would like to refer to is the Septuagint, by way of which it would be useful to make a brief detour. I am not interested here in the versions according to which the seventy (or seventy-two) translators had translated all of the bible separately, each of these translations corresponding word for word to all the others. They tend to interpret this translation as the direct intervention (for the Talmudic) of the Omnipresent, or the Holy Spirit (for the Greek and Latin fathers), and cannot be useful for individual translators, in pairs or in workshops: it is unlikely that they would again find ‘such a great tutor’. Jerome (1838) believes that this tradition is a ‘lie’ (mendacio), adding that one should not confuse the translator with the prophet inspired by God. From the point of view of a philologist and translator, Jerome reports another tradition, according to which orality and collaboration would be at the origin of Septuagint. This tradition, the oldest, derives from Aristeas’s letter to his brother Philocrates6: (301) Three days later Demetrius took the men and passing along the seawall, seven stadia long, to the island, crossed the bridge and made for the northern districts of Pharos. There he assembled them in a house, which had been built upon the sea-shore, of great beauty and in a secluded situation, and invited them to carry out the work of translation, since everything that they needed for the purpose (302) was placed at their disposal. So they set to work comparing their several results and making them agree, and whatever they agreed upon was suitably copied out under the direction of Demetrius. (Aristeas 1913)

The text does not go into details, but we understand that the translators would read the text, offer possible translations to one another, and then, when an

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agreement was reached, the text would be copied down. When, after seventy-two days, the translation by the seventy-two translators (six for each of the twelve tribes) was completed, it was read aloud to King Ptolemy, and the assembly of the Alexandrian Jews, who approved. This is indeed a description of a collective translation workshop that can stand as a reference, even if the collation or confrontation of suggestions must have been far more difficult at seventy-two than at ten or twelve!7

Orality 2: The ‘oratory numbers’, from Bruni and Dolet to Meschonnic The second reflection which gives rise to this importance of orality in the translation process concerns the crucial question of rhythm. Meschonnic insisted on this central aspect of the text and the need for a translation to create, in the target language, the effect of the original text in its own language (rhythm being, for Meschonnic, that which provides an escape from the sterile opposition of form and sense). We may remember that Meschonnic ceaselessly denounced monstrosities, what he called the ‘four forms of Teratology in translation’, that is to say suppressions, additions, displacements, non-concordances and anti-concordances, which must be strictly banished if we want to make the reproduction of rhythm possible (Meschonnic 1999: 27, 45, 164, passim). In theorizing it rigorously, Meschonnic was repeating here an incitement strongly present in the thinking of humanist translators from Leonardo Bruni on. In the De interpretatione recta, Bruni returns several times to the need to consider, with great attention, rhythm and the harmony of the text (we find the adverb numerose; the adjective oratio numerosa; the noun numerositas). He judges moreover that rendering the numerositas is the most difficult thing about translation: If all correct translation is difficult because of the numerous and diverse things that it requires, as we stated earlier, it is even more difficult to correctly translate what was written by the first author in a rhythmic and adorned way. (Bruni 2004: 86, 15)

In this sense, translators must have ears which allow them to hear the rhythm and harmony of a text (‘And moreover [a translator] must have ears, and ears with discernment, in order not to disperse and disrupt what has been said in an elegant and harmonious way [rotunde ac numerose],’8 ibid.: 82, 12). Moreover,

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translators should not believe they have engaged in an act of translation until they have been able to render what was written in a way which is rotunde ac numerose (‘It is obvious that no one can conserve the majesty of the first author if he does not preserve his ornaments and his harmony,’9 ibid.: 102, 29). We find again Bruni’s insistence in Étienne Dolet’s Manière de bien traduire d’une langue en aultre (1540: 15) when he outlines ‘the fifth rule that a good translator must observe’: Which is of such great virtue that without it any composition is heavy and unpleasing. But in what does it consist? In nothing other than the observation of oratory numbers: to establish a link, and an assemblage of dictions with such sweetness, that not only is the soul contented by it, but the ears delighted, and are never irritated by such a harmony of language.

The question of ‘oratory numbers’, of numerositas – of rhythm and harmony – is not at all linked in Bruni and Dolet to the collective or individual character of an act of translation. This is obviously in echo with the Latins’ principles of translation, and in particular with what Cicero announces in his treatise De optimo genere oratorum, when he speaks about his translation of the discourses of Aeschines and Demosthenes: ‘nec converti ut interpres, sed ut orator’. We know that this text by Cicero is used by those who contrast ‘bad’, ‘word for word’ (verbum pro verbo) translation with ‘good’ translation of sense (in truth, Cicero speaks of the necessity of preserving the force and character of words, genus omne verborum vimque servavi, which is quite different from the idea that one translates not words, but sense). What interests me here, however, is the idea that the oral quality of the relationship in pairs or with several other translators implies that rhythm and phrasing are an integral part of the process: repetitions, pauses, sonorities are elements that immediately put at stake the fact of saying aloud the original text and the translation which is proposed and discussed.

For a description of the translation process: The HM tool After this attempt to explain the links between our concrete practice of translation, and our efforts to think these links theoretically with the help of an imaginary kinship, we must say a few words about a computer tool which emerged directly out of our back-and-forths between practice and theory: HM (which does not refer to hashem, one of the names of God, but is more

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modestly the acronym of HyperMachiavelli), the tool which allows one to place an original text (in this case Machiavelli’s Il Principe of 1532) in parallel with its translations (in this case the four sixteenth-century French translations) in order to reflect on the acts carried out by each of the translators. This tool could only be developed on the basis of a translation (here in the metaphorical sense!) in which ‘several interpreters’ each spoke ‘different languages’: on the one hand, the language of the practice-theory of translation (us), and on the other, that of computer programming (our engineer Séverine Gedzelman in our research team, the UMR CNRS Triangle). The tool provided us with the possibility of reading in parallel the five proposed texts: the original Blado edition from 1532, and the translations by Jacques de Vintimille (1546), Guillaume Cappel (1553), Gaspard d’Auvergne (also in 1553) and Jacques Gohory (1571). It also allowed us to highlight the translational equivalences: how did each translator choose to translate a specific Italian word, and reciprocally, to what Italian word(s) does a French word used by the translators correspond? We have presented elsewhere the functioning of the HM tool (Gedzelman and Zancarini 2011, 2012); we will thus analyse here some examples of the concrete way of translating the Prince that the use of HM highlights.

An important clue: How to translate words? We have insisted on the way in which the polysemy of keywords used by Machiavelli allows him to emphasize the newness of the things he intends to make understood (Fournel and Zancarini 2000). We have also analysed, in this sense, a series of these terms, and one of our decisions consisted precisely in maintaining the cohesion of the semantic fields by translating one word in Machiavelli by only one word in French (Fournel and Zancarini 2002). Some formulations by the French translators of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries indicate that they had seized on this particularity, in particular Gohory who insisted on the link between ‘clean and natural words’ and ‘terms of state’.10 The way in which the various translators behave in this regard is particularly telling: what follows are two examples of how to translate ordine (one of the key words for political, military and institutional fi elds) and virtù (which speaks for itself, so clearly is it recognized as one of Machiavelli’s primary ethical concepts). To the four translators of the sixteenth century we have added Amelot de la Houssaie (whose text is currently being entered into the HM).11

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Figure 4.1 ‘Ordine’ graph in Vintimille.

Figure 4.2 ‘Ordine’ graph in d’Auvergne.

Figure 4.3 ‘Ordine’ graph in Cappel.

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Figure 4.4 ‘Ordine’ graph in Gohory.

Figure 4.5 ‘Ordine’ graph in Amelot.

Figure 4.6 ‘Virtù’ graph in Vintimille.

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Figure 4.7 ‘Virtù’ graph in d’Auvergne.

Figure 4.8 ‘Virtù’ graph in Cappel.

Figure 4.9 ‘Virtù’ graph in Gohory.

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Figure 4.10 ‘Virtù’ graph in Amelot.

We immediately see that we progress from a notable respect of the Prince’s words (the case of Vintimille) to a wide dispersion in the translations which, by not respecting the polysemy characteristic of Machiavellian usage, tend to use one word or another according to the meaning taken by the Italian word in the enunciative context (this approach is particularly evident in the translations of Gaspard d’Auvergne and Amelot de la Houssaie). We could give many other examples which all point in the same direction. We can thus, after this initial approach, define several ‘translation guidelines’ on how to translate words, and whether or not to respect the semantic fields: Vintimille is the most respectful of Machiavelli’s terms; Gaspard d’Auvergne and Amelot de la Houssaie are, on the contrary, those who choose to translate the ‘sense’ of words by using numerous French terms for only one Italian word; Cappel and Gohory adopt in some sense a middle-way: for each word used by Machiavelli, we see that there is one translation predominantly used, but they do not hesitate to employ other, more or less synonymous words, in particular when the respect of their own majority choice would imply a repetition in the French text.

Reflecting on the act of translation To enter into the specificity of the act of translation, we cannot stop at this first stage, at the respect (or lack) of specific words and semantic fields. Instead, we must descend deeper into questions relating to writing itself, in order to see how they respect or diverge from the syntax of a text, whether they add or remove certain elements, if they are sensitive or not to the rhythm and tonality of the argument. It is the synoptic reading facilitated by HM which makes such analyses possible (see p. 82 for the table presenting Chapter IV, Segment 15).

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The feature that stands out in Jacques de Vintimille’s translation is the systematic presence of additions, which are either elucidations or commentaries of the text he is translating. Nevertheless, as we have just seen, Vintimille often respects more than the others the polysemy of Machiavelli’s words.12 The two translators of 1553, Cappel and Gaspard d’Auvergne, translate very differently from each other. Gaspard d’Auvergne, like Vintimille, tends to make additions and commentaries. This is not the case, however, for Cappel’s translation, which remains far closer to the text. Contrary to Vintimille, both tend not to respect the polysemy and tensions of meanings in Machiavelli’s text. They translate the same words by numerous other different French words, and Gaspard d’Auvergne does this far more than Cappel. There then remains Gohory’s translation of the Prince completed in 1571, and published at the same time as the new edition of his translations of the Discourses. Except for a few rare words, this translation is practically the same as Cappel’s (and a comparative reading proves this). Its characteristics are thus exactly the same as Cappel’s: no additions, explanations or commentaries, but a relative respect for polysemy (moreso than in d’Auvergne, far less than in Vintimille). By declaring that Cappel did not know a word of Italian, Gohory implies that it is not he who ‘copied’ Cappel’s translation, but rather that he took back his property so to speak, in the same way as he republishes the Discourses under his own name.13 In any case,14 Gohory employs a translation method which is indeed that of ‘Cappel-Gohory’, and which is opposed to that of Gaspard d’Auvergne: ‘He held a contrary way to mine of always judging his style to be superior, even when he would distance himself from his author, who had been the first to anticipate the right and natural words, and the terms of the state.’ This commentary on Gaspard d’Auvergne’s translation style is perfectly appropriate, and we will content ourselves with giving one example, which allows us to compare the translators’ varying styles15 (Prince IV 15):

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After this very rapid exemplification, we may note that the words the translators use in order to define their way of conceiving of translation (‘fidelity’, ‘clarity’, ‘servitude’, ‘freedom’) – words which to this day are still part of the traditional terminology when talking about translation – must be relativized, and again historicized, by way of minute description of the ‘actual reality’ of the translation process. Vintimille writes that he could not be faithful to the text because French ‘enjoys a copious and asiatic form of speech’, but, in spite of the copia of which he makes unrestrained use, Vintimille is, among all the other translators (a fact which would last until the very end of the twentieth century) the one who most closely respects Machiavellian semantics. In the seventeenth century, Amelot de la Houssaie will claim to produce a translation which is ‘faithful’ and ‘clear’, but it is clearly he who most radically transforms the text of the Prince, even more so than Gaspard d’Auvergne, in spite of the fact that he distanced himself greatly from Machiavelli’s lexical and stylistic choices. It is surely not by chance that it was precisely the last two translations – those whose translators ‘judg[ed] [their] style to be superior, even when [they] would distance [themselves] from [their] author – which knew the most longterm success: 1553–1646 for Gaspard; 1683–1793 for Amelot. This is perhaps the price to pay so that Machiavelli “from being a Thosco [may become] a true Franco” ’16 (Machiavelli 1548: no page number), and attain ‘the ratification of his naturalization papers’17 (Machiavelli 1544: 3).

Conclusion We have tried to outline here a research experience inextricably linked to translating in pairs. In doing so, we have explored the theoretical and practical elaborations which flow from it, the ‘imaginary kinship’ which links us to the reflections of other theorist-practitioners, and finally the uses of the investigative tool of various translation modes. All that remains is to give elements of an answer to a question which we are presently asking ourselves. Our experience of translation is strongly linked to the desire to integrate, into French cultural heritage, texts linked to a specific moment in Italian history, to provide ‘naturalization papers’ to these texts, all the while ensuring, ‘as much as possible’ that they produce in French an effect similar to that produced in Italian, five centuries ago. Such an objective describes a way forwards, with resolution, but without illusions. It is important to express this goal in all its radicality, however utopian it may be, for the reason that it allows us to introduce, into the text thus produced, the distance needed for reflection.

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Could we, and would we want to, reproduce this approach for any other text, situated in an entirely different era, and linked with entirely different political and literary realities? Our response is not univocal. We could decide to apply the same type of translation practice to any other text; the fact remains that we have not done this systematically for all the other texts – whether academic or literary – which we have translated, alone or with other translators, and for which we favoured criteria of legibility and readers’ comfort. In these cases, we thus applied the process of ‘negotiation’ of which Umberto Eco speaks in his Dire quasi la stessa cosa (2003),18 all the while remaining conscious that such ‘negotiation’ is nothing else besides the need for careful work, and the existence of an intimate relationship of each individual with the text itself. For each text to be translated, there is a decision to be made, one which is radically free, wherein the act of translating joins the act of writing. We may thus say, using Jerome’s terms in his De optimo genere interpretandi: In my case, I confess and proudly declare that in my translation from the Greeks – apart from the scriptures, where the very order of words is a mystery – I do not attempt to render word for word, but sense by sense.19 (Hieronymus 1980: 13)

There are texts which we consider as sufficiently important that we treat them, like Jerome, as scripture: texts which are ‘sacred’ because they make up part of our heritage, because ‘the very order of words’ is an integral part of the ‘mystery’ of their sense. This was indeed the crux of our decision: we thought that the texts of the Florentine thinkers of the era of the Italian Wars, in order to be perceived and read in their full political and historical sense, had to be translated by ‘leaving the author in peace’, and by asking the reader ‘to go meet him’ (Schleiermacher 1999: 49). Indeed, should we not treat in the same way texts written by the hand of God, and those which, like the Prince, were written by ‘the devil’s finger’? Translated by Nicholas Manning

Notes 1 This chapter was written by Jean-Claude Zancarini but depends to such an extent on the joint work Jean-Louis Fournel and I have carried out together over a great number of years with that it is signed with both our names. We would like to thank Céline Frigau Manning and Anthony Cordingley for their invitation, which was an opportunity for us to take stock of our work, and Romain Descendre, Marie Fabre and Stéphanie Lanfranchi, who were the first readers of this text.

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2 The workshop brought together Perle Abbrugiati, Pierre Benedittini, Jean-Louis Fournel, Anne Lazarev, Sylvie Martin, Michel Paoli, Corinne Paul, Jean-Paul Sbriglio and Jean-Claude Zancarini. 3 Romain Descendre (2010) highlights the presence of the expression congiuntura del tempo in Paolo Sarpi, who explains its meaning by referring precisely to the power relations and to the occasion itself, in a reflection which clearly depends on Machiavelli. 4 Schleiermacher encourages us ‘to leave the author in peace’, and asks the reader ‘to go meet him’ by ‘bending the language of the translation, as much as possible, to the source language’ (1999: 49 et 85). 5 Marie-Thérèse d’Alverny draws on examples extending from the twelfth century (in Spain) to the sixteenth century (in Venise). 6 On the texts by the Fathers and Talmudists concerning the Septuagint, see ‘Le développement de la légende’ in André Pelletier’s introduction, Lettre d’Aristée (1962: 78–98). 7 Augustin d’Hippone, De doctrina christiana, II, xv, 22, relates the two versions and esteems that the second one (the agreement that the translators came to together) could not have occurred without divine intervention. Cf. Lettre d’Aristée (1962: 92–3). 8 ‘Et insuper ut habeat aures earumque iudicium, ne illa quae rotunde ac numerose dicta sunt dissipet ipse quidem atque perturbet.’ 9 ‘abunde patet neminem posse primi auctoris maiestatem servare, nisi ornatum illius numerositatemque conservet.’ 10 Cf. Jacques Gohory’s (1571, a III v) dedication (‘Au Magnifique Seigneur Ian Francisque delli Affaytadi’) to the second edition of his translation of the Discours. 11 In the graphs, each different colour corresponds to a different French word; we also remark the (sometimes notable) presence of the label ‘untranslated’ (‘non traduit’). 12 Another example: he generally translates stato by ‘état’ (‘state’ – ‘estat’ is used 89 times against 49–48 for Cappel-Gohory and 36 for Gaspard d’Auvergne) and this choice to conserve essentially the same translation shows a form of comprehension of the fact that the polysemy of the term can have meaning to designate a complex reality like the Machiavellian stato. 13 He had published his translation of the first book in 1544 without a translator’s name, then in 1548, the next two. At the same time, Hierosme de Marnef and Guillaume Cavellat published a joint edition of the Discours and the Prince (the latter in Gaspard d’Auvergne’s translation and the Discours in the nameless translation, which is in fact Gohory’s) (Epistre au magnifique seigneur Ian Francisque delli Affaytadi in Gohory 1571: a III v.) 14 For a precise analysis of this case of ‘plagiarism’, see Zancarini (2015). 15 In the translation by Gaspard d’Auvergne, we have underlined the additions and modifications.

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16 Sonnet by M. G. P. M. [J.-P De Mesmes] to the reader: ‘Che n’ha d’un Thosco fatto un vero Franco’. 17 Epistre of the translation of the Discorsi, without the name of the translator but of Jacques Gohory: ‘Since this Florentine merchant, of whom I was just speaking, left his own country of his own accord to be received in yours, French Reader, you must not be so discourteous as to refuse him the ratification of his naturalization papers.’ 18 In the introduction: ‘From this point derives the idea that translation is based on processes of negotiation, the latter being precisely a process according to which, in order to obtain something, we give up something else, and through which, in the end, the players of the game come out of it with a feeling of reasonable and reciprocal satisfaction, in the light of the golden rule that you cannot have everything you want’ (Eco 2003: 18). In the conclusion: ‘Faithfulness is rather the conviction that translation is always possible if the source text has been interpreted with passionate complicity, it is the commitment to identifying what for us is the text’s profound meaning, and the ability to negociate at every instant the solution which seems to us best’ (ibid.: 364). 19 ‘Ego enim non solum fateor, sed libera voce profiteor, me in interpretatione Graecorum, absque Scripturis sanctis, ubi et verborum ordo mysterium est, non verbum e verbo, sed sensum exprimere de sensu’.

Works cited Aristeas (1913). The Letter of Aristeas. Translated by R. H. Charles. Oxford: Clarendon Press. http://www.ccel.org/c/charles/otpseudepig/aristeas.htm (accessed 5 March 2016). Bistué, B. (2011). ‘The Task(s) of the Translator(s): Multiplicity as Problem in Renaissance European Thought’. Comparative Literature studies 48 (2): 139–64. Bruni, L. (2004). Sulla perfetta traduzione. Edited by P. Viti. Naples: Liguori. D’Alverny, M.-T. (1989). ‘Les traductions à deux interprètes: d’arabe en langue vernaculaire et de la langue vernaculaire en latin’. In Traduction et traducteurs au Moyen Âge: Actes du colloque international du Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, edited by G. Contamine, 193–206. Paris: Éditions du CNRS. Descendre, R. (2010). ‘La parola armata. Speranze belliciste e pensiero della guerra nel carteggio di Paolo Sarpi (1607-1610)’. In Teatri di guerra: rappresentazioni e discorsi tra età moderna ed età contemporanea, edited by A. De Benedictis, 133–48. Bologna: Bononia University Press. Dolet, É. (1540). Manière de bien traduire d’une langue en aultre. Lyon: E. Dolet. Eco, U. (2003). Dire quasi la stessa cosa. Esperienze di traduzione. Milano: Bompiani.

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Fournel, J.-L. and Zancarini, J.-C. (2002). ‘Les enjeux de la traduction. Traduire les penseurs politiques florentins de l’époque des guerres d’Italie’. Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales 145: 84–94. Fournel, J.-L. and Zancarini, J.-C. (2000). ‘Sur la langue du Prince: des mots pour comprendre et pour agir’. In De Principatibus. Le Prince, Niccolò Machiavelli, edited by J.-L. Fournel and J.-C. Zancarini, 545–610. Paris: PUF. Gedzelman, S. and Zancarini, J.-C. (2011). ‘HyperMachiavel. Un outil de comparaison de traductions’. Lingua e stile XLVI: 247–64. Gedzelman, S. and Zancarini, J.-C. (2012). ‘HyperMachiavel: A Translation Comparison Tool’. In Digital Humanities 2012 Conference Abstracts, edited by J. C. Meister. Hamburg: Hamburg University Press. www.dh2012.uni-hamburg.de/conference/ programme/abstracts/hypermachiavel-a-translation-comparison-tool (accessed 27 November 2015). Guicciardini, F. (1988). Avertissements politiques [Ricordi]. Translated by J.-L. Fournel and J.-C. Zancarini. Paris: Le Cerf. Guicciardini, F. (1996). Histoire d’Italie [Storia d’Italia]. Collective Trans. supervised by J.-L. Fournel and J.-C. Zancarini. Paris: PUF. Guicciardini, F. (1997). Écrits politiques. (Discours de Logrogno, Dialogue sur la façon de régir Florence [Discorso di Logrogno, Dialogo del Reggimento di Firenze]). Translated by J.-L. Fournel and J.-C. Zancarini. Paris: PUF. Hieronymus (1980). Liber de optimo genere interpretandi. Edited by G. J. Marinus. Leiden: Brill. Lettre d’Aristée à Philocrate (1962). Edited by A. Pelletier. Paris: Le Cerf. Machiavelli, Niccolò (1544). Le premier livre des discours de l’estat de paix et de guerre, de Messire Nicolas Macchiavegli, Secretaire & citoyen Florentin, Sur la premiere decade de Tite Live, traduict d’Italien en Françoys. Translated by J. Gohory. Paris: Denys Janot, 1544. [Paris, BNF, Réserve *E 41]. Machiavelli, Niccolò (1546). Le Prince de Nicolas Machiavel, citoyen et secrétaire de Florence, traduict en François, MDXLVI, par Jacques de Vintimille. [Bibliothèque du château de Chantilly, ms. 315]. Edited by N. Bianchi Bensimon. (accessed 27 November 2015). Machiavelli, Niccolò (1548). Le premier [second-troisiesme] livre des Discours de l’estat de paix et de guerre, de messire Nicolas Macchiavelli sur la premiere decade de Tite Live. Translated by E. Groulleau. Paris: Estienne Groulleau. [Paris, Bibliothèque Sainte Geneviève, fol. r 201 (2) INV 216 RES]. Machiavelli, Niccolò (1553a). Le Prince de Nicolas Machiavelle secrétaire et citoyen de Florence, traduit de l’italien en François. Translated by G. Cappel. Paris: Charles Estienne. [Paris, BNF E*- 913]. Machiavelli, Niccolò (1553b). Discours de l’estat de paix et de guerre de messire Nicolas Macchiavelli sur la première décade de Tite-Live, traduict d’italien en françoys, plus un livre du mesme aucteur intitulé: le Prince. Translated by G. d’Auvergne. Paris: H. de Marnef and G. Cavellat. [Paris, BNF E*- 2836].

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Machiavelli, Niccolò (1571). Le premier [-troisième] livre des Discours de l’estat de paix et de guerre, de messire Nicolas Macchiavelli... sur la première décade de Tite-Live - Le Prince de Nicolas Machiavel secrétaire et citoien florentin. Translated by J. Gohory. Paris: Robert le Mangnier. [Paris, BNF, E*- 2835]. Machiavelli, Niccolò (1683). Le Prince de Nicolas Machiavel, secrétaire et citoyen de Florence. Translated by A. N. Amelot de la Houssaie. Amsterdam: Wetstein, 1683. Machiavelli, Niccolò (2000). De Principatibus. Le Prince. Italian text by G. Inglese, translated and critical apparatus by Jean-Louis Fournel and Jean-Claude Zancarini. Paris: PUF. Machiavelli, Niccolò (2014). De Principatibus. Le Prince. Italian text by G. Inglese, translated and critical apparatus by Jean-Louis Fournel and Jean-Claude Zancarini, revised edition. Paris: PUF. Meschonnic, H. (1999). Poétique du traduire. Paris: Verdier. Saint Jérôme (1838). Œuvres. Edited by M. L. Aimé-Martin and B. Matougues, Paris: Auguste Desrez. http://www.abbaye-saint-benoit.ch/ (accessed 27 November 2015). Savonarola, G. (1993). Sermons, écrits politiques et pièces du procès. Edited and translated by J.-L. Fournel and J.-C. Zancarini. Paris: Le Seuil. Schleiermacher, F. (1999). Des différentes manières du traduire. Translated and edited by A. Berman and С. Berner. Paris: Le Seuil. Simeone, B. (2014). Écrire, traduire, en métamorphose. Lagrasse: Verdier. Zancarini, Jean-Claude (2002). ‘Le métier de la traduction’. EUtropia 2: 25–32. Zancarini, Jean-Claude (2015). ‘Et favellar francese non gli spiace. Sulle traduzioni francesi del Principe, XVI-XVII secolo’. In Machiavelli500. Mezzo millennio del Principe, edited by G. M. Anselmi, R. Caporali and C. Galli, 73–90. Milano-Udine: Mimesis.

Part Two

Collaborating with the Author

5

Author-Translator Collaborations: A Typological Survey Patrick Hersant

Translating is an act of loving collaboration. The translator and his or her author must constantly re-interpret the fable of the Blind Man and the Lame Man: I will walk for you, you will see for me. M.-E. Coindreau (1992: 137) Though neither systematic nor even frequent, collaborative relationships between an author and his or her translator reveal blind spots, which are interesting both for translation studies and textual genetics. The exchange between the two parties is not always fruitful, nor amicable; rarely prolonged, it often proves disappointing. Occasionally, however, the experience is rich in teachings and surprises, and offers us valuable insight into the translator’s workshop. Collaboration can thus bring into the light of day an activity – that of translation in the making – normally kept in the shadows, revealing its lines of force and fracture, hesitations and revisions, instances of audacity, daring and regret. Without being totally absent from theoretical charts, the terrain that now lies spread out before us remains largely unexplored.1 The heterogeneous corpus presented here, consisting of letters and translators’ accounts, will allow us both to outline a typology of these various exchanges and to identify their key stakes, whether they concern questions of correction and revision, intention and auctoritas, the desire for mastery and the fight for control. To better understand a practice which naturally varies according to the era, as well as the authors and translators involved, it is useful to divide this corpus into several methodological categories. A distinction may indeed be made between varying, more or less extensive degrees of collaboration – from informal discussion to a text’s author taking control, from general recommendations, co-translations, revisions, questions and answers, back-and-forth exchanges, to giving a translator carte blanche.

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Carte blanche and recommendations By giving carte blanche to their translator, some authors show a type of trust, which may be based on an earlier collaborative experience, on the translator’s reputation or on the author’s own conception of the writing process. André Brink thus affirms to Jean Guiloineau: ‘Do as you like, it’s your text’ (SegondsBauer 1994: 62). Breyten Breytenbach: ‘I think that the ideal is precisely that, from the time a translator starts working on it, the text is her own’ (62). Aimé Césaire to Janheinz Jahn: ‘I hasten to tell you that I leave you absolute freedom for the German adaptation’ (Mbondobari 2009: 260). Gregory Rabassa concerning Gabriel García Márquez: ‘[He] lets one go his way and is satisfied with the overall impression he has’ (Hoeksema 1978: 9). William Faulkner to Maurice-Edgar Coindreau (1992: 23), who was afraid of not doing justice to the American novelist: ‘Why are you concerned about it? If there were passages which caused you problems, you could simply have skipped them.’ Next in our progressive scale of author-translator collaboration come general recommendations to the translator. Joseph Conrad, in a letter to André Gide, thus gives some advice to his French translator: ‘My style is almost always entirely idiomatic. One can therefore translate me faithfully by seeking the equivalent French idioms. For example: – if I wrote, let us say, that in the narrated circumstances, a certain Mr X had taken his own life, the most faithful translation would be the French idiom: “Monsieur X s’était donné la mort.” ’ It is not here a question of corrections, nor of suggestions, but rather of guidelines outlining a general poetic: ‘The most simple, most energetic idiom is always preferable’ (Conrad 1996: 592). My second example may be surprising, since it presents a collaboration which can only be described as posthumous. I recently translated a text by Mary Butts entitled Imaginary Letters (2013), whose very particular Modernist style forced me to repress, in each line, a natural tendency towards smoothing out its disparities, since it is true that ‘faced with a heterogeneous work … the translator tends to unify, to homogenize what relates to the different or the disparate’ (Berman 1999: 60). A difficult task, which Mary Butts summoned me to tackle by challenging me from beyond the grave. Indeed, browsing through her Journal between two pages of my translation, I came across a warning from Butts to her future French translator. On 16 May 1930, then, Mary Butts let me know that my language is simply not made in such a way as to appropriately render her own; her singular style, her way of manhandling syntax, creates turns of phrase which

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are ‘not known in french (sic), not to be known in french or only to be admitted by the back door of a paraphrase’. In this way, Butts confirms that my translation, if I am not careful, risks being merely ‘nearly always a bald explanation’ (Butts 2002: 348–9).

Revision, questions-and-answers, back-and-forths In addition to their minimal character, the various forms of collaboration discussed so far all have in common the fact that they take place before the actual process of translation has itself begun. A much higher degree of involvement is implied in the process of revision: it assumes that the author inspects a translation submitted for his or her judgement. Provided that he sufficiently masters the target language, such an author thus becomes his translator’s corrector. The most well-known case is perhaps that of Milan Kundera, who discovered quite late in the day that the French public had a distorted image of his work because of the translator of La Plaisanterie having ‘introduced around a hundred (yes!) embellishing metaphors (in my original: the sky was blue; in the translation: under a sky of periwinkle October flew its sumptuous bulwarks; in mine: the trees were multicoloured; in his: upon the trees there abounded a polyphony of tones’ (Kundera 1985: 399). In the best case scenario, revision may take the form of a fruitful dialogue, as we see in the epistolary exchange between the Canadian poet Anne Hébert, and her translator Frank Scott, concerning her ‘Tombeau des Rois’, an exchange which, as Graham Fraser (2013: 20) notes, unfolds ‘line after line, peeling like an onion the multiple layers of meaning in what constitutes a remarkable document on the collaboration between poet and translator’. Hébert (1970: 43) thanks Scott in the following terms: ‘Your keen attention, your precise questions, the clarification of some linguistic misunderstandings, often allowed me to go deeper into the hidden meaning of certain passages.’ Scott replies: ‘The “dialogue between author and translator,” as you point out, can thus be carried on between us directly, and little by little what is in your poem can be made to express itself more and more in my language. At the end, however, there will still be something unsaid by me. This is where your poem is left standing alone’ (50). The richest exchange, however, and the one most likely to affect the final outcome, intervenes neither before nor after the work of translation itself; it most often occurs during the translation process, and as difficulties are encountered,

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when the translated material presents a maximum of plasticity. For Italo Calvino (2002: 81), everything begins with questions: ‘I strongly believe in collaboration between the author and translator. Rather than a revision of the translation by the author, this collaboration emerges out of the translator’s questions to the author.’ At a 1982 UNESCO translation conference in Rome, Calvino outlined his conception of translation as ideal reading. For a writer who had been translated so many times, and who was himself a translator, translation constituted ‘not only an essential complement to writing, but the veritable keystone of literary creation’ (Cappello 2007: 164). In 1934, when René-Noël Raimbault wrote to George Orwell (2006) to ask him to preface his translation of Down and Out in Paris and London, he appended to his letter a series of questions concerning ‘some points in your book that [he] d[id] not think [he] understood very well’ (19). Two examples: Raimbault: ‘Page 238: The current London adjective, now tacked on every noun, is – … What is this adjective?’ (21) Orwell: ‘This adjective is fucking. Fuck means “foutre” and fucking is the present participle’ (24). Raimbault: ‘Page 259: “Bull shit” ’ (21). Orwell: ‘Bull shit is an expression which means the excrement of male cows. A man would thus say to another You’re talking bull shit; that is, “You’re talking nonsense.” It’s a very impolite expression’ (25). Once the proofs have been reread, Orwell adds ‘some changes and suggestions, for the most part very minor’ (53) to his initial responses. These various forms of authorical participation, need it be said, are not necessarily mutually exclusive: general recommendations may be accompanied by an explicit revision, and an instance of revision may follow a series of back-and-forth exchanges. The Italian poet Fabio Pusterla, translator of Jaccottet, welcomes the poet’s various interventions in his work: ‘He could tell me if I was exaggerating, if I was going too far in a certain direction. … The right distance from another’s work is always difficult to find’ (Vischer 2000). The Italian novelist Claudio Magris anticipates questions of translation by accompanying the manuscript with a list of instructions for his translators, which range ‘from intertextual references in the form of direct quotations or paraphrases, to the so-called culture-specific words, from dialectical expressions to the most general mixture of linguistic registers and varieties’ (Ivančić 2011: 161). That an author should be so concerned about the fate of his work in a foreign language is certainly fascinating, but one can imagine the uneasiness or apprehension a translator might feel upon discovering such a list, before subsequently receiving, by post, Magris’s remarks and corrections of the translation currently in process.

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Closelaborations We owe this beautiful neologism to Guillermo Cabrera Infante, who thus chose to baptize his ‘close collaboration’ with the translator Suzanne Jill Levine (1991: 47). Resolutely target-oriented, the method used by Levine and Cabrera Infante consists in adapting the original with the author’s active collaboration: ‘[The translations] are consistently more literary than the original. The incommunicable in-jokes of Havanan popular culture and the associations provoked by the spoken play of sounds have been displaced by conceptual, graphic, readerly in-jokes’ (23). Levine continued this collaborative practice with Manuel Puig, affirming that the Argentine’s ‘vast knowledge of North American mass culture was invaluable to our creative collaboration’ (127). We can glimpse in this practice a particular form of mediated self-translation, or of four-handed translation, in which the final text sometimes appears as the joint work of the author and his or her translator – all the English editions of Cabrera Infante’s novels thus specify that the book is ‘translated from the Spanish by Suzanne Jill Levine with the author’. In this sense, the ‘closelaboration’ announced by Cabrera Infante intends less to pay tribute to his translator than to clearly signal his own participation: ‘A tyrannical writer so jealously protective of his text that he claims to have produced the French translation,’ the Cuban novelist thus claims a sort of ‘paternity by force’ (Bensoussan 1995: 43). Jorge Luis Borges translated around ten of his books into English with Norman Thomas Di Giovanni, a student he met at Harvard and immediately invited to visit him in Buenos Aires. Borges, it seems, sought to offer his Anglophone readership a version as far from ‘foreign’ as possible, and the young American translator was thus appropriately invited to adapt the text to his liking: ‘I said we could then credit the finished product as having been translated in collaboration with the author. Borges was stunned by the suggestion. “Of course, I’ll help,” he said, “but won’t it hurt you to say that I took part?” I told him it would give the work more authority’ (Di Giovanni 2003: 165). Borges’s books in English are the fruit of such a close collaboration with his translator that for many years the copyright was shared between them. As in the case of Levine with Cabrera Infante and Puig, we will see that an author’s participation in the translation process, far from producing a more literal version than usual, can in fact have the opposite effect: without the author’s approval (and even incitement), we may suppose that Levine and Di Giovanni would never have modified and acclimatized the original with such confidence.

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Translations of this type are often the cause or effect of a deep friendship between an author and his or her translator. Heinrich Heine (1857: vi): ‘I cannot, without profound emotion, remember the evenings of March, 1848, when the kind and gentle Gérard [de Nerval] came every day to see me in my reclusion … in order to work peacefully with me on the translation of my tranquil German reveries.’ Laure Bataillon (1991: 55): ‘Julio Cortázar never hesitated to push me further than his text allowed, whether the request came from me or from him.’ Concerning Vargas Llosa, Puig and Cabrera Infante, Albert Bensoussan (2001: 13) recognizes ‘the requirement for sympathy, and more still of empathy, which defines the translator’s attitude before his or her author’. Borges and Di Giovanni (2003: 165): ‘We don’t think of ourselves as being two men. We think we are really one mind at work.’ The Irish poet Denis Devlin recalling his working sessions with Saint-John Perse: ‘When the night was growing darker, and the voice of a negro outside underlined for an instant the colour of rhythm, we set the Latin dictionary on the Mansion dictionary, with the Petit Larousse above both, and it all ended with a burst of laughter’ (Saint-John Perse 1972: 1112–13). Friendships are at once the cause and effect of some collaborative translations. Philippe Jaccottet thus notes concerning Giuseppe Ungaretti: ‘He was an extraordinarily warm, generous man, a true friendship soon developed between us. … He invited me to Rome to work on the translations’ (Graf 1998: 63). The correspondence between the two poets and translators was the subject of a publication, which allows us to follow, step by step so to speak, the evolution of the translation of one of Ungaretti’s poems entitled ‘Dunja’ (Jaccottet 2008: 201 sqq; Graf 1998: 65–72). This is not the place to examine in detail these typed and handwritten pages which, far beyond the mere revision and correction of terms, or even scattered suggestions, give the feeling of a text forged by a backand-forth exchange as amicable as it is demanding; one extract should suffice in indicating the tone and fecundity of the exchange. Jaccottet (2008: 200), in a letter dated August 22 1969: ‘Leoparda: I don’t know if we can say léoparde in French. Littré doesn’t say. Maybe panthère?’ Ungaretti, in the margins of the typewritten translation: ‘Better to go with the neologism: it’s not a panthère: it’s primarily a beast of grace rather than of cruelty’ (Jaccottet 2008: 210). An extreme (and rather rare) form of closelaboration consists in modifying the original according to its translation, in changing the source text in the light of the target text. Gregory Rabassa (2005: 43) thus affirms: ‘Julio Cortázar, my first author and oldest friend among them all, liked the way I handled his stuff.  … Of all “my” authors he was the one who came closest to what might

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be called collaboration. His marginal notes were well-taken and sometimes he would even alter his text to better fit the English.’ Fabio Pusterla: ‘Some authors who speak Italian wanted to collaborate in the translation. One of them, who was very meticulous, even decided to change one of the lines of his own poem in accordance with one of my suggestions, because he preferred the translation’ (Vischer 2000). When undertaking a translation into German of an anthology of poems by Aimé Césaire, Jahn sends the Martinican poet a list of questions; having to delve back into old poems for a foreign edition, Césaire took the opportunity to rewrite or remove certain passages. When asked about the meaning of the word ‘tur-ra-mas’ for example, he responds to his translator (Ruhe 2003: 414): ‘The word tur-ra-mas is an Australian word whose meaning I no longer remember. We can remove it. I’ll remove it myself in the French edition.’ As we can see, it becomes difficult to judge a translator’s work without having access to the translation process’s complete genetic record; as Ernstpeter Ruhe makes clear, ‘we must take into account the contribution of the author himself, who changes his text in order to facilitate its passage into another language’ (ibid.: 413). How do authors come to modify their own texts based on a translation currently in progress? Some seek to comply with the customs of the target language in order to better appeal to a foreign readership: Kundera removes certain elements which he deems untranslatable (such as the use of formal and informal pronouns), or which are overly linked to a specific historico-cultural context (like the Slavophilia of Czechs in the 1950s, Woods 2006: 3–4), while Cabrera Infante, with the help of his translator, imagines new references to popular music and cinema (Levine 1991: 23). Others take into account possible suggestions from a translator who has been able to earn their trust. Jean Guiloineau, while in the process of translating André Brink’s novel A Chain of Voices (1982), informs the author that some passages remind him of a work by Michel Foucault, Moi Pierre Rivière, published in 1973. Struck in turn by the correspondences between his own novel and Foucault’s text, Brink decides to add several lines to the original text: ‘What amazes me is the light that [Foucault’s book] sheds on several aspects of Galant himself. And it is perhaps because of this that I have two last passages to add’ (Guiloineau 2007: 241). Finally, some authors, in a more playful way, go as far as to accept changes inspired by a typo: Rabassa, having typed ‘fired eggs’ instead of ‘fried egg’ in his translation of Hopscotch, notes with surprise and pleasure that ‘Julio said, “I like it. Let’s keep it” ’ (Rabassa 2005: 44).

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Rarity and reliability of sources Celebrating the long overdue marriage between textual genetics and translation studies in a special issue of the journal Genesis, Fabienne Durand-Bogaert (2014: 8) regrets that the majority of translators ‘do not consider it useful to preserve traces of the various battles that allowed them to reach a particular lexical or syntactic choice’. The published text thus constitutes a translation’s sole state, the successive versions of which remain forever inaccessible. With translators always ready to erase their tracks, the scarcity of their drafts and manuscripts makes all the more precious those rare exchanges, whether epistolary or otherwise, in which we see the transition from one text to another emerge and mature under the dual, more or less benevolent or critical gaze, of both author and translator at once. Some of these exchanges have survived. The letters and manuscripts of Saint-John Perse, who collaborated regularly with his English, German and American translators, are all available in the form of archives or publications which elicit abundant critical interest. Analysing in detail the English versions of T. S. Eliot and Robert Fitzgerald, Henriette Levillain (1987: 334) notes that this relatively interventionist poet, ‘by expressing his preferences for certain words or sounds rather than others, or by refusing the ones or the others, extended into the English language his reverie regarding words’. Maryvonne Boisseau (2009: 200) has shown that SaintJohn Perse’s relationship with translation, as illustrated by his collaboration with Denis Devlin, reveals several aspects of the interaction between translation and criticism – ‘the importance of the conditions of translation, in other words, translation’s enunciative context … [and] the importance of critical dialogue and collaboration in the genesis of translation’.2 Following an examination of the translation manuscripts of Wallace Fowlie (and John Marshall)’s ‘Narrow Are the Vessels’ (‘Étroits sont les vaisseaux’) according to a triple approach (genetic, hermeneutic and poetic), Esa Hartmann (2000: 26) concludes that as the ‘mirror of a writing in quest of itself … the history of this translation is like the evolution of a second creation’. A collaboration which has been followed and documented, either in the form of archives or in a posthumous publication, is close to a miracle. Indeed it requires conditions as strict as they are numerous: the author and translator must be contemporaries, must accept to work together, must master the other’s language and, above all, leave written traces of their exchanges. It often occurs that the author’s letters are preserved and published without those of the translator:  ‘Translators’ archives have never generated the same concern

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for preservation, from libraries and publishers, rights holders, and even the translators themselves, as writers’ archives’ (Durand-Bogaert 2014: 16). The hundreds of letters and telegrams sent by Gabriele D’Annunzio to his French translator are a case of one-way correspondence. Fascinating but truncated, the exchange above all reveals the conception that D’Annunzio (1946: 175) came to have of literary translation: ‘I do not despair of getting you to be a more literal translator; especially since the most beautiful and noble passages of translation are precisely those in which the faithfulness of the text has been most closely respected.’ D’Annunzio did not conserve the letters he received from his translator, who did not himself keep his own drafts; Georges Hérelle’s questions and responses thus remain unknown. We can only regret such a loss: one of his letters, which survived by happy coincidence in the form of a copy sent to a journalist, reveals a translator at once supple and tenacious in the face of an excessively fussy novelist. [Some of your corrections] are unfortunate, either because you use words which cannot express in French what you want them to express, or because you employ barbaric constructions that make the French text look like a translation by a clumsy schoolboy. … Yes, you are ‘solely responsible for your art’; but it is I who am responsible for the translation of your work, and therefore it is my role to be the ultimo correttore of this translation.’ (ibid.: 350)

The correspondence between Joseph Conrad and André Gide, which in this instance is fully documented, allows us to follow the highs and lows of a collaboration as amicable as it was fruitful. Direct exchange, however, is not always enough: if we indeed want to understand the position of the two correspondents, we must read with caution, and even crosscheck, their respective claims. Gide, for example, never reveals to Conrad that his own translation of Typhoon is a simple (and utterly imperfect) revision of the same work entrusted in 1915 to a certain Marie-Thérèse Muller. Sylvère Monod (1991: 24) argues sympathetically that Gide’s Typhoon is in reality ‘an unacknowledged collaboration with an anonymous and forgotten individual, who cleared away the initial scrub and provided a terrain on which Gide’s great literary talent could then flourish.’ What credit should be given then to the discourses of translators and their authors? Whether in good faith or not, some exaggerate the quality of their exchanges or the richness of their collaboration. Vanity lies in wait, sometimes fuelled by the author’s compliments. Albert Bensoussan, Mario Vargas Llosa’s translator: ‘It is rare for an author to dedicate a book to his translator. I am a translator among others, but he has never known such fidelity with a single

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other translator over the past forty years’ (Bataille 2011: 21). João Guimarães Rosa (2003: 62) to his Italian translator: ‘What is this predisposition? A sort of correspondence of souls, the same wavelength and sensibility. I feel the calling to become … your disciple.’ Di Giovanni (2008) on his collaboration with Borges: ‘We had set new standards in the art of translation, and the New Yorker’s editor, William Shawn, informed us that he did not regard the work we submitted to him as translation but as elegant works of literature in English.’ D’Annunzio (1946: 170) to his French translator: ‘From now on, your name will always be linked with mine; from now on, in France, we are one person.’ John Cowper Powys to Marie Canavaggia on 17 May 1956 (Powys Collection): ‘You my fellowauthor, for so any sensible writer is bound to feel about a first-rate Translator of his most characteristic book.’ The author conveyed a similar sentiment to Phyllis Playter on 26 September 1964 (Powys Collection): ‘[George] Steiner told me this astonishing story about Faulkner in Virginia: at a meeting of the University he was, as so often, sullen & silent and then Coindreau came in; & Faulkner said: “Here is the man who created Faulkner.” … Is not it an extraordinary homage to pay to a translator?’

Conflictual relationships ‘Writers are like vampires,’ declares the Portuguese novelist José Saramago (qtd in Pontiero 1992: 304), conscious as he is of having demanded a great deal of sweat and blood from his own translators. On the subject, one such translator affirmed: ‘In my experience, writers can betray certain insecurities which can transform the translator into confidant, psychiatrist and even guru’ (ibid.). In seeking the cooperation of the author they translate, translators certainly gain an interlocutor of choice, combined with an attentive rereader; but they also expose themselves to demanding, difficult or even conflictual working relationships. As Edmund Keeley (1989: 57) humorously reports concerning the Greek poet Georges Séféris: ‘Some might see an immediate advantage in having the poet one is translating alive and friendly …; and others, perhaps more skeptical or sagacious from some personal experience, would see great dangers [there].’ Readers are unaware of these risks, and even more of the disagreements, that the majority of publishers, caught between author and translator, attempt to keep from the public eye – the same applies for information concerning copyright fees or ghost writers. Poorly documented because of trade secrets, this type of

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conflict is more common that one might think; if it fails to excite the general public, it fuels conversations as bitter as they are amusing between translators, and most likely between authors as well. Alice Kaplan (2013: 71–2) has recounted her savoury troubles with the translator of her French Lessons (1993) who, for the sake of beautiful style, did not hesitate to rewrite a prose he deemed overly transparent. Two unnamed characters from the original text, ‘he’ and ‘she’, thus become in his translation ‘Betsy’ and ‘Joey’, on the pretext that the indefinite article would be ‘very ugly in French’. The conflict escalates. At first enthusiastic, the translator multiplies his reproaches and threatens to publish under a pseudonym; in the end, Kaplan rejects the translation, and the publisher renounces the plan to publish it. Indeed, stylistic or personal disagreements often arise, perturbing a collaboration which may have initially seemed fruitful.

Authorial appropriation The case of Vladimir Nabokov in many respects foreshadows that of Milan Kundera. In each case, the fear of betrayal is a powerful motivator, encouraging the author to monitor closely his translator, and then replace him. We know that experience had taught Kundera to dread embellishments of his work and that he corrected his translators unceremoniously in order to conserve, even at the price of a certain psychological violence, absolute control over his written production. Equally polyglot and respectful of the original, Nabokov shows himself similarly wary of the liberties his translators might take. Between 1959 and 1977, he systematically collaborates with them, as though on the lookout for the slightest alteration of image or term in their work. As translator of Nabokov’s first novel Mashenka (1926), Michael Glenny for example abandons the metaphor ‘dog nipples’, used to describe the aeration vents aligned on the roof of a carriage, and replaces the image with simple ‘ventilators’. Nabokov is quick to correct him: ‘There are no “revolving ventilators” in my text; such’i soski are dog nipples’ (Grayson 1977: 126). This type of correction is a mere prelude to Nabokov’s slow appropriation of the English language by way of the translation process. Such an appropriation first manifests itself by Nabokov’s close surveillance of his collaborators in the languages he speaks (French, German, Italian), and then, from 1959 on, by the collaboration between Nabokov and his son Dmitri, who, according to Nabokov, is a veritable ideal model of the translator: ‘A translator

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who would provide him with an accurate version in good English, leaving him free to attend to the “gnoseological side”, to adapt, revise, elaborate as he chose, resisting or indulging the creative urge’ (Grayson 2000: 989).3 Derek Walcott is among the many poets and translators who worked with Joseph Brodsky on the English version of the latter’s poems. The collaboration Walcott evokes takes place over three stages: ‘The first is the interlinear translation, the second a transformation, and the third, with luck and with Brodsky’s tireless discipline, transfiguration’ (Walcott 1998: 138). It is over the course of these three successive stages that disagreements and tensions begin to emerge – the tone of the following letter to Daniel Weissbort (1989: 225–6) provides a glimpse: ‘Lots of things to be changed. … Watch the meter. … The first line is by far too long. … I am positive. … Stubbornly yours, Joseph.’ Brodsky, by dint of blaming his translators for their shortcomings, notably in matters of rhythm and rhyme, eventually opted for solitary work: after years in exile, his mastery of the foreign tongue allowed him both to write directly in English and to translate his own Russian texts. The demands of the Russian poet got the better of his most patient translators; according to Alexandra Berlina (2014: 3), ‘Conflict-laden collaboration eventually led to the co-translators giving up and clearing the field for Brodsky himself.’ In the course of a rigorous analysis of Paul Celan’s interventions on certain French versions of his poems, Dirk Weissmann (2003: 138) notes that JeanPierre Wilhelm must ‘content himself with signing in his own name a translation done mainly by Celan himself ’, to the extent that the suggestions of the German poet ‘go beyond the limits of a simple translation and in reality come close to a recreation of the text in French’. For example, by suggesting that the title Nächtlich geschürzt be translated ‘Retroussées et de nuit’, Celan replaces a relationship of subordination (the lips are curled up for the night, according to Wilhelm’s first version) by a parataxis absent from the original German.

Intention and auctoritas In its various forms, from the most superficial to the most in-depth, collaboration is an act of writing whose finality and efficacy still remain to be determined. What does collaboration claim to do, and to what extent does it succeed? Whether through preliminary framing, revising the completed text, or accompanying the work of translation, collaboration aims, in an almost always unformulated way, to improve the translation itself. In his way, it is based on a

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presupposition which, though certainly admissible, deserves to be questioned, namely: that the author would know more about his own text than any other reader, and his or her intention would be at once defineable, circumscribed and beneficial. None of this is self-evident, a fact translators are indeed well-placed to judge. Referring to a working session with Faulkner, Coindreau (1999: 21) thus recalls: ‘Only once he was unable to give me an answer. … He read it, reread it, then began to laugh. “I have absolutely no idea of what I meant,” he admitted.’ Occasionally, the translation reveals to the author of the original subtle aspects which he did not expect in his own text. Patricia Zurcher, translator of the Swiss poet Kurt Marti: ‘Kurt Marti had found in my translations certain dimensions of his texts which he had not perceived before. He had planned to rewrite his poems in the light of these dimensions’ (Vischer 2009: 230). When he happened to read his own texts in translation, Umberto Eco (2007: 14) always perceived with enthusiasm the possibilities revealed to him by the passage into another language: ‘I felt how, at the contact of another language, the text exhibited interpretative potentialities which had remained unknown to me, and how translation could sometimes improve it (I say “improve” precisely with regard to the intention that the text suddenly manifested, independently of my original intention as an empirical author).’ It is safe to assume, however, that in the majority of cases, the offer of collaboration comes from authors concerned with ensuring the preservation of their intended meanings, sometimes to the detriment of what the text may unwittingly mean – in spite of, or even against, itself. Every reader, according to Eco (1985: 230), ‘by identifying profound structures, sheds light on something that the author could not mean, but which the text nevertheless seems to exhibit with absolute clarity’. If each of us has this experience upon reading a literary text, many authors seem to think it is especially important to understand, and thus translate, their initial intention. Borges to Rabassa (1989: 2): ‘Don’t translate what I’ve written, but what I wanted to say.’ Saint-John Perse, collaborating with Fitzgerald on the translation of Chronique, embarks on an endless quest of possible meanings, so much so that, ‘as the poet analysed what he “had sought to suggest,” the poetic effect was multiplied and attached to separate or competing semantic or phonic origins’ (Levillain 1987: 213). Does translation benefit from reflecting the author’s intention to the detriment of the intention of the text, at least such as its translator perceives it? Lawrence Venuti (1995: 165) has shown the extent to which ‘this notion of authorship assumes romantic expressive theory: the text is seen as expressing the unique thoughts and feelings of the writer, a free, unified consciousness

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which is not divided by determinations that exceed and possibly conflict with his intention’. There is a certain unction to auctoritas. In many cases, the translator who collaborated with the author – and even more so when this collaboration is explicitly mentioned on the title page – takes far greater liberties with the source text when he enjoys the author’s blessing. We may occasionally observe a phenomenon of acclimatization, constrained by the culture of the target language, which constitutes a type of ethnocentrism against which Antoine Berman (1984: 74) warns the translator to be on guard: ‘ The very aim of translation – to open up in writing a certain relation with the Other, to fertilize what is one’s Own through the mediation of what is Foreign – is diametrically opposed to the ethnocentric structure of every culture’ (Berman 1992: 4). Now it is in this sense that many collaborations seem to play out with the author. From already old Borges texts, Borges and his translator Norman Thomas Di Giovanni ‘rewrote their versions as if they had been originally written in mid-twentieth-century English’ (Krause 2010: 85), inserting subtle changes ‘so that American readers could understand the various historical and cultural references taken for granted by an Argentine readership’ (41). Cortázar’s French translator, Laure Bataillon (1987: 83), also admits that the author’s approval provided him with an unexpected margin for manœuvre: ‘In terms of the advantages: authorised illumination of notorious obscurities, rejections or credible requests regarding the audacities of translation; accentuation of the text (rhythm, sonority) in tune with the author’s ear – the advantage here is a double-edged sword, as Cortázar did not hesitate to push me further than his own text allowed.’ Cabrera Infante’s American translator, Suzanne Jill Levine, partly Americanizes place names and insults with the author’s permission (or insistence). Munday (2007: 225) concludes from this that ‘freedom of expression is a function of the permissive presence of the author’. As for Kundera, he does not hesitate to modify his own original in the course of translation, the most often in order to carry out a cultural acclimatization which we may assume his translator was careful to avoid (Woods 2006: 4). What prevails here is in fact the author’s image of that which, in his eyes, will seem ‘too exotic’ to the translation’s reader, which amounts to assuming an explicitly target-oriented approach that the translator would most likely be loathe to endorse. As Lawrence Venuti (1998: 6) underlines concerning Kundera, ‘ The fact that the author is the interpreter doesn’t make the interpretation unmediated by targetlanguage values.’ This unformulated aspect of collaboration (‘the author knows best’) clearly hides some questionable presuppositions – which, although certainly not

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inadmissible, deserve to be exposed and critiqued – and raises unexpected questions which loom or erupt with particular force in those situations that are finally not uncommon of disagreement between the translator and the author of the text.

For better and for worse Given these frequent disagreements, combined with the problems of a poorly mastered target language and the dubious virtues of authorial intention, we may wonder whether authors’ participation in the translation of their own texts is indeed useful, or even desirable. Their corrections may be inept; their lists of commentaries may attract the translator’s attention to unessential points; their conception of the act of translation itself may sometimes testify to an unexpected ethnocentrism and academicism. Analysing George Davis’s questions and annotations in the margin of his translation of Mario Vargas Llosa’s essay entitled ‘El Paraíso de los libros’ (1991), Jeremy Munday (2012: 121) concludes: ‘Davis’ negotiation with Vargas Llosa revolves around narrowing down the semantic space occupied by the source text items and very often adjusting the graduation in the target text. It is interesting that often the target text wording that is selected (presumably by or with agreement of Vargas Llosa) is the most standardized and the least intense.’ Finally, we must mention a significant methodological difficulty: how to evaluate the real impact of the author’s collaboration? Does it indeed have an impact, other than an incidental one? Of course, the exchanges quoted above indicate lexical and other changes with regard to the initial version. Can we in fact affirm, however, that without the author’s collaboration, an entirely different translation would have seen the light of day? Though the matter is rarely verifiable, some configurations may allow us to come to a partial conclusion. The same text by Calvino for instance, Dall’opaco (1976), has been the subject of two translations into French, of which only one benefited from collaboration with the author. Danièle Sallenave received commentaries of the following type: ‘It seems to me that ensoleillé is too common a term, like the Italian soleggiato; we should thus translate opaco by ombragé. For opaco, I would prefer ubac, close as it is to the dialect term from which I started’ (Calvino 2000: 1322). Jean-Paul Manganaro translated the same text after Calvino’s death, without having access to the first translator’s clarifications and responses. A comparison of the two translations – one collaborative, the other not – thus becomes possible. Garbarino (2005: 401) suggests that in this case

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Sallenave, more than Manganaro, was able to ‘create a version more faithfully reproducing the precision of the source text’. The case of Tres tristes tigres presents a similar interest. Cabrera Infante’s novel was the subject of a collaboration between the author and his French and English translators, while the Dutch translator not only worked alone, but some twenty years after the other two. Comparing Bensoussan’s and Levine’s versions, which date from the 1970s and which both benefited from the author’s clarifications, July De Wilde (2010: 3) ‘assumed that the author’s collaboration would be traceable in the translation product’. In the light of three linguistic criteria (‘intralingual speech variety’, ‘language play’ and ‘intertextual irony’), she finds that this is not so: in this particular case, the non-collaborative translation is not significantly different from the two others. To the usual criteria we may refer to when analysing or criticizing translations, author-translator collaborations thus encourage us to add another: that of collaborative efficiency. Beyond the obvious relevance of their various correspondences and negotiations – and possibly the manuscript traces of their collaboration – it is indeed important to determine whether collaboration has had a noticeable effect on the published translation (an effect which would itself be susceptible to evaluation). Collaboration is also an experience of writing, the effects of which are sometimes felt not only on the translation currently taking place, but also on the work to come. It is, in the end, a practice which sheds more light than any other on the translation process – and it is for this reason that Umberto Eco (2007: 12) may observe: ‘I wonder if, in order to elaborate a theory of translation, it would not only be necessary to examine numerous examples of translation, but also to have carried out three experiments: to have checked the translations of others, to have translated and been translated oneself, or better still, to have translated in collaboration with one’s own translator.’ Translated by Nicholas Manning

Notes 1 See however Vanderschelden (1998), Graf (1998), Segonds-Bauer (1994), Ivančić (2011), Tanqueiro (2000), Gschwen (2000: 188–229). 2 For a transcription of Saint-John Perse’s correspondence with T. S. Eliot, Denis Devlin and Robert Fitzgerald, with lists of questions, commentaries and suggestions, see Hartmann (2007: 479–85). 3 See Anokhina (2014 and chapter 5 in the present volume).

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Works cited Anokhina, O. (2014). ‘Traduction et réécriture chez Vladimir Nabokov: genèse d’une œuvre en trois langues’. Genesis 38: 111–27. Bataille, N. (2011). ‘Rencontre avec Albert Bensoussan’. Espaces Latinos 262: 16–23. Bataillon, L. (1991). ‘Traduire Cortázar avec Cortázar’. In Traduire, écrire, edited by L. Bataillon, 17. Paris: Arcane. Bensoussan, A. (1995). Confessions d’un traître: essai sur la traduction. Rennes: Presses universitaires de Rennes. Bensoussan, A. (2001). Ce que je sais de Vargas Llosa. Paris: F. Bourin. Berlina, A. (2014). Brodsky Translating Brodsky: Poetry in Self-Translation. London: Bloomsbury. Berman, A. (1992). The Experience of the Foreign: Culture and Translation in Romantic Germany. Translated by S. Heyvaert. New York: State University of New York Press. Berman, A. (1999). La traduction et la lettre, ou L’auberge du lointain. Paris: Éditions du Seuil. Boisseau, M. (2009). ‘Traduire Saint-John Perse en anglais: intuition critique et raison poétique. Entre Denis Devlin et Derek Mahon’. Souffle de Perse 14: 189–214. Butts, M. (2002). The Journals of Mary Butts. New Haven: Yale University Press. Butts, M. (2014). Imaginary Letters. Translated by P. Hersant. Paris: Le lavoir Saint-Martin. Calvino, I. (2000). Lettere 1940-1985. Milano: Mondadori. Calvino, I. (2002). ‘Tradurre è il vero modo di leggere un testo’ [1982]. In Mondo scritto e mondo non scritto, edited by M. Barenghi, 78–84. Milano: Mondadori. Cappello, S. (2007). Les années parisiennes d’Italo Calvino. Paris: Presses de l’Université Paris-Sorbonne. Coindreau, M.-E. (1992). Mémoires d’un traducteur: Entretiens avec Christian Giudicelli [1974]. Paris: Gallimard. Coindreau, M.-E. (1999). ‘The Faulkner I knew [1931]’. In Conversations with William Faulkner, edited by M. T. Inge, 18–26. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. Conrad, J. (1996). The Collected Letters of Joseph Conrad vol. 5, 1912-1916. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Conrad, J. (2005). The Collected Letters of Joseph Conrad vol. 7, 1920-1922. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. D’Annunzio, G. (1946). Gabriele D’Annunzio à Georges Hérelle: correspondance accompagnée de douze sonnets cisalpins. Translated by Guy Tosi. Paris: Denoël. De Wilde, J. (2010). ‘Diverging Author-Translator Interventions in the Dutch, French and US Translations of the Cuban Novel Tres tristes tigres: Some Explanatory Factors’. Translation Effects. Selected Papers of the CETRA Research Seminar in Translation Studies 2009, edited by O. Azadibougar. http://www.arts.kuleuven. be/cetra/papers/files/july-de-wilde-diverging-author-translator.pdf (accessed 15 January 2016).

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Di Giovanni, N. T. (2003). The Lesson of the Master: A Memoir and Essays about Borges and His Work. London: Continuum. Di Giovanni, N. T. (2008). ‘The Borges Papers’. http://www.digiovanni.co.uk/borges.htm (accessed 15 January 2016). Durand-Bogaert, F., ed. (2014). Special Issue ‘Traduire’. Genesis 38 (2014). Eco, U. (1985). Lector in Fabula. Translated by M. Bouzaher. Paris: Grasset. Eco, U. (2007). Dire presque la même chose: expériences de traduction. Translated by M. Bouzaher. Paris: Grasset. Erasmus (1930). Opus Epistolarum Des. Erasmi Roterodami. Edited by P. S. Allen, vol. 8, 1529–30. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Fraser, G. (2013). ‘F. S. Scott and the Poetry of Translation’. In Translation: Honouring Sheila Fischman, edited by S. Simon, 13–25. Montréal. McGill–Queen’s University Press. Gallot, M. (2011). ‘D’Annunzio et son traducteur: à la recherche d’un alter ego’. Cahiers d’études romanes 24: 81–9. Garbarino, S. (2005). ‘Les traductions oubliées. Si par un jeu du hasard deux médiateurs calviniens …’. Italies, Revue d’études italiennes 9: 395–411. Graf, M., ed. (1998). L’écrivain et son traducteur en Suisse et en Europe. Genève: Zoé. Grayson, J. (1977). Nabokov Translated: A Comparison of Nabokov’s Russian and English Prose. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Grayson, J. (2000). ‘Vladimir Nabokov’. In Encyclopedia of Literary Translation in English, 2 vols, vol. I, edited by O. Classe, 987–90. London: Fitzroy Dearborn Publishers. Gschwen, R. M., ed. (2000). Der schiefe Turm von Babel: Geschichten vom Übersetzen, Dolmetschen und Verstehen. Straelen: Straelener Manuskripte Verlag, 2000. Guiloineau, J. (2007). ‘Relations auteur-traducteur’. In Pre- and Post-publication Itineraries of the Contemporary Novel in English, edited by V. Guignery and F. Gallix, 237–42. Paris: Publibook Université. Guimarães Rosa, J. (2003). Correspondência com seu tradutor italiano Edoardo Bizzarri [1981]. Belo Horizonte: Editora UFMG. Hartmann, E. C. (2000). ‘Histoire d’une traduction’. Souffles de Perse 9: 11–27. Hartmann, E. C. (2007). Les manuscrits de Saint-John Perse: pour une poétique vivante. Paris: L’Harmattan. Hébert, A. and Scott, F. (1970). Dialogue sur la traduction: à propos du ‘Tombeau des Rois’. Montréal: HMH. Heine, H. (1857). Poëmes et légendes. Translated by G. de Nerval. Paris: M. Lévy frères. Hoeksema, T. (1978). ‘The Translator’s Voice: An Interview with Gregory Rabassa’. Translation Review 1: 5–18. Ivančić, B. (2011). ‘Dialogue between Translators and Authors. The Example of Claudio Magris’. In The Translator as Author: Perspectives on Literary Translation, edited by C. Buffagni and B. Garzelli, 157–75. Berlin: Lit Verlag. Jaccottet, P. (2008). Jaccottet traducteur d’Ungaretti: correspondance 1946-1970. Paris: Gallimard.

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Kaplan, A. (2013). ‘Translation: The Biography of an Artform’. In Translation: Translators on Their Work and What It Means, edited by E. Allen and S. Bernofsky, 67–81. New York: Columbia University Press. Keeley, E. (1989). ‘Collaboration, Revision and Other Less Forgivable Sins in Translation’. In The Craft of Translation, edited by J. Biguenet and R. Schulte, 54–69. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Krause, J. R. (2010). ‘Translation and the Reception and Influence of Latin American Literature in the United States’. PhD dissertation. Nashville: Vanderbilt University. Kundera, M. (1985). ‘Note de l’auteur’. In La plaisanterie, translated by M. Aymonin, C. Courtot and M. Kundera, 397–400. Paris: Gallimard. Levillain, H. (1987). Sur deux versants: la création chez Saint-John Perse d’après les versions anglaises de son œuvre poétique. Paris: J. Corti. Levine, S. J. (1991). The Subversive Scribe: Translating Latin American Fiction. Saint Paul: Graywolf Press. Mbondobari Ebamangoye, S. (2009). ‘ “Je suis votre voix en Allemagne”: contextes et réception critique de Et les chiens se taisaient en Allemagne’. Francofonía 18: 248–70. Monod, S. (1991). ‘Note sur la traduction d’André Gide’. In J. Conrad, Typhon, translated by A. Gide, 21–6. Paris: Gallimard. Munday, J. (2007). Style and Ideology in Translation: Latin American Writing in English. New York: Routledge. Munday, J. (2012). Evaluation in Translation: Critical Points of Translator DecisionMaking. London: Routledge. Orwell, G. (2006). Correspondance avec son traducteur René-Noël Raimbault. Paris: J.-M. Place. Pontiero, G. (1992). ‘The Role of the Literary Translator’. In Teaching Translation and Interpreting, edited by C. Dollerup and A. Loddegaard, 299–306. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Powys Collection [Letters of John Cowper Powys]. National Library of Wales, Aberystwyth. Putnam, W. (1999). ‘A Translator’s Correspondence: Philippe Neel to Joseph Conrad’. The Conradian 24 (1): 59–91. Rabassa, G. (1989). ‘No Two Snowflakes Are Alike: Translator as Metaphor’. In The Craft of Translation, edited by J. Biguenet and R. Schulte, 1–12. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press. Rabassa, G. (2005). If This Be Treason: Translation and its Dyscontents. A Memoir. New York: New Directions. Ruhe, E. (2003). ‘ “La littérature, mon poumon essentiel”: le souffle créateur d’Aimé Césaire’. In Aimé Césaire: une pensée pour le XXIe siècle, edited by C. Lapoussinière, 405–17. Paris: Présence Africaine. Saint-John Perse (1972). Œuvres complètes. Paris: Gallimard. Segonds-Bauer, M. (1994). ‘Les rapports de travail traducteurs-auteurs’. In Actes des dixièmes assises de la traduction littéraire: Arles 1993, edited by Segonds-Bauer, M., Wackers, K. and Lambrechts, R., 39–71. Arles: Atlas/Actes Sud.

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Tanqueiro, H. (2000). ‘Self-Translation as an Extreme Case of the Author-TranslatorDialectic’. In Investigating Translation, edited by A. Beeby and D. Ensinger, 55–63. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Vanderschelden, I. (1998). ‘Authority in Literary Translation: Collaborating with the Author’. Translation Review 56 (1): 22–31. Venuti, L. (1995). The Translator’s Invisibility: A History of Translation. London: Routledge. Venuti, L. (1998). The Scandals of Translation: Towards an Ethic of Difference. London: Routledge. Vischer, M. (2000). ‘Entretien avec Fabio Pusterla’. www.culturactif.ch/entretiens/ pusterlaimprime.htm (accessed 15 January 2016). Vischer, M. (2009). La traduction, du style vers la poétique: Philippe Jaccottet et Fabio Pusterla en dialogue. Paris: Kimé. Walcott, D. (1998). ‘Magic Industry’. In What the Twilight Says: Essays, 134–52. London: Faber & Faber. Weissbort, D., ed. (1989). Translating Poetry: The Double Labyrinth. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press. Weissmann, D. (2003). Poésie, judaïsme, philosophie: une histoire de la réception de Paul Celan en France, des débuts jusqu’à 1991. PhD Dissertation. Paris: Sorbonne Nouvelle. Woods, M. (2006). Translating Milan Kundera. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters.

6

Vladimir Nabokov and His Translators: Collaboration or Translation Under Duress? Olga Anokhina

Vladimir Nabokov actively participated in the translation of his own work, though the mode of participation varied depending on the target language and the periods of his life. I will focus specifically here on Nabokov’s collaborative practices in the translation of his works into English and French.1 If his involvement was considerable in the translations into English, French translators showed some resistance, attempting to limit the author’s interventions in their texts. Without the space to analyse here in an exhaustive way the translation of the ensemble of Nabokov’s work, I will rather attempt to identify general trends in the collaborative strategies the author implemented, primarily after 1940.2 In order to guarantee a degree of methodological rigour to my analyses, which have a dual linguistic and genetic aim,3 I will concentrate primarily on translations for which I had an opportunity to consult material traces in the writer’s and translators’ working papers (translation drafts, for instance), or for which we have relevant information thanks to correspondence.4 Indeed, Nabokov’s archives conserve a trove of invaluable treasures, which will advance understanding not only of Nabokov but also translation studies, as well as of the creative processes of multilingual writers more generally.5 If Nabokov (1975: 15) deems the study of writers’ manuscripts futile,6 I prefer to follow in the footsteps of Brian Boyd (1990: 516) when he highlights the central interest of exploring archives and studying Nabokov’s drafts: A manuscript allows us a rare glance at Nabokov’s creative processes, at all the continuities, disruptions, redirections, and reappropriations normally disguised by the self-containedness and the apparent inevitability of the finished works.

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Nabokov and his translators’ working documents indeed allow us to accurately establish the role of each individual – writer and translator(s) – during the re-elaboration of the text in another language, and to identify the places and nodes where the writing of one feeds the other’s and vice versa, in a multilingual and polymorphous genesis.7

Collaboration with the Anglophone translators For the translation of his Russian works into English during the ‘American’ period, a translation which lasted thirteen years (between 1959 and 1972), Nabokov adopted the following model: his collaborators had to provide him with a literal translation, which the writer abundantly amended. Nabokov had previously proceeded according to another approach, which did not suit him. Indeed, after having already worked on translation in his youth in the 1920s,8 he attempted a decade later to translate himself some of his Russian works into English.9 He then looked for a native speaker to revise his self-translated text, and to detect possible blunders10: У меня к вам еще одна просьба,- серьезная и срочная: не знаете ли вы англичанина с хорошим литерат урным слогом, который мог бы тщательно проредактировать мой перевод Отчаяния и не требовал бы платежа, по крайней мере немедленно. Дело это для меня крайне важное и спешное, так что, пожалуйста, ответьте мне, не откладывая. (Nabokov Papers [LoC]: Box 22, Folder 6)11 [I have one more request to make of you: would you perhaps know an English person with a beautiful literary style, who could scrupulously12 revise my translation of Despair and who would not ask to be paid, at least not in the short term. This business is very important and very urgent for me, so I beg you to answer me without delay].

After 1940, Nabokov radically changed his modus operandi for his translations into English, since it was no longer he who produced the first draft: he entrusted his collaborators with providing the most faithful possible translation of the original Russian text, which he would then sometimes considerably rework. It was thus not so much the quality of a translation Nabokov was looking for, as the quality of the relationship with his potential translator (this quality being measured for him by the degree of faithfulness to the original text). Whatever the particular stage of his life, Nabokov sought to find a malleable translator, who must unconditionally accept all of the author’s possible corrections. This

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was the case for a number of translations completed after Nabokov had reached the peak of his fame. It was, however, already the method which he had put in place before leaving for the United States in the 1930s, when he tried to publish some of the first translations of his works into English, such as Spring in Fialta,13 Cloud, Castle, Lake14 or The Aurelian. In his abundant correspondence with his Anglophone translators, Nabokov demands ‘faithfulness’ to his text (although he does not always explicitly use this term), as well as his right to correct the translations provided by his collaborators: Да, было бы чудно, если бы вы перевели пильграма! (но с ближайшим моим участием, так как там есть энтомология с которой можно запу таться).15 [Yes, it would be superb if you were to take care of the translation of Pilgram [English translation: The Aurelian] (but with my active participation, as this story features entomology which could prove to be a headache)]. У меня нет у времени переводить ‘Весну’, но если бы вы перевели keeping in touch with то было бы чудесно. Только что Denis Roche закончил французский перевод одной вещи и мы часов шесть с ним проверяли каждую фразу.16 [I don’t have time to translate Spring [in Fialta], but if you translate it keeping in touch with, that would be wonderful. Denis Roche just finished the French translation of one of my stories: we spent six hours with him checking over each sentence]. Если у вас есть охота и время, мне кажется, можно было бы засесть за перевод ‘Весны в Фиалте’ – на таких же началах и по тому же методу  – т.е. для меня главное – получить точный и грамотный перевод, который вероятно потом раздраконю.17 [If you want to, and have the time, I think we could tackle the translation of Spring in Fialta – with the same bases and the same method – namely that, for me, the most important thing is to get a precise and competent translation which I will then probably dragonize].

For the translations into English, Nabokov had three strategies he used in order to choose a translator who was able to satisfy his requirements. The first way to find a ‘docile’ collaborator was to choose one from among his friends. This, for example, was the case of Gleb Struve, one of Nabokov’s close friends,18 whom the author could ask to translate his stories with his ‘active participation’, ‘keeping in touch with’ him, in spite of Struve’s strong and irritable temperament. A second strategy was to choose a translator from within the family

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milieu. Thus, the young Dmitri Nabokov was recognized as his father’s officially ‘appointed’ translator. Representing an absolute authority for his son, Nabokov could intervene in the translations at will.19 Finally, the third strategy consisted in hiring an outsider, but one who would accept all of the author’s interventions. One might also mention in this respect Michael Scammell,20 who was the same age as Dmitri when he was hired by Nabokov to translate his two major novels The Gift and The Defense.21 By choosing a young student with a limited experience of translation, Nabokov was sure that his authority as a renowned American writer would allow him to correct and rewrite Scammel’s translations as he pleased (Boyd 1991: 475). Peter Pertzoff, another translator who collaborated with Nabokov in the 1930s, was originally neither a close friend nor a young student. Pertzoff became, however, an ideal translator for Nabokov, never challenging the latter’s supreme authority and authorship in the translations whose first drafts he produced (Anokhina forthcoming). These translations are officially recognized and signed by both Pertzoff and Nabokov, the specific terms chosen being: ‘translated from the Russian by P. A. Pertzoff and the author’.22 Notably, Nabokov wanted to place Pertzoff ’s name before his own. When analysing Pertzoff ’s translation drafts, which were entirely rewritten by Nabokov – Shrayer (1999a: 557) estimates that this rewriting sometimes concerns approximately 80 per cent of the text23 – it may seem that Nabokov was not satisfied with his collaborator’s work. In reality, the exact opposite was true!24 Once he had emigrated to the Unites States, Nabokov had planned to pursue their collaboration, but Pertzoff ’s poor health made it impossible (Shrayer 1999b, 2000). This very fruitful collaboration suggests that the translator may have contributed to the elaboration of Nabokov’s English style.25 To the extent that Pertzoff allowed the author absolute freedom to completely rewrite what he submitted to him, all the while ensuring the quality of the English text, this translator may indeed have played an important role in the elaboration of Nabokov’s Anglophone linguistic consciousness and identity.26 Why then did Nabokov choose this collaborative model and remain faithful to it until the end of his life? Before answering this question, I must ask another: Why did Nabokov not self-translate himself,27 while numerous other multilingual writers did, such as Nancy Huston, Samuel Beckett, Anne Weber Bernardo Atxaga? All these authors have the same fears and demands as Nabokov. They cannot entrust the task of translation – and in consequence authorship, or a certain degree of authorship – of their work into another language, to somebody

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else, especially when it is question of one of their own languages of creation. ‘I would not have trusted anyone to translate it,’ Nancy Huston (qtd in Laurin 1993) states regarding the translation of her novel Plainsong: ‘When the first version was finished, I rewrote it in French.’ As for Nabokov, he confided the translation of his works to external translators for several reasons. Besides resisting the temptation to rewrite his own work, the main reason was most likely to save time. On the one hand, Nabokov’s fame, triggered by the publication of Lolita, had created strong demand for his works. It was thus necessary to translate relatively quickly his Russian works into English, and all of his works in English – whether written or translated – into French, in the space of a dozen years. During these same years, however, Nabokov felt invested with the mission of translating Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin into English for the reason that, in his view, there was no English translation worthy of this masterpiece of Russian literature.28 He devoted himself to the task for several years, constantly pushing back the publication deadline.29 Finally, in addition to the very demanding activity of revising translations into his two other languages of creation, English and French, Nabokov continued his writing activity in the strict sense. All of this explains why Nabokov had recourse to other people in order to translate his works into English, even though it was his main language of creation. Thus, the collaborative model in which exterior translators carry out the thankless and time-consuming work of literal translation, and where the writer intervenes only at the process’s end, reserving for himself the absolute right to modify, correct and rewrite the translators’ texts, perfectly corresponded to Nabokov’s demands and creative needs.30

Collaborations with Francophone translators This approach did not work well, however, for the translations into French. Some clarification is needed regarding this point. Contrary to commonly accepted translation practices – which stipulate that a translation should be made directly from the source language without passing through other translations and intermediate languages – the translations into other languages, as per Nabokov’s explicitly expressed demand, were to be made from the English translation, revised by the author himself: Once he had polished the English translation to his satisfaction, he would then arrange for subsequent translations into other languages to be made from the

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English rather than the Russian text, not only because there were far more translators available from English than from Russian, but also because Nabokov regarded the English-language versions with their minor glosses as textually definitive for non-Russian readers. (Boyd 1991: 484)

Thus, for example, in the typescript draft of the The Enchanter, it is specified that the text has been ‘translated by from Russian into English Dmitri Nabokov, and from English into French by Gilles Barbedette’ (Barbedette Collection BRD2. N3-05.02). But what collaborative model did Nabokov use for the translations of his works into French? It would seem that he at first tried to proceed in the same way as with his English translators. To do this, the best solution was again to resort to the help of family or friends (Nabokov, accustomed to regular trips to France and Belgium before his emigration to the United States, had many Francophone friends in both countries). The French translation of the story И  стребление тиранов/Extermination des tyrans, completed in Berlin in 1936, was done by Vladimir Sikorski, Nabokov’s nephew and professional conference interpreter.31 Similarly, the translation into French of The Defense/La Défense Loujine was carried out by friends of Nabokov, the Cannacs: During the first week of January [1963], Nabokov began checking the French La Défense Louijine, translated by his friends Evgenia and René Cannac. The easy relations he could have with them were not the norm. (Boyd 1991: 479)

The collaboration with Denis Roche, whom Nabokov met in Paris in October 1932 (Voronina and Boyd 2014: 198–9), also seems to have been particularly happy,32 as demonstrated by the author’s correspondence – notably the 3 May 1937 postcard to Gleb Struve quoted above – as well as his letters to Véra Nabokov of 30 March 1937 (‘Denis Roche is translating “Spring” excellently,’ qtd in Voronina and Boyd 2014: 336) and of 19 April 1937 (‘Roche’s translation was simply magnificent, but we went over it and corrected for 4 hours – and haven’t completely finished,’ 353). This strategy, however, did not function in the long term. Paradoxically, the celebrity which allowed Nabokov the complete freedom to intervene in the translations into English became the main obstacle for his interventions in the translations into French. Indeed, in order to ensure the quality of the translations of Nabokov’s works into French, Nabokov’s French publisher33

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chose renowned translators, such as Maurice-Edgar Coindreau34 and Raymond Girard. The publisher was most likely attempting to satisfy the demand for excellence asserted by Nabokov (1941) himself concerning the qualities that a good translator required: First of all he must have as much talent, or at least the same kind of talent, as the author he chooses. … Second, he must know thoroughly the two nations and the two languages involved and be perfectly acquainted with all details relating to his author’s manner and methods; also, with the social background of words, their fashions, history and period associations. This leads to the third point: while having genius and knowledge he must possess the gift of mimicry and be able to act, as it were, the real author’s part by impersonating his tricks of demeanor and speech, his ways and his mind, with the utmost degree of verisimilitude.

These translators, who themselves enjoyed a high profile in France and were proud  of their profession, aware of their copyright, and sensitive to the recognition of the authorship of the texts they produced, did not at all appreciate Nabokov’s interventions. They regarded them as an intrusion, and did not hesitate to make this fact known. The extensive correspondence with the French translators, as well as their drafts corrected by Nabokov, allow one to perceive, on the one hand, the extent of the author’s involvement in the translation process, and on the other, the reactions that these interventions aroused. Thus, when Nabokov, as per his habit of collaborative translation, proposed a certain number of corrections to Coindreau and Girard (his translators of Pale Fire/Feu pâle), an ‘epistolary’ conflict broke out. Coindreau, strongly protested, questioning the writer’s legitimacy to intervene in his text: I have not published thirty-three translations without having learnt that a translator has certain imperious duties towards the author whom he translates. He must consult him in order to avoid semantic contradictions, misinterpretations, to resolve insoluble problems which may require makeshift stopgaps. … But a translator’s duties stop there where the author’s begin, duties which may be summarized by one rule: let the translator be master of his own syntax and vocabulary. … Please limit yourself then to correcting semantic errors that I have certainly committed. … I will thus make no change to my text unless it is a case of flagrant mistranslation. (Letter from M.-E. Coindreau to V. Nabokov, 6 January 1964, Nabokov Papers [NYPL])35

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Accustomed throughout his career to a far more permissive collaborative interaction, Nabokov was deeply shocked. He responds: You tell me, Monsieur, that you have published 33 translations. I myself have had more than sixty translators. With many of them I collaborated very closely. Thus, like you I have acquired a certain familiarity with the process. … As for the reader’s scorn, we will not provoke it, provided my translators are willing to agree with me. Given that, up until now, I have allowed myself no interference with your style (or M. Girard’s), the violence of your fighting against thin air does not seem justified to me. You mention your rights as a translator. They are indisputable. Nevertheless, there are borderline cases where our rights overlap. (Letter from V. Nabokov to M.-E. Coindreau, 14 January 1964, Nabokov Papers [NYPL]).

Infuriated by such insolence from his French ‘collaborators’, Nabokov referred the matter to his publishing house in order to claim his right to approve the final version: I don’t want to hear Coindreau say anymore that I am guilty of barbarisms. While he is the one guilty of being imprecise. The most important thing is that my French is sufficient to see more precisely than he does that his French does not correspond to my English.36 In any case, I have to see the proofs, and the most important thing is that I need to have the last word on deciding for such and such a translation, even if this last word is necessarily a courteous compromise. (Letter from V. Nabokov to Gallimard, 19 January 1964, Nabokov Papers [NYPL])

From then on, Nabokov no longer worked with Coindreau, but rather Raymond Girard, who translated his novel The Gift/Le Don.37 Nabokov’s letters to Girard show great meticulousness, and the very close attention the author paid to the revision of translated work. After having expressed his high appreciation of the text provided by Girard – ‘Your translation is of admirable quality and I am deeply impressed by the faithful and elegant manner in which you have overcome the difficulties of the text’ (Letter from V. Nabokov to R. Girard, 9 January 1967, Nabokov Papers [NYPL]) – Nabokov quickly moves on to dissect its every defect by drawing up a typology: The ‘revisions’ which I allowed myself to make are related to four categories of imperfections: errors in translation such as, for example ‘gorge de pigeon’ where we need ‘gris de ramier’, or ‘elle trébuche’ where we need ‘il trébuche’, etc.; terms which are not sufficiently precise, for example, ‘revolver’ where we need ‘pistolet’; small stylistic defects (repetition of words, tautologies – sometimes in the English text!); the spelling of Russian names. (ibid.)

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Nabokov’s epistolary exchanges with his translators show that, for his revisions of the French translations, he developed a specific model of communication. To the extent that the changes mainly concern vocabulary, and were generally very numerous, he prepared a list of his corrections by dividing the page into two. He put ‘we need’ (‘il faut’) on the left and ‘instead of ’ (‘au lieu’) on the right, or vice versa. Some letters are accompanied by lists, dozens of pages long, with the changes Nabokov suggested.38 In the translations of his works into French, Nabokov’s changes focus mainly on lexis. (1) Translator’s version: j’avais enlevé mon manteau Author’s commentary in the margin: mistranslation: should be veston (2a) English version: One such blurry morning, a Sunday, when he and Martha in her beige dress were walking decorously about the snow-powdered garden (2b) Translator’s version: alors qu’il faisait avec Marthe, vêtue de sa robe beige, une bienséante petite promenade dans le jardin enneigé (2c) Author’s version: alors qu’il faisait avec Marthe, vêtue de sa robe beige, une bienséante petite promenade dans le jardin saupoudré de neige.39

Towards the end of his life, Nabokov spoke of his mastery of French: ‘French or rather my French, which is something quite special, does not submit very well to the tortures of my imagination. Its syntax forbids me certain liberties that I take quite naturally with the other two languages’ (Nabokov 1975a). Nevertheless, despite this opinion which may seem reserved,40 Nabokov sometimes allowed himself more freedom of expression, as he did for the translations into English. Passionate about lexical creativity and especially puns, Nabokov could not resist, for instance, the temptation to coin certain neologisms, as witnessed in his corrections to the typescript of Georges Magnane’s (Nabokov Papers [NYPL]) French translation of King, Queen, Knave (Nabokov 2010). (3a) English version: Then there was the high-class fop in a double-breasted jacket, very wide in the shoulders, and ultra-tight around the hips, and with incredibly

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elephantine trouser legs the tremendous cuffs of which practically concealed his shoes. (46) (3b) Translator’s version: Et puis, il y avait le véritable gandin en version croisé très large d’épaules et très ajusté autour des hanches, dont l’incroyable pantalon à pattes d’éléphant avait d’énormes revers cachant pratiquement ses chaussures. (61) (3c) Author’s version: Et puis, il y avait le véritable gandin en version croisé très large d’épaules et très ajusté autour des hanches, dont le pantalon éléphantesque avait d’énormes revers cachant pratiquement ses chaussures. (61) (4a) English version: Franz reached a plausible street corner. After much fussing and squinting he discovered the red blur of the bus stop. (23–4) (4b) Translator’s version: Franz parvint à un coin de rue plausible. Après beaucoup d’agitation et de clignotements d’yeux, il découvert la tache rouge de l’arrêt d’autobus. (34) (4c) Author’s version: Franz parvint à un coin de rue plausible. Après beaucoup d’agitation et de louchement, il découvert la tache rouge de l’arrêt d’autobus. (34)

During the revision of the French translations, we also find Nabokov attempting to perfect the alliterations which characterize his English style: (5a) English version: She smiled, only just baring her incisors, and this contented, precious smile lingered on her face several instants. (14) (5b) Translator’s version: Elle sourit en ne découvrant que ses incisives et ce sourire satisfait, affecté, s’attarda quelques instants sur son visage. (23) (5c) Author’s version: Elle sourit en ne découvrant que ses incisives et ce sourire ravissant et repu s’attarda quelques instants sur son visage. (23)

Nabokov replaces the translator’s more neutral and generic terms (sourire satisfait, affecté) by an alliteration (sourire ravissant et repu), without sacrificing (which he does not hesitate to do elsewhere lexical fidelity to sonic elegance), since the suggested translation is quite close to the original English.

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Though rare for the translations into French, Nabokov sometimes rewrote an entire sentence, as in the following case, also from the corrected typescript of the French translation of King, Queen, Knave: (6a) English version: Those rentable objects grow accustomed to their chance owner remarkably fast, becoming part of his life simply and trustfully. (262) (6b) Translator’s version: L’heureux propriétaire de l’un de ces objets de location avait vite fait de s’y habituer et d’en faire l’un des accessoires simples et fidèles de sa vie. (318) (6c) Author’s version: Ces objets de location ne tardent pas à s’habituer à leur possesseur fortuit en devenant un morceau de sa vie avec candeur et confiance. (318)

In order to explain this last change to the translator, Nabokov writes in the margin, according to his habit, a metadiscursive comment: ‘ “Chance” is not “heureux,” “trustful” is not “fidèle” and the entire sentence is distorted.’ Indeed, besides the lexical changes, the drafts of Nabokov’s translators also contain a large number of metadiscursive comments used by the author in order to argue and explain his corrections. The aforementioned manuscript contains, for instance, the comment: ‘She teaches him three things at once, dance, murder, and love. The beginning of this chapter is a metaphorical combination of three acts’ (185–6). Nabokov’s interventions were not limited to the translations of his works: he did not hesitate to draw up written responses for his interviews. As an example, we may mention the famous Apostrophes television programme, in which Bernard Pivot asks questions, authorized by Nabokov himself, to which the latter reads aloud his answers in all likelihood written in advance (Nabokov 1975a). Highly conscious of his image, and of the erroneous interpretations which the public may have of it, Nabokov always demanded to reread and correct the texts of his interviews before their publication. This was, for instance, the case for his interview with Jane Howard. The Life magazine journalist sent her questions to the author, and Nabokov sent her back his written answers with the following postscript: Dear Miss Howard, allow me to add the following three points: 1. My answers must be published accurately and completely: verbatim if quoted; in a faithful version, if not.

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2. I must see the proofs of the interview – semifinal and final. 3. I have the right to correct therein all factual errors and specific slips (‘Mr Nabokov is a small man with long hair,’ etc.) (qtd in Boyd 1991: 485) As he had previously announced in his letter, Nabokov intervened significantly in the interview’s final text: Thanks for letting me see your jottings. I am returning them with my notes and deletions. … I am a poor causeur, and this is why I prepare my answers to interviews in writing. … Please, do not resent my fastidious and fussy alterations. I did take a lot of trouble with the written answers I sent you. (Boyd 1991: 486)

Thus, the strategy of intervening in what would be read and known as ‘his’ text always accompanied the translation of Nabokov’s works into English and, to a lesser extent, into French.41 This strategy was transferred to an entirely different medium which, in one way or another, had his ‘signature’.

Conclusion In the world of collaborative translation, there is a large number of models, a certain number of which are presented and analysed in this volume. This variety of collaborative arrangements creates a broad spectrum in which conflicting modes occasionally meet – from an author stimulating creative liberty in his translator, participating only slightly or not at all in the translation process, or on the contrary, when an author implicates himself in the process actively, to the point that it becomes difficult to distinguish a co-translation from a selftranslation. This last scenario characterizes Nabokov’s own translation activity, and especially the translation of his works into English, insofar as it is not only, and not simply, a re-creation of his works in a language he understands well, but a re-creation in a language which has become the main tool of his creation. The same concern for precision and perfection which led Nabokov to spend hours ‘checking every sentence’ of his translations impelled him to apply this same collaborative model – which consisted in meticulously checking his co-translators’ work – to the texts of his own interviews, as stated earlier. Working in collaboration with Nabokov was certainly a great privilege, but it also necessarily meant working under duress, in a strictly delimited space of freedom, in which the demanding writer always had the last word. Translated by Nicholas Manning

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Notes 1 I would like to thank Brian Boyd, Nabokov’s biographer, for his commentaries and suggestions, which were of precious help in the revision of this chapter. 2 Brian Boyd divides Nabokov’s life into two periods, the Russian years (1899– 1940) and the American years (1940–1977) (see Boyd 1990 and 1991), which corresponds to the writer’s creative activities in two languages: the writing in Russian, before his departure for the USA, and the creation in English, after his emigration. Boyd includes in this ‘American period’ Nabokov’s resettlement in Switzerland, where he lived until his death. Following Boyd, it also seems pertinent to observe the evolution of Nabokov’s translation practice from a chronological point of view. 3 On the genetic approach to writers’ working documents, see Grésillon 1994; de Biasi 2003; Deppman, Ferrer and Groden 2004. 4 I would also like to thank Dmitri Nabokov for having allowed me to consult the Vladimir Nabokov archive in the Manuscript Division of the Library of Congress (Washington, USA) and at the New York Public Library (NY, USA). The letters quoted here are conserved in these two institutions. 5 I indeed apply a genetic approach to the study of the creative process of multilingual writers (see Anokhina 2014, 2015a, 2015b, 2016). 6 ‘Rough drafts, false scents, half explored trails, dead ends of inspiration, are of little intrinsic importance. An artist should ruthlessly destroy his manuscripts after publication, lest they mislead academic mediocrities into thinking that it is possible to unravel the mysteries of genius by studying cancelled readings. In art, purpose and plan are nothing; only the results count.’ 7 The first researcher who engaged in a minute analysis of the translations of Nabokov’s texts is unquestionably Jane Grayson (1977), whose pioneering work has remained highly relevant for several generations of researchers. 8 I believe that, as with many multilingual writers and poets, Nabokov used translation as a preparatory stage to his writing activity (see Anokhina 2012a, 2014). 9 This is notably the case with his novel Отчаяние/Despair. He also translated the short story Камера обскура/Laughter in the Dark. This story was first translated by Winifred Roy and published in London in 1936 by Jonathan Long. Nabokov was so disappointed by this text however that he retranslated it himself two years later, in 1938. He also translated into English the short story Сказка/A nursery tale. 10 Indeed, Nabokov proceeded in the same way for one of his first works of fiction written in English, The Real Life of Sebastian Knight: in January 1939, ‘unsure of his English’, he asked an Anglophone friend Lucie Léon Noël to go over his manuscript (Boyd 1990: 503).

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11 This quote is drawn from a postcard from Nabokov to Gleb Struve in 1936. Translation here and later is by myself and by the translator of this volume. 12 This term could also be translated by carefully. Considering Nabokov’s extreme meticulousness, however, which could even be qualified as obsessional or tyrannical, the choice of the term scrupulously seems to us more appropriate. 13 Cf. Anokhina 2012a. 14 Cf. Anokhina 2014. 15 Letter to G. Struve (Nabokov Papers [LoC]: Box 22, Folder 6). Struve’s translation of Passazhir [The Passenger] was already published in English in Lovat Dickinson’s Magazine, cf. Nabokov 1934. 16 Postcard [May 3 1937] to G. Struve (Nabokov Papers [LoC]: Box 22, Folder 6). 17 Letter to P. A. Pertzoff, 1 August 1941 (Nabokov Papers [NYPL]), published in English in Shrayer (1999b: 140). 18 They had been friends since their youth. On this point, see for instance Dragunoiu (2011: 51) and Boyd (1990: 165–6 and 199–200). The epistolary exchanges accompanied this friendship throughout their life (see Belodubrovskii 1999; Belodubrovskii and Dolinin 2003, 2004). 19 The consultation of Dmitri’s translation manuscripts allows us to establish a very precise vision of their collaboration. 20 M. Scammel (2007) explains the reasons which led Nabokov to collaborate with him. 21 Nabokov had planned to have Dar/The Gift translated in 1946 by an experienced translator, Bernard Guerney, but the lack of a financial agreement (the translator was claiming 50 per cent of the copyright) prevented this collaboration (Boyd 1991: 54). 22 See for instance the typescript of the translation of Cloud, Castle, Lake, which includes some corrections by Véra Nabokov (Nabokov Papers [LoC]: Box 8, Folder 22). 23 The rewriting of the translations of Scammel and Dmitri Nabokov is also considerable. 24 On this subject, see in Russian Shrayer (2000: 277) and in English Shrayer (1999b: 131): ‘Despite a very high number of corrections and emendations, Nabokov was very pleased with Pertzoff ’s work and hoped to continue co-translating with him.’ 25 Thanks to analysis of the drafts of an English translation of Cloud Castle, Lake, I (Anokhina 2014, Anokhina forthcoming) have shown with concrete examples how Nabokov learnt to polish his sentences in English on the basis of Pertzoff ’s formulations. On Nabokov’s style, see Anokhina (2012b). 26 Regarding the financial terms of their collaboration, the translator was being paid 30 per cent of what Nabokov received for the publication of his stories in journals. On this subject, see Nabokov’s letters to Pertzoff on 13 March and 29 March 1947, and Pertzoff ’s letter to Nabokov on 20 March 1947.

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27 As indicated at the beginning of this chapter, I am dealing in this contribution only with the translations of Nabokov’s works into French and English. I will thus not analyse here his self-translations of Conclusive Evidence (as Drugie berega) and Lolita into Russian. 28 This translation, which absorbed the writer for many years and even cost him his friendship with Edmund Wilson, was controversial before and after its release: ‘Professor Arndt had attempted the tour de force of translating the whole of Onegin into the original iambic tetrameter and rather intricate stanza form. Mr Nabokov decided that this could not be done with any real fidelity to the meaning and undertook to make a “literal” translation which maintains an iambic base but quite often simply jolts into prose. The results of this have been more disastrous than those of Arndt’s heroic effort. It has produced a bald and awkward language which has nothing in common with Pushkin or with the usual writing of Nabokov’ (Wilson 1965). Boyd (1991: 491–9) goes into detail concerning their friendship and their ‘controversy’. Karlinsky (1979: 23) also mentions this. 29 Begun in the 1950s, the translation of Eugene Onegin was only published in 1964. Nabokov even interrupted the writing of his novel Ada, or Ardor to devote himself entirely to the revision of Eugene Onegin for the new edition. For more detail on the translation and revision process, see Boyd (1991: 318–20 and 519–20). The novel Ada, or Ardor was published in 1969. 30 It is indeed important to understand that it was not question, in any of these practices, of an obsessive personality trait, but above all of a true creative need. Nabokov (1959: 7) spoke of this need himself: ‘To abridge, expand, or otherwise alter or cause to be altered, for the sake of belated improvement, one’s own writings in translation.’ 31 The NYPL archives contain the manuscript of the French translation. Sikorski’s text contains Nabokov’s autograph corrections. The story was published in French in 1964 in the Mercure de France. 32 Denis Roche was notably responsible for translating Printemps à Fialta (Vesna v Fialte), Le Guetteur (Soglyadataj) and La Défense Loujine (Voronina and Boyd 2014: 607). His translations, however, seem not to have seen the light of day. 33 Gallimard published Lolita in French in 1959, closely followed by the publication of Feu pâle and Le Don, along with other novels. 34 Since 1981, a translation prize has borne the name of Maurice-Edgar Coindreau, who introduced such great twentieth-century American writers as Faulkner, Steinbeck, Hemingway and Styron into France. The prize is awarded every year to a literary translation from American English. 35 Italics are mine. Coindreau wrote to Nabokov on behalf of himself and Girard. For a discussion of both translators see Boyd (1991: 479–80). 36 In reality, an analysis of Nabokov’s manuscripts, correspondence and the ensemble of his published work shows a remarkable mastery of the French language.

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Collaborative Translation Nabokov himself declared to Andrew Field that he could have become a great French writer (Field 1977: 141). For the analysis of the manuscripts of Dar, see Grayson 1999 in Russian and Grayson 1994 in English. When Nabokov suggested something, it went without saying that these changes had to be integrated. In receiving a new version, Nabokov checked that the modifications had indeed been made. It is interesting to note that Nabokov transposed this collaborative ‘French’ model onto his late translations into English, notably Michael Glenny’s translation of the novel Mary (Машенька), in 1969–70. Example (1) is drawn from Nabokov’s corrections to the typescript copy of Feu pale (Nabokov Papers [NYPL]: 8), Girard and Coindreau’s translation of Pale Fire; (2a) from the 2010 English edition of Pale Fire (155); (2b-c) from the typescript copy of Roi, dame, valet Georges Magnane’s translation of King, Queen, Knave with Nabokov’s corrections (Nabokov Papers [NYPL]:188). As stated earlier, Nabokov declared elsewhere that he could have become a French writer! Given the writers’ often contradictory declarations, genetic analysis of their working documents allows one to establish a more objective view of the reality of their creative practices. Concerning Nabokov’s mastery of French, basing my interpretation on numerous documents (printed works, drafts, translations and correspondence), I have argued that French had as much importance in his creative process as English and Russian (Anokhina 2013). I have not mentioned here the French translation Ada ou L’Ardeur: Chronique familiale [Ada, or Ardor: a Family Chronicle]. Given the novel’s length and the extent of Nabokov’s corrections – he took four to five hours a day to reread the French text which was given to him (on this subject, Boyd 1991: 644 and 646) – analysis of this translation is outside the scope of this chapter. The drafts of this translation, revised by the author, may be found at the New York Public Library (Nabokov Papers [NYPL]).

Works cited Anokhina, O. (2012a). ‘Le rôle du multilinguisme dans l’activité créative de Vladimir Nabokov’. In Multilinguisme et créativité littéraire, edited by O. Anokhina, 15–24. Louvain-la-Neuve: Academia Bruylant/L’Harmattan. Anokhina, O. (2012b). ‘Vladimir Nabokov: du style et des langues’. La Licorne, special issue ‘Dans l’atelier du style. Du manuscrit à l’œuvre publiée’, edited by S. Bikialo and S. Pétillon: 98: 211–20. Anokhina, O. (2013). ‘Nabokov et la langue française: étude de l’utilisation du français dans les œuvres publiées, les manuscrits, les traductions et la correspondance de

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Vladimir Nabokov’. Presentation at the International Conference Vladimir Nabokov et la France, Université Paris IV-Sorbonne, Paris, 30–31 May, 1 June 2013. Anokhina, O. (2014). ‘Traduction et ré-écriture chez Vladimir Nabokov: genèse d’une œuvre en trois langues’. GENESIS Revue internationale de critique génétique, special issue ‘Traduire’, 38: 111–27. Anokhina, O. (2015a). ‘Traductions vers l’anglais de Vladimir Nabokov: traduction ou auto-traduction?’ GLOTTOPOL, Revue de sociolinguistique en ligne, special issue ‘L’autotraduction: une perspective sociolinguistique’, 25: 198–210, glottopol.univrouen.fr/numero_25.html (accessed 5 February 2016). Anokhina, O. (2015b). ‘Étudier les écrivains plurilingues grâce aux manuscrits’. In Écrire en langues: plurilinguisme et littératures, edited by O. Anokhina and F. Rastier. Paris: Éditions des Archives Contemporaines. Anokhina, O. (2016). ‘Multilingual writers and metalinguistic awareness: Can we use manuscripts as a basis for a typology of scriptural practices?’ In Recherches en écriture: regards pluriels/Writing Research from Multiple Perspectives, edited by S. Plane, C. Bazerman, C. Donahue and F. Rondelli. Nancy: Éditions Universitaires de Lorraine. Anokhina, O. (forthcoming). ‘Peter Pertzoff, un traducteur ideal de Vladimir Nabokov’, In Traduire avec l’auteur, edited P. Hersant. Paris: Presses de l’université Paris Sorbonne. Belodubrovskii, E. (1999). ‘Pis’ma k Glebu Struve’ [Letters to Gleb Struve]. Zvezda, 4: 23–39, http://magazines.russ.ru/zvezda/1999/4/gleblet.html (accessed 5 February 2016). Belodubrovskii, E. and Dolinin, A. (2003). ‘Pis’ma V.V. Nabokova k G.P. Struve. Chast’ pervaia: 1925-1931’ [V. Nabokov’s Letters to Gleb Struve. Part 1: 1925-1931]. Zvezda 11: 115–50. Ed. with an introduction and annotations by A. Dolinin. Belodubrovskii, E. and Dolinin, A. (2004). ‘Pis’ma V.V. Nabokova k G.P. Struve. Chast’ vtoraia: 1931-1935’ [V. Nabokov’s Letters to Gleb Struve. Part 2: 1931-1935], Zvezda 4: 115–40. Ed. with an introduction and annotations by A. Dolinin, http:// zvezdaspb.ru/index.php?page=8&nput=69 (accessed 5 February 2016). Biasi de, P.-M. (2003). Génétique des textes. Paris: Armand Colin. Boyd, B. (1990). Vladimir Nabokov. The Russian Years. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Boyd, B. (1991). Vladimir Nabokov. The American Years. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Butler, S. (2012). ‘Document: Nabokov’s Notes’. The Paris Review, 29 February, http:// www.theparisreview.org/blog/2012/02/29/document-nabokov%E2%80%99s-notes/ (accessed 5 February 2016). Deppman, J., Ferrer, D. and Groden, M., eds. (2004), Genetic Criticism: Texts and Avanttextes. Pennsylvania: University Pennsylvania Press. Deshusses, P. (2010). ‘Le traducteur est un écrivain’, Le nouveau bulletin de l’ADEAF, special issue Traduction 110: 6–8.

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Dragunoiu, D. (2011). Vladimir Nabokov and Poetics of Liberalism. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Field, A. (1977). Nabokov, His Life in Part. New York: Penguin. Grayson, J. (1977). Nabokov Translated. A Comparison of Nabokov’s Russian and English Prose. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Grayson, J. (1994). ‘Washington’s Gift: Materials Pertaining to Nabokov’s Gift in the Library of Congress’. Nabokov Studies 1: 21–68, http://muse.jhu.edu.gate3.inist.fr/ journals/nabokov_studies/v001/1.grayson.pdf (accessed 5 February 2016). Grayson, J. (1999). ‘Метаморфозы Дара’ [The Metamorphosis of The Gift. В.В.Набоков: Pro et Contra. Личность и творчество Владимира Набокова в оценке русских и зарубежных мыслителей и исследователей. Антология [V. V. Nabokov: Pro and Contra. Personality and Work of Vladimir Nabokov in the Eyes of Russian and Foreign Thinkers and Academics. Anthologye]. Edited by A. Dolinine, B. Avérine and M. Malikova, Saint-Petersburg, Издательство Русского Христианского Гуманитарного Инстит у та [РХГИ], Collection Russkuj Put’, Tome 1. Grésillon, A. (1994). Éléments de critique génétique. Paris: PUF. Karlinsky, S. (1979). ‘Introduction. Dear Volodya, Dear Bunny; or, Affinities and Disagreements’. In Correspondence between Vladimir Nabokov and Edmund Wilson 1940-1971, edited by S. Karlinsky. New York, Hagerstown, San Francisco andLondon: Harper & Row. Laurin, D. (1993). ‘Source sûre’. Interview with Nancy Huston. Voir, 16–22 September: 25. Nabokov, V. (1934). ‘The Passenger’. Lovat Dickinson’s Magazine 2/6. Translated by G. Struve (June): 719–25. Nabokov, V. (1941). ‘The Art of Translation’. The New Republic, 4 August, https:// newrepublic.com/article/62610/the-art-translation (accessed 10 March 2016). Nabokov, V. (1959). ‘Foreword’. In Invitation to a Beheading, 5–8. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons. Nabokov, V. (1963). The Gift. Translated by M. Scammell and D. Nabokov in collaboration with V. Nabokov. New York: Putnam’s Sons. Nabokov, V. (1965) [1962]. Feu pâle. Translated by R. Girard and M.-E. Coindreau. Paris: Gallimard. Nabokov, V. (1967) [1963]. Le Don. Translated by R. Girard. Paris: Gallimard. Nabokov, V. (1971) [1968]. Roi, dame, valet. Translated by G. Magnane. Paris: Gallimard. Nabokov, V. (1975a). Interviewed by B. Pivot. Apostrophes, 30 May, https://www.ina.fr/ video/CPB75050355 (accessed 5 February 2016). Nabokov, V. (1975b). ‘Translator’s Introduction’. In Aleksandr Pushkin, Eugene Onegin: A Novel in Verse, vol. 1, 1–88. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

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Nabokov, V. (1994) [1969]. Ada ou L’Ardeur: Chronique familiale [Ada, or Ardor: a Family Chronicle]. Translated by G. Chahine with the collaboration of J.-B. Blandenier, transl. revised by the author. Paris: Gallimard. Nabokov, V. (2010) [1968]. King, Queen, Knave. Translated by D. Nabokov in collaboration with V. Nabokov. London: Penguin books. Nabokov Papers [LoC]. Manuscript Division. Library of Congress, Washington. Nabokov Papers [NYPL]. Berg Collection. New York Public Library, New York. Scammell, M. (2007). ‘Translation is a bastard form. An interview with Michael Scammel’, by Y. Leving. NOJ/НОЖ: Nabokov Online Journal, vol. 1, http://www. michaelscammell.com/assets/interviews/Translation-Is-Bastard-Form-Interview.pdf (accessed 5 February 2016). Shrayer, M. (1999a). ‘After Rapture and Recapture: Transformations in the Drafts of Nabokov’s Stories’. The Russian Review 58 (October): 548–64. Shrayer, M. (1999b). ‘Nabokov: Letters to the American Translator’. AGNI 50 (October): 128–45. Shrayer, M. (2000). Nabokov: Temy i variatsii. Saint Petersburg: Akademicheskii proekt. Voronina, O. and Boyd, B., eds. and transl. (2014). Vladimir. Nabokov. Letters to Véra. London: Penguin Classics. Wilson, E. (1965). ‘The Strange Case of Pushkin and Nabokov’, The New York Review of Books, 15 July, http://www.nybooks.com/contributors/edmund-wilson/ (accessed 5 February 2016).

7

Günter Grass and His Translators: From a Collaborative Dynamic to an Apparatus of Control? Céline Letawe

Günter Grass was always conscious of the role translation played in the transmission of his work, which was reputed difficult to translate. From the very beginning, he was in contact with his translators, giving them information about his novels in the form of documentation, and maintaining correspondence with them in which he would respond to questions in a systematic way.1 Moreover, he was always committed to making possible a ‘direct collaboration’2 (AdK 3404), as he called it, by giving his translators the possibility of asking their questions in person. Noting, however, that some translations were not satisfactory to him,3 he took the initiative, in order to improve their quality, of organizing working seminars over several days in which translators could talk with him (and among themselves), before publication, about the difficulties encountered. We are witness here to a shift away from occasional collaboration in a writer–translator pair, towards a collective, proactive and systematic interaction. The idea first emerged in the mid-1960s but was only made concrete later, after Grass participated in events during which his translators began to take their place at his side. Thus, in 1973, he was invited to the sixth ‘Esslinger Gespräch’, an annual seminar of literary translators which concluded with a 2-hour meeting between a writer and some of his translators, with each reading passages in his or her language.4 On 20 December 1976, after taking part in another event of this kind, Grass expressed his idea to his American publisher, Helen Wolff: ‘to organise, a few months after the publication of the original, a meeting with the translators, to be available as author during three or four days in order to discuss

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the principle problems. … The whole process could become a model’ (Hermes 2003: 236).5 The German writer was searching for a new modus operandi that other authors could reproduce in turn. The first seminar took place in the January and February of 1978: the author worked during five days with nine of his translators on the translation of his novel Der Butt. It was an ‘experiment’ (AdK 9902, AdK 7015, Frielinghaus 2002: 12), both in the sense of ‘experimentation’ (a laboratory for both author and translators where new practices may be tested) and of a daring attempt, a risky venture.6 The novelty of this seminar depended moreover on the contract drawn up with foreign publishers. Indeed, in 1977, Grass added a clause stipulating that, at the author’s request, the foreign publisher would commit to the translator participating in an international meeting, during which he or she would be able to discuss with the author certain problems posed by the translation of the work. As per the agreement, all travel costs would be paid by the foreign publisher, and the living expenses during the stay by Grass (AdK 9902). Grass does not set his conditions then merely with regards to the translators, but also his own publisher and the foreign publishers, for whom such seminars represent a significant expense. Since that time, there has been a seminar for each novel (including for the preparation of the retranslation of The Tin Drum in 2005, fifty years after its initial publication), up until Grimms Wörter in 2011. To this may be added a final seminar in February 2013, which brought together nine translators around the author’s poetic production. Grass did not hesitate to affirm that these translator seminars numbered among his most rewarding professional experiences (AUD 367), and the translators who expressed themselves publicly did so in a very positive way (I will return later to this point). The experience thus seems to have been successful, but nevertheless raises numerous questions: What mode of collaboration was practised in these seminars? What are the stakes of this dynamic, besides the improvement of the quality of the translations themselves? On the basis of the correspondence and protocols kept at the Akademie der Künste in Berlin, recordings conserved at the GrassMedienarchiv in Bremen, and comparisons between Grass’s original and several translations in English, French and Dutch, I will attempt not only to retrace this process but also to evaluate its result, in order to better identify the issues linked to this type of enterprise. To this end, I will concentrate on two seminars: the very first one (Der Butt in 1978) and the last one concerning a novel (Grimms Wörter in 2011).

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Der Butt, 1978: From collaboration to control? Facilitating the translators’ work The protocol of the first seminar, a document of fifty-two typewritten pages7 (AdK 2199), specifies that except for an introductory presentation of the structure of the book, the discussion between the author and his translators always starts with translators’ questions. A reading of the document shows that the issues discussed are varied, from the use of dialect to proverbs and idiomatic expressions, by way of allusions/citations, plays on words, neologisms and realia. Grass sometimes draws his translators’ attention to stylistic peculiarities, or to the irony of certain passages, but these interventions are rare. The type of problems tackled shows that it is about helping translators, not to interpret the novel correctly, but to understand the elements which could be foreign to them because related to a language, culture or history different from their own. A large part of the discussions specifically concerns realia: those elements unique to the culture of a given people or country which do not exist among other peoples, in other countries, and which are thus sometimes considered as untranslatable. Such elements are very numerous in Grass’s novels, and even appear as characteristic of them. For instance, a part of the novel, ‘entitled Father’s Day’, describes the men who wander around Berlin on this national holiday, among whom are fans of ‘Hertha und Tasmania’ (577/461).8 The majority of German readers immediately know what these two names refer to, but the situation is quite different for foreign readers. Confronted with this type of expression in the twenty-first century, the text’s translators would search on the internet – but in 1978, it was not so simple. Grass explained to them that Hertha and Tasmania are Berlin sporting clubs, more specifically West-Berliner (the action of this part of the book takes place a year after the construction of the Berlin Wall). The author thus facilitates the task of his translators and avoids the need for them to do research which, for certain realia, could turn out to be fastidious. Yet one must note here that the author, presenting himself as the holder of the ‘truths’ of his culture, has the potential to exert a form of cultural control. It is interesting to observe how the three translators studied in the framework of the present chapter approach the question differently. The American, Ralph Manheim, chooses an explanation, directly adding a word to the text in order to indicate to his readers the category which this foreign cultural reality belongs to: ‘the Herta and Tasmania teams’ (Grass 1999: 455 – an example of what

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Michel Ballard (2001) calls incrementialisation). The French translator Jean Amsler, on the other hand, repeats both realia without explanation, ‘Hertha et Tasmania’ (Grass 1979b: 445). Yet the Dutch translator Peter Kaai simply omits them (Grass 1981: 521). The same processes recur in their respective versions, applied to other realia, which seems to indicate tendencies specific to each of these translators.9 The French translator (the only one of the three who neither participated in the seminar nor read the protocol) keeps the text with no explanation, thus complicating the reading, and even rendering it opaque in certain places. The Dutch translator removes the offending phrase, avoiding the complication, but also losing the cultural element so dear to Grass. The American translator, however, keeps the foreign element and adds the class of object to which it belongs in order to allow it to be understood. Even if this last strategy seems the most appropriate to the novel, visibly Grass did not impose it on his translators. It is important to note that this type of seminar also facilitates the translators’ work for the reason that it brings together translators of languages which are sometimes close; they are thus confronted with similar difficulties and may share common solutions. This is indeed the case for the Scandinavian translators for example (Ørgaard 2002: 99). As Grass repeatedly points out in interviews, the seminars allow not only for a collaboration between author and translator but also among translators themselves (AUD 522; AUD 956).10 Even if each translator is alone before her or his own language, the possibility of ‘collective work’11 (Per Øhrgaard 2002: 99) does indeed exist.

Avoiding errors in translations Among the three translations of Der Butt analysed here, two have received official recognition: the Dutch translator received the Martinus Nijhoff Prize, the American the Schlegel-Tieck-Preis. In contrast, the translation by the French translator, who did not participate in the seminar as we saw, is problematic. It notably contains additions and omissions, which were reported to Grass by a German scholar two years after its publication (AdK 9935). Comparing his translation with that of the American Ralf Manheim, who did not participate in the seminar but appears to have read the protocol, suggests that the errors in the Frenchman’s translation might certainly have been avoided had Amsler participated in the seminar or read attentively the protocol, which had also been sent to him. Two examples of idiomatic expressions addressed by Grass during the seminar, and poorly translated by the French translator, illustrate this hypothesis. First of

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all, the lexicalized expression ‘mit jemandem Pferde stehlen’, literally ‘to steal horses with someone’, is used in German to express the idea that one could run wild with someone, or follow someone into hell. Grass does not limit himself to explaining the expression to his translators, but suggests to them another image: the German expression ‘Berge versetzen’, which exists moreover in English (to move mountains). This is the solution that the Dutch translator Peter Kaai chooses: ‘bergen verzetten’ (465). The American Ralf Manheim uses another expression, common in English even if a little outdated: to ‘go through fire and water’ (404). Yet the French translator Jean Amsler decides to translate it literally: ‘voler des chevaux’ (397), which corresponds to no idiomatic French expression and makes the passage difficult to understand or even incomprehensible for the Francophone reader. A second example is even more revealing: ‘etwas mit langen Zähnen essen’ (438), literally ‘to eat something with long teeth’, which Grass clarifies during the seminar by the phrase ‘es schmeckte ihm nicht mehr’ (he no longer liked what he ate). While the Dutch translator keeps the image, which indeed exists in his language (‘met lange tanden at’, 494), and the American renders the sense by using a very English expression (‘he’d been turning his nose at her peasoup’, 432), the French translator commits a significant mistranslation: mangeait à belles dents (he ate with great appetite) (421).

To encourage and orient Grass’s language, a far cry from standard idiom and its lexicalized expressions, often enjoys playing with the possibilities of German syntax, and the protocol specifies that the author encourages his own translators to ‘dare the unfamiliar’12 (AdK 2199) by keeping his original structures as much as possible; the writer insists on the fact that he ‘fractures the German language through his writing, and that the translators should have the courage to do the same’13 (ibid.). These encouragements are not neutral: Grass clearly encourages his translators to adopt an ‘exoticizing’, or in Venuti’s (1995: 20) terms ‘foreignizing’, approach to translation. By inciting his translators to lead the reader towards a text, and not the other way around, Grass takes a stand against the normalization or levelling of his work.14 In an interview given in 1999, Grass moreover evokes the ‘danger that literature be weakened by translation’15 (AUD 522). Faced with such a risk, Grass mentions three possible reactions: to translate nothing at all, to criticize translations after their publication, or to organize seminars for translators. Grass’s position is unsurprising: he pleads for a certain ‘faithfulness’ to the original. As we see in the correspondence, this old question of faithfulness

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played an important role in the seminar discussions. Grass esteems that ‘a good part of faithfulness to the original is necessary and desirable, given that the aim of the novel [Der Butt] is not to transmit simple facts’16 (AdK 9903/1). Conversely, as he explains in an interview in 1991, he does not want readers to be consciously aware that they are reading a translated text (AUD 680).17 What he wants is a compromise between faithfulness and liberty – ‘a little liberty’18 (ibid.), to use his words.

A system of surveillance, or a liberating effect? On two occasions prior to the conception of the seminars, Grass added new clauses to the contract aimed at the foreign publishers. These clauses show his desire to control the translations of his works: in 1964, the text indicates that every translation must be presented for approval before being sent to the printers (AdK 9889/5); in 1976, Grass specifies that the translations will be subject to an evaluation process (AdK 10242–3 and 9901/1). The procedure is not new, but in becoming an integral part of the contract it takes on a legal value, as does the translators’ participation in the seminars. In this sense, the seminars seem to be part of a larger system of oversight, in which author and publisher attempt to retain maximum control over the fate of a work in a foreign language. Contrary to certain publishing houses, however, for whom Grass’s distrust is an insult,19 the reactions of those among his translators who have spoken in public on the issue seem generally positive. This enthusiasm was expressed, among other times, in 2002, in a work published on the occasion of Grass’s seventy-fifth birthday: Der Butt spricht viele Sprachen. Grass-Übersetzer erzählen (The Turbot Speaks Many Languages. Grass’s Translators Speak) (Frielinghaus 2002). It is a rare book, featuring thirty or so texts, in which Grass’s translators take the floor in order to speak about their work, in a format they have chosen: from letters to narratives, by way of the fairy tale and theoretical reflections inspired by the seminar discussions (e.g. Fontcuberta 2002: 130–5). The Italian translator Bruna Bianchi (2002: 41) thus exclaims: ‘Never have translators been happier than we were,’20 the Spanish translator Pilar Estelrich Arce (2002: 142) proposes Grass to be a new patron of translators, and on several occasions the translators who speak of Grass present themselves as a ‘family’21 (86, 128, 189), an image often used by Grass himself and taken up by the media. According to Bruna Bianchi (37), Grass even ‘liberated’ his translators by organizing these seminars: thanks to his encouragements, she claims, they freed themselves from the fear they may feel before publishers and readers.22 We must

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of course relativize: the publication context of this collection of homages implies that only enthusiastic translators expressed themselves. If certain translators were critical concerning the seminars organized by Grass, and sometimes refused to participate in them, their voices have left no trace in these pages. If we are to believe Grass’s words in 1983, we may moreover have the impression that a certain control was also exerted by the translators on the author: I have never been questioned with such rigor, such minutious and painful precision, as I was by my translators. … Translators are the most rigorous readers. They discover the author’s tricks. They notice when he cheats. They know his inconsistencies. I willingly exposed myself to this tribunal, and I did so, in my opinion, for the good of the translations to come.23 (AdK 4498)

Nevertheless, what could be a challenging of the author by himself is in reality not one at all, since the ‘tribunal’ takes place ‘for the good of the translations’, and since this potential control of the translators exerted on the author does not affect the work of writing (while, in contrast, the control exerted by the author on the translators clearly affects the work of translation itself).

Grimms Wörter, 2011: ‘Become authors!’ The seminar that took place from 14 to 16 March 2011 devoted to Grimms Wörter: Eine Liebeserklärung shows that Grass intended to give great liberties to his translators. The event was special, first because it was public,24 and secondly because its explicit goal was primarily to tackle the famous question of translatability: Can a book as thoroughly ‘German’ as Grimms Wörter indeed be translated? The difficulties are evident from the very first pages: first of all the wordplay with initials which structures the entirety of the book (while the Lithuanian alphabet, to take just one example, has no X, Q, nor Y), then the link with the Brothers Grimm’s dictionary and the quotations drawn from it (Grass thematizes the history of the German language and culture). Grass’s publisher went as far as to decree a moratorium on foreign licences, which could only be sold to other publishing houses after the seminar had taken place. By way of illustration, here are the first lines of the book: IM ASYL Von A wie Anfang bis Z wie Zettelkram. Wörter von altersher, die abgetan sind oder abseits im Angstrad laufen, und andere, die vorlaut noch immer bei Atem sind: ausgewiesen, abgeschoben nach anderswohin. Ach, alter Adam!

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A recording kept in Bremen allows one to follow the discussion between Grass and nine of his translators (AUD 1716). It becomes clear very quickly that the majority of translators present consider the book to be truly untranslatable. Only two translators seem to be of a different opinion: the Dutch translator Jan Gielkens and the Danish translator Per Øhrgaard. They draw attention to the fact that because their own languages are close to German, they are able to conserve certain words without having to explain them. The American translator Michael Henry Heim is absent, but sends a letter to the translators present in order to plead for the translation of the book into all the languages concerned, an enterprise that is possible, according to him, on condition that certain German words are conserved and explained in parentheses: IM ASYL, OR, IN EXILE From A as in Anfang (start) to Z as in Zettelkram (scraps and ends). Words of another age, once animate, now racked on the wheel of anxiety, and words, albeit alive and audacious, set aside, apart. Ah, ancient Adam!25

The reactions of the translators present, however, are rather reserved. They raise the objection that the book risks becoming too long, and may lose the literary and linguistic play which characterizes it. Grass remains confident: he encourages his translators to ‘appropriate the text and to write something in their respective languages, in relation to the history of their respective languages, to invent, in some way to become authors’26 (Scherle 2011). He goes on: This novel is impossible to translate in the traditional sense of the term. But I would like to encourage you to appropriate the content in another manner, to probe it in a new way, perhaps to come occupy centre stage as authors. Imagine something, prolong the book in your own language, create additions wherever additions are needed!27 (qtd in Iliev 2011)

Moreover, Grass invites his translators to thematize their own translational difficulties in their translations themselves. He wants to ‘liberate’ the book ‘for a literary experimentation’, a ‘taking of risks, on both sides’28 (Tenta 2011). He thus encourages his translators to become authors (‘Werdet Autoren!’) and indirectly encourages them to question the relationship between author and translator – a challenge taken up by the Catalan translator Joan Fontcuberta (2002: 130–5). The translators react very modestly, however, and finally ask themselves, in a pragmatic way, if such a text could in fact interest readers. Whatever the case may be, at the moment of the writing of the present chapter,

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only three translations have been published – in Romanian, Dutch and Finnish (Grass 2013, 2015a,b) – and no rights have been sold for translations into other languages.

A final major issue: The translator’s visibility A major issue of the seminars organized by Grass is the visibility which they give to the translators and to their work. This question has for a long time been at the centre of the preoccupations of translators and translation scholars. The position according to which translators should remain hidden behind their translations has long been commonplace. In Juliane House’s famous ‘covert translation’, ‘the translator’s task is to hide behind the metamorphosis of the original’29 (House 2002: 106). Among the famous defenders of ‘covert translation’, we may think, among others, of the French linguist Georges Mounin and his ‘verres transparents’ (‘transparent panes of glass’), a metaphor already used by the Russian author Gogol in the nineteenth century in order to define a translational ideal: ‘To become a pane of glass so transparent we in fact believe there is no glass there at all’ (Mounin 1994: 74ff ). In 1995, Lawrence Venuti went so far as to place the question of the translator’s visibility at the centre of a book: The Translator’s Invisibility. By way of a quotation from the American writer Norman Shapiro, Venuti (1995: 1) highlights what, in his opinion, has sadly become the norm in Anglo-American contexts: 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 it’s there when there are little imperfections – scratches, bubbles. Ideally, there shouldn’t be any. It should never call attention to itself.

The question of the translator’s visibility is posed at three levels: not only at the intra-textual level (inside the text) but also at the para-textual (for example on the cover or in the preface30) and extra-textual levels. The translators’ seminars started by Grass contribute considerably to his translators’ extra-textual visibility. Widely publicized, they call attention to the role of his translators and give them a voice. From the first seminar onwards, Grass invited journalists, recordings were made for radio, he was interviewed by foreign television stations and a press release was sent out (by calling itself a ‘manifesto’, this text signals the political impact it was expected to have: it was meant to call on other authors and editors to do as Grass did – even if it received little attention at the time). Of course, all this is related to a marketing plan, and one cannot ignore the commercial

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considerations at play in this type of process. As the Finnish translator Oili Suominen (2002: 86) remarks, journalists suddenly became interested in translators, which has had positive repercussions on the translator’s image. While Don DeLillo brought together his translators in New York after the publication of his novel Underworld in 1997, it has been rare for authors to follow in Grass’s footsteps. But today, there are signs that his model may have inspired other authors and translators. Since 2007, this type of seminar has been organized once or twice a year in Straelen, Germany, by the Europäisches Übersetzer-Kollegium,31 focusing on German language authors as well known as Julia Frank, Ingo Schulze or Uwe Tellkamp. Its most recent meeting in July 2016 brought together the writer Ilija Trojanow and the translators of Macht und Widerstand. Similarly, the Belgian writer Jean-Philippe Toussaint, ‘convinced of the merits of close collaboration with one’s translators’ (Wuilmart 2014), has been meeting with the translators of his work since 2003, at the European College of Literary Translators in Seneffe, in seminars similar to those organized by Grass, the last of which took place in August 2016 around the novels La Réticence, Fuir, L’Urgence et la Patience and Football.32 Grass’s death on 13 April 2015 presents a number of concluding questions with respect to the future of the translator collaborations he initiated. Will the translators continue to meet, without the author, to focus on the translation of books which, in certain languages, still remain untranslated, or to concentrate on questions of retranslation? Who then will orchestrate these meetings, the translators themselves, or the publishers? When I posed these questions to Steidl Verlag, Grass’s publisher, their response was unequivocal: ‘Nobody really knows yet.’33 Nevertheless, the publishing house is currently preparing a new seminar on Vonne Endlichkait, one of Grass’s posthumous works published in August 2015 – indeed the first time a seminar will take place without the author’s participation and presence. Such gatherings are, however, a significant expense, and it is most likely that – except perhaps on the occasion of an anniversary year – they will be sacrificed in the name of cutting costs. Translated by Nicholas Manning

Notes 1

Cf. for example the correspondence between Grass and the Yugoslavian translator Ivan Ivanji. Literaturarchiv der Berliner Akademie der Künste, AdK 7021 et 3351. The documents kept in these archives are indicated by the abbreviation AdK

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3 4

5

6

7

8 9 10

11 12 13 14

Collaborative Translation followed by the file number. The audio documents housed at the Grass-Medienarchiv will be indicated by the abbreviation AUD followed by their classification number. ‘direkte Zusammenarbeit’ (letter from Grass to his Czech translator Vladimir Kafka, 12 December 1966). Unless explicitly stated, all translations here are by the author of this chapter and this volume’s translator. For example, the Swedish version of The Tin Drum published at the beginning of the 1960s contains errors, omissions and additions. The first ‘Esslinger Gespräch’ took place in 1968 in Esslingen. Since 2004, these annual meetings of literary translators take place in Wolfenbüttel, and thus the name changed (the last ‘Wolfenbütteler Gespräch’ having occurred on the 12th to the 14th of June 2015). ‘Während der Tagung kam mir die Idee, einige Monate nach Erscheinen der Originalausgabe ein Treffen mit Übersetzern zu veranstalten, als Autor 3–4 Tage zur Verfügung zu stehen, die Hauptprobleme zu besprechen … Der gesamte Vorgang könnte beispielhaft sein.’ Cf. the second meaning given by the reference dictionary Duden online: ‘[gewagter] Versuch, Wagnis; gewagtes unsicheres Unternehmen’, http://www.duden.de/ rechtschreibung/Experiment (accessed 17 February 2016). This first protocol was drawn up by Ursula Brackmann, at the time the general secretary of the Verband Deutscher Schriftsteller (the association of German writers) and organizer of the ‘Esslinger Gespräche’. The quotations from Grass’s novels, as well as their translations, are followed by the page number of the editions mentioned in the bibliography at the chapter’s end. In order to confirm this tendency we would have to carry out a systematic comparison of translations beyond the scope of this chapter. ‘ There is not only a dialogue between the translators and the author but also a dialogue of the translators among themselves.’ (‘Es ist ja nicht nur das Gespräch der Übersetzer mit dem Autor sondern auch ein Gespräch der Übersetzer untereinander’). ‘It is not only the meeting with the author which matters but also of the different linguistic groups (comparable difficulties)’ (‘Nicht nur die Begegnung mit dem Autor ist wichtig, sondern auch die einzelnen Sprachgruppen (vergleichbare Schwierigkeiten)’) ‘kollektive Arbeit’. ‘auch Ungewöhliches zu wagen’. ‘dass er mit seiner Schreibweise die deutsche Sprache aufbricht und empfahl, die Übersetzer sollten ebenfalls den Mut dazuhaben.’ As Venuti makes clear, the first criterion of ‘domesticating translation’ is fluidity: one ‘smooths out’ the text, erasing its cultural and linguistic particularities in order to allow the foreign reader to have an agreeable reading experience. Françoise Wuilmart has dealt with this question extensively: ‘The phenomenon of

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17 18 19 20 21 22 23

24 25

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levelling (nivellement) goes to the heart of the problem of all literary translation. Levelling, or “normalization”, that is the action of “planing” a text or flattening it: removing from it all types of relief, cropping its protuberances, filling its gaps, ironing out all of its rough edges, which precisely make it a literary text’ (Wuilmart 2007: 391). ‘Gefahr, dass die Literatur durch die Übersetzung geschwächt werde’. ‘gerade beim “Butt”-Text zeigt es sich, dass ein hohes Maß von Originaltreue notwendig und wünschenswert ist, weil es eben nicht um die Mitteilung platter Fakten geht.’ (Hans Altenheim to Helen Wolff ) ‘sodass der Leser nicht dauernd das Gefühl hat, er liest ein übersetztes Buch.’ ‘ein Stück Freiheit’. See for example a letter from Odeon-Verlag (AdK 9891/4). ‘Wir sind glücklich. Nie waren Übersetzer glücklicher als wir.’ ‘Familie’. ‘Indeed, Grass liberated us! . . . He liberated us from our fear’ (‘Grass hat uns nämlich befreit! . . . er hat uns befreit von unserer Angst’). ‘Nie bin ich so gründlich, so peinlich genau, so peinigend genau ausgequetscht worden wie von meinen Übersetzern . . . die Übersetzer sind die genauesten Leser. Sie kommen dem Autor auf die Schliche. Sie merken, wo er schummelt. Sie kennen seine Ungereimtheiten. Ich habe mich diesem Tribunal gerne ausgesetzt und, wie ich meine, zum Nutzen der später vorliegenden Übersetzungen.’ Jean-Philippe Toussaint, who has organized similar seminars since 2003, seems to echo this letter: ‘The gaze is ruthless. . . . The gaze of translators is extremely precise, it penetrates deeply, sees details that even an attentive reader may overlook. It is good when the author is sure of himself. But we may also feel threatened by ten people bent with a magnifying glass over the text (Anonymous 2014). Besides the many journalists present, high school students were also able to attend the event for the first time and ask questions (see Klatt 2011). The translator justifies this decision in the following way: ‘The approach I propose is twofold: 1) to incorporate a modicum of German into the text, and 2) to include minimal clarification when necessary. I further propose that these insertions appear in parentheses. . . . Since Grimms Wörter contains no parentheses, parentheses in the translation will automatically and unobtrusively signal the translator’s presence.’ My thanks to Michael Henry Heim for permission to quote this letter. ‘sich den Text an zu eignen und jeweils in ihren Sprachen – auch im Umgang mit ihrer eigenen Sprachgeschichte – etwas zu Papier zu bringen, zu erfinden, sozusagen als Autoren aufzutreten.’ ‘Der Roman ist im herkömmlichen Sinne nicht zu übersetzen. Aber ich möchte euch Mut machen, sich den Stoff auf eine andere Weise anzueignen, ihn neu auszuloten, vielleicht als Autoren in den Vordergrund zu treten. Lasst euch was

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Collaborative Translation einfallen, führt das Buch mit eurer Sprache einfach weiter, dichtet hinzu, wo Hinzudichtungen nötig sind! Bringt euch selbst ins Spiel!’ ‘frei geben für ein literarisches Experiment’, ‘ein literarisches Wagnis, auf beiden Seiten.’ ‘Der Übersetzer hat die Aufgabe, sich selbst hinter der Verwandlung des Originals zu verbergen.’ Cf. the study day organized by I. Génin and J. Stephens at Université Sorbonne Nouvelle – Paris 3 on November 23 2013 in the framework of the project TTT (Textes théoriques sur la traduction): ‘Quand les traducteurs prennent la parole: préfaces et projets traductifs/Prefaces: Translators on Translating’. The Collège de Straelen, founded in 1978, is the oldest college of literary translators in the world. It served as a model for several ‘translator residences’ in Europe, including the Collège européen des traducteurs littéraires de Seneffe (CTLS), inaugurated in 1996. The Collège de Straelen and the Collège de Seneffe are both part of the Réseau Européen des Centres de Traducteurs littéraires (RECIT). Reviews of the sessions as well as videos are available on the writer’s blog, www. jptoussaint.com/traductions.html#college-des-traducteurs-de-seneffe [accessed 22 January 2016]. ‘Das weiß jetzt noch niemand so konkret.’ My thanks to Jan Menkens from the publishing house Steidl for this information, communicated in an email on 25 January 2016.

Works cited Anonymous (2014). ‘Jean-Philippe Toussaint et ses traducteurs’, 16 March, www. duboutdeslettres.fr (accessed 22 January 2016). Arce, P. E. (2002). ‘Ein irdischer Schutzheiliger’. In Der Butt spricht viele Sprachen. Grass-Übersetzer erzählen, edited by H. Frielinghaus, 142–7. Göttingen: Steidl. Ballard, M. (2001). Le nom propre en traduction. Anglais-Français. Gap-Paris: Ophrys. Bianchi, B. (2002). ‘Ich erinnere mich’. In Der Butt spricht viele Sprachen. GrassÜbersetzer erzählen, edited by H. Frielinghaus, 35–43. Göttingen: Steidl. Fontcuberta, J. (2002). ‘Das Buch gehört jetzt euch’. In Der Butt spricht viele Sprachen. Grass-Übersetzer erzählen, edited by H. Frielinghaus, 130–5. Göttingen: Steidl. Frielinghaus, H., ed. (2002). Der Butt spricht viele Sprachen. Grass-Übersetzererzählen. Göttingen: Steidl. Grass, G. (1979a). Der Butt, Frankfurt: Fischer (first edition, Darmstadt and Neuwied: Luchterhand, 1977). Grass, G. (1979b). Le Turbot. Translated by J. Amsler. Paris: Seuil. Grass, G. (1981). De Bot. Translated by P. Kaaij. Amsterdam: Meulenhoff.

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Grass, G. (1999). The Flounder. Translated by R. Manheim. London: Vintage (first edition, New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978). Grass, G. (2010). Grimms Wörter: Eine Liebeserklärung, Göttingen: Steidl. Grass, G. (2013). Cuvintele Fratilor Grimm. Translated by Alexandru Al. Sahighian. Bucharest: Polirom. Grass, G. (2015a). De woorden van Grimm. Translated by Jan Gielkens. Amsterdam: Meulenhoff. Grass, G. (2015b). Grimmin sanat. Translated by Oili Suominen. Helsinki: Teos. Hermes, D., ed. (2003). Günter Grass/Helen Wolff. Briefe 1959-1994. Göttingen: Steidl. House, J. (2002). ‘Möglichkeiten der Übersetzungskritik’. In Übersetzen und Dolmetschen. Eine Orientierungshilfe, edited by J. Best and S. Kalina, 101–9. Tübingen-Basel: Francke. Iliev, L. (2011). ‘Alles übersetzbar? Günter Grass im europäischen Übersetzer-Kollegium in Straelen’, 27 April 2011, www.anglogermantranslations.wordpress.com (accessed 22 January 2016). Klatt, M. (2011). ‘Ein Blick auf Günter Grass’, 16 March 2011, www.rp-online.de (accessed 22 January 2016). Mounin, G. (1994). Les Belles infidèles. Lille: Presses Universitaires de Lille (first edition, Paris: Cahiers du Sud, 1955). Ørgaard, P. (2002). ‘Nähe und Ferne’. In Der Butt spricht viele Sprachen. GrassÜbersetzer erzählen, edited by H. Frielinghaus, 99–107. Göttingen: Steidl. Scherle, A. (2011). ‘Der neue Grass. Hoffnungslos unübersetzbar?’, 21 April 2011, www. dw-world.de (accessed 22 January 2016). Suominen, O. (2002). ‘Grass im Griff ’. In Der Butt spricht viele Sprachen. Grass-Übersetzer erzählen, edited by H. Frielinghaus, 84–90. Göttingen: Steidl. Tenta, S. (2011). ‘Günter Grass trifft seine Übersetzer in Straelen. Auf der Suche nach Grimms Wörtern’, 15 March 2011, www.wdr.de (accessed 15 December 2014). Venuti, L. (1995). The Translator’s Invisibility. A History of Translation. London and New York: Routledge. Wuilmart, F. (2007). ‘Le péché de “nivellement” dans la traduction littéraire’. Meta: journal des traducteurs 52 (3): 391–400. http://id.erudit.org/iderudit/016726ar (accessed 22 January 2016). Wuilmart, F. (2014). Closing speech of the summer session 2014 of the Collège européen des traducteurs littéraires de Seneffe, 30 October 2014.

Archival documents: Literaturarchiv der Berliner Akademie der Künste AdK 2199: protocol of the seminar on Der Butt (1978). AdK 3351, 3404, 4498, 7015, 7021, 9885/1, 9889/5, 9891/4, 9901/1, 9902, 9903/1, 9935, 10242–3: various correspondence.

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Archival documents: Medienarchiv Günter Grass Stiftung Bremen AUD 367: Günter Grass und seine Übersetzer, Ulrike Petzold, Radio Bremen, first broadcast 5 October 1999 (duration 06:46). AUD 522: Gespräch mit Günter Grass und Per Øhrgaard. Anlässlich des Übersetzertreffens zu Mein Jahrhundert, Radio Bremen, first broadcast on 4 April 1999 (duration 15:48). AUD 680: Gratwanderung zwischen Sprachen und Kulturen. Internationales Übersetzertreffen in Palermo. Wolfgang Rumpf im Gespräch mit Günter Grass, Radio Bremen, first broadcast on 12 May 1991 (duration 10:06). AUD 956: Übersetzerkonferenz 2002, Kurzinterviews mit 4 Übersetzern, zu Im Krebsgang, recorded on 25 March 2002 (duration 18:00). AUD 1716: Straelener Atriumsgespäch im Europäischen Übersetzer-Kollegium, zu Grimms Wörter, recorded on 14 March 2011 (duration 4:30:13).

8

Contemporary Poetry and Transatlantic Poetics at the Royaumont Translation Seminars (1983–2000): An Experimental Language Laboratory Abigail Lang

From 1983 to 2000, the Abbaye de Royaumont in the outskirts of Paris hosted an original project for the collaborative translation of contemporary poetry.1 During this period, its Centre littéraire (renamed Centre de Poésie & Traduction in 1990) organized fifty-two collaborative translation seminars, invited ninety-three poets from thirty-five countries who spoke twenty-two different tongues, and published almost fifty individual volumes as well as a 576-page anthology. Three or four times a year, a group of French writers would collaborate on a translation of a foreign poet’s most recent work, in the presence of the author. These fiveday seminars would most often culminate in two bilingual public readings (in Royaumont and Paris) and a published volume. These volumes were published by Les Cahiers de Royaumont (1984–94) and then by Créaphis (1994–2000), in two separate series: Un Bureau sur l’Atlantique, run by the poet Emmanuel Hocquard, was devoted to US authors, while all other poets were published in the series Les Cahiers de Royaumont, managed by Rémi Hourcade.2 The goal of these series was to build an anthology in progress by contemporary poets from around the world. Despite their singularity, the Royaumont translation seminars have attracted little critical attention until recently.3 Using interviews with some of the founders and participants, and archival material from the Royaumont Foundation, my aim here is to analyse the origins, functioning and legacy of these seminars, while also exploring the theoretical questions with which they engage. I will point to the impact which these collaborative translations had upon the aesthetic development of Emmanuel Hocquard, one

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of the most active promoters of translation in contemporary French poetry, and chart their influence on the reception of transatlantic poetry in France and the United States.

Origins and aims In 2014, the Royaumont Foundation celebrated its fiftieth anniversary. It was created in 1964 by Henry and Isabel Goüin, the owners of the 800-year-old abbey and its holdings, which they were determined to preserve, enrich and energize by hosting artists in residence and by welcoming visitors. Founded in the 1960s, the site was named Fondation Royaumont (Goüin-Lang) pour le progrès des Sciences de l’Homme, and its ambition was to become a place of exchange for people, disciplines and nations. The Foundation hosted conferences, meetings and offered creative, educational and research programmes in literature, music, dance, the social sciences as well as, briefly, biology and anthropology. After Henri Goüin passed away in 1977, partnerships with the French state multiplied, especially with the Conseil général du Val-d’Oise. Under the Foundation’s new director, Francis Maréchal, it developed a focus on vocal music, while remaining active in other medieval, baroque and contemporary music, poetry, and contemporary dance. It also encouraged cross-disciplinary projects. In 1983, a literary centre was created and its direction entrusted to the writer Bernard Noël on the basis of his proposal to develop a programme of local events, training and research. These activities were to be consolidated in the creation of a documentary centre within the Royaumont library (Noël n.d.). Local literary events and training courses involved organizing meetings with writers, librarians, teachers, cultural centre attachés and various délégués au livre (public servants in charge of promoting literary activities and publications), while the research mission focused on translation. ‘Bernard Noël had suggested this crazy idea: collaborative translation’ recalls Marie-Florence Ehret (2013: 11). ‘He was looking for ways to share writing, and wanted to transform this solitary act into a collective action.’4 Noël’s project was ultimately to use translation as a means to bring writers together. In an interview from 1984, Noël singled out a ‘concern for translation [un souci de traduire]’ as one of the things that had characterized the work of French poets over the past twenty years, ‘a very recent concern in French literature which has always been very self-centered’ (qtd in Etcheto 1984: 32). While this activity was visible in poetry magazines,5 it lacked

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institutional support. Noël thus saw Royaumont, with its financial subsidies, as an auspicious opportunity. In justifying his proposed calendar of events, Noël (n.d.) cites ‘the generations of Yves Bonnefoy and Jacques Roubaud, of Claude Royet-Journoud and Yves di Manno for whom translation was a means of discovery and of broadening one’s knowledge’. In quoting these four names, each with significantly different poetics, Noël underscores the importance of translation across the spectrum of French poetry.6 As Bonnefoy (2004: 62) notes: ‘This is a distinctive feature of our historical moment. As soon as the question of the translation of poetry is broached, discussions become animated, heated even.’ Bonnefoy published several reflections on translation, often as afterwords to his translations of Yeats and Shakespeare.7 Jean-Pierre Faye’s journal Change devoted two issues to translation in 1973 and 1974, while Michel Deguy’s Po&sie published numerous translations as well as reflections on translation, including two contributions by Antoine Berman in 1982 and 1986. Berman (1995: 246) argues that not since the nineteenth century had France experienced such a surge of interest in translation practice and theory as it did in the 1960s. He singles out notable contributions by Yves Bonnefoy, Pierre Leyris, Michel Deguy, Léon Robel, Jacques Roubaud, Henri Meschonnic, Pierre Klossowski, Jean Grosjean and Philippe Jaccottet. Walter Benjamin’s influential ‘Die Aufgabe des Übersetzers’ (The Task of the Translator) was first translated into French in 1971. Noël (n.d.) adds that this passion for translation on the part of French poets ‘has greatly influenced the very intense production of poetry since that time’. In promoting translation, then, Noël was also promoting creation. A clear objective of the seminars was for poets to translate their contemporaries. In a 1984 interview with Nadine Etcheto (1984: 32), Noël bemoans the French tendency to ‘only translate dead authors’, hence the subsequent ‘time-lag between a writer’s contribution and the moment when it reaches us’. The decision to translate often unrecognized authors and non-canonical texts diminished the pressure of expectation and encouraged an experience of translation as process rather than product, as collaboration and friendship rather than a channelling of tradition. The poet Claude Esteban (2000: 551), one of the main instigators of the Royaumont seminars, defended collaborative translation against those critics who doubted that a work ‘born from a personal impulse can find its equivalent in another tongue through a collective translation’. He argues that collaborative translation is consonant with a contemporary poetics of the open work. The aim is not to create an absolute responding to another absolute, but

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to  propose  ‘a  moment captured in an endless virtuality’ (553). As if to flaunt such provisory, experimental poetics, the very first seminar in December 1983 was devoted to David Antin, an American poet and critic who in the early 1970s began performing extemporaneously, improvising ‘talk poems’ at readings and art venues. This first seminar resulted in the publication of Poèmes parlés (Antin 1984), and though no complete list of participants’ names has survived, the published translations are attributed to Jacques Darras, Jacques Demarcq, Denis Dormoy and Jacques Roubaud.8 This is typical of the early volumes, published by Éditions Royaumont, which ascribed the translation to the translator(s) who perfected the version that emanated from the seminar. The first page of Série Baudelaire by Michael Palmer, for instance, reads ‘traduit de l’américain par Emmanuel Hocquard et Philippe Mikriammos’, while the collaborative functioning of the Royaumont translation seminar is described on the back cover. After 1994, with the new publisher Créaphis, the translations began to reveal more fully their collaborative origins. Mars (extraits) by Norma Cole (1997: 3) is thus presented in the following terms: ‘Traduit de l’américain. Traduction collective à Royaumont, revue et complétée par Denis Dormoy et Juliette Valéry [Translated from the American. Collaborative translation at Royaumont, revised and expanded by Denis Dormoy and Juliette Valéry].’ This bolder endorsement of collaborative translation, evident in the paratexts of the published volumes, reflects the growing confidence over the years in a translation process that developed as the seminar format consolidated and matured.

A transatlantic affair? The existence of a separate collection devoted to US poets attests to the ‘special relationship’ between French and ‘American’ poetry at Royaumont, under the influence of Emmanuel Hocquard. In 1985, after barely a year and a half as director of the Centre de Poésie et Traduction, Noël resigned and was replaced by his former assistant, Rémy Hourcade. Hourcade (2014: 341) had worked in the theatre and was interested in extending the bounds of translation to nonliterary domains, organizing, for instance, a translation seminar with deaf poets and later inviting artists from various fields to work in an artistic discipline other than their own. He divided the responsibilities of his two advisers between the United States (Emmanuel Hocquard), on the one hand, and the rest of the world (Claude Esteban), on the other. Hourcade, Hocquard and Esteban

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continued working together until the demise of the programme in 2000, and each authored one of the three texts that frame the retrospective anthology of 2000: À Royaumont, traduction collective 1983-2000, une anthologie de poésie contemporaine. The volume features the work of all ninety-three invited poets, a quarter of whom were from the United States. In his introduction to 49+1 nouveaux poètes américains d’aujourd’hui, the second anthology of contemporary American poetry that he co-edited with Claude Royet-Journoud, Hocquard (2007: 12) recounts his discovery, like many others in France in the 1960s and 1970s, of American poetry through translation. A trip to the United States in 1980 made him ‘conscious of the possibilities for a productive relationship (based on numerous shared ideas and similar approaches to the problems of writing) between French and American poets of the same generation’.9 To facilitate these relationships and to promote a better understanding of American poetry in France he organized a series of events, which became more visible with the creation, in 1989, of the association Un Bureau sur l’Atlantique. The association invited American writers to France, organized public readings and, in partnership with the Royaumont Foundation, ran the collaborative translation seminars between 1983 and 2000, which then moved to the Centre international de poésie in Marseille.10 Un Bureau sur l’Atlantique was integral in publishing American poets through publishers such as Cahiers de Royaumont, Créaphis and Farrago, as well as its own series of chapbooks: Format américain11 and Le Gam, both created and run by Juliette Valéry, who joined Un Bureau sur l’Atlantique in 1992 and who was instrumental in getting younger American poets of her own generation invited to Royaumont (see Hocquard 2014: 343). In the À Royaumont anthology, the traductions de l’américain12 form a separate section and represent a third of the 576-page volume. They constitute a coherent whole which complements the two anthologies co-edited by Hocquard and Royet-Journoud (1986, 1991). The three criteria which guided Hocquard’s (2007: 14) selection are detailed in his introduction to 49+1 nouveaux poètes américain d’aujourd’hui: ‘emphasis on language itself, taken as the substance or material of the poem and not merely as an instrument of expression or aesthetic veneer; richness and complexity of formal invention; … a vigilant poetry’. Hocquard distinguishes ‘vigilant poetry’ from poésie engagée in its general suspicion of language and the ideologies it conveys (13). The American poets Hocquard invited to Royaumont were certainly aware of the linguistic turn and post-structuralist theories. Indeed, many were closely or more distantly related

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to the Language poets, a loose grouping of 1970s poet-critics who reacted against the spontaneity, orality and individuality that characterized much of the poetry of 1950s. Language poetry was critical, textual, vigilant and often written collaboratively.13 This shared interest for collaboration, whether in writing or translation, must have been one of the ‘numerous shared ideas and similar approaches to the problems of writing’ (qtd above) that Hocquard discovered on his 1980 trip to the United States. More generally, one of the reasons why American poetry occupied such a privileged position at Royaumont is that, as Bernard Noël pointed out in his proposal, many French poets had become passionately interested in American poetry since 1970. Hourcade (2014: 340) claims that when the novelty and excitement of the Royaumont translation seminar waned for local poets, only American poets continued to recruit enthusiastic French translators. What French poetry seeks in Anglophone poetry, Berman claims, is ‘the form of its modern prosaic poeticity’ (Berman 1995: 225). Hocquard, for one, was seeking and promoting exactly this turn towards the prosaic.

Collaborative practices Though most participants remember being astonished by ‘the crazy idea’ (Ehret, qtd above) of collaborative translation and consistently attribute the conception to Bernard Noël, attentive readers of Change or of Deguy’s more confidential Revue de poésie (1964–71) would have been aware of previous experiments in the collaborative translation of poetry. In his introduction to the February 1973 issue of Change that he coordinated with the Brazilian poet and translator Haroldo de Campos, translator and slavist Léon Robel (1973: 6) singles out translation as the most efficient means of dispelling ‘a mystical notion of Literature, of the Masterpiece, as a Singularity sprung mysteriously and fully-armed from the brain of the author and henceforth untouchable’. For Robel, collaboration offers a privileged way to witness meaning as it is born, to observe the process of the generation of utterances. In a section entitled ‘Le traducteur collectif ’, he dispels as Romantic the notion of poetry’s supposed untranslatability and claims that translation is not a desperate one-on-one encounter of monads, that it can, on the contrary, establish communication and community (9). In the same issue of Change, at the end of ‘De la traduction comme création et comme critique’, de Campos (1973: 79–80) recounts that when the ‘Noigandres’ group of Sao Paulo poets set out to recreate Brazilian poetics by following

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Pound’s use of translation as creation and criticism, they began by translating Pound’s Cantos collectively. De Campos (1973: 82) advocates collaboration between linguists and poets: The problem of creative translation can only be solved, in ideal cases, by teamwork, gathering, in the service of a common goal, linguists and poets with at least some command of the language. The barrier between artists and professors must give way to a fruitful cooperation, but to this end, the artist must have a proper appreciation of translation as a highly specialized task that requires a loving and rigorous devotion, while the professor must have what Eliot called ‘the creative eye’.

In order to overcome this difference in the respective linguistic and poetic competencies, de Campos proposes the creation of a ‘TEXT LABORATORY’, where the results of both linguist and artist complement each other, contributing to a competent translation of artistic merit (1973: 82–3). Both Deguy’s Revue de Poésie and the Royaumont translation seminars can be seen as responding to de Campos’s call. Cloistering writers in the abbey, twenty miles north of Paris, encouraged new forms of collaborative poetry translation that were inevitably shaped by the exchanges and encounters that developed among the poets. Rémy Hourcade (2000: 10) details the basic format of the Royaumont seminars in his preface to the anthology: One or two poets who speak the same language are invited to stay in France for ten days, including five days at Royaumont. The Centre de Poésie et Traduction convenes ten to fifteen French writers – most often poets but also writers of prose, translators and sometimes artists in other fields – who are accommodated at Royaumont. Seated at one or two large tables in the neo-gothic library of the Abbey, they collaborate on a translation for five days, seven hours a day.

Consistent with the development in France of the poetry reading as event and genre,14 and coupled with a heightened interest in the performativity of language, as well as the poem as/in performance, the oral rendering of the poem by its author solicited special interest from the Royaumont translators: The poet begins by reading from a 30-page selection he has been asked to prepare. This reading is always enlightening in so far as it provides not only what I would call the signature of the voice, but also precious clues for the translation to come, in terms of rhythm, tone, breath, run-on or end-stopped lines. (Hourcade 2000: 10)

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Hourcade (2000: 10) elaborates further how the author regularly clarified an obscure passage by offering contextual information or an anecdote, rather than ‘pedestrian close-reading’. A reigning spirit of pragmatism at the seminars surmounted any contemporary post-structuralist objections to the presence of the author and valued the author’s explanations and vocalization of the poem. However, the fact that several of the translators were themselves poets in their own right created a context that desacralized the position and opinions of the foreign author. Indeed, in a 1999 letter to Rémy Hourcade, Emmanuel Hocquard (2001: 34) implies that the translators at Royaumont did not come to the table with an attitude of subservience to the author: The advantage with living poets, especially when they are present at the table, is that they can answer certain questions and we’re quite thankful that they do so. The disadvantage with living poets, especially when they are present at the table, is that they sometimes think they can answer all our questions, especially the final one [How are we going to put that in French?].

Because one of the primary aims of the project had always been to entrust the translation to French writers – ultimately to further French writing – not all participants were proficient in the language of the invited author, especially in the case of ‘minor languages’. In each translation team, there were always several professional linguists – sometimes scholars and literary translators, such as Marc Chénetier, Philippe Jaworski and Claude Richard who volunteered their time, unlike professional translators who would need to be paid and were less likely to relish the experimental dimension of the project. They played the role of the ‘motamoteur’ (Hourcade 2000: 11), or word-for-worder, a neologism that plays on ‘word-for-word’ (mot-à-mot) translation and ‘motor’ (moteur). The motamoteur would, Hourcade (2000: 11) claimed, offer ‘a word-for-word translation devoid of any interpretation, sometimes going so far as to respect in French the syntactic organization of the sentence’, as in his example of Turkish, ‘where the subject sometimes comes last’. All participants would first take down the ‘word-for-word translation’ of the poem. Someone would then formulate a proposal for the first line, which was immediately countered or adjusted by another, until a provisory solution was reached. This configuration raises several issues. The choice of the line as unit of translation can be explained by the fact that a great majority of the poems translated at Royaumont were written in free verse, where the line is often a self-contained unit and the sole feature distinguishing it from prose. A more troubling issue is that of the separation between a supposedly neutral word-for-word translation provided

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by linguists and the reworking by poets. In Pour la poétique  (II), Meschonnic (1973: 314–15) had condemned such a division of labour in the context of Biblical translation, where committees translate the ‘meaning’ and then sprinkle ‘poetry’ on top; a practice which, he argues, materializes old dualisms (content vs. form, prose vs. poetry etc.) and perpetuates the general prejudice that designates poetry, and indeed literature, as embellished prose: ‘The first translation, the “word-forword” version, is made by someone who knows the source language but not the language of the text, next the “poetry” is added by someone who speaks the text but not the source language. It’s the materialization of the dualism (the text is attributed social value, the translation obsolescence and an inferior status).’ Yet, at Royaumont the poets were entrusted with precisely the opposite task15 – Emmanuel Hocquard, in particular, used his influence to enforce an anti-poetic poetics, championing literality as a cure against prevailing literary aesthetics.16 Similarly, Meschonnic’s indictment of ‘poeticization (or littérarisation)’ (315) was launched not against poets but against translators and biblical committees. Hourcade (2000: 11) stipulates that one of the conveners was always in charge of channelling the potentially endless discussions and ensuring the steady rhythm of daily translation. According to him, it was largely through the moderating work of the convener that what he calls the ‘collective translator’ was able to emerge, an entity evoked by several participants in the Royaumont seminar: ‘At some point (in general toward the end of the first day) a consensus is established among the members of the group, often after they have overcome a major difficulty posed by the text.’ Bernard Noël (2004: 21) was repeatedly stunned by the advent of ‘collective understanding’ and of ‘a mouth that spoke for all’. Others simply considered the need for group decision-making to have a positive influence on the translations’ quality control. How might this ‘collective translator’ differ from an individual one? In a letter to Léon Robel published in Change n°19 in 1974, Michel Deguy describes the collaborative translation practice he devised with the Chilian poet Godofredo Iommi for the Revue de Poésie and which may conceivably have inspired the Royaumont seminars.17 Their team brought together native speakers of the source language, French-speakers competent in the source language and experienced French poets, who were sometimes joined by specialists of the poet’s work or of the source language. In a setting reminiscent of Royaumont, the translation was produced around a shared table. In his letter to Robel, Deguy (1974: 47) pinpoints the advantages of such team translation: Others’ suspicion would reveal those obsessions and biases of whoever may champion a little too zealously, and with too little self-reflection, the cherished wonders of his little display of translation wizardry, but which, when held up

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to scrutiny, tried and even checked, were left exposed. The translation had no author, and this exchange helped to guarantee the objectivity of the process.

This ‘objectivity’ attributed to the supposedly authorless text haunted thinking about this kind of translation. Hocquard (2000: 403–4), for instance, termed the authorless text a ‘blank spot’ in literature, a ‘space without a subject’. If Deguy’s idea of ‘objectivity’ may appear naive in the way it elides the complexity of group dynamics, team translation does have the capacity to check the sort of whims, exaggerations or departures to which Antoine Berman believes the individual translator is sometimes prone. In Pour une critique des traductions, Berman (1995: 47) praises Meschonnic for offering a stinging critique of ‘the shortcomings of the translator’, ‘a certain number of ugly but undeniable traits of the translator’s psyche’. Berman ascribes such perversity in the translator to ‘the fact that this psyche has always worked in the shadows’. According to this reasoning, nobody pays close attention to what the translator does, and his solitude and dereliction procure him a certain impunity. ‘Left to himself ’, the translator can ‘do as he wishes’ (47). Without subscribing to an idealized notion of the ‘collective translator’, one can indeed admit that by placing the translator in the spotlight and in the company of his peers, collaborative translation exposes and, at least partly, keeps in check a multitude of individual flaws: one can no longer ‘forget’ to translate an exasperating line or succumb to the temptation of translating ‘freely’, at least not without convincing one’s fellow translators and, should he or she be present and competent in the target language, the poet.

Foreignizing strategies In his introduction to the US section of the retrospective À Royaumont anthology, Hocquard (2000) grants that the seminars successfully bridged a thirty-year gap by introducing mostly unknown poets to French readers, and effectively exposed French poets to certain radically innovative American poetics. He observes, however, that the seminars had only limited success in ‘promoting reflexive, creative and collaborative networks with our American counterparts’ (399). This is a curious verdict given the small but committed transatlantic community that the Royaumont-Un bureau sur l’Atlantique partnership generated and which has remained active to this day, continuing the tradition of the reading series, translation seminars and publishing ventures.18 Most importantly, the translation seminars had been ‘opportunities to continually think about what translation work is – or could be’ (400) and were thus instrumental in developing a sense of

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critical reflexivity among poet-translators.19 This is evident in Hocquard’s own change of perspective with respect to the seminars’ guiding principle. Initially intent on ‘[having] the translation of a poem behave like a French poem’ (401), he came to adopt a more Schleiermacherian and Bermanian position, where, on the contrary, a translation should not ‘make one believe that [the translation] was written in French. It should rather emphasize the strangeness of the translation. It should bring to the surface a singular language within the French; so that it sounds like French without really being French’ (401). Conceiving of translation as a ‘blank spot’ (403), an unexplored area on a map, or an edge [lisière; as opposed to a neat boundary], he invests it with the ability to create a neutral linguistic zone between national literatures, ‘an a-literary breathing space’ (404). Indeed, Hourcade (2000: 403) suggests that it may have been the word-for-word translation of the motamoteur that provided Hocquard (2000: 11) with this model for writing ‘between two languages’.20 Similarly, for Berman (1995: 60), a translation is most successful when it achieves une écriture-detraduction, a writing that no French writer could have written, a foreign writing harmoniously imported into French. Interestingly, when he offers the criterion for a successful translation as one ‘where the translator has written foreign [écrit-étranger] in the target language’, Berman quotes Hocquard’s criterion of satisfaction when reading a translation: ‘That is something no French poet would have written’ (1991: 10; qtd in Berman n.d.: 11). The imperative for Hocquard (2000) is as much philosophical and anthropological as it is literary: to produce a more or less ironed-out ‘French poem’ is to blind oneself to ‘perspectives of language glimpsed at during word-for-word translation’ (402), to ‘pasteurize [the American poets’] thought’ (403) and to renounce trying to see differently in French. For Hocquard, an enthusiastic reader of Wittgenstein, the aim of translation, like that of writing, is ultimately to make perceptible the habits of thought imposed by our native language. He supplies examples, such as a wordfor-word translation from Chinese and a one-line poem by Joseph Guglielmi, which challenge French syntax by tracking the order of visual perception – ‘dans la cour platanes cinq’ [in the courtyard plane-trees five] (401, 405) – to support his claim that to translate, especially with other native speakers, helps identify the ideological frameworks imposed by one’s own language. Such aspirations were present at Royaumont from the outset. Noël’s initial intention had been, for instance, ‘to shift language, not on the level of metaphors, but in its very structures’ (qtd in Depaule 2014: 321). The way to leverage literalism in collaborative translation and to effect such change, however, evolved in Hocquard’s thinking. When he revisits the Royaumont model in his text of

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2000, he not only argues for foreignizing translation, but also revises his definition of the literal.21 Forsaking word-for-word translation in the name of elucidation, Hocquard embraces an approach similar to Deguy’s (1974: 53) strategy of using ‘as many words as are required for a single word’.22 Like Deguy, Hocquard finds this technique exemplified by Quignard’s translation of Lycophron. In a letter to Hourcade in October 1999, reprinted in ma haie, Hocquard (2001:  34) remembers how the presence of the author at Royaumont created the risk of ‘translating the explanations rather than the text’. This risk is retrospectively seized as an opportunity and Hocquard proposes a strategy of ‘translationelucidation’, where one offers several different translations for a single word and even includes explanations offered by the author. Such a translation integrates its own processes of investigation. The idea was inspired by Hocquard’s experience of Royaumont and of translating a Latin poem by Quignard with the author: ‘Giving several possible translations for a Latin word when this appeared illuminating to us. We had thus translated saltus by: “The outside! The bereft-of-language! Further than the end of the field, the excess of greenery threatens the harvest” ’ (2001: 35).23 While Hocquard laments that the Royaumont seminars never made the leap into ‘translation-elucidation’ (2000: 35), it is precisely his experience at Royaumont which led him to reconsider the value of explanations. Beyond Quignard’s Latin poem, Hocquard mentions two other texts that prompted his reflection on this subject. One is Bill Luoma’s The Annotated My Trip to New York, which contains the 101 answers Luoma wrote and faxed in answer to the queries received from Hocquard and Valéry’s students at the École des beaux-arts de Bordeaux as they collaboratively translated his 1994 My Trip to New York. The other text is Charles Bernstein’s highly comical ‘A Test of Poetry’, which lists a series of questions from his Chinese translator. It was translated into French at Royaumont and published by Format Américain as Un test de poésie in 1995. This gives a sense of the creative as well as critical feedback effects that the experience of collaborative translation generated for those involved, whether as convener, translator or translated author.

Legacies of Royaumont The Royaumont seminars brought ninety-three as-yet-unknown poets to the attention of French readers and were the catalyst for translations that were sometimes pursued individually. Jean-Paul Auxeméry, for instance, who took part in the seminar devoted to Rachel Blau duPlessis’s work in 1992 and was

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responsible for finalizing the Royaumont volume in 1995, has continued to translate her work individually: Brouillons was released in 2013 by Éditions Corti. Caroline Dubois and Anne Portugal, who participated in the translation seminar devoted to Stacy Doris in 1997, completed the translation of Paramour, which was published by P.O.L. in 2009. After taking part, sometimes reluctantly, in a Royaumont seminar, some French writers felt authorized and even encouraged to undertake translation projects. Royaumont sparked the French reception of many contemporary American poets, whose foreign standing then added to their prestige in the United States. Hocquard (2014: 343) recalls how Jackson Mac Low’s Forties was only published in the United States after Les Quarantains had come out with Créaphis in 2001. Several of the French writers involved in the seminars went on to further the conversation in their own way. In 1993, Frank Pruja and Françoise Valéry created the Éditions de l’Attente, which is committed to publishing contemporary writing, including many translations. Norma Cole, the only American poet to have been invited to Royaumont twice, edited two volumes of translations from the French. Twenty-Two New (to North America) French Poets, a special French issue of the magazine Raddle Moon co-edited by Norma Cole and Stacy Doris, came out in 1997, the year that Stacy Doris was invited to have her work translated at Royaumont. Crosscut Universe: Writing on Writing from France, published in 2000 by Rosmarie and Keith Waldrop’s Burning Deck, contains letters, poems, interviews, critical pieces and texts by twelve French writers, creating new contexts for each individual text and widening the perspective in which a great deal of writing imported from France can be read. In sum, Royaumont played a crucial role in foregrounding translation as practice, both for the translators and the poets involved. While the 1960s and 1970s had seen a burst of theoretical writing on translation in France, the translation seminars provided a unique opportunity for practical experimentation; they demonstrated that translation was a critical and, potentially, creative practice. The work of Cole Swensen and Stacy Doris (invited in 1992 and 1997 respectively) is exemplary of the feedback and reprocessing which the Royaumont seminars generated between original and translation, individual and group, France and the United States: both authors became translators from French into English and promoters of French poetry in the United States, and both have since integrated translation into their own poetry.24 Some of the poets invited to Royaumont took the collaborative translation seminar format home with them. By 1990, a European network of centres for the translation of contemporary poetry was created, with active centres in Catalonia, Ireland, Italy, Portugal, Romania, Turkey, Germany, Spain and Sweden.

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Furthermore, Royaumont created an exceptional space for intergenerational as much as transatlantic transmission, and differed significantly from the traditional models of the salon or the avant-garde review. These translation seminars were also experimental language laboratories that functioned as de facto professional forums for writer-translators to discuss translation writing. Indeed, at a time when very few other forums in France encouraged writers to meet and discuss writing in its minute but critical detail, and in a country suspicious of the idea that writing might be taught and learnt, the translation seminar offered an acceptable alternative, and forerunner, to the writing workshop.

Notes 1 The originality of the project remains difficult to determine as collaborative translation of modern and contemporary poetry has so far elicited little interest and no general history or study of it exists. I have found one possible immediate forerunner of the Royaumont translation seminars that occurred during the 1970s in France, which I discuss further in this chapter. 2 For a complete list of publications see: http://www.royaumont-archives-etbibliotheque.fr/opacwebaloes/index.aspx?IdPage=339 (accessed 30 December 2015). 3 In 2014, on the occasion of its fiftieth anniversary, the Fondation Royaumont commissioned Jean-Charles Depaule to give an overview of its literary activities for a collective volume presenting its various actions and achievements. Jean-Charles Depaule very kindly shared some of his archival findings and thoughts with me. I thank him for his generosity and trust. 4 Unattributed translations are mine. 5 Noël mentions Claude Esteban’s Argile (1973–81) and Michel Deguy’s Po&sie (1977–) in his proposal. He might have added Henri Deluy’s Action Poétique (1958–2012) which had been devoting special issues to a wide range of foreign poetries since the 1960s. 6 These figures are nonetheless all male. French poetry remained a predominantly male domain until the 1990s. Yet, Un Bureau sur l’Atlantique, the association officially founded by Emmanuel Hocquard in 1989 to promote a better understanding of American poetry in France (and which gives its name to one of the series published by Créaphis), helped open up poetry to women, probably under the influence of Juliette Valéry, who joined Hocquard in the early 1990s. Un Bureau sur l’Atlantique provided an early example of (almost) male-female parity when inviting American poets to Royaumont (eleven female and thirteen male poets between the mid-1980s and 2000).

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7 It is worth remarking on the absence of Bonnefoy and Deguy at the translation seminars in Royaumont, which did bring together poets from many different currents. Although their poetics differ greatly, Deguy and Hocquard’s views on translation appear somewhat convergent as both promote literality and see translation primarily as a vehicle for reflection upon poetry. This is less the case with Bonnefoy, a poet who not only refused to follow the ‘linguistic turn’, with its focus on linguistic instability and language as the subject of poetry, but has shown little inclination to translate contemporaries, preferring classic authors, such as Shakespeare, Keats, Yeats and Petrarch. A well-respected translator who apparently did take part in a Royaumont translation seminar is Henri Meschonnic (Esteban et al. 2000: [‘Participants aux séminaires de traduction depuis 1983’] unpaginated annex). 8 To the best of his memory, Jacques Demarcq believes the seminar was also attended by Bernard Noël, his assistant Rémy Hourcade, Emmanuel Hocquard, Henri Deluy and Yves di Manno, some only staying one day. (personal email, 28 December 2015). 9 All quotations from this introduction use Steve Evans and Jennifer Moxley’s translation. 10 For information on Un Bureau sur l’Atlantique, including a chronology of events and a list of publications, see http://epc.buffalo.edu/orgs/bureau/ (accessed 30 December 2015). 11 For a list of titles published see http://wings.buffalo.edu/epc/orgs/bureau/coll-fa_a. html (accessed 30 December 2015). 12 A phrase which has gained increasing currency since the end of the Second World War and remains puzzling to many American writers. 13 Ranging from the collaborative, text-based improvisations of the Poets Theater in San Francisco and the (mostly) unpublished experiments of Bob Perelman, Steve Benson and Kit Robinson, to Lyn Hejinian and Carla Harryman’s novel The Wide Road (2011), to the more manifest experiment Legend, multi-authored by Bruce Andrews, Charles Bernstein, Ray DiPalma, Steve McCaffery and Ron Silliman (1980), or Leningrad: American Writers in the Soviet Union written collaboratively by Michael Davidson, Lyn Hejinian, Ron Silliman, and Barrett Watten (1992), collaboration has played a decisive role in the formation and poetics of the Language poets: it has been a means, in particular, to interrogate authority, subjectivity and selfhood. Lyn Hejinian and Leslie Scalapino’s Sight (1999), for instance, was conceived as a joint investigation into the workings of experience. In the 2000s, ten Language poets gave a retrospective account of the movement in the ten volume The Grand Piano: An Experiment in Collective Autobiography (Armantrout et al. 2006–10). For further discussion see (Watten 2003: cpt 2). 14 Blaise Gauthier launched La Revue Parlée in 1977 at the Centre Pompidou and Emmanuel Hocquard curated a weekly poetry series at the Musée d’Art Moderne

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Collaborative Translation de la Ville de Paris (A.R.C) from 1978 to 1991. For more details on the poetry reading in France see the volume of essays, Dire la poésie (Puff 2015). In his survey of translations from the Chinese, Claude Roy (1974: 164–6) had shown that for all their linguistic competence the distinguished scholars who produced ‘the most serious and faithful of the anthologies of Chinese poetry into French’, coordinated by a professor at the Collège de France and published under the aegis of UNESCO, failed utterly because they lacked any sense of what contemporary French poetry might be. As a result, the poems in the 500-page anthology spanning three millennia of Chinese poetry all seemed parodies of minor Romantic and Parnassian poets. This is typically a pitfall that practising poets (granted they deserve their ‘contemporary’ label) will avoid. In ma haie, Hocquard (2001: 448) narrates his career as a continuous escape from literature, ‘from its fuss, its sleights of hand, its metadiscourses, its simpering airs, its intimidation’. [‘J’ai commencé une longue cure de polars. Là au moins, pas de tralalas, d’effets de manche, de surlangue, de minauderies, d’intimidation, bref pas de littérature’ (ma haie 448).] The two projects differ strongly in their choices however, Deguy’s project being to translate the ‘great poems’ of the Western tradition, by which he means ‘poems constructed and calculated to make-the-language-speak for a people’ (Deguy 1974: 47). The Revue de poésie published collaborative translations of Dante, Gongora, Kleist, Hölderlin, Gorgias and Pindare. Bernard Noël (2004: 19–20) was definitely aware of Hungary’s policy in the 1970s of inviting foreign poets for one-month residencies in Budapest to translate Hungarian poets, together with a linguist who would provide a word-for-word translations. Noël’s first experience with collaborative translation occurred in May 1974. Such reading series include Double Change, Ivy Writers Paris and Upstairs at Duroc. Translation seminars include the Un Bureau sur l’Atlantique seminars, held at the Centre international de poésie Marseille (CipM) after 2000, and the READ annual translation seminars launched by Sarah Riggs and Cole Swensen in 2005 and generally held at Columbia University in Paris. Guy Bennett and Béatrice Mousli’s Poésie des deux mondes. Un dialogue franco-américain à travers les revues 1850-2004 (2002) offers a survey of the French-American conversation in poetry by tracking landmark publishing ventures and special issues. A number of publishers or imprints are partly or entirely devoted to publishing translations from French (for instance, the Série d’écriture imprint started in 1986 by Keith and Rosmarie Waldrop’s Burning Deck press; Cole Swensen’s La Presse, created in 2006) or American English (including Corti’s Série américaine, increasingly active since Fabienne Raphoz joined Corti in 1997; Joca Seria’s Collection américaine, founded in 2010 by Olivier Brossard; the ‘To/Jusqu’à’ imprint at the Presses Universitaires de Rouen et du Havre, founded in 2014 by Christophe Lamiot-Enos).

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The five issues of the magazine issue (2002–4) were entirely devoted to such Franco-American exchanges. For instance, working as a team, having to articulate and defend their preferences, participants became aware of their habits and leanings in matters of vocabulary and syntax, of their tolerance for repetition and oddity, of their rage for coherence or predilection for idiomatic expression. Here is the passage by Hocquard that Hourcade (2000: 403) quotes from: ‘En fait, on ne “passe” jamais d’une langue à une autre. Un texte qu’on traduit d’une langue dans une autre langue n’arrive jamais à destination. Quand on traduit, on est, on reste entre deux langues ou on échoue au Musée des baleines de Nantucket.’ This is reminiscent of Schleiermacher’s view that the best translator is one who is never fully at home in the foreign language and who operates in the space between languages. Antoine Berman offers a useful distinction between literality and calque (translatorese) in La traduction et la lettre ou L’auberge du lointain (1991). Deguy (1974: 53) ends his letter to Robel by declaring two imperatives for translation: it must be a work of interpretation engaging thought; and it must be literal. He admits that this imperatives ‘send us in two opposite directions: that of the “word-for-word,”’ hence Deguy’s staunch support of Klossowski’s translation of the Aeneid, ‘and that of the “as many words as will be required for a single word,” as practiced by Pascal Quignard in his translation of Lycophron’. Deguy’s dual path is a useful reminder that the notion of literality can refer to radically different practices. The translation was published decades later, along with six other French translations of the same poem: Pascal Quignard (2011), Inter. Inter Aerias Fagos. See, for instance, Vincent Broqua (2009), ‘Recherche de traductions/Traductions de recherche’ and Abigail Lang (2015), ‘Stacy Doris ou la traduction comme interruption de l’original’. In ‘I have to Check My E-mail’, Stacy Doris (2007: 276) makes continuous sense out of her work by narrating it as translation.

Works cited Antin, D. (1984). Poèmes parlés. Translated by J. Darras, J. Demarq, D. Dormoy and J. Roubaud. Saint-Pierre-du-Mont: Fondation Royaumont/Les Cahiers des Brisants. Armantrout, R., Harryman, C., Hejinian, L., Mandel, T., Pearson, T., Perelman, B., Robinson, K., Silliman, R. and Watten, B. (2006–10). The Grand Piano: An Experiment in Collective Autobiography, San Francisco 1975-1980, 10 vols. Detroit: Mode A. Bennett, G. and Mousli, B. eds. (2004). Poésie des deux mondes. Un dialogue francoaméricain à travers les revues 1850-2004. Paris: Ent’revues.

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Berman, A. (n.d.). Toward Translation Criticism. Translated by Luise von Flotow, unpbd translation. http://metamorphosis.univie.ac.at/donne_berman_flotow/berman_ donne_engl_ue_von_flotow.pdf (13 August 2016). Berman, A. (1995). Pour une critique des traductions: John Donne. Paris: Gallimard. Berman, A. (1991). La traduction et la lettre ou L’auberge du lointain. Paris: Seuil. Bernstein, C. (1995). Un test de poésie. Collective trans. Royaumont. Royaumont: Un Bureau sur l’Atlantique-Royaumont. Bernstein, C., ed. (1999). ‘A Test of Poetry’. In My Way: Speeches and Poems. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Bonnefoy, Y. (2004). ‘La traduction de la poésie’. Semicerchio, Rivista di poesia comparata XXX–XXXI: 62–80. Broqua V. (2009). ‘Recherche de traductions/Traductions de recherche’. Le texte étranger (2). Travaux et documents 43: 217–36. Cole, N. (1997). Mars (extracts). Collective trans. Royaumont. Grâne: Créaphis. Cole, N. (2000). Crosscut Universe: Writing on Writing from France. Providence, RI: Burning Deck. Cole, N. and Doris, S., eds. (1997). Twenty-Two New (to North America) French Poets. Vancouver: Raddle Moon. Deguy, M. (1974). ‘Lettre à Léon Robel sur la traduction’. Change 19: 47–53. De Campos, H. (1973). ‘De la traduction comme création et comme critique’. Translated by Inès Oseki. Change 14: 71–85. De Julio, M. (2004). ‘Contemporary French Poetry and Translation’. Bucknell Review 47, no. 1: 151–60. Depaule, J.-Ch. (2014). ‘Royaumont littéraire’. In Le cas Royaumont, edited by D. Laborde, 318–27. Grâne: Créaphis. Doris, S. (2007). ‘I Have to Check My E-mail’. In American Poetries in the 21st Century: The New Poetics, edited by C. Rankine and L. Sewell, 274–7. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan. Ehret, M.-F. (2013). ‘Bernard Vargaftig ou L’amour toujours recommençant’. Secousses 27 January. http://www.revue-secousse.fr/Secousse-08bis/Vargaftig/Sks08bis-EhretAmour.pdf (accessed 28 December 2015). Esteban, C., Hourcade, R. and Hocquard, E., eds. (2000). À Royaumont, traduction collective 1983-2000: une anthologie de poésie contemporaine. Grâne: Créaphis. Etcheto, N. (1984). ‘Royaumont: Un lieu où la littérature est aussi question d’amitié’. Médianes 5: 32–3. Hocquard, E. (1991). ‘Notes en guise d’introduction’. 49+1 nouveaux poètes américains d’aujourd’hui. Royaumont: Un Bureau sur l’Atlantique-Royaumont. ‘Notes by Way of an Introduction’. Translated by S. Evans and J. Moxley. ‘French Poetry & Poetics’, special triple issue. Edited by Andrew Zawacki and Abigail Lang. Verse 24.1-3 (2007). Hocquard, E. (2000). ‘ “Faire quelque chose avec ça” ’. In À Royaumont, traduction collective 1983-2000: une anthologie de poésie contemporaine, edited by C. Esteban, R. Hourcade and E. Hocquard, 397–407. Grâne: Créaphis. Hocquard, E. (2001). ma haie. Paris: P.O.L.

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Hocquard, E. (2014). ‘ “Je suis entré dans le jeu. …” Entretien avec Emmanuel Hocquard, Royaumont littéraire’. In Le cas Royaumont, edited by D. Laborde, 342–3. Grâne: Créaphis. Hocquard, E. and Royet-Journoud, C., eds. (1986). 21+1 poètes américains d’aujourd’hui. Translated by M. Chénetier, P. Jaworski and C. Richard. Montpellier: Université de Montpellier. Hocquard, E. and Royet-Journoud, C., eds. (1991). 49+1 nouveaux poètes américains d’aujourd’hui. Royaumont: Un Bureau sur l’Atlantique-Royaumont. Hourcade, R. (2000). ‘De la traduction collective’. In À Royaumont, traduction collective 1983-2000: une anthologie de poésie contemporaine, edited by C. Esteban, R. Hourcade and E. Hocquard, 1–13. Grâne: Créaphis. Hourcade, R. (2014). ‘Je venais de passer plusieurs années. Entretien avec Rémy Hourcade’. In Le cas Royaumont, edited by D. Laborde, 340–1. Grâne: Créaphis. Lang, A. (2015). ‘Stacy Doris ou la traduction comme interruption de l’original’. In Genre/Genres 1, edited by I. Alfandary and V. Broqua, 21–34. Paris: Michel Houdiard. Lycophron (1971). Alexandra de Lycophron. Translated by Pascal Quignard. Paris: Mercure de France. Luoma, B. (1997). Mon voyage à New York. Collective translation at the École des Beaux-Arts in Bordeaux. Bordeaux: Un Bureau sur l’Atlantique. Luoma, B. (1998). Works & Days. West Stockbridge, MA: Hard Press/The Figures. Meschonnic, H. (1973). Pour la poétique II, Epistémologie de l’écriture. Poétique de la traduction. Paris: Gallimard. Noël, B. (n.d.). ‘Le Centre littéraire de la fondation Royaumont’ (proposal). 4 handwritten pages, uncatalogued. Royaumont: Archives de la Fondation Royaumont. Noël, B. (2004). ‘Traduire. …’ In Traduction & Poésie, edited by I. Oseki-Dépré, 17–22. Paris: Maisonneuve Larose. Palmer, M. (1989). Série Baudelaire. Translated by E. Hocquard et P. Mikriammos. Royaumont: Les Cahiers de Royaumont. Puff, J.-F. ed. (2015). Dire la poésie. Nantes: Éditions Cécile Defau. Quignard, P. (2011). Inter. Inter Aerias Fagos. Translated by P. Alferi, E. Clémens, M. Deguy, B. Gorrillot, E. Hocquard, C. Prigent and J. Stéfan. Paris: Argol. Robel, L. (1973). ‘Translatives’. Change 14: 5–12. Roubaud, J. (2009). ‘Poetry and Orality’. In The Sound of Poetry/The Poetry of Sound, translated by J.-J. Poucel, edited by M. Perloff and C. Dworkin, 18–28. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Roy, C. (1974). ‘Le vain travail de “traduire” la poésie chinoise’. Change 19: 156–66. Watten, B. (2003). The Constructivist Moment. From Material Text to Cultural Poetics. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan.

Part Three

Environments of Collaboration

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Online Multilingual Collaboration: Haruki Murakami’s European Translators Anna Zielinska-Elliott and Ika Kaminka

Translators work better when the author is not present. Albert Bensoussan (Vanderschelden 1998: 25) Although I am asked what it is like to have my novels translated into other languages, I honestly have little such awareness. Haruki Murakami (2006: 29) In recent years, a new understanding of translation has emerged that focuses on the ways in which many voices come together in published literary translations, an approach that has come to be centred around the idea of ‘multiple translatorship’ (Jansen and Wegener 2013: 1–35). This concept departs from the traditional notion of the literary author as a ‘solitary genius’: a single individual labouring alone in the fields of the imagination to create a unique text, with the translator as his equally solitary, invisible shadow. Instead, ‘multiple translatorship’ draws attention to the many agents or voices – extra-, intraand intertextual – that ‘exert a significant influence over the translator and the translated text’ (ibid.: 4). Such voices include those of publishers, literary agents, critics, editors, copy-editors and even proofreaders, as well as those of the narrator, the characters, the translator and – implicitly or explicitly  – the author. Translation of the work of living writers often involves them in the process on the assumption that the author is best positioned to make decisions as to what he or she was ‘really trying to say’ and thus resolve questions that inevitably arise during the process of translation. However, according to Isabelle

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Vanderschelden (1998: 29): ‘Translation collaboration encourages translators to hide behind authorial approval. … Authorial and translation collaboration are efficient ways to legitimize a translation, but they also constitute a safety exit by which some translators surrender part of their independence.’ Given these reservations, one might be inclined to say that, indeed, working solo is the only means for a translator to maintain independence and creative autonomy. But such a view falls back again upon the problematic assumption that the author of an original text is necessarily the principal repository for its meaning. It also  – and no less problematically – requires the translator to reproduce the authorial model of ‘solitary genius’ in the production of a translation, bringing us back to where we started. This chapter will explore modes of collaboration that neither limit the translator’s freedom nor undermine his or her authority. One such type of collaboration has been created by an informal network of European translators of the Japanese author Haruki Murakami, a multinational, multilingual group that meets almost exclusively online and does not involve participation by the author or publisher. This model of collaboration, relying upon modes of communication between translators that were simply not available in the preinternet era, is helpful in solving some common predicaments encountered in translation, while at the same time avoiding further compromise of the translator’s already fragile relationship with the text. This chapter begins by surveying some common models of collaboration in translation, and then shifts to a description of the European Murakami translators’ network. In this part, we explore the dynamics between individual and group that emerge when rendering the prose of Japan’s top-selling author into forms that are not merely accessible to Western readers, but also maintain Murakami’s particular style and trademark linguistic innovation.1 Questioning the privilege that publishers, some translators and indeed Murakami himself accord the English-language version of his works, we investigate the role English plays in translating Murakami into other languages. We find that the occasional involvement of the author in the English translation adds yet another level of complexity to the problem – one not uncommon to much Japanese literature, which has often been filtered and somewhat distorted by translation into other languages via intermediate English versions. We offer this record of the experience of our multilingual translation network as a counterpoint to the possible objection that collaborative translation that does not involve the author is somehow less legitimate than that which does.

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Three different models of collaboration in translation Common models of collaboration in translation are of three general types: collaboration between a translator and the author; collaboration between the author and a group of translators, each working in a different language; and collaboration between two or more translators working on the same text, translating into the same language. While the body of academic literature on translation-author collaboration is relatively small, there are many published testimonials of translators and authors that reflect upon the process. In If This Be Treason: Translation and Its Dyscontents, celebrated translator Gregory Rabassa (2005: 71) describes his experience of working with different authors. Some, such as Cortazar, knew Rabassa and ‘approved’ his translations. With others, Rabassa had a more distant relationship limited to correspondence. Another translator of Spanish literature, Suzanne Jill Levine (1991: 7), has written about her role as a co-creator of the work; in her words, she became a ‘subversive scribe’. Levine says that what drew her to her authors (Puig, Cabrera Infante) was the ‘playful, creative possibility of selfbetrayal, of re-creating (in) language’ (ibid.: 182) and discusses different aspects of her ‘ongoing dialogue’ and close collaborations (named ‘closelaborations’ by Cabrera Infante) with the authors (ibid.: xiii). Similar views can be found in Allen and Bernofsky’s In Translation: Translators on Their Work and What It Means, which contains a number of articles that analyse different degrees of authorial involvement. In one, Maureen Freely, Orhan Pamuk’s English translator, agrees with Levine that ‘translation is never neutral’ (2013: 125) and mentions issues she and Pamuk ‘never managed to settle’ (121). Alice Kaplan’s (2013) essay in the same volume describes the case of a translator of her book who went even further in subverting the translator’s invisibility – he felt that the author’s writing was ‘going to hamper his style’ (71). In the end, the translation project was cancelled altogether. In ‘The Translation Pact’, Cecilia Alvstad (2014: 270) describes how translators fight their invisibility by ‘draw[ing] attention to themselves and manifest[ing] their agency, for example, by discussing translational decisions in prefaces and notes’. Another important article discussing power balance between the author and translator is Marilyn Booth’s ‘Author vs. Translator (2007): Girls of Riyadh go to New York’, in which she takes issue with the changes made by the publisher and author in her translation of Raja Alsanea’s novel. The changes resulted in the domesticating and ‘ungendering’ of the text without the translator’s permission (Booth 2008: 197, 208).

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In some quarters, however, the author is still king. Göran Malmqvist (2003: 3) writes that the translator should ‘literally work like a slave’ and ‘serve the Author and the text he is translating’. His approach could hardly differ more from Leon De Kock’s, who, following in the footsteps of Venuti, believes that the translator’s invisibility must be dispelled. Describing his desire to translate the novel in question as a desire ‘to write that novel’, De Kock (2003: 346) forcefully addresses the issue of authorial ‘ownership’ and the translator’s claims on the text, and refers to translation as a ‘comprehensively engaging creative act’. The title of De Kock’s essay wryly summarizes his views on the matter: ‘Translating Triomf: The Shifting Limits of “Ownership” in Literary Translation, or: Never Translate Anyone But A Dead Author’. Not infrequently, the author’s involvement can radically change the translator’s relationship to the text by creating a situation in which translation occurs under the aegis of a source of potentially absolute authority. Whether the author is directly involved in the translation or only comments on a draft, the translator is subject to the assumption that the author’s interpretation of the text is most correct, and indeed that he or she is able to perfectly recall past intentions. There are, of course, many problems with this assumption. For one, as Umberto Eco notes (1994: 20) in ‘A Rose by Any Other Name’, authors can be tempted to seize the opportunity of consulting on a translation to continue the writing of their work, modifying the meaning of their original text. (As we will show below, Murakami engages in this to a certain extent.) Bilingual writers sometimes take such practices even further, hiring translators to provide them with a first draft, which they subsequently rewrite and sign in their own names. One wellknown case is that of Vladimir Nabokov, who wrote to one of his American co-translators that ‘the most important thing is to get a precise and competent translation, which I will then probably dragonize’ (Nabokov and Schrayer 1999: 130). Such ‘dragonizing’ could sometimes result in Nabokov’s rewriting almost 80 per cent of the translation provided (ibid.: 130). Equally well known is the translation history of Milan Kundera’s first novel The Joke – the English translation went through several translators and five versions before Kundera was satisfied.2 With reference to the 1969 translation, Kundera (1982: ix) wrote: ‘I was powerless’; of the 1982 translation, he said: ‘I had the increasingly strong impression that what I read was not my text’ (Kundera 1992: 322). Ultimately, Kundera worked with his American editor to produce another translation himself; published in 1992, this version does not mention a translator at all, but incorporates elements of the earlier translations, leaving Kundera as the sole author of the work. These experiences may help explain Kundera’s frustration

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when he observed: ‘The writer who determines to supervise the translations of his books finds himself chasing after hordes of words like a shepherd after a flock of wild sheep’ (1990: 121). It is worth noting, however, that an author’s close involvement with his or her translators may occasionally backfire, to the author’s (rather than translator’s) disadvantage, with the former coming to think of himself as somewhat helpless in the face of his ‘subversive scribe’. This seems to have been the case with Russian writer Mikhail Shishkin. In 2013, twelve translators gathered for a fiveday seminar to work with the author on the translation of Pismovnik (English title, The Light and the Dark). In an interview given later that year, Shishkin said that since that time, when he starts to write, he feels paralysed, because he finds himself wondering how it will be translated: ‘So you will know’, he said, ‘whose fault it will be if I don’t write any more novels. It will be the translators’ fault’ (Sikorskaya 2013). Of the many author-translator dynamics, the one-on-one exchange, even if it is desired – which, as we have just seen, is not always the case – is often unfeasible. This is especially in the case of best-selling authors, where the pressure on all sides is high. Authors have found different ways of dealing with the demands placed on their time. Günter Grass famously found one solution: for thirty years, upon the release of every new book, he and his publishers would organize a three- to four-day meeting with translators, during which Grass went over the text carefully, discussing major problems, elucidating phrases and answering translators’ questions (Post 2009). Norwegian author Johan Harstad tried another approach, initiating an email exchange when he began to be overwhelmed by the avalanche of questions from translators of his first novel, Buzz Aldrin, What Happened to You in All the Confusion.3 In the case of British author David Mitchell’s novel Cloud Atlas, it was the translator Stian Omland (also Norwegian, as it happens) who began an email discussion group. Omland contacted the author with questions, and as more translators signed on for the translation, either he or Mitchell himself would contact them with an invitation to join the group (which, for a period in 2006, called itself ‘The Cloud Crew’4). Gradually, the agent and publisher also became involved and took on the task of coordinating the group. Omland saved all the discussions and made a compendium in the form of a Word file, which constituted a key, as it were, to the translation of Cloud Atlas; this was then circulated to new translators after the group itself ceased its activities. The discussions consisted mostly of questions from translators, answered by the author. Unlike the model we will be describing below, however, in only a few instances did the translators

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discuss solutions among themselves; the author continued to be the ‘oracle’ from which answers were sought. One typical exchange went as follows: France: ‘A couple of taxidermist’s cast-offs’: I imagine an old couple with ragged old clothes. But I am not convinced by my intuitions here. David [Mitchell]: Your intuition is correct. (Omland 2012)5

At the same time, typos and other inconsistencies tend to be pointed out and corrected by the translators. Here is an example: Italy: ‘The de facto if not de juro Consul’ = the correct Latin expression should be ‘de jure’, I think. David: ‘You are of course quite right!’ (Omland 2012)

In this format, the author often assumes authority, and there are repeated references to something being ‘correct’ or ‘a mistake’, depending on whether it was in line with the author’s stated intention. Yet because of the innovative and invented vocabulary of the book, and Mitchell’s open-minded, inquisitive attitude, he does not assume this position with authority, but rather seems to participate in the search for the answers himself. This is seen in the following exchange: Norway: He indicated various humpbacks and landmarks. … What’s a humpback in this context? Author: Not sure. Maybe a tumulus-like protuberance in the landscape caused by I’m not sure what. That’s all.

Or: Norway: ‘… as they gewgawed the Hawi boy’: Again, I catch the drift, but what’s behind the word ‘gewgawed’? Author: Um. … I’m not sure. It looks like ‘see-saw’, the child’s balancing toy in playgrounds, which is a tiny bit sexual, in that something is going up and down in a rhythmic way … um … and maybe the victim’s mouth might involuntarily make a ‘gew-gaw’ sort of shape or noise. (Omland 2012)

In these and most other situations, translators must inevitably negotiate the presence, be it spectral or direct, not just of authors, but also of editors and publishers, whose power over collaboration in translation can also become contentious. Mich Vraa, the Danish translator of Dan Brown’s novel Inferno, describes how translators into Nordic languages, Dutch and Turkish were convened to work together under strict surveillance in a bunker-like house in London, located in a place known only as ‘The Location’. In a scenario that

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might have been taken directly from one of the author’s novels, translators were forced to give up their mobile phones upon entering the building, and the manuscript of the book could not leave the premises under any circumstances, making it impossible to work anywhere but in the ‘bunker’. They also had to sign an extensive non-disclosure contract (such as not to reveal the location of ‘The Location’) and work on computers with no internet access (Vraa 2013) – which is rather extraordinary, given the degree to which most translators today rely upon online resources. Vraa wrote a book about this experience, which he described as ‘infernal’, albeit primarily with reference to security measures, not the translation process itself, whose ‘almost autistic repetition’ he found ‘intoxicating’ (Vraa 2013). At the same time, however, Sverre Knudsen, the Norwegian translator, and Lena Karlin, the Swedish translator, recalled the six weeks with pleasure and both said they would gladly repeat the process.6 Of the Inferno experience, one might argue that the conditions for true collaboration between the translators should have been perfect: everyone was gathered in the same place and worked on the same text with the blessing of the publisher (and presumably the author). In fact, scarcely any collaboration appears to have taken place at all. Knudsen remarked that he was surprised at how little the translators assembled in The Location discussed the translation they were all working on. Perhaps the book presented relatively few translation problems – according to Knudsen, fewer than ten words gave the translators any headaches. Or perhaps the isolation and strict limits placed upon them induced everyone to work alone, despite the obvious opportunities to collaborate. In any event, translators as a group are certainly not always averse to working with each other, which brings us to group translation, our third and final model of collaborative translation. This is usually carried out in one of two ways. The first, co-translation, is a common form of translation involving two people with complementary native language abilities working together on the entire text. Often, one person interprets the source text and the other polishes the target text, as occurs, for instance, with Larissa Volokhonsky and Richard Pevear, who render Russian classics into English, or Stanisław Barańczak and Clare Cavanagh, who translated Polish poetry into English.7 Another variation, common in some countries, is to hire several translators to all work on different parts of the same book simultaneously, usually to get a potential bestseller out to readers more quickly. For instance, J. K. Rowling’s The Casual Vacancy was translated into Swedish by six people in just a few weeks. A book comprised of a number of different texts lends itself more easily to this sort of translation, as was the case with the collection of Murakami stories, Onna no inai otokotachi

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(Men Without Women, 2014), each of whose six stories was translated into Chinese by a different translator.

A solution-oriented model These three most common forms of collaborative translation – author and translator, author and group of translators, and two or more translators working as a team – are each designed to facilitate interpretation and exegesis of the source text: deciphering what the author meant, coming up with the correct understanding of a term, unpacking a sentence, tracking down a reference. But by focusing on meaning, these discussions regularly ignore questions of literary style, or indeed of how the author’s responses should be considered. Most often, it is assumed that once lexical and semantic problems in the source text appear to have been resolved, the translation simply writes itself. Yet, as all translators know, this is hardly the case. Indeed, this is just where the really challenging work of translation begins. The remainder of this chapter focuses on the creation of a fourth and, we believe, new model: independent collaboration between translators of the same work into different languages. Crucially, this model allows translators to focus their attention and pool their ideas on precisely the questions of style and nuance that matter most to them as they engage with foreign-language texts, with no publisher or author involvement. The author whose work has catalysed the formation of this translation model is Haruki Murakami. An experienced translator of American literature into Japanese himself, Murakami (2006: 29) once provided a fitting simile for thinking about the translation process when he likened it to gaining access to a house: the translator first needs to safely clear what he terms the ‘front yard’; how far he or she manages to get inside the house, past the ‘front room’ to its ‘central room’, where the meaning of the story is to be found, ‘is a separate issue’. (In the original Japanese, ‘front room’ and ‘central room’ are written phonetically, as if the expressions were taken directly from English).8 While Murakami assumes that the translator will tread the path to this house alone, his European translators have found a way to help each other forwards, so that each can arrive at their own reconstruction of the book’s ‘central room’. It is no accident that the kind of collaboration we describe here has derived from our experiences in translating Murakami, and not American or British writers. For it is precisely the challenges presented in Murakami’s writing – writing

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that contains a prominent ‘foreign’ flavour – and in the worldwide marketing of his books – overwhelmingly centred on the primacy of English-language translations – that has made us rethink how we work and, by extension, how Murakami is seen by different types of audiences (editors, publishers, readers, critics) around the world. Over the last two decades, Murakami has become an international sensation, a writer whose language is Japanese, but whose imagination and imagery are universal. A great deal of Murakami’s popularity can be traced to the runaway success of his fiction, not just in Japan, but also in Korea, China, Europe, Britain, Australia and North and South America. No Japanese writer before him has achieved a comparable level of reception and recognition. Some of this is due to what might be called Murakami’s translatability – but exactly what role does translation play in the Murakami phenomenon? An early attempt to address this question and the general issue of Murakami’s worldwide recognition came in the form of a symposium and workshop called ‘A Wild Haruki Chase: How the World Is Reading and Translating Murakami’, which took place at the University of Tokyo in March 2006. This symposium consisted of public lectures, workshops and panel discussions, with further discussions organized in Kobe and Sapporo, places related to Murakami’s life or featured in his books.9 The conference brought together several scholars of modern Japanese literature and sixteen translators of Murakami’s work, mostly from Europe and the United States. Murakami himself was not present. The first two days of the conference were followed by a two-day retreat in a hotel near Mt. Fuji, which gave Murakami translators a unique opportunity to spend time together in a relaxed setting, compare notes and exchange ideas. These interactions constituted the foundation of this collaborative model. In preparation for the conference, participants were given two very short stories to translate and present during a panel discussion. The two texts, ‘Yoru no kumozaru’ and ‘Supana’, were brimming with wordplay and took full advantage of the opportunities offered by the Japanese writing system. In the former, a spider monkey visits the narrator late at night. The monkey mimics everything the narrator says, but sometimes he repeats it in a different script: where the narrator speaks using Chinese characters, the monkey uses a phonetic alphabet.10 For some of us, perusing the solutions found by colleagues from different countries was the first opportunity to see how other translators had dealt with translation problems each of us had faced. For example, the Russian translator had increased spaces between the letters, while the Chinese translator played with using different characters; some, restricted to the Latin alphabet,

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used combinations of italics and small capitals, while others re-created the effect using puns. The realization that there was a lot to be learnt from looking at translations into languages one did not know, in writing systems one did not necessarily understand (like Cyrillic), and from comparing different versions of Chinese translations, was for us an epiphany. While the workshop proposed studying a series of archetypal one-to-one relationships between translator and text, it had the complementary effect of laying bare the different creative processes as translators move between Japanese and many very different languages. Tracing the path each translator had followed to reach his or her particular rendering made the other participants aware of new, uncharted possibilities in their own language, and put the available tools on display. After the 2006 conference, a number of us kept in touch and continued the discussion. The timing of the conference turned out to have been fortuitous, as it coincided with a change in the way Murakami’s books were released on the market – and hence in the way that many (though not all) translators into Western languages worked. Where it was once the case that the English-language version would come out first, followed years later by translations into other languages, this all changed in the mid-2000s. Given that each new Murakami book was a guaranteed bestseller, European publishers were no longer willing to wait for UK and US editions to appear and instead tried to secure the foreign-language rights as soon as possible. Murakami agents also became willing to sell the rights before the English version was published. As a result, over the last few years, whenever a new title has appeared, translators in several European countries have all begun working simultaneously on the same text. The first instance of this phenomenon after the 2006 conference came with the publication of 1Q84 in 2009.11 The novel presents a number of particular challenges for the translator, and as we worked on our individual projects, we naturally contacted the people we had met in Tokyo. When we encountered particularly thorny problems, we soon began discussing them together by email; eventually, several translators became more and more invested, and interested, in the process of mutual consultation. Over time, we found that, while some of us might occasionally organize panels for different conferences, it was most convenient to maintain regular contact via the various means afforded by the internet: email, Skype, Facebook and so forth, culminating in a blog devoted to the translation of Murakami. Called ‘Thinking of Tsukuru Tazaki’ and created the day before the publication of Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage in Japan in 2013 (http://tazakitsukuru.blogspot.com), the blog was intended as a forum in

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which translators could more systematically and openly share their experiences and discuss possible solutions. We will return to the role of the blog in the translation process below. Out of this collaboration emerged the model we present here, which differs in two important aspects from those described in the preceding section. First, it is translator-initiated. It does not involve the author in any substantive way, and is not connected at all with agendas initiated by publishers, marketing agents or anyone else. Secondly, it is solution-oriented. That is, translators share more than just information about their understanding of the source text; they also share strategies and specific suggestions for handling the particular problems that arise in translating Murakami’s texts, for finding ways into the ‘central room’ of the house. For example, in translating 1Q84, one question we all faced was how to render the voice of Fukaeri, a dyslexic 17-year-old girl whose speech, to underscore her dyslexia, was written almost exclusively using phonetic symbols (kana), the system of writing children learn in the first year of elementary school, i.e., with few Chinese characters (kanji). On top of that, the narrator tells us that Fukaeri speaks in a monotonous voice and does not use question marks. Here, European translators came up with a number of different solutions. In Swedish the monotony of Fukaeri’s diction is rendered by dividing all words into syllables using hyphens; in French, each of Fukaeri’s lines finishes with an ellipsis; in some languages she ‘speaks’ in italics, and in others hyphens serve to indicate the mechanical link between words suggested in the Japanese text. Another solution, hit upon by the Polish translator and later adopted by the Danish and Norwegian translators, was to write all of Fukaeri’s speech in lower case letters and use no punctuation marks. In all these instances, European translators appear to share a common purpose, and the creativity of their solutions each reflects in some manner the visual distinctiveness of Fukaeri’s speech on the page in the Japanese original. This becomes particularly apparent when one compares these solutions to the English translation, which was released a year after the first European translations had been published. Here, Fukaeri’s speech does not stand out visually in any way; all that remains of her strikingly idiosyncratic speech is a somewhat simplistic way of talking.12 Another case in point is the translation of metaphors or idioms. Consider the appearance of a phrase in the 2013 novel Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage, which translates literally as, ‘An early-rising bird is able to catch a lot of worms.’13 In the English translation, the expression simply blends back

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into its original language as the familiar proverb that it is: ‘The early bird catches the worm’ (Murakami 2014a: 278). Yet in at least three European languages, the phrase was rendered as a direct translation of the English, thus retaining its slightly awkward, humorous feel, standing out as it did in the original.14 Of course, this might easily come across as ‘bad translation’. This is why one part of the collaborative effort of our group has been to find both the courage and the linguistic means to retain this kind of foreignness in translation: that is, solutions that some critics might see as bad, or – even worse – that might make them suspect we in fact translate from the English, after all. Crucially, this all happens in ‘real time’, which is to say that the exchanges that take place immediately and directly affect the translations as they are being made. These aspects of the model are especially pertinent, given the nature of Murakami’s prose and the status of the English translation, questions to which we now turn.

The smell of butter in Murakami’s writing One point of common agreement concerning Murakami is the degree to which his writing is seen to be approachable by non-Japanese readers, whether in Asia or in the West. Indeed, in his early years as an author, Murakami was both lauded and criticized for his ‘un-Japaneseness’ by Japanese and foreigners alike. As discussed by Rebecca Suter, the characteristic use of a large number of words borrowed from English – including many references to Western (mostly American) music, literature, food and expressions, which stand out visually on the page of Japanese text – serves to emphasize the foreignness of the text (2008: 67–74). This feature of Murakami’s prose, along with his peculiar style of writing  – often characterized by Japanese readers as ‘translationese’ (hon’yaku buntai), devoid of the poetic ambiguity supposedly so cherished by the Japanese – have been parsed at length by readers, scholars and critics. According to his early detractors, he ‘wrote for export’ (Miyoshi 1994: 234), while in the view of some Japanese readers, his Japanese can appear ‘impossible’ and ‘feel as if it had originally been written in English’.15 One literary scholar identifies several aspects of Murakami’s style that make it appear ‘translated’ or foreign, among them his persistent use of personal pronouns, which is at odds with conventional Japanese usage, where pronouns are often skipped (Kazamaru 2006: 239–62). Murakami’s use of foreign-sounding metaphors is another feature that does not feel Japanese. As one critic has written: ‘Haruki Murakami’s novels are full

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of brilliant metaphors that hitherto had no expression in the Japanese. These metaphors give off the uncanny feeling one gets when reading English idioms translated literally into Japanese. Haruki Murakami used them strategically’ (Nakamata 2002: 32). And as Stephen Snyder (2010), scholar and translator of Japanese literature has said: ‘My sense is that Murakami’s own voice has been shaped in English into something that would appeal to English language readers; it is not a direct translation.’ For the Japanese reader, then, reading Murakami in the original can be akin to reading a translation from English, or as Naomi Matsuoka (1993: 434) has pointed out: When we read Murakami’s Japanese, we can sense the English expressions behind it at the same time. Readers with some knowledge of English (actually most Japanese people nowadays) enjoy these kinds of narratives, those which seem to be written in both Japanese and English.

Murakami himself has admitted that for his first books he borrowed storylines and other elements from Raymond Chandler, and used other American writers as models (Rubin 2005: 81). Even more telling is the story of how, when trying to write his first novel in 1979, Murakami wrote the first part in English, and later translated it into Japanese (Murakami 2015: xiii). But the influences of English upon Murakami transcend story and diction. In 1989 he made the startling revelation that when writing in Japanese he was writing with the (English?) translation in mind, commenting: ‘I try to make sure that the text is suited to translation’ (Kanemaru 1989: 21). Irmela HijiyaKirschnereit (2012: 171) in fact maintains that Murakami ‘pretranslates’ his work for an international audience, and quotes an example from Afterdark, where he gives a detailed explanation of how to enter a love hotel, information that would be superfluous for the Japanese reader, who would know exactly what was going on without the additional cultural sidebar. Indeed, in ‘To Translate and to Be Translated’, Murakami (2006: 30) went so far as to refer to his own writing as a form of translation: Seen in that light, my process of creative writing may closely correspond to the process of translation – or rather, in some respects they may be two sides of the same coin. That may be why, in my own way, I have tried to write my novels using prose that I have constructed by first converting Japanese, my mother tongue, into a mock foreign language in my head – that is, by clearing away the innate everydayness of language that lies in my self-consciousness. Looking back it seems as if that is what I have always done.

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This is a very telling admission, especially as the ‘mock foreign language’ in Murakami’s head is surely inspired by English, the only foreign language he knows well. One may wonder, then: What happens when Murakami is translated into English? Where does that foreign flavour go? Jay Rubin (2005), one of Murakami’s foremost American translators, has remarked on this question: Murakami’s style strikes the Japanese reader as fresh and new because it often reads like a translation from English. … Paradoxically, then, the closeness of Murakami’s style to English can itself pose problems for a translator trying to translate it ‘back’ into English: the single most important quality that makes his style fresh and enjoyable in Japanese is what is lost in translation. (319–20, emphasis added)

Even if Rubin were able to translate Murakami into, as he puts it, ‘traditional clunky translationese’, while retaining its American flavour (Rubin 2005: 319), the translation’s many other ‘voices’ might not permit it. This is also the conclusion reached by Suter (2008: 36), who maintains that American translators ‘tend to “domesticate” foreign elements in Murakami’s fiction: culturally specific elements are often replaced by either generic or American equivalents, so that he does not sound “too Japanese” in translation’. Something is indeed lost, it seems, in the English translation. At first glance, this would seem to give an advantage to translators working in languages other than English. The play with the English language and the presence of English expressions and references in literary texts are of course not uncommon in other European languages; the difference is that, as in Japanese, they tend to stand out as ‘foreign’ in translation. The ‘smell of butter’16 in his writing ought to be stronger in non-English translation than it is in English. That this is not always the case reflects the dominant role that English-language translations of Murakami have long played in getting his work to world audiences.

The hegemony of English As already mentioned, for many years the English versions of Murakami’s books and stories served as models for others to follow, forming the basis for a great number of ‘relay’ (or ‘secondary’) translations.17 Ironically, translators working from the Japanese have often ended up feeling pressured to take English versions into account by editors who refer to the English translation as authoritative, or even

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as ‘the original’ (!), and argue against solutions or renderings proposed by their own translators, even if those choices are closer to what was written in Japanese.18 This attitude, which may be caused by editors’ fears that the new translation will be compared to the English version and found lacking, is by no means unusual. Indeed, the power that English translations exercise over the global reception of a text has led some to argue that the English-language translator has a unique ethical role: ‘Today, the English language translator occupies a particularly complex ethical position. … [He or she] must remain ever aware of the power differential that tends to subsume cultural difference and subordinate it to a globally uniform, market-oriented monoculture’ (Allen and Bernofsky 2013: xvii). In this, Murakami is no exception. What is noteworthy is that the peculiar hegemony exercised by the English-language translation has to some degree been reinforced by the positions taken, not just by editors, but by the author himself. This is not done overtly. Unlike Günter Grass, Murakami does not organize workshops for his translators during which he explains unclear passages. While he has said that he is ‘very thankful for the translators who translate my novels’ and patiently answers translators’ questions, Murakami prefers not to interfere. Respectful of their work, he appreciates ‘how immensely the flavour of the text can vary from one translator to another’ (Murakami 2006: 30). He values fluidity as a criterion in translation – ‘If a translation can be read smoothly and effortlessly, and thus enjoyably, then it does its job as a translation perfectly well’ (ibid.: 29) – and does not seem to be particularly demanding as to whether nuances and details are correct (Murakami 2000: 28). On the contrary – and in marked contrast to Kundera – he ‘appreciat[es] the significant changes that his translators often make in his texts’ (Suter 2008: 60). But his active engagement is limited to Englishlanguage translations; and given the still-prevalent assumptions mentioned above concerning the ‘correctness’ of the author’s views on translation, very often the decisions made by Murakami and his English-language translators have serious repercussions for the way his work is translated into all Western languages. This is evident, for instance, in the first German translation of The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, translated by Giovanni and Ditte Bandini and published in 1998 as Mister Aufziehvogel. As Hijiya-Kirschnereit points out, significant portions of the novel were missing in the German version (regarded by many as one of Murakami’s most important works) because the book had been translated from English, and thus reflected the substantial cuts that had been made to the American version – cuts made with Murakami’s approval.19 Hijiya-Kirschnereit (2014) thus affirms that ‘Murakami seemed to have decided that the American version of his novels was to be regarded as the basis for translations into other

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languages. Or so the message was received on the German side.’ Additionally, her claim that, in the 1990s, Murakami ‘refused to grant translation rights for a selection of his short stories to be translated into German on the grounds that translation rights for an English edition of the stories [chosen from several Japanese anthologies] were still under negotiation, that he preferred to make the selection by himself ’ and that his ‘Japanese agent was reluctant to even negotiate translation rights for a German version as long as no English-language publisher showed interest in the book in question’ (Hijiya-Kirschnereit 2014) further underscores the author’s preference to rely on an English-language voice in communicating his work beyond Japan.20 In relation to this question, we must also consider Murakami’s own status as a translator of American literature. Since English is a language he knows well, it is not surprising that he is consulted during the English translations of his work. Indeed, he has written of his relationship to the process of rereading himself in English: ‘I usually leaf through translations of my novels if they are in English. Once I start reading one, I often find it absorbing (because I have forgotten how it goes) and fly through to the end, thrilled and occasionally moved to laughter’ (Murakami 2006: 28). Interestingly, Murakami sometimes even introduces revisions into new Japanese-language editions of his work on the basis of cuts made in the English translation (Rubin 2005: 307). In another highly recursive move, Murakami felt that Alfred Birnbaum’s translation of his story, ‘Lederhosen’, was so different from the original that he translated it back into Japanese from the English and later published it. As he wrote: ‘So in this case I took on a complex role of somebody who, while being the author, is at the same time the translator’ (Murakami 2004: 24). Murakami’s European translators, while well positioned to effectively convey into their own languages his trademark Americanized, ‘buttery’ prose, until recently faced an uphill battle. The reasons relate to the dominance of English, the author’s experience as a translator of American literature and his previous immersion in Anglophone environments. More recently, however, translations in a number of European languages have tended to be released before the English-language version, which is a sign of an at least partial ‘liberation’ from English hegemony.21

A dual liberation Given what we have said about Murakami’s relationship to American literature, this liberation from English also implies a liberation of sorts from the author.

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Recalling Vanderschelden’s (1998: 28) observation that, by involving the author in the translation, ‘the translator reduces his own freedom and the potential for his own reading of the source text’, we regard the reversal of the earlier pattern, which assumed the English translation’s temporal primacy, as a good thing. Our translations of a Murakami text differ from the English not only because we can no longer be influenced by editorial changes or word choices made in the English version, but also because the author is, for all intents and purposes, entirely removed from the equation. (On rare occasions some of us do consult the author regarding specific ambiguities in the text, as, for example, whether the floor of a room was covered with a rug or carpeting – the Japanese word, kāpetto, can mean both22). Consequently, no member of our collective has the ‘key’ to the text and no one can speak for the author. In our virtual Murakami translation workshop, translators brainstorm and learn from one another; collaboration is based on a non-hierarchical relationship of equality and is driven by the desire to help each other and get help when needed. All of us share two languages, Japanese and English; most exchanges within the group take place in English. While talking about the difficulties of translating particular phrases or speech patterns, each of us considers whether a certain solution would work in his or her particular linguistic, cultural and sociolinguistic context. Sometimes we manage to find common ground, but arriving at a consensus is not the point of the discussion; no one is made to follow a given suggestion or strategy. The point is to find a solution that works well in one’s own language; and with that in mind, it is extremely useful to learn how colleagues working in other languages have addressed an identical problem. One tool that has turned out to be especially valuable is the aforementioned blog. The beneficial aspects of a weblog for a literary translators have been described by Esmaeil Moghaddam in an article entitled ‘The Weblog: A Tool for Literary Translators’. Moghaddam (2013: 202) stressed the interactivity of the blog platform as the most important enabling factor, since in comparison to other media it allows for transparency. What Moghaddam has in mind, though, is a blog written by one translator in order to communicate with readers or publishers, and also with the author, who may become an active and public commentator during the translation process. This is clearly different from our blog, which was conceived as a forum for translators of Murakami into different languages and, potentially, for readers too. The main thing the two models have in common is the idea of transparency. We imagined the blog as a way to document the translation process and to reproduce, on some level, the sort of open exchange of experience that had

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characterized the 2006 Tokyo conference. When we sent the information about the blog, however, to a group of about ten European translators, the initial response was lukewarm. Zielinska-Elliott has continued to post and to moderate, and the blog is now as much a platform for disseminating information about the progress of translations of new works (and about Murakami generally), as for exchanging ideas about translation. There have, however, been a few exceptions. Considerable interest was generated by a discussion over how to translate nicknames in Colourless Tazaki Tsukuru and His Years of Pilgrimage (i.e. whether to keep them in Japanese or translate as colours: Red, Blue, etc.), and several people chimed in on how to translate the title of the short story anthology Onna no inai otokokatchi. (This means literally ‘men without women’, the catch being that while the word ‘men’ is definitely in plural, it is not specified whether onna is singular or plural.) There was also some debate over whether to attempt to translate the Osaka dialect spoken by a character in the story ‘Yesterday’.23 At the present time of writing, the blog has attracted over 60,000 visits from 119 countries since its launch in 2013. More detailed statistics from one month (12 September to 11 October 2015), chosen at random, reveal that 320 individual users visited the site, 41 per cent of whom were repeat visitors; the average length of a visit was 1 minute and 6 seconds, with a bounce rate of 37.6 per cent, which indicates that some people stay on the page and read several posts, and others return to read more. Judging by the comments left on the blog, visitors include both readers and translators, including several translators and editors who were not part of the original 2006 network.

Conclusion As we have shown, the specific nature of Murakami’s writing, the nature of the publishing industry and the global position of the English language means that translating Murakami into English is quite a different proposition from translating him into any other language. To escape the hegemony of English – a hegemony exercised not just by publishers, but to a certain extent by the author as well – while at the same time preserving in translation the elements of the English language embedded within the text is very difficult indeed. To manage that challenge, we have found that working together – not with the author, but with other non-English translators who all know Japanese – is preferable. It affords us the possibility of bouncing ideas off others who face the same or

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similar translation difficulties and, at the same time, helps us not to lose sight of the particularities of Murakami’s style, language and atmosphere, that we aim to recreate in our own language. We believe that the collaborative model of translation presented here, in which the author plays virtually no part, and in which the authority of the English translation as ersatz ‘original’ is circumvented, offers a richer and more fulfilling experience for the translator. But it has other important implications as well. ‘Author intervention’, Vanderschelden (1989: 25) remarks, ‘has a serious impact on the status of the translator’, in that it ‘reinforces the derivative nature of translation’. While more research would be needed to ascertain whether the creation of the network and its method of working around the author (instead of with him) have actually improved the quality of the European translations, the translators of our group seem to have gained an increased sense of autonomy, strengthening our belief in the independence of the text and in our own interpretative competence. In the process, we have achieved a stronger sense of community; leaving the confines of our separate linguistic silos creates in each of us a heightened awareness of the limits to which we can push our own languages and a greater willingness to experiment. Perhaps most importantly, we believe that we have managed to give readers a wider choice of which Murakami they would like to read. If one agrees that there is no single correct translation, providing a greater diversity of interpretations is a preferable outcome. Where the model has yet to yield entirely satisfactory results is in bringing greater transparency to the translation process. Although the limited interest translators had in posting on the blog was initially disappointing, it is worth thinking about why this happened. Timing issues relating to copyright negotiations and translators’ schedules were at times an impediment to collaboration. The Spanish and Polish editions of Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki, for instance, came out in the fall of 2013, the German and Dutch ones in January 2014, but the Danish and Norwegian translators were only able to start working on the text in late spring 2014. On a deeper level, however, there may be a continued unwillingness to open up the translation process to scrutiny. Many translators, it seems, remain uncomfortable discussing their translation work on an open forum, a reluctance that may be related to deep-seated notions about translation – that it should emulate the socially accepted model of authorship described two decades ago by Venuti, as the ‘appearance … that the translation is not in fact a translation, but “the original”’ (Venuti 1995: 1). The persistence among translators themselves of the antiquated idealization that translation, like

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literary creation, should be the work of isolated genius, pouring forth without hesitations, revisions and corrections is remarkable; it shows how far we have yet to go to destroy the ‘illusion of transparency’ (Venuti 1995: 1) and to speak freely – even to each other – about the perils and pleasures, false starts and happy discoveries that we encounter in our work.

Notes 1 According to Michael Seats (2006: 26), Murakami’s first bestseller Norwegian Wood sold 4.3 million in the first nine years. By 2013 it had sold 11.6 million copies in Japan (incl. paperback). His latest novel, Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage, sold one million copies during the first week of sales in April 2013 (Japan Times 2013). Murakami’s work has been translated into over fifty languages (personal email to Zielinska-Elliott from Yuki Katsura of Haruki Murakami Office, 8 August 2016). 2 The first translation, by David Hamblyn and Oliver Stallybrass, appeared in 1969. Another shortened version of this translation was published the same year. Following the author’s protests at the changed sequence of the chapters, it was republished in 1970. The fourth version was published in 1982 in Michael Heim’s translation, and the fifth in 1992. 3 Harstad discussed the experience with some of the translators – Paula Stevens (Dutch), Jean-Baptiste Coursaud (French), Ina Kronenberg (German) and Maria Valeria D’Avino (Italian) – in a panel discussion ‘Four Translators Meet Their Author’, during the Days in Translation festival in Oslo, 13 March 2013. 4 Private conversation with Stian Omland, 13 May 2014. 5 Here is another example: ‘France: “Up the wooden hill to Bedfordshire.” I am stupidly stuck on this. Does that mean, “Up on the wooden hill that goes down to Bedfordshire”? I do not think so. Spain: I think he means those vague aromas from TC’s childhood he can’t quite identify are somehow evocative of walking up a certain wooden hill on the way to Bedfordshire. David: I am sorry, guys, this is a very obscure old-time way of saying “going to bed” – the wooden hill is the stairs (up to the bedroom), and “Bedfordshire,” as well as being an English county, means “Bed” in this context’ (Omland 2012). 6 Skype conversation with Sverre Knudsen, 15 May 2014, and private conversation with Lena Karlin, 27 April 2014. 7 For Barańczak and Cavanagh see Victorine (2015); for Pevear and Volokhosky, see New York Public Library (2007). 8 Murakami’s interest in Jungian psychology is well known; this metaphor is reminiscent of the Jungian description of the psyche as a house with different rooms and levels.

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9 The conference was sponsored by the Japan Foundation, a quasi-governmental organization promoting Japanese culture around the world. The name of the conference was a paraphrase of A Wild Sheep Chase, the English title of Alfred Birnbaum’s translation of Murakami’s 1982 novel Hitsuji o meguru bōken. For more information about the conference, see http://www.jpf.go.jp/e/project/intel/ archive/others/murakami/. (accessed 5 October 2015). See also the publication that emerged from the conference, A Wild Haruki Chase: Reading Murakami Around the World (Japan Foundation 2008). 10 The story appeared in Murakami 1995. 11 The English translation of the novel appeared in November 2011, two and a half years after the first two of the three volumes appeared in Japanese. The main reason for this might have been that, because of the length of the book, the American publisher Knopf decided to divide the task of translation among two translators (Jay Rubin translated Books 1 and 2, and Philip Gabriel Book 3) and to publish the three volumes as one book. 12 This and other issues pertaining to translating 1Q84 are described in ZielinskaElliott and Holm (2013). 13 ‘Hayaoki no tori wa takusan no mushi o tsukamaeru koto ga dekiru’ (Murakami 2013: 346). 14 Danish: ‘Den fugl der står først op, fanger ormen, ikke?’ (Murakami 2014c: 282). Norwegian: ‘Morgenfuglen fanger marken’ (Murakami 2014d: 229). Polish: ‘Ptaszek, który rano wstaje, znajduje dużo robaków’ (Murakami 2014a: 327). 15 ‘Kore wa motomoto eigo de kaite atta bunshō on chokuyaku shita no de wa nai ka’ (‘Umibe no Kafuka’ 2015). 16 This term batākusai (‘reeking of butter’), a derogatory characterization of the adoption of Western styles, has often been used about Murakami, as in a BBC radio show aired on 1 April 2001, titled ‘The Man Who Stank of Butter’, featuring a number of Japanese critics. 17 In many European countries some of the early translations were done from the English (German and Norwegian, among them); in other countries (e.g. Portugal) this is still the case. 18 Some fellow translators confirm that their editors have referred to the English version as the ‘original’, and in some countries the copy-editor will check translations against the English translation for accuracy. In Norway and Poland this was the case until 1Q84, as we know from our own experience. Ursula Gräfe also confirmed having to deal with this issue on at least one occasion: ‘The editor wrote she had looked something up in the original. At first I was confused, because I knew she didn’t know any Japanese; then it dawned on me.’ (personal email to Zielinska-Elliott, 9 October 2015) 19 Jay Rubin, the English translator of The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, wrote that he was asked by Knopf to shorten the book so that it did not exceed a certain length,

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Collaborative Translation and that Murakami had given his approval (Rubin 2005: 306–7). The Norwegian translation of this same work, by Kari and Kjell Risvik, was also done from English and followed all the same cuts. However, several European translations of the book (for example, into Polish by Zielinska-Elliott, Danish by Mette Holm and Dutch by James Westerhoven) were based on the original Japanese published version and did not include any of the cuts made in the English translation. Both authors of this article tried to negotiate for their own compilations of short story translations into Polish and Norwegian, respectively, but were told that they had to follow the English selection. The first Murakami novel to appear in several European languages before the English was 1Q84, the first two volumes of which had come out in a number of countries by 2010 before the English edition was published in the fall of 2011. European translations of Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage were also published several months or more before its English-language release. Personal email from Zielinska-Elliott to Haruki Murakami’s office, 20 September 2013. The text in question was Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki. See posts at tsukurutazaki.blogspot.com of 1) 12–13 April, 19 November 2013, 13–14 May 2014; 2) 30 March, 6 May, 25 July 2015; 3) 25 September, 9 and 11 October 2015. In September 2014, Zielinska-Elliott changed the blog title to ‘Translating Haruki Murakami’, to allow her to write about translations of other Murakami works that had appeared since Tsukuru Tazaki.

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Literature on the Global Stage’, UC Berkeley, 6 July, https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=9krkflbnkPQ (accessed 25 October 2015). Suter, R. (2008). The Japanization of Modernity. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center. ‘Umibe no Kafuka no fukanō na nihongo’ (2015). [The impossible Japanese of Kafka on the Shore]. Anonymous fan blog, http://homepage2.nifty.com/yama-a/essay0211a. htm (accessed 15 October 2015). Vanderschelden, I. (1998). ‘Authority in Literary Translation. Collaborating with the author’. Translation Review 56: 22–31. Venuti, L. (1995). Translator’s Invisibility: A History of Translation. London: Routledge. Victorine, J. (2015). ‘How to Translate a Map: Clare Cavanagh: Poetry 2015’. Publisher Weekly, 4 June, http://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/new-titles/adultannouncements/article/66104-how-to-translate-a-map-clare-cavanagh-poetry-2015. html (accessed 10 September 2014). Vraa, M. (2013). Interno: Farvel til Dan Brown. Copenhagen: Zetland. Unpaginated ePub edition. Zielinska-Elliott, A. and Holm, M. (2013). ‘ Two Moons Over Europe: Translating Haruki Murakami’s 1Q84’. AALITRA Review 7, November, aalitra.org.au (accessed 16 March 2016). Zielinska-Elliott, A. and Kaminka, I. (2013). Thinking of Tsukuru Tazaki. Translation blog. tazakitsukuru.blogspot.com (accessed 16 March 2016).

10

Translation Crowdsourcing: Research Trends and Perspectives Miguel A. Jiménez-Crespo

Introduction The emergence of a digital era over the past two decades now permeates most aspects of human life. This digital revolution has led to a globalized world in which people, cultures, knowledge, businesses and communications move across borders in ever-increasing volumes. Translation has been conceived as both a conduit and an agent for these transnational flows (Cronin 2013). Indeed the development of new translation technologies has kept pace with the increase in democratizing, participatory and open internet practices since the Web 2.0. An expanding body of research known as the ‘technological turn’ in translation studies (TS) describes the process by which ‘translation theories begin to incorporate the increasingly evident impact of technology, in turn providing a relevant theoretical framework to language and translation technology researchers’ (O’Hagan 2013: 513; see also Malmkjaer 2013; Munday 2012). This interplay between innovation and research is exemplified by the way the emergence of ‘translation crowdsourcing’ practices in the second decade of this century has consolidated the technological turn in translation theory. Crowdsourcing in translation refers to the practice by which translations are produced by volunteer groups of internet users forming an online community (O’Hagan 2011). It emerged through the participatory nature of the Web 2.0 and ever-increasing rates of internet penetration around the world, in line with the belief held by the creator of the WWW Tim Berners-Lee (2000: 113) that ‘the web is more a social creation than a technical one’ (113). This social dimension to the World Wide Web has been explored in recent TS research into social networks in professional translation (Risku and Dickinson). Indeed, much

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translation crowdsourcing research occurs at the nexus of the technological and so-called ‘sociological turn’ (Wolf 2010; Angelelli 2011) in TS research. The purpose of this chapter is to give an overview of existing trends in crowdsourcing research and to critique and consolidate existing knowledge. The first section will attempt to clarify the current terminological confusion surrounding crowdsourcing and collaborative translation on the web. The second section addresses how TS scholars have reacted to this phenomenon, taking into consideration that the discipline is only beginning to come to terms with the impact of technology on translation (O’Hagan 2013).

Defining crowdsourcing and untangling the terminological confusion The term ‘crowdsourcing’ is attributed to Howe (2006), who created this compound term by joining the words ‘crowd’ and ‘outsourcing’. He first defined it as ‘the act of taking a job traditionally performed by a designated agent … and outsourcing it to an undefined, generally large group of people in the form of an open call’. A great number of researchers from different disciplines quickly drew their attention to this dynamic, emerging phenomenon, which has resulted in some definitional confusion. Estellés and González (2012) address this problem in ‘Towards an Integrated Crowdsourcing Definition’. They identify the following shared elements within existing definitions: (1) the crowd, (2) the task at hand, (3) the recompense obtained, (4) the crowdsourcer or initiator of the crowdsourcing activity, (5) what is obtained by them following the crowdsourcing process, (6) the type of process, (7) the call to participate, and (8) the medium. Using an integrative method they propose the following definition of crowdsourcing: Crowdsourcing is a type of participative online activity in which an individual, an institution, a non-profit organization or company proposes to a group of individuals of varying knowledge, heterogeneity and number, via a flexible open call, the voluntary undertaking of a task. The undertaking of the task, of variable complexity and modularity, and in which the crowd should participate[,] bringing their work, money, knowledge and/or experience, always entails mutual benefit. The user will receive the satisfaction of a given type of need, be it economic, social recognition, self-esteem or the development of individual skills, while the crowdsourcer will obtain and utilize to their advantage that [which] the user has brought to the venture, whose form will depend on the type of activity undertaken. (198)

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Despite the precise nature of this definition, TS is yet to agree on what exactly constitutes crowdsourcing. O’Hagan (2011: 14) defines it as the practice whereby volunteer or community translations are produced in some form of collaboration by a group of internet users forming an online community. Meanwhile, McDonough Dolmaya (2012: 169) sees it is as ‘collaborative efforts to translate content … either by enthusiastic amateurs … or by professional translators’. While both definitions emphasize online collaboration, McDonough also stresses the potential for professionals to participate in these volunteer initiatives. Keeping in mind that ‘definitions are not ends in themselves; they are only means, tools which enable us to formulate claims and arguments, or to set up useful classifications’ (Chesterman 2005: 28), this section will establish a classification of crowdsourcing and related phenomena. It will use a prototype approach (Halverson 1998) to analyse the above proposal by Estellés and González. From a prototypical perspective, it will be argued that the most important feature of crowdsourcing is its dependency on collaborative web-mediated environments. Open calls are initiated by companies and institutions, as well as by self-organized translation communities. The practice is most often facilitated by purpose-built web-based platforms, such as Facebook Translation, Minna no Hon’yaku, Transbey, Tradubi or Trommons by the Rosetta Foundation. These web platforms or translation management systems manage and structure the complex process that involves different steps, roles and responsibilities for participants (e.g. manager, editor, translator, bilingual participant). Participants are unpaid volunteers, whether or not they are professional translators (i.e. Schäler and O’Brien 2010; Dombek 2013). Skills therefore range from professional translation competence to degrees of bilingual expertise or ‘natural translation’ skills (Harris and Sherwood 1974) – that is, the natural ability that all bilinguals possess, albeit with varying capacities, to translate between languages. The rewards for the translator, as will be shown later, are mostly intrinsic in nature, related to the personal satisfaction derived from helping others, improving translation or language skills, doing satisfying intellectual work, etc., rather than extrinsic, such as improving one’s reputation or attracting potential clients.

Mapping crowdsourcing into related TS concepts Different umbrella terms have been used to refer to crowdsourcing, modifying ‘translation’ with qualifiers such as ‘crowd’ (Kageura et al. 2011), ‘usergenerated’ (O’Hagan 2013; Perrino 2009), ‘open’ (Cronin 2010), ‘community’

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or ‘volunteer’ (Pym 2011). Terminological complexity has only increased with the introduction of new acronyms, such as ‘CT’3 – meaning community, crowdsourced, and collaborative translation (Ray and Kelly 2011) – while many other TS concepts often appear in publications as synonyms for crowdsourcing, including ‘collaborative translation’, ‘community translation’, ‘social translation’, ‘non-professional translation’ and ‘volunteer translation’ (McDonough Dolmaya 2012; Pym 2011). These latter concepts can only be considered as super- or ‘umbrella’ terms (Vandepitte 2008: 578). Their superordinate nature is due to the fact that they describe translation practices that exist with and without web mediation. ‘Collaborative translation’ and ‘community translation’ are the terms most widely used as synonyms for crowdsourcing in TS publications. In fact, ‘collaborative translations on the web’ was the term used in the first publication related to translation crowdsourcing (Shimohata et al. 2001).1 This chapter will use a variation of this term, ‘online community translation’ to cover selfmanaged initiatives by online communities. It should be remembered that while the internet and the WWW have allowed these translation networks to flourish, collaborative translation is certainly not a new phenomenon (O’Brien 2011). Indeed, it has been central to translation theory since the emergence in the 1980s of action theory (Holz Mänttäri 1984) and functionalist approaches (Reiss and Vermeer 1984; Nord 1997). These theories opened up translational phenomena to include not only authors and translators but also other participants such as initiators, commissioners and end users. Pym (2011: 97) recommends ‘volunteer translation’2 be used for crowdsourcing, collaborative or community translations. Yet the ambits covered by collaborative and volunteer translation do not fully overlap: volunteering does not necessarily mean collaborating, just as collaborating does not mean volunteering. Collaborative translation, as much as crowdsourcing, may be paid or unpaid, and occur with or without the internet or dedicated web platforms. Figure 10.1 shows the conceptual overlap and mapping of terms related to crowdsourcing. In this map, phenomena related to translational practices that occur both with and without web mediation are placed as superterms. ‘Social translation’ is a fuzzy umbrella term that encompasses volunteer, collaborative and community translations. It is currently used in TS in two different senses: some scholars place social translation closer to activist approaches to translation (Newmark 2003), while in the discussions of technology it has often been used as a synonym for crowdsourcing (Austermühl 2011; O’Brien 2011; Wasala et al. 2013).

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Figure 10.1 Mapping concepts related to crowdsourcing in translation studies.

Immediately below these forms of social translation are concepts that pertain to translation contexts, practices and phenomena, which emerged with the advent of the Web 2.0. The most generic term is ‘user generated translations’ (Perrino 2009), for most, but not all, novel collaborative practices on the web tend to emanate from end users or readers of the translations. The graph represents how all web-based volunteer translations fall into one of two models, depending on whether they are ‘solicited’ or ‘unsolicited’ (O’Hagan 2013). The former refers to cases in which a company, institution or non-profit organization puts out a call to the community to complete a specific localization task, such as Facebook, Skype, Adobe, Twitter (Mesipuu 2012; Jiménez-Crespo 2009, 2013a) or NGOs such as the Rosetta Foundation (Anastasiou and Schäler 2010), Kiva (Murno 2010) and Kotoba no Volunteer [Volunteers of words] (Kagueura et al. 2011). The ‘non-solicited model’ refers to cases in which self-selected collectives of users undertake self-organized specific translation tasks without responding to any specific organized request. Their translations are later distributed across the WWW via websites, blogs or any other type of digital text, including subtitles, tweets, ROM hacking of videogames, fansubs, scanlations etc. (O’Hagan 2008). It would be more accurate to call this practice ‘online collaborative translation’. Strictly speaking, only solicited models should be considered instances of ‘crowdsourcing’, since this model entails an initiator or commissioner who ‘outsources’ to the ‘crowd’ the cognitive work normally done by a professional (Brabham 2013). Nevertheless, in recent trends, ‘crowdsourcing’ is used for online collaborative translation whether it has been

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initiated through a proposal to the ‘crowd’ or not (O’Hagan 2013). This may be due to the fact that collectives also send out calls to translate to the community. Be that as it may, some scholars such as Costales (2012) correctly identify solicited models with crowdsourcing, while unsolicited ones  – translation projects or practices that would never be performed through a business model – are identified as ‘community translation’.

Subtypes of translation crowdsourcing In addition to solicited and unsolicited models there is a range of subtypes of crowdsourcing and online collaborative translation. These may be classified by the objectives of the process or by the nature of their community’s involvement. Crowdsourcing models may be defined as open or closed, depending on whether there has been a call to participate. In the open model, any member of a community can freely participate, as is the case with Facebook or Twitter users. Yet, even here restrictions may be imposed. For example, any volunteer translating for Facebook must have had an account for at least one month. In a closed model only those preselected or invited by a company or organization may participate, as is the case with Skype volunteer translators (Mesipuu 2012). In this case, organizations or self-organized collectives might impose hierarchical structures upon the community, selecting participants with different skill levels or characteristics. For example, professional translators in TED talks are often assigned tasks of higher responsibility, such as reviewing or project managing (Camara 2014). Other self-organized communities also impose strict evaluation criteria that determine how members move up the organization ladder, as is the case with the aRGENTeaM subtitle community in Argentina (Orrego-Carmona 2012). Thus, the term online ‘community’ cannot be loosely understood as an anonymous collective of users, but rather as a group of people subject to varying degrees of internal or external organization, control and limitations to access, skills, participation, etc. DePalma and Kelly’s (2011) proposal to divide crowdsourcing processes into cause, product or outsourced-driven models has also generated debate. Cause-driven processes are those in which a collective is motivated to produce collaborative translation for a specific common goal, such as helping with translation in the wake of disasters, as happened after the Haiti earthquake (Munro 2010). Volunteers work without any monetary compensation and translate at their own convenience. Product-driven efforts represent those

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Figure 10.2 Translation crowdsourcing subtypes.

cases in which a company would not normally localize a product, except with the help of crowdsourcing. This is common for open-source software, such as OpenOffice, Ubuntu, the Mozilla and Flock Lion browsers, while some products are partially crowdsourced, such as those of Adobe, Symantec or Sun. Finally, some online translation providers offer crowdsourced translation that may be supplemented with a mix of professional and/or machine translation. The number of such providers is increasing, and includes Duolingo, Getlocalization, Cucumis, Smartling, Lingotek, Tolingo, Transifex and MNH (García 2015).

Trends in translation crowdsourcing research Translation crowdsourcing has been researched within scientific disciplines as diverse as computational linguistics and sociology, and from the varying perspectives of academia, industry and government. Within TS, the subject gained wider attention with the strident and public opposition of many professional translators to certain crowdsourcing initiatives. LinkedIn’s proposal for only professionals to participate in their crowdsourcing project was particularly contentious and provoked a backlash from the translation profession (McDonough Dolmaya 2011). Scholarship of crowdsourcing has moved from more anecdotal accounts to theoretical and analytical attempts to describe the phenomenon and develop empirical hypotheses. Empirical research into the ethical and sociological issues has focused mostly on the motivations and profiles

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of volunteers (O’Brien and Schäler 2010; McDonough Dolmaya 2011; Olohan 2013; Dombek 2013). Case studies have focused on Arab contexts (Izwaini 2014) or specific crowdsourcing efforts in different companies (Mesipuu 2012). Other studies have focused on ‘the language of translation’3 using corpus and experimental methods (Jiménez-Crespo 2011, 2013b, forthcoming).

Theoretical and applied research in TS Theoretical publications have addressed questions centred on the definition of crowdsourcing, how it relates to translation theory and the challenges it provokes (Cronin 2009; Fernandez Costales 2011). I have addressed how the translation quality model that underlies the Facebook Translate application embodies theoretical principles that have been in circulation since the 1960s (Jiménez-Crespo 2011). These include the cloze tests proposed by Nida (1964); the role of user expectations of quality, important to functionalist approaches (Nord 1997); and the basic principles of corpus-assisted approaches to quality evaluation (Bowker 2001). Applied research has until now focused on evaluating the potential of volunteer or fan networks as training opportunities (O’Hagan 2008) and the development of crowdsourcing models in collaboration with all interested parties (Désilets and van de Meer 2011; Wasala et al. 2013).

Empirical studies and research methodologies in translation crowdsourcing Since 2010, a growing number of empirical studies have appeared, most of which focus on translation’s sociological aspects: ‘the cluster of questions dealing … with the networks of agents and agencies and the interplay of their power relations’ (Wolf 2010: 29; see also Angelelli 2011). Chesterman also remarks upon this renewed interest in ‘the social role and status of translators and the translators’ profession, translating as a social practice’ and ‘people and their observable actions’ (2007: 173–4). He refers to this as ‘translator studies’ (2009) as opposed to ‘translation studies’. Such empirical studies have to date focused on (1) the motivations of volunteers, (2) their profiles, (3) their modes of organization (Orrego-Carmona 2012) and/or (4) the ethical implications of crowdsourcing for the profession. In addition to investigating sociological approaches, empirical studies have addressed (5) what type of translation

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products are produced with translation crowdsourcing (Jiménez-Crespo 2013b, forthcoming; Perez and Carreira 2011).

Survey research methods and crowdsourcing research Research into crowdsourcing reinforces the premise that TS is interdisciplinary, with a wide range of theoretical models being imported and distilled. Most, however, have been adapted from social research (using online survey methods, for instance), ethnography, document surveys or combinations of different methods. Survey methodologies are most frequently used to research the motivations and profiles of those involved in translation crowdsourcing.4 Crowdsourcing studies benefited from the evolution of survey research afforded by the internet. New online research methods (ORMs), also known as internet research or web-based methods (Fielding et al. 2008), have been used to study Wikipedia (McDonough Dolmaya 2012), Facebook (Dombek 2013), TED’s open translation initiative (Camara forthcoming), Proz.com (Risku and Dickinson 2009) and the Rosetta Foundation (O’Brian and Schäler 2010). Anastasiou and Gupta (2011) employ such methods to compare the attitudes of professionals towards machine translation and crowdsourcing. O’Brien and Schäler (2010) studied the motivation of 139 volunteers at the non-profit translation organization the Rosetta Foundation, finding that the  main driver of volunteer motivation was support for the causes to which the organization was committed. The possibility of improving translation skills was also a significant motivator. This is the only such study in which volunteers were asked what would encourage them to participate in the future, one of the main concerns of organizations and companies that coordinate crowdsourcing activities (Ray and Kelly 2011). The translators’ main suggestion was the possibility of getting professional feedback on their translations, both from other translators and from the client organizations. This may be due to the fact that 86.4 per cent of participants reported being professional translators. McDonough Dolmaya (2012) adapted the methodology used to study Free and Open-Source Software (FOSS) when researching the motivation of a sample of seventy-five Wikipedia volunteer translators. Possible motivations were divided into the intrinsic (self-improvement or enjoyment) and the extrinsic (personal benefit, potential economic gain). Participants were divided into non-professional and professional translators. McDonough Dolmaya shows that even when intrinsic motivations – such as making the content

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available in other languages and supporting the initiative – were consistently the most significant, a combination of different types of motivations were identified. Extrinsic motivations – such as gaining experience and feedback from others  – were again highlighted as more important by professions. McDonough Dolmaya also found empirical proof for Ray and Kelly’s (2011) previous hypotheses that volunteers do not see all initiatives equally or consider them to be of equal status. Identifying the motivations and loyalty that attract volunteers to some initiatives thus stands as one of the main questions that future studies might address.

Mixed methods and netnographic approaches When researching the motivation of Polish volunteer Facebook translators, Dombek (2013) combined online survey methods with ‘netnography’, ethnographical methods for researching online communities, also known as ‘online ethnography’ or ‘cyberethnography’. Here, subjects in online communities are observed directly by the researcher, who becomes involved with the community, interacting with its members and gathering data. Blogs and forums become sources comparable to the letters and archives studied by the historian. The researcher analyses online communications and archival data, in order to assess behaviour and interaction. Like the studies mentioned above, Dombek (2013: 262) showed that translators’ motivations were varied. Respondents reported that translating for Facebook: (1) generated feelings of competence, autonomy and relatedness; (2) met their expectations of personal and social benefit; (3) produced a sense of reciprocity, self-efficacy, group commitment and reputation gain; and (4) promoted a fun and enjoyable experience. Yet Facebook’s translation platform was often a source of frustration for volunteers, preventing users from attaining their goals rather than facilitating them, sapping each of these kinds of motivation. Interestingly, the study shows how users nevertheless found solutions to such technical problems by using collaborative communicative platforms and discussion fora.

Documentary research methods on crowdsourcing Documentary research methods have been used mainly to study the ethics of crowdsourcing. Publications have either compared ethical codes in professional

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and crowdsourcing contexts (Drugan 2011) or identified ethical dilemmas brought on by this new phenomenon (McDonough Dolmaya 2011). Drugan (2011: 117) identified ‘shared values and an explicit community vision’ as the main issue in non-professional ethical codes. Contrary to many professional situations, communities tend to explain clearly the penalties for non-compliance with their ethical guidelines. Moreover, there is an ‘emphasis on community policing’ (118), which is always framed in positive terms. McDonough Dolmaya (2011) identifies the main ethical issues as: (1) remuneration, (2) translation visibility and (3) minority language policies. Documentary research methods have also been used to research the issue of motivation from a qualitative point of view. For instance, Olohan (2014) studied the Translation Initiative of the TED talks website, where a small series of short talks are distributed online and subtitled into a large number of languages. The data was obtained from blog entries in which the organization asked their main contributors: ‘Why do you translate?’ Only eleven blog entries were available, though it is clearly indicated that this cannot be considered representative of the over 8,000 translators in TED. Rather, ‘the aim here is not to uncover all possible motivations … but rather to assess the usefulness of a qualitative analysis of data of this kind in studying motivation’ (2014: 23). In line with most studies, a combination of motivations seem to drive volunteer efforts, including support for TED’s mission (‘ideas worth spreading’) or the opportunity to be part of a community. Overall, this study identifies the following motivations: (1) Sharing TED benefits, (2) effecting social change, (3) deriving the ‘warm glow’ (feel-good factor or the sense of satisfaction derived from altruistic behaviour which differentiates pure from impure altruism), (4) participating in communities, (5)  enhancing learning and (6) deriving enjoyment. The results agree by and large with those of other studies, though the qualitative approach does not rank or quantify the impact of different motivations.

Motivation: A summary Having contrasted and analysed the existing studies on crowdsourcing from a sociological perspective, this section will now summarize the results. This task is complicated, first, by the need to compare different measuring scales, such as the Likert scale used by O’Brien and Schäler (2010) and the multiple choice options in McDonough Dolmaya (2012). Secondly, studies formulate

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the potential motives differently. Nevertheless, the reliance on previous studies on volunteer motivation means that the underlying principles in survey questions are quite similar. Most studies tend to differentiate between intrinsic and extrinsic motivations as defined by Frey (1997).5 For the purposes of presenting an overview of results, the data from all studies with a quantitative component were used. All similar motivations were ranked in each study and subsequently aggregated for comparison.6 The outcome of this analysis resulted in three tiers of motivations. It should also be kept in mind that the profiles of the translators are quite uneven between different studies. The percentage of volunteers who are professional translators varies according to the initiative. In the Rosetta Foundation non-profit project, professional translators accounted for 86.6 per cent of participants, while in the study on Wikipedia 12 per cent were translators, and 16.4 per cent in the TED initiative. Tier one represents the most common results in all studies; it includes intrinsic motivations. 1. Making information in other languages accessible to others. 2. Helping the organization with their mission, or a belief in the organization’s principles. 3. Intellectual development. This is most likely related to what Shirky (2010) refers to as the ‘cognitive surplus’.7 The second tier of motivations reported by participants combines intrinsic and extrinsic incentives: 4. The desire to practise the second language. 5. Professional motivations related to the need to gain translation experience or increase one’s reputation. Finally, a range of other motivations appear consistently at the lower end of the results: 6. 7. 8. 9.

The desire to support lesser-known languages. The satisfaction of completing something for the good of the community. For fun. To be part of a network.

It is to some extent surprising that the desire to be part of a community or network tends to rank at the bottom, thought it should be kept in mind that all studies conclude that a combination of motives is responsible for the motivation of volunteers.

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Other studies: Quality and ‘the language of translation’ Quality has been the focus of many studies in translation research, but only two qualitative studies have addressed the ‘language of translation’ and the quality of translated products in crowdsourcing. Perez and Carreira (2011) use an error-based evaluation method, while Jiménez-Crespo (2013b, forthcoming) uses a corpus-based approach. The research questions for these studies relate to previous corpus studies on the ‘language of translation’ (Baker 1995) in that they attempt to identify whether crowdsourcing can produce ‘natural’ sounding translations, and ask questions such as whether the Facebook model (in which volunteers propose translations that are subsequently voted on) is more effective to reach that goal. In a 2013 study, I used consolidated comparable corpus-based methods to determine whether the Spanish version of Facebook included the most frequent lexical items, within the potential range of variation, found in non-translated or original Spanish social networking sites. Comparing 142 lexical items in comparable segments of the crowdsourced version of Facebook for Spain and the twenty-five most popular Spanish social networking sites showed that the localized version of Facebook included the most frequent lexical units and syntactic patterns for each communicative purpose investigated. This study therefore confirms that the crowdsourcing method used by this company is effective in producing texts similar to those that were ‘naturally’ produced in the target language. In the subsequent experimental study (Jiménez-Crespo forthcoming), seventy-five translation students in the fourth year of the School of Translation and Interpreting in Granada (Spain) were divided into three experimental groups. The first had to directly translate a Facebook navigation menu from English. The second had to translate the terms using only those found in the corpus produced for my earlier study, thus limiting the potential range of terminological variation (i.e. ‘upload photo’ can also be expressed as ‘change profile pic.’, ‘change your photo’, etc.). The third group were instructed not to translate at all but to write from scratch the navigation options for a Spanish social networking site, thus serving as a control group for the experiment. The testing instruments were created from the results of the corpus study, following a bottom up approach to experimental design. The results were triangulated with the existing comparable corpus. They showed that the voting method used by Facebook (where participants offer translation proposals for each segment and others subsequently vote for the one they prefer) produces different results depending on the translation method

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(selecting a pre-existing translation versus translating directly). On average, selecting translations resulted in longer and more explicit renderings, while direct translations were on average shorter and closer to the conventional items found in the corpus. This finding points to potential differences in translated products depending on the translation method used, opening the door to further research into the products of translation crowdsourcing.

Conclusions and future outlook The advent of the internet is often compared to the paradigm change that caused the invention of the printing press. As this chapter testifies, translation practice, theories and research are deeply implicated in this digital revolution. Thanks to the WWW, crowdsourcing is booming and the only limit to its growth is the interest of volunteers. Indeed, communities are ‘in control of what they will give’ and make choices depending upon their belief in a ‘cause’ (O’Brien and Schäler 2010: 10). But given that communities’ initiatives are ‘ordered hierarchically, with some projects having higher status or greater value than others’ (McDonough Dolmaya 2012: 186), perhaps the often lauded ability for crowdsourcing to disrupt the professional market has been overestimated. Non-profit and activist situations aside, even successful crowdsourcing projects such as Facebook’s have found it difficult to persuade individuals to translate segments longer than several sentences. Crowdsourcing has certainly expanded the breadth and range of TS objects of research, widening the scope of both translation quality and the notion of translation itself (see García 2015). Crowdsourcing, together with raw and human post-edited machine translation, has contributed to a more flexible and dynamic understanding of translation quality, moving from a maximum quality model to the current ‘fit for purpose’ one, in which initiators, translators and end users select whichever process and quality matches the ‘purposes intended’ (Jiménez-Crespo 2013a). This can be seen in platforms that let customers decide whether they request crowdsourced, post-edited MT or human translation. This chapter has attempted to map crowdsourcing and its different subtypes within the framework of TS, in order to disentangle the related network of concepts. It thus proposes that the term ‘crowdsourcing’ may be used when a call to a community to participate over the web is made. It is advisable to distinguish between such cases and those where there has been no call to the ‘crowd’, by

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using the terms ‘online collaborative translation’ or, if members are not paid, ‘online volunteer collaborative translation’. The crowdsourcing research trends analysed here have been shown to combine the ‘sociological turn’ that started in the 1990s with the ‘technological turn’ of the twentieth century. Studies have explored in main the motivations and profiles of participants, an issue of interest to translators and scholars attempting to elucidate why anyone would do this job without monetary compensation. Studies could have inquired into the fear of corporate intervention in the crowdsourcing market, which is prevalent in the wider translation community. However, no empirical study has yet addressed what motivates professional translators in particular to participate in crowdsourcing projects. Indeed, many questions with respect to crowdsourcing remain unexplored. What is its impact upon the quality of professional translation and translation products? What constraints does it impose? How does it affect the translation profession and society more generally? What are the ideological, political and ethical implications of crowdsourcing translation? Furthermore, if translation is a problem-solving and decision-making activity (Wilss 1994), research from cognitive approaches could explore how collaborative models change the way translations are processed. From the perspective of ‘situated cognition’ (Risku and Windhager 2013), researchers could inquire into how crowdsourcing networks impact decision-making. Indeed, this novel textual population – or ‘subset of translations’ in Chesterman’s words (2004: 43) – and the work it is generating will offer future researchers a precious resource to test any hypothesis that attempts to make any generalizations about the ‘language of translation’. To address these questions, existing translation theories will need to be revised, their scope broadened. Crowdsourcing is, however, in ‘its infancy’ (Estellés and González 2012) and its future will be determined first and foremost by the shifting interests of online communities and the development of technologies to facilitate it. In this sense, the potential research paths and trajectories into this dynamic phenomenon are as unpredictable as crowdsourcing itself.

Notes 1 The term was used in the context of improving MT quality through a combination of collaborative translation, dictionaries, term extractors and a dedicated community management system (Shimohata et al. 2001).

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2 Olohan (2014: 19) defined volunteer translation as that ‘conducted by people exercising their free will to perform translation work which is not remunerated, which is formally organized and for the benefit of others’. 3 According to Baker (1996: 176) translations represent a distinct textual population with specific linguistic features since, ‘translation, like any kind of text production, develops in response to the pressures of its own immediate context and draws on a distinct repertoire of textual patterns’. 4 Survey research was imported early on into translation studies in a wide variety of subfieds, such as translation training, translation policy, social approaches to translation, audiovisual translation, translation quality, etc. 5 Olohan (2014: 19) reports on the discussion of the appropriateness of this binary intrinsic-extrinsic construct, since ‘volunteers are often motivated by a combination of factors, and can be seen as behaving simultaneously altruistically and egoistically’. 6 The qualitative results of the study by Olohan (2014) were not included since the motivations identified in the blogs by TED translators were not ranked, but in general her findings are similar to others. 7 Dombek (2013) considered boredom to be a motivator, which may relate to the desire to expend one’s cognitive surplus.

Works cited Anastasiou, D. and Gupta, R. (2011). ‘Comparison of Crowdsourcing Translation with Machine Translation’. Journal of Information Science 37 (6): 637–59. Angelelli, C., ed. (2012). The Sociological Turn in Translation and Interpreting Studies, Special issue of Translation and Interpreting Studies 7 (2). Angelone, E. and Shreve, G., eds. (2010). Translation and Cognition. AmsterdamPhiladelphia: John Benjamins. Aüstermhul, F. (2011). ‘Of Clouds and Crowds: Current Developments in Translation Technology’. T21T, http://www.t21n.com/homepage/articles/T21N-2011-09Austermuehl.pdf (accessed 20 June 2014). Baker, M. (1995). ‘Corpora in Translation Studies: An Overview and Some Suggestions for Future Research’. Target 7: 223–43. Baker, M. (1996). ‘Corpus-based Translation Studies: The Challenges that Lie Ahead’. In Terminology, LSP and Translation: Studies in Language Engineering in Honour of Juan C. Sager, edited by H. Somers, 175–85. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Bédard, C. (2000). ‘Mémoire de traduction cherche traducteur de phrases’. Traduire 186: 41–9. Berners-Lee, T. (2000). Weaving the Web: The Past, Present and Future of the World Wide Web by its Inventor. London: Texere.

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Bey, Y., Boitet, C. and Kageura, K. (2006). ‘The TRANSBey prototype: An Online Collaborative Wiki-based CAT Environment for Volunteer Translators’. In Proceedings of the Third International Workshop on Language Resources for Translation Work, Research & Training (LR4Trans-III), edited by E. Yuste, 49–54. Paris: ELRA. Bowker, L. (2001). ‘Towards a Methodology for a Corpus-based Approach to Translation Evaluation’. Meta 46: 345–64. Camara, L. (2015). ‘Motivation for Collaboration in TED Open Translation’. International Journal of Web Based Communities 11 (2): 210–29. Chesterman, A. (2004). ‘Beyond the Particular’. In Translation Universals. Do they Exist?, edited by A. Mauranen and P. Kujamäki, 33–49. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: Benjamins. Chesterman, A. (2007). ‘Bridge Concepts in Translation Sociology’. In Constructing a Sociology of Translation, edited by M. Wolf and A. Fukari, 171–83. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Chesterman, A. (2009). ‘The Name and Nature of Translator Studies’. Hermes – Journal of Language and Communication Studies 42: 13–22. Costales, A. (2012). ‘Collaborative Translation Revisited: Exploring the Rationale and the Motivation for Volunteer Translation’. Forum – International Journal of Translation 10: 115–42. Cronin, M. (2010). ‘The Translation Crowd’. Tradumática 8, http://www.fti.uab.es/ tradumatica/revista/num8/articles/04/04central.htm (accessed 20 June 2014). Cronin, M. (2013), Translation in Digital Spaces. New York and London: Routledge. DePalma, D. and Kelly, N. 2011. ‘Project Management for Crowdsourced Translation: How User-Translated Content Projects Work in Real Life.’ In Translation and Localization Project Management: The Art of the Possible, edited by K. Dunne and E. Dunne, 379–408. Amsterdam-Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Desilets, A. and van de Meer, J. (2011). ‘Co-creating a Repository of Best-practices for Collaborative Translators’. Linguistica Antverpiensia 10: 11–27. Dombek, M. (2013). A Study into the Motivations of Internet Users Contributing to Translation Crowdsourcing: The Case of Polish Facebook User-Translators, Unpublished doctoral dissertation, Dublin City University. Drugan, J. (2011). ‘Translation Ethics Wikified: How do Professional Codes of Ethics and Practice Apply to Non-Professionally Produced Translation’. Linguistica Antverpiensia 10: 97–111. Estellés, E. and González, F. (2012). ‘Towards and Integrated Definition of Crowdsourcing’. Journal of Information Science 38 (2): 189–200. European Commission (2011). Crowdsourcing. Brussels: Directorate General of Translation. Folaron, D. (2010). ‘Networking and Volunteer Translators’. In Handbook of Translation Studies: Volume 1, edited by Y. Gambier and L. van Doorslaer, 231–4. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins.

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Frey, B. (1997). Not Just for the Money. An Economic Theory of Personal Motivation. Cheltenham and Brookfield: Edward Elgar Publishing. García, I. (2015). ‘Cloud Marketplaces: Procurement of Translators in the Age of Social Media’. JoSTrans 23: 18–38. Gouadec, D. (2007). Translation as a Profession. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Halverson, S. (1998). ‘Theory, Method and Object in Descriptive Translation Studies: Establishing a Link Between Theoretical/Descriptive Categories, Corpora and a Conception of the Object of Study’. META 43 (4): 494–514. Harris, B. and Sherwood, B. (1978). ‘Translating as an Innate Skill’. In Language Interpretation and Communication, edited by D. Gerber and H. Wallace Sinaiko, 155–70. Oxford and New York: Plenum. Hewson, C., Yule, P., Laurent, D. and Vogel, C. (2003). Internet Research Methods: A Practical Guide for the Social and Behavioural Sciences. London: Sage Publications. Holz-Mänttäri, J. (1984). Translatorisches Handeln. Theorie und Methode. Helsinki: Suomalainen Tiedeakatemia. Howe, J. (2006). ‘Crowdsourcing: A Definition. Crowdsourcing: Tracking the Rise of the Amateur’, http://crowdsourcing.typepad.com/cs/2006/06/crowdsourcing_a.html (accessed 20 June 2014). Jiménez-Crespo, M. A. (2016). ‘Testing Explicitation in Translation: Triangulating Corpus and Experimental Studies’. Across Languages and Cultures 16(2): 257–83. Jiménez-Crespo, M. A. (2013a). Translation and Web Localization. New York and London: Routledge. Jiménez-Crespo, M. A. (2013b). ‘Crowdsourcing, Corpus Use, and the Search for Translation Naturalness: A Comparable Corpus Study of Facebook and NonTranslated Social Networking Sites’. TIS: Translation and Interpreting Studies 8: 23–49. Jiménez-Crespo, M. A. (2011). ‘The Future of General Tendencies in Translation: Explicitation in web localization’. Target 23 (1): 3–25. Kageura, K., Abekawa, T., Utiyama, M., Sagara, M. and Eiichiro, M. (2011). ‘Has Translation Gone Online and Collaborative?: An Experience from Minna no Hon’yaku’. Linguistica Antverpiensia 10: 45–74. Kaptelinin, V. and Nardi, B. A. (2012). Activity Theory in HCI: Fundamentals and Reflections. San Francisco, CA: Morgan & Claypool. Kozinets, R. V. (1998). ‘On Netnography: Initial Reflections on Consumer Research Investigations of Cyberculture’. In Advances in Consumer Research, Vol. 25, edited by J. Alba and W. Hutchinson, 366–71. Provo, UT: Association for Consumer Research. Kozinets, R. V. (2010). Netnography: Doing Ethnographic Research Online. London: SAGE. Lakhani, K. R. and Wolf, R. G. (2005). ‘Why Hackers Do What They Do: Understanding Motivation and Effort in Free/Open Source Software Projects’. In Perspectives in Free and Open Source Software, edited by J. Feller, B. Fitzgerald, S. Hissam and K. Lakhani, 3–22. Cambridge, MA: MIT.

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Malmkjaer, K. (2013). ‘Where are we? (From Holmes’s map until now)’. In Routledge Handbook of Translation Studies, edited by C. Millán-Varela and F. Bartrina, 31–44. London: Routledge. McDonough Dolmaya, J. (2011). ‘The Ethics of Crowdsourcing’. Linguistica Antverpiensia 10: 97–111. McDonough Dolmaya, J. (2012). ‘Analyzing the Crowdsourcing Model and Its Impact on Public Perceptions of Translation’. The Translator 18 (2): 167–91. Mesipuu, M. (2012). ‘Translation Crowdsourcing and User-translator Motivation at Facebook and Skype’. Translation Spaces 1: 33–53. Mossop, B. (2006). ‘How Computerization Has Changed Translation’. META 51: 777–93. Munday, J. (2012). Introducing Translation Studies. New York and London: Routledge. Munro, R. (2010). ‘Crowdsourced Translation for Emergency Response in Haiti: The Global Collaboration of Local Knowledge’. AMTA Workshop on Collaborative Crowdsourcing for Translation, http://www.mt-archive.info/AMTA-2010-Munro.pdf (accessed 20 June 2014). Newark, P. (2003). ‘No Global Communication without Translation’. In Translation Today, edited by G. Anderman and M. Rogers, 55–68. Buffalo: Multilingual Matters. Nida, E. (1964). Towards a Science of Translation. Leiden: Brill. Nord, C. (1997). Functionalist Approaches Explained. Manchester: St. Jerome. O’Brien, S. (2011). ‘Collaborative Translation’. In Handbook of Translation Studies, Volume 2, edited by Y. Gambier and L. van Doorslaer, 17–20. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins. O’Brien, S. and Schäler, R. (2010). ‘Next Generation Translation and Localization. Users Are Taking Charge’. Translating and the Computer Conference, 17–18 November 2010, London, http://doras.dcu.ie/16695/1/Paper_6.pdf (accessed 20 June 2014). O’Hagan, M. (2008). ‘Fan Translation Networks: An Accidental Translator Training Environment?’. In Translator and Interpreter Training: Issues, Methods and Debates, edited by J. Kearns, 158–83. London: Continuum. O’Hagan, M. (2011). ‘Community Translation: Translation as a Social Activity and Its Possible Consequences in the Advent of Web 2.0 and Beyond’. Linguistica Antverpiensia 10: 11–23. O’Hagan, M. (2013). ‘The Impact of New Technologies on Translation Studies: A Technological Turn?’. In Routledge Handbook of Translation Studies, edited by C. Millán-Varela and F. Bartrina, 503–18. London: Routledge. Olohan, M. (2014). ‘Why Do You Translate? Motivation to Wolunteer and TED Translation’. Perspectives: Studies in Translatology 7: 17–33. Orrego-Carmona, D. (2012). ‘Internal Structures and Workflows in Collaborative Subtitling’, Paper delivered to the First International Conference on Non-professional Interpreting and Translation. Università di Bologna, 17–19 May, http://isg.urv.es/ publicity/doctorate/research/documents/Orrego/Orrego-Carmona_StructuresWorkflows_NPIT1.pdf (accessed 20 June 2014).

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Perez, E. and Carreira, O. (2011). ‘Evaluación del Modelo de Crowdsourcing Aplicado a la Traducción de Contenidos en Redes Sociales: Facebook’. In La Traductología Actual: Nuevas Vías de Investigación en la Disciplina, edited by E. Calvo Encinas, M. M. Enriquez Aranda, N. Jimenez Carra, I. Mendoza Garcia, M. Moron Martin and N. Ponce Marquez, 99–118. Granada: Comares. Perrino, S. (2009). ‘User-Generated Translation: The Future of Translation in a Web 2.0 Environment’. JoSTrans 11: 55–78. Pym, A. (2011). ‘Translation Research Terms: A Tentative Glossary for Moments of Perplexity and Dispute’. In From Translation Research Projects 3, edited by A. Pym, 75–110. Tarragona: Intercultural Studies Group. Ray, R. and Kelly, N. (2011). Crowdsourced Translation: Best Practices for Implementation. Lowell, MA: Common Sense Advisory. Risku, H. and Dickinson, A. (2009). ‘Translators as Networkers: The Role of Virtual 76 Communities’. Hermes 42: 49–70. Risku, H. and Windhager, F. (2013). ‘Extended Translation: A Sociocognitive Research Agenda’. Target 13: 33–45. Sattar Izwaini (2014). ‘Amateur Translation in Arabic-Speaking Cyberspace’. Perspectives: Studies in Translatology 22 (1): 96–112. Shimohata, S. Kitamura, M., Sukehiro, T. and Murata, T. (2001). ‘Collaborative Translation Environment on the Web’. Proceedings from Machine MT Summit 8, 331–4. www.mt-archive.info/MTS-2001-Shimohata.pdf (accessed 20 June 2014). Shirky, C. (2010). Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age. New York: Penguin Press. Vandepitte, S. (2008). ‘Remapping Translation Studies: Towards a Translation Studies Ontology’. Meta 53 (3): 569–88. Wasala, A., Schäler, R. Buckley, J., Weerasinghe, R. and Exton, C. (2013). ‘Collaboratively Building Language Resources while Localizing the Web’. Proceedings of the 3rd Workshop on the People’s Web Meets NLP, ACL 2012, 15–19. Wolf, M. (2010). ‘Translation “Going Social”? Challenges to the (Ivory) Tower of Babel. ’ MonTI 2: 29–46. Zaidan, O. F. and Calliston-Burch, C. (2011). ‘Crowdsourcing Translation: Professional Quality from Non-Professionals’. Proceedings of the 49th Annual Meeting of the Association of Computational Linguistics, 1120–9. http://www.cs.jhu. edu/%7Eozaidan/AOC/turk-trans_Zaidan-CCB_acl2011.pdf (accessed 20 June 2014).

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The Role of Institutional Collaborations in Contexts of Official Bilingualism: The Canadian Example Gillian Lane-Mercier

It is often helpful to resort to the dictionary, especially when reflecting on a term whose definition(s) are so rooted in ambient discourses that they appear obvious. Such is the case with ‘collaboration’, which immediately conjures up the act of cooperating, of working in concert with someone towards a common end or on a joint project. Indeed, the most frequent synonyms one finds are ‘cooperation’, ‘concert’, ‘association’ and ‘alliance’, but there are a good twenty more. Several provide an interesting nuance, such as ‘partnership’ or ‘union’, while others are perhaps less common, such as ‘overlap’, ‘concurrence’, ‘coalition’, ‘affiliation’, ‘intercommunication’, to which could be added, if one takes into account the etymology of ‘collaboration’, the rather unexpected French synonyms ‘compétition’, ‘joute’ (joust) and ‘rivalité’ (rivalry), which would seem to run counter to the meaning of ‘collaboration’. This is borne out by the most frequently listed antonyms which, often more instructive than synonyms, include ‘disunion’, ‘division’, ‘non-cooperation’, ‘alienation’, ‘estrangement’ and, in French, ‘opposition’, ‘aggression’, ‘tournoi’ (tournament) and ‘combat’ that all share the same semantic field as the synonyms ‘joute’ and ‘rivalité’. The latter acquire, however, a certain relevance in light of the second meaning of ‘collaboration’, attested since the Second World War: ‘traitorous cooperation with an enemy force in one’s country’.1 This brief lexicological exercise will serve as the basis for two introductory remarks. On the one hand, whereas the first meaning of ‘collaboration’ implies the existence of shared goals and a common vision predicated on inclusion and consensus, the second meaning together with the French synonyms just noted reveal the presence of tensions, imbalances, dissensions, antagonisms and

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potential ruptures that both threaten and integrally constitute all collaborative initiatives. On the other hand, these synonyms draw attention to ways in which the notion of collaboration might be problematized, that is, defined not only with respect to an explicit aim – a joint project, a shared goal – but also with respect to the very processes that, in so far as they jeopardize the desired outcome, need to be negotiated, minimized or hidden. In what follows, the functioning of such processes will be explored on the assumption that, over and above a lexical viewpoint, collaborations must also be approached from a political and ethical perspective. In doing so, we may account for the power relations and ensuing tensions between self and other that the call for cooperation, participation and partnerships tends more often than not to either ignore or dismiss. More specifically, this chapter will examine some of the ethical and political issues raised by a particular kind of collaboration, which I shall call ‘institutional collaboration’, and which occurs between different cultural communities seeking to ensure the diffusion of their respective literatures through translation. The term ‘institutional collaboration’ will refer to literary translation projects undertaken by translators in concert with publishers and one or more institutions, as well as to agreements or partnerships between institutions and/or organizations whose mandate is to support literary translation. Canada offers an interesting context for the study of both types of institutional collaboration. Officially bilingual since 1867, Canada attributes an important cultural, social, economic and especially political role to translation from French to English and from English to French at the intra-national level. The country further distinguishes itself by the financial support for literary translation from and into both official languages. This has been provided by the federal government since the creation, by act of Parliament in 1972, of the Translation Grants Program administered by the Canada Council for the Arts. My objective is to propose a synthesis of the evolution of the goals of the Translation Grants Program, along with the issues, tendencies and impact associated with these goals, as evidenced by a series of documents produced by the Canada Council since the early 1970s. The material consulted includes meeting minutes, memoranda, annual reports, mission statements, statistical analyses, studies, strategic plans and application forms, many of which can be found on the Council’s website.2 My hypothesis is as follows: in addition to implicit and explicit references to the set of fundamental values the Council has consistently sought to uphold (see infra), a number of the documents contain what I shall term ‘fault lines’ that call one or more of these values into question, starting with the principle of parity between English and French which forms the cornerstone

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of the Official Languages Act adopted in 1969. These fault lines – which I shall now attempt to identify, problematize and generalize – are symptomatic of the on-going presence of unequal power relations. It is these relations which underlie the Council’s mandate to foster institutional collaborations between Anglophones and Francophones in the name of cooperation and a shared social contract. As such, they confirm the social, ethical and political nature of the Translation Grants Program. They also point to a broader context where official bilingualism in general, and literary translation in particular, are increasingly undermined by the imbalances that continue to structure the relations between the two linguistic communities.

The Translation Grants Program The Canada Council for the Arts is a Crown corporation founded by an act of Parliament in 1957, whose initial mandate was ‘to foster and promote the study and enjoyment of, and the production of works, in the arts’ (Canada Council for the Arts 2015a). Reiterated on the Council’s current website, this core mandate is enhanced by clarifications and historical hindsight: not only must the Council promote and celebrate the arts, but over the years it has also become ‘Canada’s leading supporter of the arts. [The Council] is proud to have contributed to the lively cultural life and abundance of exceptional art that we now enjoy in Canada’ (Canada Council for the Arts 2015b), thanks most notably to the many granting programmes it makes available to artists and cultural organizations, as well as prestigious bursaries and awards. The institutional collaborations the Council has initiated over the years in the form of partnerships and shared projects are multilateral in so far as they involve, to a varying degree, other federal, provincial and municipal ministries or agencies, on the one hand, and on the other, artists and cultural practitioners from all regions of the country. The Council reports to Parliament on its activities through the Department of Canadian Heritage, whose principle mandate is to implement and oversee the federal government’s commitment to stimulate the vitality of Canada’s minority Francophone and Anglophone populations, thereby ensuring their continued development. It should be recalled that while Francophones are a minority population on the national level (21 per cent), they enjoy majority status in the province of Quebec (78.9 per cent), which is officially monolingual (French) since 1974 and where the language rights of the Anglophone minority (8.3 per cent)3 are protected under the Official Languages

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Act. Adopted in 1969, when the relations between Quebec City and Ottawa were particularly strained due to the rise of the independence movement in Quebec, the Act aims to ensure respect for English and French and ensure equality of status and equal rights and privileges as to their use in federal institutions; … advance the equal status and use of English and French. (Office of the Commissioner of Official Languages 2015) Established by the federal government in 1972, the Translation Grants Program simultaneously subscribes to the logic of official bilingualism and falls within the purview of the mandate of the Canada Council for the Arts. The government’s objectives in creating the programme were twofold: the first, of a purely economic nature, was to come to the aid of the floundering Canadianowned book industry; the second, of a predominately political nature, was to encourage ‘the exchange of ideas among the two major cultural groups in Canada’ (Memorandum from the secretary of state to the Canada Council for the Arts 19704) by translating books published in the arts, the humanities and the sciences.5 In a memorandum addressed to the members of Cabinet of the Canadian government in 1971, Secretary of State Gérard Pelletier remarked, statistics in hand: Of the 60 translated non-text books published in 1970, one could hardly find ten which were Canadian books. It appears to me to be sufficient, for the time being, to create a fund which would permit the subsidization of from 40-50 translations each year and which would meet the increased costs of translation in the years to come. The number of translations, if it were attained, would constitute a real success seeing that it would represent a quadrupling of the present number of Canadian books translated. (Memorandum to Cabinet 1971)

While the political objective of the Translation Grants Program has remained unchanged since 1972, the description of its specific goals has undergone various reformulations which, as minor as they may seem, give new shades of meaning to the notion of an ‘exchange of ideas among the two major cultural groups in Canada’ by subtly displacing the emphasis. These displacements reflect the Council’s evolving vision in matters of institutional collaborations which, in turn, mirrors changes occurring within Canadian society. But one may further speculate6 that they also reveal the fault lines running through the discourses of all federal institutions bound by the Official Languages Act. The following cross section of mission statements, selected according to chronological order and

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the discrete differences (in italics) with respect to the programme’s inaugural statement quoted above, provide a representative overview of the nature of these reformulations, the values they incarnate and the interests they serve. Thus the programme aims to: ‘encourage greater exchange between Canada’s French- and Englishlanguage communities’ (Memorandum to Council 1979); ‘brin[g] together Canada’s two linguistic communities’ (Council Minutes 1993); ‘provide funding for the translation of Canadian works written in English, French or a native Canadian language into any of these languages’ (Memorandum to Council 1994); ‘foster literary exchange between English- and French-Canada’ (Memorandum to Council 2001); ‘bridge the gap between the two solitudes’7 (Memorandum to Council 2004); serve ‘as a vehicule for dialogue’ (Memorandum to Council 2005); ‘provid[e] assistance to Canadian book publishers who, in championing the act of translation and including translated works in their publishing programs, broaden readers’ access to Canadian literature’ (Report to Council 2007); ‘offset the risks of publishing translations, which require special skills and editorial expertise to ensure that the translated text captures the voice of the original author while still reading smoothly in the target language’ (Report to Council 2012); ‘build stronger ties between francophone and anglophone publishers’ (Report to Council 2013); and ‘contribute to the growth of Canadian literature’; ‘increase the availability of books by Canadian authors in the two official languages’. (Report to Council 2014)

From idealism to pragmatism From a purely empirical perspective, one notes an overall tendency, which has become increasingly obvious since 2007, to provide additional details on the nature of the programme’s mandate as well as on the goals it seeks to achieve. More specifically, the most recent statements contain references to a set of individual agents (authors, publishers, readers) and agencies (the Council, the Canadian literary institution) who supposedly share a joint project and

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participate in a collaborative venture that is portrayed as attainable and nonproblematic. Indeed, the general principles underlying the initial formulations, grounded in the liberal ideals, that dominated the 1960s and 1970s, of equality, tolerance, mutual respect and openness to the other cultural community, have given way to a much more pragmatic vision associated with editorial strategy, market demands on the book industry and fluid translational practices designed to guarantee a reading public and sales. Interestingly, the translator, often referred to in the earlier annual reports as being underpaid, over the years acquires increased visibility and cultural prestige. This results in the further consolidation of the idea of institutional collaborations involving a network of interdependent agents all on equal footing, aspiring towards a common goal. The coherency and legitimacy of these collaborations derive as much from the means deployed (funding, translation, publication, distribution) as from the principles that motivate them (see Chesterman 2006). This is made clear in the following quote from the 2011 annual report: ‘Thanks to skilled translators who capture the essence of the author’s voice, an expanded readership can appreciate the author’s work when it appears in translation’ (Report to Council 2011), to which may be added three excerpts from the programme’s web page concerning what it terms the ‘butterfly effect’ of literary translation: It all starts with a good book. Then a translator, writer or publisher is inspired to see it translated. Suddenly, thousands of readers discover another side of Canadian literature (Canada Council for the Arts 2015c); Translators spark the interest, the enthusiasm and the passion of readers (Canada Council for the Arts 2012a. My translation); Translators build bridges between English and French Canada and serve as cultural intermediaries to the most discrete perfection (Canada Council for the Arts 2012a. My translation). What comes to the fore once again is the unproblematic nature of both the collaborative work itself and the anticipated results (‘thousands of readers’), expressed mainly through recourse to hyperbole (‘inspired’, ‘perfection’) and discursive shortcuts (‘suddenly’), the interchangeability (‘or’) of the roles associated with three of the four agents mentioned, together with the federating nature of the translator’s work. To its credit, the programme is unwavering in its adhesion to the Council’s mandate which, as already stated, is to promote the arts in general. That said, a

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more critical reading of these excerpts brings to light a first series of fault lines that threaten the collaboration’s success. On one level, it would appear that more than forty years after the programme’s implementation, nothing has changed: bridges still need to be built between the two communities in an effort to bring them together. Put differently, translation as collaborative bridge-building has not (yet) succeeded in attaining this objective. On another level, the bridge metaphor was forged in the 1960s by Anglophone literary translators who wanted to convey to their readers the social and political upheavals Quebec was experiencing at the time. It was rarely endorsed by their Francophone counterparts, who were quick to point to the assimilative forces at work beneath the assumptions of parity and mutual understanding which images of bridges ostensibly promote. The very presence – and English-Canadian origin – of this particular metaphor on the Council’s website epitomizes (for Canadians) the linguistic, cultural, economic and political imbalances it was designed to correct, and (for Francophone Quebeckers) the historical resistance it encountered. Such interpretations are moreover exacerbated (for many Francophones) by recurring references in the Council’s documents to ‘Canadian literature’ (in the singular – see supra) depicted as a monolithic, hence potentially assimilationist entity that all but erases the idea of linguistic duality.8 The discursive framing of the programme’s mission has evolved. From predominantly idealistic formulations to predominantly pragmatic reformulations, it has run parallel to a realigning and acknowledgement of the power relations between the collaborative agents. As the programme officers themselves have come to recognize, instead of fostering the desired ideal of cultural rapprochement, the translation grants have tended to serve the commercial interests of publishers in a highly competitive marketplace that is dominated, in English, by powerful American and British publishing houses and, in French, by just as powerful Parisian ones.9 This tendency reinstates (or, more properly, re-enacts) hierarchical power positions that contradict the collaborative principle. More importantly, it has also necessitated a re-evaluation of the status, role, rights and interests of Canadian literary translators within that hierarchy and marketplace. The ensuing tensions between the programme’s founding values on the one hand and market pressures on the other are particularly palpable in a 2004 memorandum: For over 20 years, … [the Council’s] main focus for the program was to bridge the gap between the two solitudes. However, in the past years we have noticed a marked difference in the publishers’ approach to the Translation program. They

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now look at the program as a means for audience development and strategic market initiatives. Translation was also perceived as a technical activity and not as a literary activity in its own right. (Memorandum to Council 2004)

Hence the increased visibility given by the programme to the translator over the past decade or so: no longer absent nor seen, when present, as a poorly paid intermediary between cultures, the translator is rather considered as a creator equal to the author. On the pecuniary level, this has led to an increase in the rates per word and, on the symbolic level, to the downplaying of the economicbased power relations noted above. This in turn allows for the reintroduction of the parity principle and a subtle shift in focus to the central role of the translator within the translation process: The success of the program … confirms the Council’s important contribution in supporting translations as a literary activity in Canada, not only for the publishers, writers, but most importantly for the translators who give the Canadian readers access to our various authors. (Memorandum to Council 2004)10

From the standpoint of network theory as developed by Bruno Latour (2005) and recently applied to the field of translation studies (see Buzelin 2007), the equal distribution of positions of authority and prestige attests to the inherently fluid, decentralized nature of networks. It also implies that relations of interdependence and parity between different actors are vital to successful collaborations, construed as one particular type of network. In practice, however, this fluidity can be interrupted by more or less unpredictable centralizing forces that temporarily place a given agent or agency (the publisher, the translator) in a dominant position as a result of conflicts and changes – whether political, cultural or economic – occurring within the network or, more broadly, within the society at large. In the case of the institutional collaboration between the Council, authors, publishers, translators and their readers, portrayed in many of the Council’s documents as fluid, harmonious and non-problematic, covert points of tension and competing interests are at play. These can be inferred not only from the repeated use of out-dated motifs (the two solitudes; bridges), supposedly stripped of their original political charge, or from references to the marketplace, but also from the ‘sudden’ visibility given to actors hitherto more or less invisible. In this particular instance, what the Council’s official publications do not reveal are the long, often conflictual negotiations between the Council, the Association of Canadian Publishers and the Canadian Association of

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Literary Translators, who played an instrumental role in ensuring improved working conditions and more social acknowledgement for literary translators – including the right to royalties and their name on the cover of their published translations (see Claxton 2005).

From equality (sameness) to equity (fairness) This leads to another set of issues raised by the multiple reformulations of the programme’s mission statement. Despite the omnipresence of allusions to Canada’s official linguistic duality, one notices a gradual increase over the years in the number of cultural communities eligible for a translation grant.11 Indeed, a new series of fault lines slowly emerges which, by calling attention to the (suppressed) presence of sociopolitical conflicts of an altogether different scope, not only weakens once again the notion of participation on an equal footing towards a common goal, but shakes the very foundations of official bilingualism and linguistic equality in which federal institutions are grounded. In the mid-1990s, programme agents began to underscore the urgency of ‘explor[ing] issues of access [to the programme] facing native Aboriginal writers and publishers’ (Council Minutes 1994) with a view to creating incentives, such as a loosening of the eligibility criteria. The programme’s mandate was subsequently expanded to include the sixty-odd languages still spoken in Canada by the three categories of Aboriginal populations identified in the 1982 Constitution Act – the First Nations Peoples, the Metis and the Inuits – whose languages, despite the fact they have never had official status, were henceforth eligible for a translation grant, with a few notable exceptions (e.g. the mixed French-Cree languages of the Metis, see Sing 2010/2011).12 It should be noted that the Canada Council for the Arts and the Department of Canadian Heritage are the only federal agencies to have developed a policy on Aboriginal languages and cultures, the acknowledgement and revitalization of which are not supported by any other significant federal law, policy or programme. Indeed, the Council’s leadership in this area should be lauded. Not only does it serve as a salutary reminder of the assimilations, exclusions and genocides perpetrated through colonization, but it also foregrounds the processes of domination at the foundation of official linguistic duality. In this respect, the decision to subsidize literary translations from and into Aboriginal languages resonates with the Canadian Multiculturalism Act (1985) which at once recognizes the language rights of Canada’s indigenous peoples and stipulates

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that ‘English and French are the official languages of Canada and neither abrogates nor derogates from any rights or privileges acquired or enjoyed with respect to any other language’ (Minister of Justice 1985).13 Linguistic dualism thus seems in competition with multicultural diversity, unless a clear distinction is made between language and culture, as occurs in several reformulations of the programme’s mission statement and, more widely, in the text of the Canadian Multiculturalism Act where references to multilingualism are virtually absent. Such distinctions are, however, artificial. The ideological incoherency between official duality and official diversity is here the real issue, given that the former presupposes necessary exclusions and the latter implies a desire for inclusion. In the latest reformulation of the programme’s objectives posted on its web page, the resulting tension takes on an interesting aspect: The Canada Council for the Arts is committed to equity and inclusion, and welcomes applications from diverse Aboriginal, cultural and regional communities, and from people with disabilities. This program provides grants for the translation of literary works written by Canadian authors. Translation must be into French, English or an Aboriginal language for publication in Canada. … The Canada Council for the Arts is administering, on behalf of the Department of Canadian Heritage, the National Translation Program for Book Publishing [which] is designed to increase the visibility of Canadian-authored books in both official languages, under the Government of Canada’s official language strategy. (Canada Council for the Arts 2015d. Emphasis added)

This tension is significant. Over the past several years, the Council’s discourse has shifted, no longer promoting the liberal ideal of equality from which stem both the Official Languages Act and official multiculturalism. In its stead, one finds the more politically conservative notion of equity, defined as a principle and practice. Thus, rather than occulting de facto disparities, exclusions and inequalities so as to uphold a vision of Canadian federalism based on the peaceful coexistence of equal cultural communities, it would seem that the Council prefers, on the contrary, to confront this vision head on. For once the principle has been accepted that ‘all people have the right to be treated equally, [though] not all experience equal access to resources, opportunities or benefits’ (Canada Council for the Arts 2014), it is possible to improve the unfavourable conditions of certain artistic communities through corrective cultural policies and financial formulae designed to foster ‘a vital and diverse arts ecology’ (Canada Council for the Arts 2014). The principle and practice of equity thus go hand in hand with a diversity of

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viewpoints, expressions, identities and cultures, undermining restrictive dualist paradigms that – with all due respect to (neo)liberal ideologies – tend towards homogenization as a consequence of more or less disavowed assimilatory and exclusionist processes, of which the pending extinction of Canada’s Aboriginal languages offers a stark example. In this light, it could be argued that the semantico-ideological incompatibilities embedded in the Council’s current documents once again underscore the dual nature of institutional collaborations. While such collaborations require cooperation, teamwork and partnerships, they also invariably reveal blind spots where antagonisms risk jeopardizing the collaborative process. Just as the power relations between agents and agencies can rise to the surface in the wake of functional or structural redistributions, the shared goal is never perfectly seamless due to the stakeholders’ diverging interests, or to ideological variation within the dominant discourse. Although blind spots – together with the discursive fault lines they create – are characteristic of any collaboration, they are perhaps more salient in institutional collaborations, especially when Crown corporations are involved, in so far as the latter are at once an integral part of, and at arm’s length from, the government’s structure and administration. In the Canadian context, this means Crown corporations are autonomous in their internal policies, administrative structures and public activities; their mandate, along with their budget, however, are determined by the political priorities of the government, namely the need to maintain national unity and to uphold a sense of pan-Canadian (coast to coast) identity.14 By favouring the principle of equity, and by gradually distancing itself from the traditional liberal discourse on bilingualism and multiculturalism15 in order to reduce significant cultural imbalances, the Council has revealed, over and above the presence of ideological dissonances within Canadian federalism, its desire to adapt to a sociocultural and political reality. This reality has evolved since the 1970s towards an ever greater pragmatism and conservatism – a position which, dominant though it may be, is far from unanimous. In 2002, the Treasury Board of Canada Secretariat observed with respect to Crown corporations: ‘The pursuit of public policy objectives in a manner normally associated with the efficiency of private sector firms often creates a major challenge for board members of Crown corporations. The balancing of difficult and competing concerns often requires trade-offs of these objectives’ (Treasury Board of Canada Secretariat 2002). It is now easier to understand the reasons for the subtle displacements of focus in the successive reformulations of the Translation Grants Program’s mission statement, as well as the ‘logic’ of the

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fault lines they display. These fault lines are clearly delineated in five of the nine fundamental values to which the Council adheres, where competing principles are pitted against each other from within two dichotomous frameworks: homogeneity (‘a national perspective’) versus heterogeneity (‘regional diversity’), and official (‘French- and English-speaking Canadians’) versus non-official (‘Aboriginal peoples’). Accordingly, the Council aspires to: believe in the value of a national perspective of the arts, to enrich knowledge within the Council and the arts community, foster attitudes inclusive of all art forms and artistic traditions, and provide national and international leadership; respect Canada’s official languages and recognize the need to support professional artistic activity by both French- and English-speaking Canadians; respect the regional diversity of Canada and recognize the need to support professional artistic activity in all parts of the country; respect the histories, traditions, languages and contemporary practices of Aboriginal Peoples and seek to foster the development of Aboriginal artists and organizations; respect artists and arts organizations from diverse cultural and racial backgrounds and traditions. (Canada Council for the Arts 2015e. Emphasis added) One should nevertheless stop short of taxing the Council with ideological inconsistency. On the contrary, the double exigency of duality and diversity is intrinsic to the current issues and challenges raised by the Council’s mandate and by Canadian society as a whole; in this respect, the fault lines emerging here point above all to the difficulties involved in creating fluid institutional collaborations that include multiple actors with a history of complex, conflicting relations. Hence the relevance of briefly examining the impact that the Translation Grants Program has, or has not, had on the cultural exchanges between Francophone, Anglophone and Aboriginal communities since its implementation over forty year ago.

Impact of the Translation Grants Program The vast majority of documents consulted highlight the programme’s efficiency and successes. Moreover, the term ‘collaboration’, along with its many synonyms, is constantly employed, no matter what the date of the document or the type of

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collaboration envisioned: between Anglophone, Francophone and Aboriginal publishers; between various federal agencies; between authors, translators and readers; between the Council and publishers. Even the antonyms are mobilized, literary translation offering one of the most effective antidotes to cultural division, estrangement, disaffiliation and non-cooperation which has characterized the relations between the two ‘founding’ nations since the British conquest of New France in 1759. From 1972 to 1993, the programme’s agents were diligent in stressing the equal number of grants allocated for translation into the two official languages (during the entire period, 585 translations from French to English and 581 from English to French). A memorandum dated June 2001 reports that ‘the program attracts a good mix of applicants, from the larger more established publishers who translate works of fiction and non-fiction, to the smaller more specialized houses wishing to translate works of poetry and drama’ (Memorandum from Council 2001). Since 2004, almost all the annual reports include, among the success indicators, the number of council-funded literary translations which were awarded high-profile prizes, notably the Governor General of Canada’s Award for translation, also administered by the Council. Despite the unrelenting budget constraints (which until 2009–2010 prevented the programme from funding all eligible requests16) and while the initially envisioned average of sixty translations per year (see supra) was not immediately attained, the demand has increased annually since 1979, leading to an average of 103 grants allocated over the past six years – another positive sign. That said, a new series of fault lines runs through the programme’s successes, which several Canadian translation studies scholars remarked upon in the early 1980s on the basis of data provided by the Council. Ray Ellenwood was among the first to observe the imbalances underlying the statistics, namely the higher number of literary translations into English during the ten years of the programme’s existence; the fact that almost all the translations into French were published by the same Quebec publisher; the preference of Francophone readers for English-Canadian non-fiction and that of Anglophone readers for Quebec fiction; the lack of interest on the part of both communities in translated poetry despite the importance of the originals in the source cultures. Ellenwood went so far as to accuse the Council of discouraging the translation of poetry by refusing to raise the rate per word for a genre reputed to be difficult (Ellenwood 1983: 64–8). For his part, Richard Giguère (1983) called attention to the fact that the selection of novels translated into English offered a very limited view

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of Quebec literature (52), which in turn limited the understanding EnglishCanadian readers could acquire, through translation, of the ‘other solitude’. Studies conducted in the late 1990s confirm these trends (see Koustas 1997), although Council statistics also show that, as of 1990, the number of translations into French, all genres included, largely surpassed the number of translations into English, a tendency maintained to this day. The programme’s minutes, memoranda and annual reports to Council record many of these imbalances, which are exacerbated if one takes into account the extremely low number of funded translations from or into Aboriginal languages. In response to queries from members of the Council’s Board, programme officers vowed that they were attempting to correct the situation. Rather than attributing them however, as had previously been the case, to a structural problem intrinsic to the programme itself (a lack of funds), such imbalances are perceived as resulting from the internal logic of the Canadian book industry, specifically: reader expectations and demographic factors. This interpretation has had the twofold effect of normalizing disparities, henceforth defined as para-synonymous with diversity, and of relativizing the principle of equality, portrayed simultaneously as unattainable and as an ideal towards which the programme should nonetheless continue to strive by way of equitable practices. The annual reports for example provide information on the number of grants allocated by province per year, with Quebec far outstripping the others (77 per  cent in 2006), followed by Ontario and British Columbia: a normal distribution, according to the Council, given the concentration of Canadian publishing houses in these regions. The number of publishers who received one or more grants each year, including those who were newly eligible, is also specified, which enables the programme officers to highlight additional successes: Publishers who have made translation a priority for their lists find the program very valuable to offset the financial risk in publishing translations. Indeed, some publishers have established reciprocal relationships where they will share information about and translate books on each other’s lists. (Report to Council 2009)

In so far as the higher numbers of grants for translation into French is concerned, this can be interpreted in terms of the law of supply and demand, as well as a sign of the robustness of the French-language book industry in Quebec, with publishers now in a position to compete with Parisian houses for the purchase of translation rights and to negotiate co-publications. This is yet another indication

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of the programme’s success, albeit unexpected perhaps if one recalls that its initial objective was not only to foster intercultural exchange, but also to assist the Canadian book trade as a whole. On another level, however, economic and demographic factors internal to the logic of the publishing sector are only part of the overall picture. The Council’s rather upbeat discourse is accompanied by a more alarmist one, especially audible since 2009 when the Department of Canadian Heritage, on the recommendation of the federal government, injected 5 million dollars into the programme’s budget over a period of four years. This contribution was publicized in a 2008 document entitled (unsurprisingly) Road Map for Canada’s Linguistic Duality. On the upside, the number of translation grants requested and allocated rose, respectively, by 40 per cent and 60 per cent in the 2009–2010 fiscal year; on the downside, this growth has since declined. Forty years after the creation of the programme, literary translation in Canada is still a precarious enterprise, additional budgets notwithstanding. Furthermore, the consistently inferior number of translations into English since 1990 suggests both a reticence on the part of English-language publishers to take risks and a lack of interest in translated Francophone literature on the part of Anglophone Canadians. This likely explains the sombre tone of the 2009 annual report: ‘While this program serves in part as a modest attempt to bridge the two solitudes, exchange between Anglophone and Francophone publishers is not as robust as it could be’ (Report to Council 2009). The assessment is symptomatic of a partial failure: in 2010, the number of translations into French is again two and half times greater (71) than into English (27), which is worrying given the funds available. Even more concerning, in 2011, 2012 and 2013 the programme ran a surplus, returning between $320,000 and $450,000 per year to the receiver general of Canada.17 Over and above the apparent reluctance of English-Canadian publishers to take risks, the rise of the e-book, the decline in the number of bookstores and a world-wide book market in full mutation, more fundamental sociocultural factors specific to the Canadian context seem also to be at work here. Indeed, perhaps the most troubling of all the fault lines identified above is the ever growing gap between the much higher level of bilingualism among Francophones compared to Anglophones. Duly noted by the commissioner of official languages and by Statistics Canada, this gap, according to the programme’s 2011 annual report, explains the lower number of translations into English: largely unilingual Anglophone publishers are either unaware of Francophone literary production

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in Canada, or disinclined to purchase the translation rights for a readership historically uninterested in understanding the ‘other’. From a more general perspective, this last tendency reveals the impact of federal linguistic policies on the majority English-speaking population outside Quebec and, by extension, the rather dismal results, again primarily in Englishspeaking Canada, of official bilingualism since it was first legislated almost half a century ago. In light of the collaborative spirit that the Council’s mandate was designed to foster following the adoption of the 1969 Official Languages Act, it is discouraging to witness on-going disparities and imbalances which, in the final analysis, have less to do with market pressures or government budget restrictions than with attitudes, perceptions and power relations that hinder intra-national exchanges based on teamwork and shared goals. Unless, of course, one chooses to emphasize the fault lines that run under the surface of the Council’s collaborative projects, as opposed to ignoring them or giving up all hope of success. This, I would argue, is the strategy adopted by the Council in 2010 when it launched two pilot initiatives aimed at tackling the problem of unilingualism. These initiatives allowed publishers to request additional financial aid for bilingual revision of the translated manuscript in order ‘to ensure a smooth and accurate text’ (Report to Council 2011), on the one hand, and on the other, to hire readers to recommend books for translation into the other official language (references to Aboriginal languages were absent). A third initiative, inaugurated the same year, consisted in convening Anglophone and Francophone publishers at an annual translation rights fair, with a view to increasing the sales and purchases of Canadian translation rights as well as enhancing interaction between the two linguistic groups. Some might maintain, however, that this was tantamount to going back to the starting point. The Council’s approach continues, therefore, to remain pragmatic and dynamic, oriented towards finding solutions rather than allowing the current status quo to stagnate. Given that the financial partnership with the Department of Canadian Heritage has been renewed for another five years, this situation could, in the short term, confirm the ultimate incapacity of subsidized literary translation to significantly impact intercultural exchange in Canada. As for translations into/from Aboriginal languages, they have typically oscillated between 0 and 3 per year. In this respect, it is telling that the Council’s Strategic Plan 2011-2016 acknowledges ‘the urgency for more collaboration’ (Canada Council for the Arts 2010) at both the national and international levels, in an on-going attempt to dispel the deep suspicion with which, historically, the

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Anglophone, Francophone and Aboriginal communities have regarded the notion of a shared social project, especially when it involves artistic practices based on language: By strengthening the connections between artists and their publics, the Canada Council and other funders, the public and private sectors, different regions, cultural communities of Canada, and Canada and the rest of the world, the Council will help to ensure that the arts continue to play a dynamic and transformative role in our society. (Canada Council for the Arts 2010)

Conclusion The fact that institutions are anchored in a particular geographic, historical, sociocultural, political and economic context prevents us from generalizing the example of the Canada Council for the Arts, whose specificity is to a large extent predicated on the unique interaction of four factors determined by French and British colonialism: British-inspired federalism, official bilingualism, official multiculturalism and Quebec nationalism. The first three adhere to what is termed the equal authenticity rule which, by conferring the status of ‘original’ on all legal texts, be they translations or not, guarantees the rights and freedoms of Canadian citizens together with their differences: equality of the federal and provincial governments in their respective areas of competency; equality of the two statutory languages in the face of the law; equality of the rights of cultural communities. Conversely, the Quebec separatist movement sparked a profound crisis of Canadian federalism by revealing not only the dissatisfaction of Francophones with the cultural and socio-economic inequities which the latter appears to at once eliminate and uphold, but also the existence of an alternative social project steeped in its own set of values. For all federalist systems equate parity with autonomy, which means that cultural communities are free to develop on their own, without seeking to know, recognize or understand the other(s), as has been the case of Canada’s two ‘founding’ peoples for over 250 years. Hence the explicitly political, bridge-building mission attributed to literary translation by Anglo-Canadian translators during the turbulent 1960s and 1970s; hence, too, the relevance of the following statement: ‘The translation of literary works from one official language to another, a critical necessity in a bilingual country like Canada, is a form of activity likely to be supported only by a federal agency’ (Council Minutes 1985).

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That said, whereas the example of the Canada Council should not be generalized, the idea of institutional collaborations is extremely rich and of potential use to those working in the area of the sociology of translation, whose objective is to identify the social conditions of the production of relations between texts, agents and agencies. These relations are of particular interest when the agencies in question are Crown corporations operating in contexts of federalism and official bi- or multilingualism. Their dual positioning with respect to the private and public sectors enables them to serve as magnifying glasses through which one may examine the fault lines underlying the dominant political discourse focused on common goals, and the ambient social discourses increasingly focused on linguistic, cultural and ethnic diversity. In this sense, the present study, from a comparative perspective, can hopefully contribute to the discursive analysis of issues raised by institutional collaborations in other officially multilingual countries that adhere to the federalist model, such as India, South Africa, Switzerland or Belgium, where intra-national literary translation is – or is not – ‘a critical necessity’ (Council Minutes 1985).

Notes 1 Online dictionaries consulted: Merriam Webster, The Oxford Dictionary, Collins Dictionary, The Free Dictionary, Trésor de la langue française, Le Petit Robert. All dictionaries were accessed 15 June 2015. 2 I would like to thank Mélissa Boulrice for giving me access to the Council’s archives on the Translation Grants Program. Archival research was conducted in 2014–2015; the most recent archival documents consulted were dated 2014. 3 These statistics are based on the 2011 Census of the Canadian population. They represent those who declared English or French as their mother tongue. The responses of those who declared both were divided equally between the two linguistic groups. See http://www12.statcan.ca/census-recensement/2011/as-sa/ index-eng.cfm (accessed 22 April 2014). 4 The memoranda, reports to Council, Council minutes and other documents not included in the references cited section are unpublished archival materials to which I was given access by the Canada Council. 5 The Council defines ‘literary translation’ as translation of works of fiction, poetry, drama, children’s literature and non-fiction. 6 For further reading, see the articles by Conway, Gagnon, Lane-Mercier, Leclerc and Nolette in the special issue of Meta 59 (3) entitled Translation in Contexts of Official Multiculturalism (2014).

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7 The bridge-building metaphor in English-Canadian political and social discourse dates back to the 1960s, while the motif of the two solitudes (French and English Canada) was coined by English-Canadian novelist Hugh MacLennan in 1945. 8 By systematically using the singular (as opposed to the plural ‘literatures’, more in keeping with ‘cultures’ and ‘languages’), the Council acknowledges neither the division of Canada’s literary institution along linguistic lines, nor the relative autonomy of the French-language Quebec literary institution with respect to its English-language counterpart. 9 The tensions between the ideal of rapprochement underlying the Council’s policies on literary translation and the internal logic of the English-Canadian and Quebec book publishing industries cannot be elaborated on here. Suffice to note that the Council’s policies, their (waning) idealism notwithstanding, reinforce the industries’ internal logic in at least three respects: i) the publisher – not the translator – must apply for the translation grant; to do so, the publisher must be eligible according to a certain number of criteria established by the Council; ii) the grant is awarded to the publisher, who then transfers it to the translator in several instalments; iii) the Council does not fund the translation of bestsellers, in Bourdieu’s sense of works situated within the field of large-scale production (see Bourdieu 1992). 10 This is an excellent example of the discursive manoeuvring often necessary to protect collaborations from failing because of power imbalances. By overtly asserting the equality of all the agents and agencies involved, the Council neutralizes the tensions, reconfirms its adhesion to its founding values and posits the successful outcome of its Translation Grants Program. 11 The programme had been funding since the outset translations from non-official languages such as Spanish and Italian into English or French, although this fact has never been explicitly stated in its mission statements. 12 Nuances are needed here. Several Aboriginal languages have official status in the north-west territories and in Nunavut. The majority of Aboriginal languages are oral and of the sixty-odd still in existence, only eight are spoken by more than 5,000 people, with Cree leading at 87,285, according to the 2006 Census (see Canada Council for the Arts 2014b). 13 Here is another excerpt: ‘It is hereby declared to be the policy of the Government of Canada to … preserve and enhance the use of languages other than English and French, while strengthening the status and use of the official languages of Canada’ (Minister of Justice 1985). 14 ‘Crown corporations must be sensitive to the government’s broad policy objectives and priorities. These may include … such policies as official languages’ (Treasury Board of Canada Secretariat 2002). 15 Interestingly, ‘equity’, ‘diversity’ and ‘equality’ appear, respectively, once, twice and six times in the text of the Canadian Multiculturalism Act, the preferred

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term being ‘multiculturalism’. Conversely, ‘multiculturalism’ is absent from the document Equity Framework prepared by the Council. 16 This chronic penury leads one to question the willingness of successive governments to honour the spirit of official bilingualism and the Council’s mandate, at least in so far as translation is concerned. While the situation changed radically in 2009 thanks to a financial partnership between the Council and the Department of Canadian Heritage (see infra), the newly released funds are only available for translations from/into French and English, thereby excluding Aboriginal and other languages, which in turn calls into question the government’s willingness to honour the spirit of multiculturalism. 17 Given that the average grant since 2010 has been $10,000, the Council could have funded between 32 and 45 additional translations per year. The 2011 annual report indicates that negotiations had begun between the Council and the Department of Canadian Heritage ‘to include translation grants for non-literary titles … to ensure that the full amount of the official-language translation budget is expended’ (Report to Council 2011).

Works cited Bourdieu, P. (1992). Les règles de l’art. Genèse et structure du champ littéraire. Paris: Seuil. Buzelin, H. (2007). ‘Translations in the Making’. In Constructing a Sociology of Translation, edited by Michaela Wolf and Alexandra Fukari, 135–69. Amsterdam: Benjamins. Chesterman, A. (2006). ‘Questions in the Sociology of Translation’. In Translation Studies at the Interface of Disciplines, edited by João Ferreira Duarte, Alexandra Assis Rosa and Teresa Seruya, 9–27. Amsterdam: Benjamins. Claxton, P. (2005). ‘Literary Translation in Canada’. http://www.attlc-ltac.org/literarytranslation-canada (accessed 10 June 2015). Canada Council for the Arts. (2010). Strengthening Connections. Strategic Plan 201116. Ottawa, http://canadacouncil.ca/~/media/files/corporate-planning%20%20en/ canadacouncil_strategicplan2011_16_en.pdf (accessed 22 April 2014). Canada Council for the Arts. (2012a). The Butterfly Effect of Translation. [The web page has been removed]. Canada Council for the Arts. (2012b). We Have to Hear Their Voices. Ottawa, http:// www.canadacouncil.ca/en/council/research/find-research/2012/hear-their-voices (accessed 22 April 2014). Canada Council for the Arts. (2014). Equity Framework – Summary 2014. Ottawa, http://canadacouncil.ca/~/media/files/equity/equity%20framework%20summary. pdf (accessed 22 April 2014).

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Canada Council for the Arts. (2015a). Overview of the Council. Ottawa, http:// canadacouncil.ca/council/overview-of-the-canada-council (accessed 10 June 2015). Canada Council for the Arts. (2015b). Corporate Information. Ottawa, http://www. canadacouncil.ca/council/about-the-council (accessed 10 June 2015). Canada Council for the arts. (2015c). The Butterfly Effect of Translation. Ottawa. [accessed 10 June 2015]. Canada Council for the Arts. (2015d). Book Publishing Support: Grants. Ottawa, http:// canadacouncil.ca/council/grants/find-a-grant/grants/book-publishing-supporttranslation-grants (accessed 10 June 2015). Canada Council for the Arts. (2015e). The Canada Council’s Fundamental Values. Ottawa, http://www.canadacouncil.ca/about-the-council/the-canada-councilsfundamental-values (accessed 10 June 2015). Ellenwood, R. (1983). ‘Some Actualities of Canadian Literary Translation’. In Translation in Canadian Literature, edited by Camille La Bossière, 61–72. Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press. Giguère, R. (1983). ‘Traduction littéraire et ‘image’ de la littérature au Canada et au Québec’. In Translation in Canadian Literature, edited by Camille La Bossière, 47–60. Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press. Koustas, J. (1997). ‘Quebec Literature in Translation: Loaded Canons’. Québec Studies 23: 43–53. Lane-Mercier, G., Merkle, D. and Meylaerts, R., eds. (2014). ‘Translation in Contexts of Official Multiculturalism/La traduction dans des contextes de multilinguisme officiel’, special issue of Meta 59 (3). Latour, B. (2005). Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Mezei, K. (1994). ‘Translation as Metonymy: Bridges and Bilingualism’. Ellipse 51: 85–102. Minister of Justice. (1985). Canadian Multiculturalism Act. Ottawa. http://laws-Lois. justice.gc.ca/eng/acts/c-18.7 (accessed 22 April 2014). Office of the Commissioner of Official Languages. (2015). Understanding Your Language Rights. Ottawa. http://www.languesofficielles.ga.ca/en/language_rights/act (accessed 10 June 2015). Shouldice, L. (1983). ‘On the Politics of Literary Translation in Canada’. In Translation in Canadian Literature, edited by Camille La Bossière, 73–82. Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press. Sing, P. (2010/2011). ‘J’vous dijs enne cho’, lâ: Translating Oral Michif French into Written English’. Québec Studies 50: 57–80. Statistics Canada. (2014). Linguistic Characteristics of Canadians. Ottawa, http://www12. statcan.ca/census-recensement/2011/as-sa/index-eng.cfm (accessed 22 April 2014). Treasury Board of Canada Secretariat. (2002). Directors of Crown Corporations: An Introductory Guide to Their Roles and Responsibilities. Ottawa, http://www.tbs-sct. gc.ca/gov-gouv/role/role01-eng.asp (accessed 22 April 2014).

12

A New Ecology for Translation? Collaboration and Resilience Michael Cronin

For the fiftieth birthday of The New York Review of Books, the well-known British historian Timothy Garton Ash (2013) was invited to comment on what he felt had fundamentally changed in the world since the NYRB first appeared on the racks in 1963. Seeing the magazine as a ‘light-house at the centre of the Western world’, he wanted to show ‘how the world has changed under its steady illumination’ (51). ‘Human rights’ are first picked out under the sweeping beam of retrospection. He then sheds light on the rise and staggered fall of the United States as ‘hyperpower’, the increased prominence of the Arab world, the inexorable ascension of China and the explosion of ‘digital opportunity’, the binary revolution that leaves expression gloriously unbound. Not a word, however, about the Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change. Not a line about the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. No melting ice. No rising sea levels. No acidic oceans. No species loss. For Garton Ash, all is gloriously quiet on the weather front. Our duty in this changing world, if we have one, is to ‘remain true to the core values of a modernized Enlightenment liberalism, Western in origin but universal in aspiration’ (53). In thinking about translation in the contemporary moment, my argument will be that the ‘modernized Enlightenment liberalism’ Garton Ash has in mind is no longer effective or persuasive as a means of liberation because of a set of assumptions around what it is to be human which can no longer remain uncontested. In the first half of the chapter, I will sketch out the background to new thinking around the notion of the human; and in the second half, I will examine the implications for translation of a move towards what has been dubbed the ‘posthuman’ (Braidotti 2013). Central to my thesis is an idea that

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has been borrowed from the Nobel Prize winning chemist Paul Crutzen and his collaborator, a marine scientist specialist, Eugene F. Stoermer, namely: the idea of the ‘Anthropocene’. Crutzen’s (2002) contention is that in the last three centuries, the effects of humans on the global environment have escalated dramatically. As a result, anthropogenic emissions of carbon dioxide are very likely to significantly affect the climate for millennia to come: ‘It seems appropriate to assign the term “Anthropocene” to the present … humandominated, geological epoch, supplementing the Holocene – the warm period of the past 10-12 millennia’ (23). The Anthropocene is traced back to the latter half of the eighteenth century when analyses of air trapped in polar ice showed the beginning of growing global concentrations of carbon dioxide and methane. The principal consequence of anthropogenic climate change is that humans have now become capable of affecting all life on the planet. As Dipesh Chakrabarty (2009) pointed out a number of years ago, when the collective actions of humans fundamentally alter the conditions of global life, such humans move from being biological agents to becoming a geological force in their own right: ‘For it is no longer a question of man having an interactive relationship with nature. This humans have always had, or at least that is how man has been imagined in a large part of what is generally called the Western tradition. Now it is being claimed that humans are a force of nature in a geological sense’ (207). With this shift in status comes a shift in perspective. It is no longer tenable to conceive of humans as a species apart. We must rethink what it is to be human, and in doing so, reassess one of the activities humans engage in: in the present case, collaborative translation.

The post-human Joseph Stalin, no friend it is fair to say of humanists, claimed in his Dialectical and Historical Materialism that ‘changes in geographical environment of any importance require millions of years, whereas a few hundred or a couple of thousand years are enough for even very important changes in the system of human society’ (Stalin 1938). Stalin’s distinction between natural history and human history had a certain credibility as long as the human remained, in Fernand Braudel’s words, a ‘prisoner of climate’ rather than a maker of it (cited in Crosby 1995: 1185). In the era of the Anthropocene, however, the distinction no longer holds. Once humans move from being biological agents to geological ones, dominating and determining the survival of many other

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species, they become not so much subject to nature as a condition of nature itself. This dominance comes, of course, at the cost of humanity’s very survival. For this reason, trying to conceive of a sustainable future for humans means the convergence of human history with the history of life on the planet to produce a form of ‘deep history’. Implicit in the notion of deep history is that thinking about a variety of historical phenomena does not involve an excessive privileging of the printed word. Historical evidence can take other forms. Daniel Lord Smail in On Deep History and the Brain points out that the ancient world is unimaginable without archaeological evidence, and this also holds true for what we now know about the Middle Ages. He adds: So what does it matter that the evidence for the deep past comes not from written documents but from the other things that teach – from artefacts, fossils, vegetable remains, phonemes, and various forms of modern DNA? Like written documents, all these traces encode information about the past. Like written documents, they resist an easy reading and must be interpreted with care. (Smail 2008: 6)

The biologist Edward O. Wilson (2002) in The Future of Life sees such long-range historical thinking as crucial to curbing humanity as ‘planetary killer, concerned only with its short-term survival’ (202). Wilson argues that it is only when humans begin to think of themselves as a species that they can begin to take the longer view, not only as an important exercise in critical self-understanding, but as a means of securing the future. For Rosi Braidotti (2013), this move towards species awareness is a necessary step towards post-anthropocentric identity. Critical at the present moment is the de-centring of anthropos, ‘the representative of a hierarchical, hegemonic and generally violent species whose centrality is now challenged by a combination of scientific advances and global economic concerns’ (65). Of course, the critique of the historical tradition of Renaissance humanism and underlying anthropocentrism in the human and social sciences is not just a fact of environmental awareness. It is explicit in the tradition of ‘anti-humanism’ that Braidotti references, ‘feminism, de-colonization and antiracism, anti-nuclear and pacifist movements’ (16) where the white, sovereign, male subject of Western techno-imperialist thought was singled out for repeated critique. Out of this vision comes a notion of relationality and ontological equality that does not privilege one life form over another. Jorge Louis Borges once grouped animals into three classes: those we watch television with, those we eat and those we are scared of (Braidotti 2013: 68). Another more psychoanalytically inflected way of classifying these relationships

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might be the Oedipal (you and me on the same sofa), the instrumental (you will end up by being eaten) and the fantasmatic (how exotic, sleek and dangerous you are). In Braidotti’s view, a post-human ethics implies an end to forms of ‘anthropolatry’ which not only obscure emergent forms of species thinking, but consign all other species to dangerous, destructive and ecologically untenable forms of subordination. For her, ‘becoming animal’ is a way of realizing the irretrievably embodied, material nature of our existence on a planet we share with innumerable other species and that we continue to destroy in vast numbers. The current rate of loss in species diversity alone is similar in intensity to the event that wiped out the dinosaurs 65 million years ago (Millennium Ecosystem Assessment Report 2005; Shubin 2008: 17–19). The backdrop to the end of anthropolatry is the rise of geocentrism, the notion that the planetary must now be figured into all our thinking. This includes everything from the Great Barrier Reef and the Gulf Stream to the future of the honeybee. In Braidotti’s interpretation of Spinoza’s monism, she emphasizes less the tyranny of oneness or the narcissism of separateness that is often associated with monism than the freedom of relationality: ‘[Monism] implies the open-ended, interrelational, multi-sexed and trans-species flows of becoming through interactions with multiple others’ (2013: 89). Being ‘matterrealist’, to use her term, is to take seriously our multiple connections to natural and material worlds. If we conceive of the notion of subjectivity so as to include the nonhuman, then the task for critical thinking is, as Braidotti herself admits, ‘momentous’. This would involve visualizing the subject as ‘a transversal entity encompassing the human, our genetic neighbours the animals and the earth as a whole, and to do so within an understandable language’ (Braidotti 2013: 82). So where does translation, which on the face of it appears to be a preeminently human activity, fit into this notion of the post-human? Or more importantly, what does translation studies gain from being situated in a posthuman perspective? If we bear in mind what Braidotti has to say about new, emergent forms of subjectivity, ‘a transversal entity encompassing the human, our genetic neighbours the animals and the earth as a whole’, the emphasis is clearly on extended forms of relatedness. Fundamentally, it is a more generous or extended form of relatedness that defines the emergent, post-human moment. Herein lies a paradox for translation as it is frequently understood. On the one hand, translation is seen to be all about relatedness as it brings together people, languages and cultures, crossing the chasms of cultural suspicion and historical aversion. The first principle of the PEN Charter, adapted at its congress in

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Brussels in 1927 on the initiative of John Galsworthy, was that ‘literature knows no frontiers and must remain common currency among people in spite of political or international upheavals’ (Rotondo 2011). The principle, of course, has no currency if there are no translators to put it into effect. On the other hand, translators have been keen to deny relatedness of a kind in their desire to emphasize the value or distinctness of their profession. This denial is part of a much larger conceptual galaxy that needs to be briefly defined if we are to understand how notions of collaborative translation could prove to be profoundly subversive of dominant ways of thinking about the translation subject.

Individualism In his most recent work L’Individu qui vient, Dany-Robert Dufour (2011: 57–83) locates contemporary understandings of the individual subject in a series of decisive shifts in the powerful stories that the West has been telling itself for centuries. One of these stories originates in North Africa, in modern-day Algeria, and is the response of one man – Augustine, Bishop of Hippo – to contemporary events. Augustine was greatly troubled by the different factors that had led to the Sack of Rome in 410AD. He concluded in his monumental work The City of God that the Sack of Rome was, in fact, a playing out of a struggle that would bedevil humanity to the end of time. The conflict between the City of God and the City of Man was based on two competing forms of love. The first involved the love of God to the point of expressing contempt for the self (Amor Dei usque ad contemptum sui). The second was a love of self to the point of expressing contempt for God (amor sui usque ad contemptum Dei) (Augustine 2003: XIV, 28, 1). The lives of believers occasioned the endless playing out of this tension between Amor Dei and amor sui that were seen to be radically distinct and in deadly opposition. It is paradoxically in the Augustinian tradition that Augustine’s opposition comes to be undone. Blaise Pascal (1993: 187), in one of his most famous Pensées (fragment 397), argued the following: Si vous gagnez, vous gagnez tout. Et si vous perdez, vous ne perdrez rien. Gagez donc qu’Il est, sans hésiter.

Implicit in the Pascalian wager is the notion that self-interest can have divine consequences, or as he puts it, in fragment 106, ‘la grandeur de l’homme, [c’est]

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d’avoir tiré de la concupiscence un si bel ordre’ (102). In his Essais de morale, Pierre Nicole (1671), the pupil and friend of Pascal, takes Pascal’s reasoning further and posits that the only way of truly reforming the world and driving out the forces of evil is to develop in everyone an amour-propre éclairé, which through the use of reason will be able to distinguish its true interests from false ones. John Locke, the great liberal theorist, translates the Essais de morale into English in 1680 and renders ‘l’amour propre éclairé’ as ‘harmless self-love’. Adam Smith (2010), an admirer of Locke, makes the notion of self-love central to his Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776), where he argues that it is not on the benevolence of the butcher or the baker that we depend for the supply of meat and bread, but on the interest they have in their own self-enrichment. We appeal not to their humanity but to their selfishness (12). Individual pursuit of self-interest, rather than harming or destroying the community, leads through the invisible hand of the market to collective prosperity and well-being. A new regime of value thus emerges in opposition to the Augustinian rejection of amor sui, wherein the self is not to be castigated, but celebrated as the touchstone of legitimacy and the engine of progress. Revolutionary notions of democratic citizenship and Romantic notions of expressive originality further strengthen the link between self and worth. In the words of L’Oréal’s famous 2009 advertising campaign, ‘because I am worth it’, so much of what is outside of the I is worthless. It is against this dominant regime of value that one has to situate attempts to think about the translator as the forgotten agent of history, or as the worthless hack cowering behind a cloak of invisibility, whose contribution to global societies and cultures needs to be foregrounded and celebrated (Simeoni 2007: 13–26; Venuti 1995). Drawing attention to the individual achievements of translators (Delisle and Woodsworth 2014) is a way of restoring their literary, political and social identity in the context of an episteme that denigrates or does not value the faceless anonymity of the mass, or what Negri and Harding have called the ‘multitude’ (Hardt and Negri 2005). If translators are commonly neglected or obscured in cultural and political histories, then a narrative of heroic individualism appears to be the only way of ensuring both professional recognition and remuneration, and an acknowledgement of historical dues. If the death of the author was one of the standard tropes of post-structuralism, it is difficult to celebrate the death of the translator when, for centuries, translators have been entombed by indifference. The individual assignation of identity and value in the liberal, utilitarian paradigm would seem to be in obvious tension

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with the collective embrace of the relational that is seen as part of the utopian promise of translation. In other words, there is a clear contradiction between what I have termed elsewhere the ‘messianic tradition’ in translatorial selfrepresentation (Cronin 2013: 89) – the idea of translation as a collective project of mutual understanding – and the regimes of value that have been dominant in Western modernity for more than three centuries.

Ecology of translation What I would like to propose is that we situate value elsewhere and consider how collaborative forms of translation might be situated within a posthumanist ecology of translation. In other words: is there a way of attaching value to what translators do that does not involve the sacrifice of a sense of collective responsibility? Three potential principles underlying this emergent ecology would be those of place, resilience and relatedness. Just as the ecology movement has stressed the importance of locally produced foodstuffs as a way of drawing on local traditions in the context of preventing long-term damage to the planet, one could argue that a similar commitment to the situatedness of place and the preeminence of context within the framework of a global sensibility must underlie any form of translation practice considered from an ecological perspective. The alternative to a McDonaldisation of the word with the mass production of translated language is an awareness of the place sensitivity of language and usage, allowing in turn for the flourishing of creativity and difference at a global level. During the humanitarian catastrophe that followed the Haiti earthquake in 2010, one of the major problems for the search and rescue teams was language. The teams themselves were multilingual and the survivors they were searching for were predominantly speakers of Haitian Creole. The mobile phone network was still functioning, so messages indicating location could be sent out. But the question was: who would understand them? The solution was to set up a collaborative translation network where the messages were posted to a site so that they could be read by Haitian Creole speakers around the world. These speakers were frequently bilingual and translated the messages into the different languages of the members of the search and rescue teams (Biewald 2010). It was the globally collaborative nature of the translation that saved lives, but it was collaboration that was firmly predicated on understanding the specific nuances and forms of language usage. In other words, collaboration here was not to do

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with the massification but with the diversification of language. It was through understanding the language of a particular locale that the particularity of place could be mapped for rescue and survival in the context of the global enablement of mobile, digital technologies. More generally, it can be argued that a place-based, rather than ethnosbased, sense of identity allows for the inclusion of all speakers of a language, both natives and newcomers. In this way, rather than positing a set of ethnic attributes  – which somehow map onto the translation situation, irrespective of where particular speakers and translators happen to find themselves – the focus of our translation activity, as in community interpreting, is firmly on the communities of speakers of a language in a particular place. Translating from Turkish into German in Berlin is not comparable to translating from Turkish into English in London (Mandel 2008; Issa 2005). An ecological notion of translating in situ means that place, not race, becomes the marker of collective significance and collective emancipation, through the provision or denial, for example, of community interpreting services. This notion of place-based translational politics is all the more significant as a standard trope of xenophobic populism – and a cause of its hostility to the provision of translation and interpreting services – is the elaboration of a fantasy vision of place (always, everywhere monolingual) which parallels a fantasy vision of the polity (ethically and culturally homogenous). This placebased translational politics is of course inclusive, not exclusive, of other places, in the sense of the broader ecological awareness of the connection between voice, place and belonging in different situations and contexts. As Naomi Klein (2014) has noted with regard to activists fighting the depredations of the fossil fuels industry: ‘What is clear is that fighting a giant extractive industry on your own can seem impossible, especially in a remote, sparsely populated location. But being part of a continent-wide, even global, movement that has the industry surrounded is a very different story’ (322). In a similar sense, the local and global dimensions to struggles for language and translation rights are reinforcing one another in the context of a political ecology of translation, adding a further meaning to the notion of ‘collaborative’ translation. A second principle of translation ecology is the principle of resilience. Resilience is generally understood as the capacity for individuals, cultures and societies to withstand stress or catastrophe. Where might we situate translation, and more particularly collaborative translation, within the framework of resilience? If resilience is all about drawing on the resources of difference to deal

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with the unexpected, is there a sense in which too much translation uniformizes and that the only way of safeguarding difference is not more translation, but less? Indeed, Emily Apter (2013) in Against World Literature: On the Politics of Untranslatability has recently argued that too much value is placed on the virtues of circulation, wherein anything which resists or blocks the circulation of meaning is seen as an immediate object of suspicion. Her concerns lie principally with a notion of world literature that erases difference or sifts out the foreign or the unsettling in the name of easy consumption. In this way, world literature mimics a free market fantasy of the endless, frictionless circulation of goods and information. In this massification of the written word, there is no room for difficulty or opacity. The untranslatable in this context is the world party pooper. It is the resistance of language to univocal meaning, the countless historical, political and cultural associations of words that trouble any easy traffic between languages. Apter, drawing on Barbara Cassin’s Dictionary of Untranslatables: A Philosophical Lexicon, gives various examples of words that are resistant to simple rendering. There is famously the Portuguese saudade, which means variously nostalgia, longing, yearning, torpor, moral ambiguity, loneliness. The Russian word pravda, which is conventionally translated in English by the word ‘truth’, exists in a complex echo chamber of reference. Depending on the context, the word can allude to ‘democratic cosmopolitics, the topology of exile, solidarity with persecuted minorities and refugees, Russian Saint-Simonianism and Russophilic worldviews’ (34). The untranslatable becomes a way of thinking about the specificity of languages and cultures, a call to attend to the singularity of written expression in particular places at particular times. One of the paradoxes of untranslatability, of course, is that we need more translation not less. We have to try harder to understand what the other is saying, devote more resources to the effort and value successful translation all the more when it is achieved, precisely because it is so difficult. An essential element in Apter’s thinking on this subject came from her involvement with the English-language translation of Cassin’s Vocabulaire européen de philosophie. The explicit model for this project was Émile Benveniste’s (1969) Le vocabulaire des institutions indo-européennes. Benveniste used his encyclopaedic knowledge of ancient and classical languages to trace the evolution and separate developments of different institutions in the ancient world. Comparing, for example, the different appellations for ‘king’ in Persia, Rome and Greece, allowed him to explore the radically different concepts of sovereignty that emerged in the different civilizations. The idea behind a ‘Vocabulaire’ or Lexicon as opposed

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to a dictionary is, of course, that it can be added to. It is open-ended, and does not pretend to the inclusive exhaustiveness of the dictionary or encyclopaedia. We may thus ask: why did the English-language translation reverse the order of presentation and give pride of place to the word ‘dictionary’, a notion which is undermined by the democratic incompleteness of the initial project? The inversion is primarily political. By giving pride of place to the notion of the ‘untranslatable’ consigned to the sub-title in the original, the co-editors Apter, Lezra and Wood were signalling an instability at the heart of language which has a fundamental bearing on how any knowledge structure (dictionary, encyclopaedia) might want to make sense of the world. More to the point, this instability is often invisible to the primary target readership of this publication: English speakers. As Emily Apter notes in her introduction, the increasing global tendency to make English the official language of instruction in science, technology and business means that ‘students increasingly naturalize English as the singular language of universal knowledge, thereby erasing translation-effects and etymological histories, the trajectories of words in exile and in the wake of political and ecological catastrophes’ (ix). Faced with desengaño or sprezzatura, an English speaker might reach for the dictionary or Google, but in the case of ‘consensus’, ‘conservative’, ‘performance’, ‘whole’, ‘instinct’, ‘law’, ‘style’, ‘duty’? All of these words appear as entry topics in the Dictionary with complex, knotted histories of interactions, shifts and transformations across languages, but these histories rarely trouble the monolingual hubris of the Anglophone world. Once the italics – the manacles of otherness – are removed, the word can forget everything about its past life in another language and enjoy the amnesiac embrace of Plain Speaking. It is this preoccupation with the untranslatable that becomes readily apparent in particular forms of collaborative translation activity. A case in point is the online discussion forums used by translators and language professionals. For example, in a WordReference.com (2005: 1–2) language forum, the request for a French translation of ‘cream cheese’ generated twenty-five separate posts. One post claimed that ‘crème de fromage’ existed in French and also ‘crème de gruyere’, but another senior member ‘Claude 123’ responded: ‘No, no, no, Cream Cheese is a North American reality; it has nothing to do with Fromage fondu. In Quebec the “Comité intergouvernemental de terminologie de l’industrie laitière” has adopted Fromage à la crème as an equivalent.’ This post prompted a response from another senior member, ‘Rodger’: ‘Sorry Claude123, it’s a french [sic] reality! Called Saint Moret.’ A debate then ensued about the appropriateness

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of ‘fromage frais’ as a translation with further references to the Office de la langue française, a contribution from a senior member ‘williamtmiller’ who works for a French cheese company where ‘cream cheese’ is translated as ‘Fromage Frais Fondu’ or ‘Fromage Frais à Tartiner’ and a discussion as to whether Saint Moret really tastes like Cream Cheese. Apparent in the range and intensity of the discussion is that the participants are both testing and defining the limits of what can be said in French. They are doing this to capture a culinary reality that originated in the United States in 1872 as an attempt to recreate the French cheese Neufchâtel. The attempted cultural translation of a French food product leads over a hundred years later to a polemical effort to retranslate the product, this time linguistically, back into French. What the online collaborative debates reveal is that the more language resists translation, the more it invites translation. We can thus advance the idea that the ability of language to survive and flourish over time and adapt to a multiplicity of pressures – the principle of resilience – lies in the endless unveiling of the incommensurable in language, which calls for new translations, new accommodations, new ways of rendering what can only be rendered with difficulty. As James Hopkins (1999: 255) points out, the ability to ‘spontaneously, continually, and with remarkable precision and accuracy’ interpret one another ‘seems fundamental to our co-operative and cognitive lives.’ In this respect, questions of untranslatability, incommensurability and resilience are central to the communicative regimes that are the daily reality of global cities, with their linguistically and culturally mixed populations. The third principle of ecology is one that emerges frequently in public pronouncements concerning translation, namely, the principle of relatedness. It is something of a truism that translation relates to historical contexts, languages and cultures. All these forms of relatedness are solely situated in the realm of the human. However, I want to relate relatedness here to a more unexpected form, namely relatedness to the nonhuman. An area which is largely neglected in translation studies is intersemiotic communication. With the exception of research in the field of sign language interpreting – and even here it could be contended that sign language interpreting is simply a form of interlingual interpreting – intersemiotic communication often emerges as the poor cousin of Jakobson’s (2012: 127) famous tripartite division of the translation task. A core concern of ecology is that we are not alone on the planet and that we are responsible for species destruction on an unprecedented scale. Our food and farming practices have resulted in conditions of existence for other sentient

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beings which are frequently barbaric and inhumane (Schlosser 2001). This principle of relatedness draws on a posthumanist, post-anthropocentric idea of relatedness where humans see inter-species relatedness as central to new, more ethical forms of behaviour (Braidotti 2013). If this relatedness is to become a reality, we must invest heavily in that hugely neglected area of translation studies, intersemiotic communication, in order to see how translation would feature, for example, in emerging disciplines such as animal studies. Works such as Henry Gee’s (2013) The Accidental Species: Misunderstandings of Human Evolution and Thomas Suddendorf ’s (2013) The Gap: The Science of What Separates Us from Animals or Raymond Corbey’s (2005) earlier work The Metaphysics of Apes: Negotiating the Animal-Human Boundary point to the enormous potential of translation studies in exploring forms of collaboration that would radically transform our species-based understanding. Thinking about how we might move outside anthropocentric assumptions in translation studies and relate to other species involves a radical point of departure for an area of enquiry that has previously only considered forms of relatedness in human terms. In this respect, if Professor Garton Ash had spent more time reading Doctor John Dolittle, he might have had a more keen awareness of the planet whose history he so blithely describes. If it is possible to demonstrate that translation, both in the past and present, has always existed as a collaborative practice, and thus to challenge the Promethean myth of the individual artificer, we might also give thought to how translation scholars as a group may collaborate in order to promote a sustainable vision of language and culture. In this way, when the The New York Review of Books’s next centenary comes around, we will have something to celebrate, other than a landscape of endless desolation.

Works cited Apter, E. (2013). Against World Literature: On the Politics of Untranslatability. London: Verso. Augustine. (2003). The City of God. Translated by Henry Bettenson. London: Penguin. Biewald, L. (2010). ‘How crowdsourcing helped Haiti’s relief efforts’. radar.oreilly. com/2010/03/how-crowdsourcing-helped-haiti.html (accessed 12 May 2013). Braidotti, R. (2013). The Posthuman. Cambridge: Polity. Chakrabarty, D. (2009). ‘The Climate of History: Four Theses.’ Critical Inquiry 35: 197–222.

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Corbey, R. (2005). The Metaphysics of Apes: Negotiating the Animal-Human Boundary. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Cronin, M. (2013). Translation in the Digital Age. London and New York: Routledge. Crosby, A. W. (1995). ‘The Past and Present of Environmental History’. American Historical Review 100: 1177–89. Crutzen, P. (2002). ‘Geology of Mankind’, Nature 415, 3 January. Delisle, J. and Woodsworth, J. (2014). Les traducteurs dans l’histoire, 3rd ed. Laval: Presses de l’Université Laval. Dufour, D. (2011). L’indvidu qui vient … après le libéralisme. Paris: Denoël. Garton, A. T. (2013). ‘From the Lighthouse: The World and the NYR After Fifty Years’. New York Review of Books 60, no. 17, November 7. 51. Gee, H. (2013). The Accidental Species: Misunderstandings of Human Evolution. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Hardt, M. and Negri, A. (2005). Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire. London: Penguin. Hopkins, J. (1999). ‘Wittgenstein, Davidson and Radical Interpretation’. In The Philosophy of Donald Davidson, edited by L. E. Hahn, 255–85. Chicago/La Salle: Open Court. Issa, T. (2005). Talking Turkey: The Language, Culture and Identity of Turkish Speaking Children in Britain. Stoke-on-Trent: Trentham Books. Jakobson, R. (2012). ‘On Linguistic Aspects of Translation’. In The Translation Studies Reader, 3rd ed., edited by Lawrence Venuti, 126–32. London and New York: Routledge. Klein, N. (2014). This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate. London: Allen Lane. Mandel, R. (2008). Cosmopolitan Anxieties: Turkish Challenges to Citizenship and Belonging in Germany. Durham: Duke University Press. Millennium Ecosystem Assessment Report (2005). Washington: Island Press. Nicole, P. (1999). Essais de morale. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. Pascal, B. (1993). Pensées. Paris: Flammarion. Rotondo, J. P. (2011). ‘Literature Knows No Frontiers: John Galsworthy and the Shaping of PEN’, The Daily Pen American. August 11. http://www.pen.org/blog/?p=2086 (accessed 22 January 2013). Schlosser, E. (2001). Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Shubin, N. (2008). ‘The Disappearance of Species’. Bulletin of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences 61: 17–19. Smail, D. (2008). On Deep History and the Brain. Berkeley: University of California Press. Smith, A. (2010). The Wealth of Nations. London: CreateSpace. Stalin, J. (1938). Dialectical and Historical Materialism. http://www.marxists.org/ reference/archive/stalin/works/1938/09.htm (accessed 22 April 2014).

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Suddendorf, T. (2013). The Gap: The Science of What Separates Us from Animals. New York: Basic Books. Venuti, L. (1995). The Translator’s Invisibility: A History of Translation. London and New York: Routledge. Wilson, E. O. (2002). The Future of Life. New York: Vintage.

Index Aaltonen, S. 62 nn.3, 5 Abbrugiati, P. 85 n.2 Abirached, R. 51 Ackerman, D. 5 Action Poétique 158 n.5 Adobe 196, 198 Akademie der Künste 131 Alari, N. 52, 62 n.7 Alexis, A. 57 Alfonso of Cartagena 35–6, 42, 46 n.6 Liber Alphonsi episcopi Burgensis contra Leonardum invehentem contra libros Ethicorum Aristotelis 35 Alfonso X of Castile 38, 46 n.9 al-Hajjaj 38 al-Kindī 37 Allen, E. In Translation: Translators on Their Work and What It Means 169 alliterations 120 Alsanea, R. 169 Alvstad, C. ‘Translation Pact, The’ 169 Amsler, J. 133, 134 Andreini, L. 64 n.22 Andrews, B. Legend 159 n.13 Anokhina, O. 111, 124 n.25 “Anthropocene” 234 anthropolatry 236 Antin, D. Poèmes parlés 148 Apostrophes (television programme) 121 Apter, E. 242 Against World Literature: On the Politics of Untranslatability 241 Arce, P. E. 135 Archer, H. Relational Subject, The 13 Argile 158 n.5 Aristeas 74

Aristotle 40 De Animalibus 43 Ethics 41 Nicomachean Ethics 35, 45 n.3 ‘a servant with two masters’ metaphor, of translator 50 Association Goldoni Européen 64 n.18 Association of Canadian Publishers 219 as-Sufi 38 Atalante theatre 57–8 Atxaga, B. 114 auctoritas and intention 16, 21, 102–5 Augustine, Bishop of Hippo City of God, The 237 De doctrina christiana 85 n.7 author-function 6–9 authorial appropriation 101–2 authority 8, 50, 95, 114, 152, 159 n.13, 168, 172, 180, 219 absolute 114, 170 cooperating 13 decentred 7 provisional 2 sharing of 4, 12 singular 1, 5, 9 synchronic dispersal of 11 textual 12 author-translator collaborations 16, 91, 130–9, 152, 156 authorial appropriation and 101–2 carte blanche and recommendations and 92–3 closelaborations 95–7 conflictual relationships in 100–1 intention and auctoritas and 102–5 promote translation of contemporary works 147 rarity and reliability of sources and 98–100 revision and questions-andanswers 93–4, 156

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Index

Auxeméry, J.-P. 156 Avendauth 37, 39 Avicenna De anima 37 Baines, R. 62 n.3 Baker. M. 14, 207 n.3 Ballard, M. 133 Bandini, D. 181 Bandini, G. 181 Banu, G. 63 n.16 Barańczak, S. 173, 186 n.7 Baratto, M. 54 Barbedette, G. 116 Baron, H. 45 n.4 Barthes, R. 25 n.2 Bassnett, S. 63 n.12 Bataillon, L. 96, 104 Bate, H. 37 Beckett, S. 16, 114 Belodubrovskii, E. 124 n.18 Benedittini, P. 85 n.2 Benjamin, W. ‘Die Aufgabe des Übersetzers’ (The Task of the Translator) 147 Bennett, S. 62 n.3 Benoît, J.-L. 65 n.25 Benson, S. 159 n.13 Bensoussan, A. 96, 99, 106, 167 Benveniste, É. Le vocabulaire des institutions indo-européennes 241 Berlina, A. 102 Berman, A. 104, 147, 150, 154, 155, 161 n.21 Pour une critique des traductions 154 Berners-Lee, T. 192 Bernofsky, S. In Translation: Translators on Their Work and What It Means 169 Bernstein, C. Legend 159 n.13 ‘Test of Poetry, A’ 156 Berthier, P. 63 n.10 Berutti, J.-C. 52, 54, 63 n.10, 64 n.18 Bianchi, B. 135 Bibliothèque Nationale de France 64 n.18 bilingualism, see institutional collaborations, in official bilingualism context

bilingual writers 145, 170, 194, 229, 231 n.16, 239, see also institutional collaborations, in official bilingualism context Birkenmajer, A. 46 n.6 Birnbaum, A. 182, 187 n.9 Bistué, B. 1, 33, 38, 46 nn.10, 13, 72 Blau duPlessis, R. 156 Brouillons 157 Bloom, H. 8 Boisseau, M. 98 Bonnaud, I. 62 n.5 Bonnefoy, Y. 147, 159 n.7 book and translation history, view on 9 Booth, M. ‘Author vs. Translator (2007): Girls of Riyadh go to New York’ 169 Borand, F. 64 n.22 Borges, J. L. 16, 95, 96, 100, 103, 104, 235 Boter, G. 39 Botley, P. 33, 45 n.3 Boulrice, M. 229 n.2 Bourdieu, P. 13, 230 n.9 Bowles, P. 16 Boyd, B. 111, 116, 122, 123 nn.1–2, 10, 124 nn.18, 21, 125 nn.28–9, 35, 126 n.41 Brackmann, U. 140 n.7 Braidotti, R. 235–6 Branca, V. 63 n.13 Braudel, F. 234 Bresciani, C. 63 n.14 Breytenbach, B. 92 Brink, A. 92 Chain of Voices, A 97 Brodsky, J. 102 Brook, T. Collaboration 17 Broqua, V. 161 n.24 Brossard, O. 160 n.18 Brown, D. Inferno 172, 173 Bruni, L. 40–4, 45 n.1, 46 nn.6, 8, 12–14, 47 nn.15–16 definition of correct translation by 35–6, 39, 40, 43–4 De interpretatione recta 33, 35, 36, 39, 45 n.3, 75

Index Dialogi ad Petrum Paulum Histrum (Dialogues for Pier Paolo Vergerio) 45 n.4 Historiae Florentini populi (History of the Florentine People) 45 n.4 individual-translator model, endorsement by 34, 39, 40–1, 43, 44 Laudatio Florentinae urbis (an oration in Praise of the City of Florence) 45 n.4 new use of the verb traducere by 33, 34, 43 place in translation history of 33–4 single-task model, endorsement by 43–4, single-version model, endorsement by 34, 44 Bryant, J. 20 Burning Deck 157, 160 n.18 butterfly effect, of literary translation 217 Butts, M. Imaginary Letters 92 Cabrera Infante, G. 95–7, 104, 106, 169 Cahiers de Royaumont 145, 149 Calvino, I. 94 Dall’opaco 105 Canada Council for the Arts 213, 214, 217, 223–9, 230 nn.8–10, 12, 231 n.17 and Heritage Canada 220, 231 n.16 Strategic Plan 2011-2016 227 Canadian Association of Literary Translators 219–20 Canadian Multiculturalism Act 220, 221, 230 n.15 Canavaggia, M. 100 Cannac, Evgenia and René 116 Capacelli, C. 62 n.7 Cappel, G. 77, 82 Carreira, O. 204 Cassin, B. Dictionary of Untranslatables: A Philosophical Lexicon 241 Vocabulaire européen de philosophie 241 cause-driven crowdsourcing process 197 Cavanagh, C. 173, 186 n.7

249

Cavellat, G. 85 n.13 Celan, P. 102 Centre de Poésie et Traduction 145, 148, 151 Centre international de poésie Marseille 149, 160 n.18 Césaire, A. 92, 97 Chakrabarty, D. 234 Chandler, R. 179 Change 150, 153 Chénetier, M. 152 Chenevoix, Y. 63 n.10 Chesterman, A. 15, 199, 206 Chiari, P. 52 Chrysoloras, M. 35, 39 Cicero De optimo genere oratorum 76 closelaborations 95–7, 169 co-authorship and collaboration, distinction between 7, 23–4 Cohen, J. ben 38 Coindreau, M.-E. 91, 92, 100, 103, 116–18, 125 nn.34–5, 126 n.39 Coldiron, A. E. B. 9 Printers Without Borders 8–9 Cole, N. Crosscut Universe: Writing on Writing from France 157 Mars (extraits) 148 collaborative autobiography 19, 20, 159 n.13 collaborative consumption 19 collaborative economy, the 19 collaborative efficiency 106, 153, 154 collaborative translation, see also individual entries anthologies 149 and coessence 22–3 early-Renaissance instances of 37, 39 historicizing of the myths of 15–19 medieval instances of 36–9 place in translation history of 34, 39, 44–5 relational definition of 3–4 semantic definition of 3 sociologies of 12–15 theoretical rejection of 34, 35, 39–40, 44–5, 46 n.13 views and definitions of 15–18

250

Index

Collection américaine 160 n.18 collective 4, 10, 22, 24, 49, 52, 58, 68, 72, 73, 75, 76, 130, 133, 146, 147, 151, 158 n.3, 183, 196–7, 234, 238–40 memory work 20 traduction 3 translation 3, 49–50, 75, 147, 153, 154 translator 153, 154 understanding 153 Collège de Straelen 142 n.31 Collège européen des traducteurs littéraires de Seneffe (CTLS) 142 n.31 Comédie de Saint-Étienne 54, 64 n.18 Comédie-Française 54, 57, 60, 64 n.25 community translation 15, 16, 194, 195, 197 Comparini, L. 61, 62 n.7, 64 n.23 computer assisted translation (CAT) 18 conflictual relationships 100–1 Conrad, J. 92, 99 Conservatoire d’art dramatique 57 Constitution Act (1982) (Canada) 220 contemporary poetry and transatlantic poetics, see Royaumont Foundation Corbey, R. The Metaphysics of Apes: Negotiating the Animal-Human Boundary 244 Cordingley, A. 1, 11, 84 n.1 corpus-based approach and crowdsourcing in translation 204 correct translation 35–40, 44, 75, 185 Cortázar, J. 96, 104, 169 Costales, A. 197 co-translation 21, 24, 49, 91, 102, 122, 124 n.24, 170, 173 Council Minutes (Canada) 220, 228, 229 Coursaud, J.-B. 186 n.3 Couser, T. Vulnerable Subjects 20 covert translation 138 Créaphis 145, 148, 157, 158 n.6 creative translation 151, 157 Cronin, M. 233, 239 crowdsourcing, in translation 15, 16, 18, 19, 192–3 definition of 193–4 documentary research methods on 201–2

empirical studies and research methodologies in 199–200 and mapping into related concepts 194–7 mixed methods and netnographic approaches in 201 motivations 202–3, 207 n.5 quality and language translation and 204–5 research trends in 198–9 subtypes of 197–8 survey research methods and research in 200–1 theoretical and applied research in 199 Crown corporations (Canada) 222, 229, 230 n.14 Crutzen, P. 234 Cucumis 198 cyberethnography, see online ethnography D’Alverny, M. T. 37, 72, 85 n.5 D’Annunzio, G. 99, 100 D’Arcier, B. F. 62 n.5 D’Auvergne, G. 77, 81–3, 85 n.15 D’Avino, M. V. 186 n.3 Darras, J. 148 Daspa, G. A. 38 Davidson, M. Leningrad: American Writers in the Soviet Union 159 n.13 Davis, G. 105 De Biasi, P.-M. 11, 123 n.3 De Bosio, G. 54 De Campos, H. 150, 151 Decembrio, P. C. 42, 46 n.6 Decembrio, U. 39 Decroisette, F. 49, 62 n.7, 64 n.25 deep history 235 Deguy, M. 147, 150, 151, 153, 156, 158 n.5, 159 n.7, 160 n.17, 161 n.22 DeLillo, D. Underworld 139 Deluy, H. 158 n.5, 159 n.8 Demarcq, J. 148, 159 n.7 de Nerval, G. 96 Department of Canadian Heritage 214, 221, 226, 227, 231 n.17 Depaule, J. C. 158 n.3

Index Deppman, J. 123 n.3 Déprats, J.-M. 55 Der Butt spricht viele Sprachen.GrassÜbersetzer erzählen (The Turbot Speaks Many Languages. Grass’s Translators Speak) 135 Descendre, R. 84 n.1, 85 n.3 De Vintimille, J. 77, 82, 83 Devlin, D. 96, 98, 106 n.2 De Wilde, J. 106 Di Giovanni, N.T. 16, 95, 96, 100, 104 digital humanities 76–83 Di Manno, Y. 147, 159 n.8 Dion, M. 63 n.10 DiPalma, R. Legend 159 n.13 discourse 2, 4, 8, 23, 70, 76, 212, 215, 221, 222, 226, 229, 230 n.7 metatheatrical 55 ornate 41 public 17 Dobranski, S. B. Milton, Authorship, and the Book Trade 9 Dolet, É. Manière de bien traduire d’une langue en aultre 76 Dolinin, A. 124 n.18 Dombek, M. 201, 207 n.7 Donati, P. Relational Subject, The 13 Doris, S. 161 n.24 Paramour 157 Dormoy, D. 148 Dort, B. 55 Double Change 160 n.18 Dragunoiu, D. 124 n.18 dramatic text and writing 49, 50, 54, 55 translation of 5–9, 50–1 dramaturg 50, 52–5, 59, 61, 62 nn.3, 5 Drugan, J. 202 Dubois, C. 157 Dufour, D.-R. L’Individu qui vient 237 Duolingo 198 Durand-Bogaert, F. 98 Eco, U. 86 n.18, 103, 106 Dire quasi la stessa cosa 84 Rose by Any Other Name, A 170

251

École des beaux-arts de Bordeaux 156 École Normale Supérieure 54, 62 n.7 ecology, of translation 239–44 Éditions Corti 157, 160 n.18 Éditions de l’Attente 157 Éditions Royaumont 148 Ehret, M.-F. 146 Eliot, T. S. 98, 106 n.2, 151 Ellenwood, R. 224 Enlightenment 9, 233 ENS de Fontenay-Saint-Cloud 68, 73 epistolary exchanges 93, 98, 117, 119, 124 n.18, 130, 156 Erasmus Adagia 43 Ertzscheid, O. 25 n.5 Esslinger Gespräch 130 Esteban, C. 147, 148, 158 n.5 À Royaumont, traduction collective 1983-2000, une anthologie de poésie contemporaine 149 Estellés, E. 194 ‘Towards an Integrated Crowdsourcing Definition’ 193 Etcheto, N. 147 Europäisches Übersetzer-Kollegium 139 European College of Literary Translators 139 European Goldoni Association 51, 54 Evans, S. 159 n.9 Fabre, M. 84 n.1 Facebook 196, 197, 200, 201, 204 Facebook Translate 199 faithfulness of translation, to original 134–5, 160 n.15 Farrago 149 Faulkner, W. 92, 100, 103, 125 n.34 Favalier, S. 62 n.7 Faye, J.-P. 147 Fenoglio, B. Una questione privata 72 Ferrer, D. 11, 123 n.3 Field, A. 126 n.36 Fitzgerald, R. 98, 106 n.2 Flock Lion browser 198 fluidity 140–1 n.14 Folena, G. 33, 34, 45 nn.1–2 Fonds, A. F. 21, 25 n.5

252

Index

Fontcuberta, J. 137 foreignness, of text 178 Format américain 149, 156 Foucault, M. 6, 7 Moi Pierre Rivière 97 Fournel, J.-L. 68, 84 n.1, 85 n.2 Fowlie, W. 98 Frank, A. Diary of Anne Frank, The 21 Frank, J. 139 Frank, O. 21 Fraser, G. 93 Free and Open-Source Soft ware (FOSS) 200 freedom 92, 104, 114, 116, 119, 122, 135, 168, 183, 228, 236 Freely, M. 169 Frey, B. 203 Fruttero, C. 72 Gabriel, J. P. 187 n.11 Gallimard 118, 125 n.33 Galsworthy, J. 237 Garbarino 105 Garton, A. T. 233, 244 Gauthier, B. 159 n.14 Gaza, T. 42 Gedzelman, S. 68, 77 Gee, H. Accidental Species: Misunderstandings of Human Evolution, The 244 genetic criticism 10, 11, 91, 98, 111, 123 nn.3, 5, 126 n.40 genetic translation studies 11 Génin, I. 142 n.30 geocentrism 236 Gerard of Cremona 38 Getlocalization 198 Gide, A. 92 Typhoon 99 Gielkens, J. 137 Giguère, R. 224 Girard, R. 116–18, 125 n.35, 126 n.39 Glenny, M. 101, 126 n.38 Gogol, N. V. 138 Gohory, J. 77, 82, 85 n.10 Goldoni, C. 51–5, 64 nn.18, 21, 64–5 n.25 Gli innamorati 57 Il Campiello 54, 59

Il ritorno della villeggiatura/Le Retour de la villégiature 60 Il servo di due padroni 56 I rusteghi 56 La Bonne mère 54 La Locandiera 53, 54, 56, 59 La scuola di ballo 57 La serva amorosa 54, 59 La Trilogia della villeggiatura 53, 56 La Trilogie de Zélinde et Lindor 54 La villeggiatura (Fin d’été à la champagne) 59–60 Le avventure della villeggiatura/Les aventures de la villégiature 60 Le baruffe chiozzotte (Barouf à Chioggia) 54, 56 Le Joueur 54 Le smanie della villeggiatura/La Manie de la villégiature, Le avventure 60 Le Théâtre comique 54 L’Homme exemplaire 54 L’Honnête Fille/La Bonne Épouse (Bettina) 54 L’Impresario delle Smirne (L’Opéra de Smyrne) 54, 57 Mémoires 58, 59 Une des dernières soirées de Carnaval 54 Goldoni en France 62 n.8 González, F. 194 ‘Towards an Integrated Crowdsourcing Definition’ 193 Goüin, H. 146 Goüin, I. 146 Governor General of Canada’s Award 224 Gozzi, C. 52 Gräfe, U. 187 n.18 Grass, G. 23, 130, 171, 181 Der Butt 131–6 Grimms Wörter 131, 136–8 Tin Drum, The 131 Vonne Endlichkait 139 Grass -Medienarchiv 131 Grayson, J. 123 n.7, 126 n.37 Greg-Bowers method 12 Grésillon, A. 123 n.3 Groden, M. 123 n.3 Grosjean, J. 147 Grosseteste, R. 45 n.5 Guerney, B. 124 n.21

Index Guglielmi, J. 155 Guicciardini, F. 69, 73 Avertissements politiques 68 Dialogo del reggimento di Firenze Écrits politiques 68 Histoire d’Italie 68 Guiloineau, J. 92, 97 Guimarães Rosa, J. 100

71

habitus 13 Hagin the Jew 37, 39 Hamblyn, D. 186 n.2 Hankins, J. 33, 39, 45 nn.3–4 Harryman, C. Wide Road, The 159 n.13 Harstad, J. 186 n.3 Buzz Aldrin, What Happened to You in All the Confusion 171 Hartmann, E. C. 98, 106 n.2 Haskins, C. 38 Hatem, H. 52, 62 n.7 Hébert, A. 93 Heim, M. H. 137, 141 n.25, 186 n.2 Heine, H. 96 Hejinian, L. Leningrad: American Writers in the Soviet Union 159 n.13 Sight 159 n.13 Wide Road, The 159 n.13 Hemingway, E. 125 n.34 Hérelle, G. 99 Herry, G. 51, 52, 53, 56, 62 nn.6–7 Hersant, P. 91 Hijiya-Kirschnereit, I. 179, 181–2 Hirschfeld, H. A. 7 Hocquard, E. 145, 148, 150, 152–5, 157, 158 n.6, 159 nn.7–8, 14, 161 n.20 À Royaumont, traduction collective 1983-2000, une anthologie de poésie contemporaine 149, 155–6 49+1 nouveaux poètes américains d’aujourd’hui 149 ma haie 156, 160 n.16 Holm, M. 187 n.12, 188 n.19 Hopkins, J. 243 Hourcade, R. 145, 148, 150–3, 155, 156, 159 n.7, 161 n.20 À Royaumont, traduction collective 1983-2000, une anthologie de poésie contemporaine 149

253

House, J. 138 Houssaie, A. de la 77, 81, 83 Howard, J. 121 Howe, J. 193 Humanism 33, 35–6, 39, 45 n.4 Huston, N. 114–15 HyperMachiavel (HM tool) 68, 76–83 Iça of Jabir 37, 39 incommensurability 243 institutional collaborations, in official bilingualism context 212 from equality to equity 220–3 from idealism to pragmatism 216–20 Translation Grants Program 214–16, 222, 223 impact of 223–8 internet research, see online research methods (ORMs) intersemiotic communication 243–4 invisibility, of translator 169–70 Ivanji, I. 139 n.1 Ivy Writers Paris 160 n.18 Jaccottet, P. 96, 147 Jahn, J. 92, 97 Jakobson 243 Jansen, H. Authorial and Editorial Voices in Translation 25 n.7 Japan Foundation 187 n.9 Jaworski, P. 152 Jerome (Hieronymus) of Stridon, St 74, 84 Jiménez-Crespo, M. A. 192, 204 Joca Seria 160 n.18 John of Brescia 37 John of Segovia 37, 39 Johnston, D. 51, 63 n.12 Kaai, P. 133, 134 Kafka, V. 140 n.2 Kaminka, I. 167 Kaplan, A. 169 French Lessons 101 Karlin, L. 173, 186 n.6 Karlinsky, S. 125 n.28 Keeley, E. 100 Kelly, N. 197, 201 Kiva 196

73,

254

Index

Klein, N. 240 Klossowski, P. 147, 161 n.22 Knapp, J. 5, 7, 8, 24 Shakespeare Only 7 Knopf 187 nn.11, 19 Knudsen, S. 173, 186 n.6 Kock, L. de ‘Translating Triomf’ 170 Kotoba no Volunteer (Volunteers of words) 196 Kronenberg., I. 186 n.3 Kundera, M. 97, 101, 104, 170–1, 181 Joke, The 170 La Plaisanterie 93

186, 213, 214, 216–21, 224, 226–9, 230 nn.8–9, 238 Locke, J. 238 Long, J. 123 n.9 López García, D. 34 Lortat-Jacob, B. 22 Love, H. 25 n.7 Lucentini, F. 72 Luhmann, N. 13 Luoma, B Annotated My Trip To New York, The 156 My Trip to New York 156 Lycophron 156, 161 n.22

Lamiot-Enos, C. 160 n.18 Lane-Mercier, G. 212 Lanfranchi, S. 84 n.1 Lang, A. 145, 161 n.24 language poetry 20, 150, 159 n.13, see also poetry La Presse 160 n.18 La Revue Parlée 159 n.14 Lassalle, J. 52, 54, 57, 63 nn.10–11 Latour, B. 13, 219 Lazarev, A. 85 n.2 Lefevere, A. 34 Le Gam 149 Letawe, C. 130 Levillain, H. 98 Levine, S. J. 95, 104, 106, 169 Lévi-Strauss, C. 63 n.16 Leyris, P. 147 liberties, to translators 136 Lingotek 198 linguistic dualism, see institutional collaborations, in official bilingualism context linguistic multiplicity 38, 40–5 LinkedIn 198 literality, significance of 153, 156, 159 n.7, 161 nn.21–2 literary field, as a network of power relations 13 literary tradition 2, 4, 6, 7, 9–16, 21, 34, 40, 53, 72, 84, 94, 95, 99, 103, 112, 125 n.34, 130, 137, 140 n.4, 141 n.14, 142 n.31, 146, 152, 153, 155, 158 n.3, 167, 174, 178, 180, 183,

McCaffery, S. Legend 159 n.13 McDonough Dolmaya, J. 194, 200–2 McGann, J. 12 Textual Condition, The 12 Machiavelli, N. 68, 69–70, 73, 77, 81–3 Discourses 70, 82, 85 nn.10, 13 Il Principe 68, 77 Prince 68, 81, 82, 84 McKenzie, D. Bibliography and the Sociology of Texts 12 Mac Low, J. Forties 157 Les Quarantains 157 McQuain, J. Bard on the Brain, The 5 Magnane, G. 119, 126 n.39 Magris, C. 94 Malmqvist, N.G. D. 170 Manceron, A. 62 n.7 Manganaro. J.-P. 105, 106 Mangini, N. 63 n.13 Manheim, R. 132–4 Manning, C. F. 1, 84 n.1 Manning, N. 61, 84, 106, 122, 139 ‘Man Who Stank of Butter, The’ (BBC radio show) 187 n.16 Marceau, F. 65 n.25 Maréchal, F. 146 Marinetti, C. 63 n.12 Marliani, M. 63 n.14 Marnef, H. de 85 n.13 Márquez, G. G. 92

Index Marshall, J. 98 Marti, K. 103 Martin, S. 85 n.2 Masten, J. Textual Intercourse 5–6 Matsuoka, N. 179 Matthews, P. Bard on the Brain, The 5 Medieval period 16, 34, 35, 37, 40–2, 146 Memorandum from Council (2001) (Canada) 224 Memorandum to Council (Canada) 216, 218–9, 229 n.4 Menkens, J. 142 n.33 Meschonnic, H. 75, 147, 154, 159 n.7 Poétique du traduire 69 Pour la poétique (II) 153 ‘messianic tradition’ in translatorial self-representation 239 metadiscursive comments 121 Millennium Ecosystem Assessment Report (2005) 236 Milton, J. 9 Mitchell, D. 172 Cloud Atlas 171 MNH 198 Moget, G. 65 n.25 Moghaddam, E. H. 183 ‘Weblog, The’ 183 Monod, S. 99 Montdidier, O. de 37, 39 Montini, C. 11 Morin, C. 60, 63 n.10, 64 n.23 Mornas, J. 64 n.22 Mounin, G. 138 Moxley, J. 159 n.9 Mozilla browser 198 Muller, M.-T. 99 multilingual writers 16, 111, 112, 114, 123 nn.5, 8, 221, 229, 239 multiple authorship 5–12, 19–21 multiple translatorship, see online multilingual collaboration Munday, J. 104, 105 Murakami, H. 167, 168, 174, 186 n.8, see also online multilingual collaboration Afterdark 179

255

Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage 176, 177–8, 184, 185, 186 n.1, 188 nn.21–3 dual liberation in writings of 182–4 English hegemony in translations of 180–2 Hitsuji o meguru bōken 187 n.9 ‘Lederhosen’ 182 Norwegian Wood 186 n.1 1Q84 176, 177, 187 nn.11–12, 18, 188 n.21 Onna no inai otokotachi (Men Without Women) 173–4, 184 ‘ To Translate and to Be Translated’ 179 Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, The 181, 187 n.19 writing of 178–80 ‘Yesterday’ 184 Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris (A.R.C) 159–60 n.14 Nabokov, D. 16, 101, 114, 116, 123 n.4, 124 nn.19, 23 Nabokov, V. 16, 111, 124 nn.24–6, 125 nn.30, 35, 125–6 n.36, 126 n.40, 170 Ada, or Ardor 125 n.29, 126 n.41 Aurelian, The 113 Cloud, Castle, Lake 113, 124 nn.22, 25 collaboration with Anglophone translators 112–15 collaboration with Francophone translators 115–22 Conclusive Evidence 125 n.27 Defense, The 114, 116 Despair 123 n.9 Enchanter, The 116 Extermination des tyrans 116 Feu pâle 125 n.33, 126 n.39 Gift, The 114, 118, 124 n.21, 125 n.33, 126 n.37 King, Queen, Knave 119, 121, 126 n.39 Laughter in the Dark 123 n.9 Lolita 115, 125 n.33 Mary 126 n.38 Mashenka 101 Nursery tale, A 123 n.9 Pale Fire 117, 126 n.39

256

Index

Real Life of Sebastian Knight, The 123 n.10 Roi, dame, valet 126 n.39 Spring in Fialta 113, 116 Nabokov, Véra 116, 124 n.22 Nancy, J-L 22, 23 National Translation Program for Book Publishing 221 neologisms 95, 96, 132, 152 coining of 119–20 Nero, B. del 71 network theory 13, 219 New York Review of Books, The 233, 244 Nichet, J. 55, 63 n.15 Nicole, P. Essais de morale 238 Nida, E. 199 Noël, B. 146–8, 150, 153, 155, 158 n.5, 159 n.7, 160 n.17 Noël, L. L. 123 n.10 Noigandres 150 non-essentialist ontology 13 ‘non-solicited model’ and crowdsourcing 196, 197 Norton, G. 33 O’Brien, S. 200, 202 O’Hagan, M. 194 Obama, B. 17 objectivity 154 Official Languages Act (1969) (Canada) 214–15, 221, 227 Øhrgaard, P. 137 Olohan, M. 202, 207 nn.2, 5–6 Omland, S. 171–2, 186 nn.4–5 online collaborative translation 18, 196 online community translation 195, 197 online ethnography 201 online multilingual collaboration 167–8, see also Murakami, H. collaboration models in translation and 169–74 solution-oriented model and 174–78 online research methods (ORMs) 200 OpenOffice 198 Orwell, G. 94 outsourced-driven crowdsourcing process 197, 198

P.O.L. 157 Palmer, M. Série Baudelaire 148 Pamuk, O. 169 Paoli, M. 85 n.2 para-textual visibility 138 Pascal, B. 238 Pensées 237–8 Paterlini, P. 20 Paul, C. 85 n.2 Pavis, P. 51, 61 n.2, 62 n.4, 63 n.12 Pelletier, G. 215 PEN Charter 236–7 Penchenat, J.-C. 52, 54, 62 n.7, 63 n.10 Perelman, B. 159 n.13 Perez, E. 204 Perse, S.-J. 96, 98, 106 n.2 Chronique 103 Perteghella, M. 53, 58 Pertzoff, P. 114, 124 nn.17, 24–6 Peter of Poitiers 37, 39 Peter of Toledo 37, 39 Peter the Venerable (Abbot of Cluny) 37 Pevear, R. 173, 186 n.7 Philocrates 74 Pivot, B. 121 place-based translational politics 240 Plato 40 Phaedrus 41, 45 n.3 Republic 39 Playter, P. 100 Po&sie 158 n.5 poetic diction 10 poetry 9–11, 14, 93, 96, 97, 102, 103, 148, 149, 151, 152, 155–7, 160 nn.15, 17, 161 n.23 Poets Theater 159 n.13 political philology 69, 70–1 Portugal, A. 157 post-human ethics 234–7 Pound, E. Cantos 151 Powys, J. C. 100 practice-theory, of translation 68 disconnection between 35, 43 empirical path 69 general rule and partial rules 71–2 HM tool and 76–7

Index orality and 73–5 oratory numbers and 75–6 political philology 70–1 quality of times and 69–70 reflection of 81–3 together, and choice 72–3 of words 77–81 Presses Universitaires de Rouen et du Havre 160 n.18 product-driven crowdsourcing process 197–8 Profacius 37 Proz.com 200 Pruja, F. 157 Ptolemy 75 Almagest 38 Puff, J. -F. Dire la poésie 160 n.14 Puig, M. 95, 96, 169 Pushkin 125 n.28 Eugene Onegin 115, 125 n.29 Pusterla, F. 94, 97 Pym, A. 15–16, 195 Translation Research Terms 15 Quignard, P. 156, 161 nn.22–3 quintina, as music 22 Rabassa, G. 92, 96, 97, 103 If This Be Treason: Translation and Its Dyscontents 169 Raddle Moon 157 Raimbault, R.-N. 94 Raphoz, F. 160 n.18 Ray, R. 201 realia 132, 133 re-creation, translation as 122 relatedness principle 243–4 relational realism 13 relational sociology 13–14, 20, 23 Renaissance 1, 5–9, 11, 24, 35, 42, 235 collaboration and co-authorship in 5–9 collaborative translation in 37, 39 translational acts and demands during 5, 7 Rener, F. 33, 36 Report to Council (Canada) 216, 225–7, 229 n.4, 231 n.17

257

Réseau Européen des Centres de Traducteurs littéraires (RECIT) 142 n.31 resilience and collaboration 233–4 individualism and 237–9 post-human ethics and 234–7 translation ecology and 239–4 Revue de Poésie 150, 151, 153, 160 n.17 Richard, C. 152 Riggs, S. 160 n.18 Risvik, Karai 188 n.19 Risvik, Kjell 188 n.19 Road Map for Canada’s Linguistic Duality 226 Robel, L. 147, 150, 153, 161 n.22 Robinson, D. 34 Robinson, K. 159 n.13 Roche, D. 113, 116, 125 n.32 Rolán, G. 46 n.6 Romantics 10, 150, 160 n.15, 238 Ronconi, L. 54 Rosenzweig, F. 50 Rosetta Foundation 196, 200, 203 Roubaud, J. 147, 148 Rowling, J. K. Casual Vacancy, The 173 Roy, C. 160 n.15 Roy, W. 123 n.9 Royaumont, L. C. de 145 Royaumont Foundation 145 collaborative practices at 150–4 foreignizing strategies at 154–6 legacies of 156–8 origins and aims of 146–8 transatlantic bias 148–50 Royet-Journoud, C. 147 49+1 nouveaux poètes américains d’aujourd’hui 149 Rubin, J. 180, 187 nn.11, 19 Ruhe, E. 97 Sachs, A. 63 n.17 St Jerome 73, 74 De optimo genere interpretandi 84 Letter to Pammachius 42 Sallenave, D. 105, 106 Salutati, C. 35, 36, 39 Saramago, J. 100 Sarpi, P. 85 n.3

258

Index

Savonarola, G. 69, 73 Lettre à un ami, Traité sur la façon de régir Florence 68 Sbriglio, J.-P. 85 n.2 Scalapino, L. Sight 159 n.13 Scammell, M. 114, 124 nn.20, 23 scenic text and writing 49, 50, 55 Schäler, R. 200, 202 Schleiermacher, F. 72, 84, 85 n.4, 161 n.20 Schulze, I. 139 Scott, F. 93 Seats, M. 186 n.1 Séféris, G. 100 self-translation 16, 114 semantic field 15, 17, 72, 77, 81, 212 seminars, significance of 130–9 Série américaine 160 n.18 Shakespeare scholarship, authorship in 5–8 Shapiro, N. 138 shared ontology 22 shared translation 16, 49–50 debate elements in 50–1 experience of 51–6 limits and perspectives of 58–61 spectator integration in 56–8 Shawn, W. 100 Shimoata, S. 206 n.1 Shirky, C. 203 Shishkin, M. Pismovnik (The Light and the Dark) 171 Shore, L. A. 37 Shrayer, M. 114, 124 nn.17, 24 Shubin, N. 236 Sidet, M.-F. 62 n.7 Sikorski, V. 116, 125 n.31 Silliman, R. 20 Legend 159 n.13 Leningrad: American Writers in the Soviet Union 159 n.13 Simeone, B. 72 singular genius 2, 10, 11 singularity myths, of translation 4–12 situated cognition 206 Skype 196, 197 Smail, D. On Deep History and the Brain 235 Smartling 198

Smith, A. Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations 238 Snyder, S. 179 social text 12 social translation 195–6 sociological turn, in translation studies 14, 193, 206 solicited models and crowdsourcing 196, 197 solitary genius model 2, 5, 10, 150, 167, 168 Somonte, S. S. 46 n.6 source language 37, 40, 52, 56, 85 n.4, 115, 153 Stalin, J. Dialectical and Historical Materialism 234 Stallybrass, O. 186 n.2 Stallybrass, P. 7 Statistics Canada 226 Steinbeck, J. 125 n.34 Steiner, G. 100 Stephens, J. 142 n.30 Stevens, P. 186 n.3 Stillinger, J. 10–12 Stoermer, E. F. 234 Storia d’Italia workshop 73 Strehler, G. 53, 54, 60, 65 n.25 Struve, G. 113, 116, 124 nn.11, 15–16 Studio-Théâtre de Vitry 54 Styron, W. 125 n.34 subjectivity 7–8, 13, 21, 15, 159 n.13, 236 relational 20 of scientific gaze 22 subversive scribe 169, 171 Suddendorf, T. The Gap: The Science of What Separates Us from Animals 244 Sun 198 Suominen, O. 139 Suter, R. 178, 180 Swensen, C. 157, 160 n.18 Symantec 198 Tanant, M. 52, 62 n.7 Tasca, V. 62 n.7 technological turn, in translation studies 192, 206

Index TED’s open translation initiative 200, 202, 203 Tellkamp, U. 139 terminological unification 34 terza rima style 57 text laboratory 151 textual authority 13–14 textual genetics, see genetic criticism Théâtre 14, 64 n.23 Théâtre Antoine 63 n.17 Théâtre de l’Europe-Odéon 54 Théâtre des Amandiers de Nanterre 54 Théâtre des Variétés étrangères 64 n.18 Théâtre du Campagnol 54 Théâtre du Peuple de Bussang 54 Théâtre national de Strasbourg 52 theatrical text 5, 49 theatrical translation, definition of 62 n.4 ‘To/Jusqu’à’ 160 n.18 Tolingo 198 Toussaint, J.-P. 139, 141 n.23 Football 139 Fuir 139 La Réticence 139 L’Urgence et la Patience 139 traducere, significance of 34–5 traduction collaborative, notion of 3 traduction collective, notion of 3 Traduire/Transmettre festival 57 Transifex 198 translation-elucidation strategy 156 Translation Grants Program (1972) (Canada) 213–16, 222, 223, 230 n.10 impact of 223–8 Translation Initiative, of TED talks website, see TED’s open translation initiative translation management systems 194 translation memories and TMX files 18 translator 14, see also individual entries author and 4–12, 40, 46 n.13 solitary 2, 154 as surrogate author 2 translator studies 199 transparency 17, 40, 101, 138, 183, 185–6 Treasury Board of Canada Secretariat 222, 230 n.14 Trencsényi, K. 62 n.5

259

Trojanow, I. 139 Macht und Widerstand 139 Twitter 196, 197 Ubersfeld, A. 49 Ubuntu 198 Un Bureau sur l’Atlantique 145, 149, 154, 158 n.6, 159 n.9, 160 n.18 une écriture-de-traduction 155 Ungaretti, G. ‘Dunja’ 96 unitary authorship 9 untranslatability 136, 150, 241–3 Upstairs at Duroc 160 n.18 user generated translations 196 Valéry, F, 157 Valéry, J. 148, 149, 156, 158 n.6 Vanderschelden, I. 23, 167–8, 183, 185 Vargas Llosa, M. 96, 99 ‘El Paraíso de los libros’ 105 Vattimo, G. Not Being God 20 Venuti, L. 103, 104, 134, 140 n.14, 170, 185–6 Translation Studies Reader, The 34 Translator’s Invisibility, The 138 verbo-corps 61–2 n.2 Vickers, B. 7–8 Shakespeare, Co-Author 7 Victorine, J. 186 n.7 vigilant poetry 149 Visconti, L. 53 visibility, of translator 138, 139 Viti, P. 42 Vives, J. L. 42 Volokhonsky, L. 173, 186 n.7 volunteer translation 15, 18, 195–7, 200, 207 n.2 Voronina, O 116, 125 n.32 Vraa, M. 172–3 Wackers, K. 62 n.7 Walcott, D. 102 Waldrop, K. 157, 160 n.18 Waldrop, R. 157, 160 n.18 Watten, B. Leningrad: American Writers in the Soviet Union 159 n.13

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Index

Web 2.0 196 web-based methods, see online research methods (ORMs) Weber, A. 114 weblog 183 Wegener, A. Authorial and Editorial Voices in Translation 25 n.7 Weissbort, D. 102 Weissmann, D. 102 Westerhoven, J. 188 n.19 Wikipedia 200, 203 ‘Wild Haruki Chase, A’ (symposium) 175, 187 n.9 Wilhelm, J.-P. 102 William of Moerbeke 45 n.5 Wilson, E. 125 n.28

Wilson, E. O. Future of Life, The 235 Wolff, H. 130 word-for-word translation 37, 39, 74, 76, 84, 152–3, 155, 156, 160 n.17, 161 n.22 WordReference.com 242 Wordsworth, W. Lyrical Ballads 10 written plays, collaborative 6 Wuilmart, F. 140–1 n.14 Zancarini, J.-C. 62 n.7, 68, 84 n.1, 85 nn.2, 14 Zielinska-Elliott, A. 167, 184, 187 nn.12, 18, 188 nn.19, 22–3 Zurcher, P. 103